Rusty's Blog

This may seem like being flippant to some people. I’m OK with that. I’m also well aware that there are millions of people who suffer from test anxiety. I do know what it is, primarily through observation. I’m far from perfect, and I have not passed ‘every’ test I’ve taken, but one of my observations over time is that I don’t seem to suffer from test anxiety.

First of all test anxiety is essentially a form of a panic attack. It’s a mechanisim that many people, perhaps even most, have of dealing with the uncertainty of their future, and how this exam can impact that future. The mind goes into overdrive thinking of all the possible ways things could go wrong, and what some of the really bad things that will happen if they ‘fail’ this exam.

Part of this has to do with the way our educational system had developed. You get one chance at most exams from preschool through your PhD disertation. Each time you are ’stuck’ with whatever result you got. Didn’t do well on the spelling quizes? Well that’s OK, we’ll just remember that through the rest of your school life. It won’t really matter anywhere else like your creative writing, or on any reports. But as you prepare to turn in your creative writing paper, or that project report, you fret about whether you misspelled words, and will you loose points for that. And yes those things do matter. However let’s take a look at a few other things, and we’ll see that all of these are things you can work around.

So you go through school, and then what? Well perhaps you dropped out early. Or you might have completed HS then went into the military. Or who knows, went into the work force, college, acedameia. The are all possibilities. Let’s take a look at a couple of ‘real world’ examples of things that some people do right out of High School. The results may surprise you.

So you go out and find a job. Perhaps its as a fry cook at the diner, or who knows. Along the way you earn a little bit of money and decide it’s time to get your own set of wheels. Of course it’s probably a good idea to get a licence to drive if you are going to get a car. Right? So you catch the bus, or walk over to the local test center, or perhaps look online, and see that there are two exams involved in getting a drivers licence. The first is a written exam. It might be administered by a computer, but you get the idea. It’s either true/false or multiple choice questions.

What are the questions on? Well, the questions are primarily aimed at making sure you understand the laws of the place you live as regards to driving. Oh, they are not going to ask you which law, and what section applies to a specific situation, but they are concerned that you know such basic things as when you may pass another vehicle, how and when to use turn signals, what the local laws are regarding headlights and windshield wipers. You get the idea. Because you are probably not ready immediately they almost always have a handbook available that you can read, which goes over the questions that will be on the exam and they will suggest taking it home and comming back when you are ready to take the exam.

The handbook is a larger format than a paperback book, but is significantly shorter front to back, and content wise is fairly short as well. Also they give you sample questions through the book so you understand the type of questions that will be asked at the exam center when you take your written exam. In fact they have more questions in the book than the test will contain, because most of the written tests are designed to be taken and completed in a faily short period of time, 20 min to an hour, and if they put too many questions on the exam, no one will pass.

That’s really the trick to passing most written exams. Know that your study material is going to cover stuff that will not be on the exam. You won’t know what the specific questions you will get on exam day, but in most cases you will have some idea of what the topics being asked about are. If you are prepared to spend a bit of money, you can often take ’sample’ tests to see how prepared you are. If you think this will help you to feel a bit more comfortable when you go in to test, take them. However the real trick is to remember that whether you pass the exam on the first time or not, doesn’t really matter.

Oh, the people at the exam center are probably not going to be all that happy about administering a test to someone who didn’t pass, but they see that often enough that they will take it with sense of humor if you are comfortable with that, and in most cases will explain to you what areas of the exam you need to bone up on before you come back.

Go home, crack open the handbook and take a closer look at the areas where the administrators say you need to study a bit more. Look at the sample questions again. Notice any that are familiar from the exam? Probably. The best part is that if you see the same question, you can now say, OK why is ‘that’ the correct answer? and get even more out of the book.

So you take your time, study, and you feel you are ready. Go back. Take the exam again. Whether you pass or fail again, you’re further along, and unless there is some fundamental reason that you don’t get the right answers, it’s almost a given that you will ultimately pass. A really ‘rookie’ mistake is to presume that the order of the responses given in the sample questions has some bearing on the order of responses on the exam. Usually this is not the case. That way you can’t ‘memorize’ the ‘letter’ response to a collection of questions and pick that letter just by knowing that ‘A’ is the correct response to ‘When you are aproaching an intersection with a train crossing…’ After all the examiners just may throw in a response to ‘A’ of ‘Don’t worry about it, the train only comes through on the 7th Tusday of the 14th month.’

So you’ve taken the writen exam one or more times, and you pass. Now what? Well in most cases the state will give you a learner’s permit that has some specific rules attached to it. Depending on the local rules, you may have a couple of hand and eye co-ordination tests, or a brief visual test to see if you can read some letters at a projected distance. If you can’t you may be advised to see an optometrist to have your eyes checked out, and you may need to wear glasses when you go back. If that’s the case, be prepared to wear them whenever you drive. It will be noted on your permit and licence that you need to have prescription eyewear on at all times when operating a vehicle. (If you later on go through a procedure like Lasic and your vision is corrected to 20/20, or whatever the requirements are in your state, you will be given a document from the doctor that will declare that your vision has been corrected, and the restriction will be lifted from your licence/permit.

The next ‘major’ hurdle is the behind the wheel exam. For this you will want to do two things. First up get some classroom experience. In almost every city there is at least one school available to you to go through Drivers Education. The instructors are (generally) good humored people who want you to pass your behind the wheel exam and will give you a great grounding in the rules of the road as they apply to being behind the wheel. Oh, the rules are not different from those you studdied for the written exam, however putting the acedemic knowledge into practice is not necessarily simple. Better schools will have simulators of some sort that you can use to build up some skills, however at some point the instructor is going to put you behind the wheel of a car, that they are going to get into as well, and they will have you drive a variety of courses to become familiar with how to operate the vehicle.

Take advantage of these schools. Sure they cost money, but it’s almost a given that you will learn more from these instructors than almost anyone you might work with otherwise.

You may also find a car simulator that you can play with on your computer or game console. Most of the time these come with the explanation that they are a ‘racing’ game, or the like. Ask though, and it’s very often possible to find one that will also allow you to ‘play’ in ‘drivers ed’ mode. You don’t get points for completing laps the fastest. You loose points for doing things ‘wrong’.

For some interesting practical experience, find someone who is licensed and sit down with them. Let them know that you want to get your drivers license, and that you would appreciate it if they would give you some additional experience based on how they guide you around as a passenger. Oh, they may not be all that great at parallel parking themselves, but you’ll learn a bit more about how you interact with someone in the car with you besides that helpful instructor at the school.

Somewhere along the line you’ll decide you are ready to have a behind the wheel exam. Find out what the schedule is for your exam station, get on it, and go. You may need to bring your own vehicle, though if you have been working with a school, the examiner and school may be able to work with you to use one of those vehicles instead.

Again, look at the exam as a ‘how am I doing’ exam, not a ‘must not fail, must pass’ exam. If you go in with that mindset, you’ll be far better prepared than you might initially be expecting. And you will be far more relaxed.

That really is the trick to taking exams. After all in ‘real life’ as opposed to school, you can go back at any time and retake an exam that you feel it is important to know that you understand what is going on, or for which you believe you need the pass for. So take it with the understanding that if you don’t do as well as you expected, you can come back to it later on.

And when it comes down to it, there is some of that truth related to school as well. So you missed 5 words on the 20 word spelling test. Ok, what were the words. Write them down correctly. Do that a few times. Now do that a few more times. Use the words in a couple of simple sentences. You’ll most likely know them in the next day or two. And move on. There are a large number of text to speach programs out there now. Put together spelling tests for yourself. Have the computer read to you the word. wait a bit, then read the next word. Write each word. Go back and see how you did.

Get a tape recorder or use the audio recording program on your computer, and record spelling tests to give yourself later on. You’ll do fine.

There are other ‘exams’ that you may be running into that being relaxed and prepared will help for as well. There are a surprising number of people on high blood pressure medication because when they go to the doctor, they get concerned about what their blood pressure will read. The nurse may be a bit defferntial and all ‘professional’ like, and you are completely unaware that you are getting into a higher state of stress. Your heart rate goes up. and so does your blood pressure. And after a couple of visits, you are sat down and the doctor tells you that the results of the last few blood pressure exams concern him or her, and all of a sudden you are looking at a diagnosis of hypertension.

It happens. So be aware that it’s a potential concern. But don’t get worked up about it, or it will be a self fulfilling concern.

Remember to go out, take walks and run, play with the kids and the dogs, watch the cat, and have fun.

Before I get too far down this path, and since I don’t appear to be citing anyone for you to reference easily. This page is primarily a set of suggestions. My knowledge of network security is not comprehensive, and I suspect that you can find flaws here if you really go looking for them. My ‘credentials’ are that I have a BS in Computer Information Science from Winona State University, where I focused on network connectivity. I’ve worked for US West before they were bought by Qwest, Carlson Companies and most recently for Wells Fargo. My primary occupation is as a Network Analyst which means that I work with the network infrastructure, routers switches, some firewalls, and various technologies that interconnect these devices both locally and through third party network connectivity. I do not work on servers or analog voice equpment at this time, and what little experience I do have is not particularily useful for that at this time. There are other experiences that I have that have gone towards this posting. Hopefully you will find it useful.

This post goes to over 3000 words. I’m not going to say it’s a simple topic, however I’m hoping that as I explain things you will find it reasonably easy to follow. If you have specific questions, feel free to ask.

If you’ve been using computers for a while, and if you’re reading this, I presume that means you have, you probably have thought about setting up a wifi connection, or possibly already have set one up. If you’re like most people a simple wifi connection may be all you need. However I would advise that you do set up WPA2 on a wifi connection that you intend to use purely for your own use. The reason is not that I’m concerned about people sniffing your traffic and gleaning what disreputable activites you may be getting into. Those sorts of concerns may drive you to do that, however it’s not my major concern. My primary concern is that if you leave your computer on an open network, you are basically asking that the computer be attacked in one way or another.

Some examples are viruses that turn your computer into a spambot. Someone stashing illegal material on your computer. People can access your computer, grab the contents of your memory swap file, which may very well have the cleartext version of your passwords for your bank accounts and other systems. Someone using your identity to establish a line of credit for themselves that they have no intention of honoring. Etc.

In any case you really do want to keep your own computer’s connection secure.

If you are reading this, and your computer is connected directly to your cable or dsl modem, you’re probably also asking for trouble. I’m hoping that you have enabled your computer’s firewall software, but even with that it’s much safer to put some form of a hardware firewall between your computer and any publicly accessable network.

If you have been using computers for a long time, you probably have an old pentium computer lying around. You might even be considering using it as a firewall and server. Well, I’ll allow that using it as a server may be a good idea, but I really don’t recommend using it as your firewall. Oh there’s not a problem from the security side. In fact it may be even more secuire than most of the dedicated broadband router varients out there. However it is going to cost you significantly more from a power and noise perspective.

An older PC probably has a 250 or even a 400 watt power supply. It will have at least 1 power supply fan, and probably a CPU fan. It may have a spare case fan. If you pulled the hard drive, you have to decide are you installing a new hard drive, or putting in some sort of a flash based sollution. You probably don’t have replacement bezels for the DVD-Rom/CD-RW drive, so it will probably have to stay there. You might pull the power cord from it once you have put an OS on the hard drive/flash/usb-key, or if you have enough memory in there you might even just put a live linux/live bsd distribution on there and boot from that after you’ve hard coded all the rules into the ISO then written it.. It probably won’t boot from a usb-key so unless you go to an SSD solution you almost have to have some drive with a moving part to wear out.

In other words you’ve got this huge piece of hardware burning electricity it doesn’t need to. I’m guessing you weren’t planning on putting this in the living room and having it also be your MP3 player for your stereo. I could be wrong though. My guess is based on the fact that most people don’t want a bunch of fans for a PC sitting in their entertainment center. Too much noise.

That said, if you are using a cable modem for your broadband connection, it’s almost a given that any hardware you use for a firewall will need to be right next to that entertainment center. I don’t know about you. but while computer fans are OK at the desk at work, possibly in the den or computer room at home (if you have one) when I want to catch the nuances of good music, a soft spoken character in a movie, or something other than the advertising on a TV show, the white noise of a fan is not what I want to have interfering with my entertainment. So fan’s are generally out.

So you have three options. Option 1 is a computer and power supply that has a case that provides a heat sink. Option 2 is a very old computer with a power supply that you replace with something that doesn’t have a fan, or a broadband router. The reality is that a broadband router is going to draw fewer watts, and will perform at least as well as almost anything you can build. If you are building a router and server room into your new housing construction project, things might be different, but for most people a broadband router is going to give you more security for the dollar than anything else.

Now you have two choices for your internal or personal wifi. Option 1 is to get a stand alone Access Point (AP) that has a single Ethernet connection, or 2 in some cases, I’ll get to that in a bit. Option 2 is to get a broadband router with wifi built in.

Tip, for now go with option 1 if you can. Option 2 sounds better. One piece of equipment to debug, one to configure, one to deal with if it fails, etc. etc. However further down the road you are going to be adding a couple of devices, and it’s a lot more secure to have a separate AP and firewall. At the very least if you are ever uncertain if there is something on the wifi network that is causing problems for your network in general, taking down an individual AP will not affect your wired network. In a bit I’ll give you a good use of a combined platform, but it isn’t for your primary network.

For network security never, ever, use WEP. There is a long and drawn out explanation. The simple explanation however is that in less time than it takes to enter a WEP key into your laptop, software can sniff the WiFi traffic for the AP, and can find a key that works to give a user access to a WEP secured network. If you want to go looking for that variety of software, I’m not going to be much help.

For the moment you will want to use WPA2. On top of that use a large random key. There are places to get a one shot key, grc.com has a key generator that will give you several keys at a time, and you can select one, or even select substrings from each until you have a complete key that you can use. Those keys are given out over an https connection, so it should not be easy for someone else to capture one of those keys, but if you are paranoid enough that that’s not secure enough for you, then this posting probably isn’t going to be much help either.

At this point you should have, or be able to put together a secure connection between your mobile device and your AP. Some general tips for WiFi. You are building what is called a Structured WiFi network. That means that all traffic to and from a device has to go through an access point. There is another variety of WiFi network that you can find often enough, and that’s called an Ad-Hoc WiFi network. If you have several Sony PSP users or Nintendo DS users, who want to play a game with each other wirelessly, very often they will set up an ad-hoc network amongst them which does not use any WiFi Access Points. You can also use this method to connect two laptops via wifi without having to set up an AP. In fact if you have an AP, it’s generally a good idea to not allow two devices connecting to the AP to communicate with each other, even if it does use the AP. The reason is that leaving that option enabled allows for the possibility of an undesirable application performing an attack on other hosts on the wifi network. Many AP’s allow you to configure that.

Ok, you have your network set up, but occasionally you have friends who drop by with netbooks or wifi enabled cell phones, and, well it makes sense that being the technically advanced friend that you are, you might want to give them an option for getting on the network through your broadband connection. Right? You’re a friendly sort of a person after all.

OK. Here’s where you want to think about how you are going to do this. Some people may suggest giving the friend the key for the WPA2 secured network After all it’s the neighborly thing to do. Right? Well, in that case you really shouldn’t be using WPA2 or even wep in the first place. In reality it’s not a good idea, though some people do so.

Well, these broadband routers with WiFi on them really are not all that expensive. Let’s just plug one of those into the network, configure it to give user’s a different IP address range, and after making sure that no one can re-configure the device via wifi, we’ll just open that to everyone. Well, where are you going to plug it in? There really are two places. The first is the broadband connection, and your home firewall gets hung off the inside network of the device with open network access. The second is to plug it into the lan side of your existing broadband router. Neither provide a good secure solution for you though. If we take the later first, anyone on the wireless network can gain access to any of the network devices (think your laptop for example) as they are now ‘inside’ your firewall. Probably not what you were looking for.

The former option allows for the possibility that trafic that you think is just between your firewall and the internet can be intercepted, and some of it may be sent across that open wireless network. So that’s not going to be a good idea either.

I didn’t mention it earlier, but one of the reasons that you want to go with separate broadband routers and wifi aps is that in many cases a stand alone broadband router is significantly less expensive than a combined unit. Presuming you can find one of thes significantly less expensive devices, let’s set up a network that isolates your private network from a network access that you are going to share. You will need 3 broadband routers. the first broadband router plugs into your cable modem/ dsl modem and should have at least 2 ports for your inside network. One of these ports is going to connect to your old broadband router that we’ve been discussing up till now. Let’s call that LAN1 or PriNet. The other port you are going to use will be connected to that combined AP/Broadband router that you just bought. Let’s call that connection LAN2, or PubNet. Let’s call this broadband connected router oGate as it will be the outside gateway.

Since there will be a very limited number of devices in this local network, you can use a subnet of a class C 1918 private ip address space. Or you can use a significantly larger address space if you would prefer. I know people who set the network address to 10.0.0.0/8, the inside address of the broadband router to 10.0.0.1. the outside interface for lan1’s router could get the address 10.10.10.10, and the outside address of lan2’s router could be 10.255.255.254, and it would all work. In any case you will want to know what the IP addresses are for lan1 and lan2 outside interfaces. You will be using these addresses to build rules on each of these broadband routers to block traffic coming in from the other device, while allowing trafic coming from oGate. You may also wish to set up oGate so that it accepts management traffic from devices in lan1, but not from devices in lan2.

Now the device you are using for lan2 can be that broadband router ap, or a setup similar to what I described earlier for lan1 with a separate AP and router. That’s up to you. In some cases you can even use a single AP to provide a connection into your private network as well as your public network. It takes a bit more work to set that up in a secure manner, but it can be done.

Things that you should do in any case. Disable configuration of your routers from your wireless networks. Most routers have the option of setting up firewall rules that can redirect or re-route traffic. Most of the time the rules you will run into are fairly simple, however occasionally a rule can do some really interesting things, that if you are not prepared for, can leave you with essentially no security at all. Not a good situation.

Disable wifi end point interconnection. If two users of your wifi network want to talk to each other, they should do so through a server somewhere, but not just through your AP.

Clearly identify which network an AP is connected to in it’s SSID. Additionally I prefer tagging the ssid with WiFi to distinguish such connections from someone plugged into a switch port. So if you want your overall network to be domain specific, say beresourceful, the public wifi portion would have a SSID of BeresourcefulPubWiFi, the private wifi portion would have an SSID of BeresourcefulPriWiFi and each lan segment would be tagged as either PubNet, PriNet, or for that small area that interconnects the three routers DMZNet.

I am not a fan of UPNP on my broadband routers. If you are a gamer and your games require that you enable UPNP, understand that games are not the only applications that understand how to use UPNP to reconfigure your routers. And that is what games are doing with UPNP. If a game reconfigures your router to give itself 2 way access through your firewall to the internet, you’ve just opened a hole that any malicious developer can use to take advantage of flaws in the game, or possibly tell some other application to do things. Send out Spam, or worse.

Change the passwords on your APs and Routers. Once you’ve had your router plugged into your home network long enough to log into it to start configuring it, and before you enable wifi or connect to your broadband modem, change the password. There is no sensible reason on earth to be using a manufacturer’s default passwords on your devices. Disable remote administration. This allows the manufacturer to connect to your router and perform updates or configuration changes without your knowledge. Really it allows anyone to do that. Not a good idea.

Unless you really need a ‘DMZ host’ don’t configure one. For most broadband routers a DMZ host is there to allow you to run your own servers and services. If you are attempting to secure your network, you are best off if you open specific ports for any services you want open. If you want to ssh into your server remotely, set up a specific rule to allow you to ssh in on specific ports. I recommend not using the well known service port for a service if it is not going to be available to the general public. If you plan on running a web server to host a small phpbbs for you and your family, you might best use 8080 or 8433. If on the other hand you plan to start a small business and want to host the business web site at home, you probably should be using port 433, optionally with a redirect on a service at port 80 that does nothing else.

The above has been pretty basic. I hope it’s enough that you can work out how to complete the rest yourself. I’ve stayed away from subnetting  and most of the advanced topics related to networking applications. If you are looking for what is essentially an introduction to computing and networking with a focus on security, I’m going to direct you over to the weekly podcast Security Now. On it’s own it will not give you enough knowledge to build a high security network, but if you pay attention, you can learn enough to be pretty comfortable with the security of your network. Most of the comercial hardware vendors have certification programs for their network hardware that includes a significant amount of information that is cross hardware. Oh, they like to do things their own way at times, but the general idea’s are out there and have applications no matter what system you are using. Many universities and colleges these days have courses in their computer science curiculum that are focused on networking, and you can learn a significant amount about network security through them. Likewise for the Technical colleges.

A common question that comes up is what network addresses should I use. I’ve given a very brief note to that in the above material, but let me go a bit further here. First, I’m not going to subnet any network addresses. There is a history of three primary clases of network addresses in existence. Those are class A, B and C network addresses. These work by separating the four ‘octets’ of an IP address into a ‘network’ portion and a ‘host’ portion. in class A netowrks the arangement is n.h.h.h where the first octet is the network address, and the remaining octets are host identifiers. In a class B address the arangment is n.n.h.h where the first 2 octets are network address and the remaining are host identifiers. In class C, you can presume accurately that the arrangement is n.n.n.h where only the last octet is used to identify hosts. There are approximately 125 networks in clas A address space, somewhat less than 65,000 networks in class B and approximately 24 million class C netowrks. In a class A network there may be as many as 24 million hosts connected to the network, about 65,564 hosts in a class B and 254 hosts in a class C.

Within each class of networks a network, or range of networks has been set asside for use as private address space. These networks are allocated so that businesses and individuals can build their own networks for their own internal use that can then be connected via a gateway or proxy to the rest of the internet. In class A that network is 10.h.h.h. In class B the range is 172.16.h.h through 172.31.h.h. and in class C the address range is 192.168.0.h though 192.168.255.h. Within a given network, there are two addresses that can not be given out. n.0 and n.255. n.255 for a class A address private address space would be 10.255.255.255 though most people will subnet the range so I won’t get into that further.

Without any particular tricks let’s designate three addresses to be used for our three networks DMZNet, PriNet and PubNet. To simplify things a bit, since most broadband routing software already comes configured around the class C private address space, let’s use networks 192.168.1.h, 192.168.2.h and 192.168.3.h for those networks.

The oGate device will have an address assigned by our Internet Service Provider, usually via dhcp, but it may be using another means, including a network engineer giving you a piece of paper saying “here’s your address.” The other critical address to configure is the inside address. Let’s give it the addresss 192.168.1.1 and we’ll call that our oGate address.

PriNet is going to be 192.168.2.h, and we need to configure two addresses on the router directly. The outside address will be 192.168.1.2 with a gateway address of 192.168.1.1 (oGate). The inside address is going to be 192.168.2.1 and let’s call that th iGate address. This is going to be the address that all of the devices in the 192.168.2.h network space will use to talk to devices on the internet.

PubNet is going to be 192.168.3.h and we again need to configure two addresses directly. 192.168.1.3 with a gateway 192.168.1.1, and 192.168.3.1 as the PubNet iGate address.

Presuming you are getting the outside address of oGate’s through dhcp, there should be some additional addresses provided that you may want to take advantage of. Particularly these are the dns server addresses. Since we are using staticly assigned addresses on our pubnet and prinet routers, we will need to configure our dhcp servers to publish the information on oGate. since the 192.168.1.h address space is pretty much all staticly assigned, we can’t rely upon dhcp to propigate that information to pubnet and prinet routers, so you will need to transfer the information yourself.

For the most part you will need to set up yoru dhcp service to suit your needs. For a long time I was allocating addresses between 30 and 49 within my own network via dhcp. Actually I was doing a bit more than that, but that gave me 19 addresses to use. You could use that rule, or if you expect to be hosting larger parties where you may have a lot of guests who carry wifi enabled cell phones around, set he address range to something larger. my pubwifi address space is a range from 100 to 250, or 151 hosts can connect at once. There are potential problems with that many concurrent hosts, but it won’t be the address space that presents the problems.

If you are currious, I am not using those addresses as laid out within my networks. You don’t need to know what addresses I use for networks that you are not getting an address specifically for. So don’t worry too much about it.

Have fun, and maintain a safe network.

ICE – In Case of Emergency. – It may save your life.

I presume it’s available for the iPhone, but don’t know. I hope it’s available for Symbian based and Nokia phones in general, but I wouldn’t know how to confirm it’s available. I use the G1 Android phone, and can confirm that it’s a very functional and useable application, and interfaces with the portions of the system that I want it to.

First of all, what is the application? A few years ago you may have seen a flyer in your electric bill, or with your cell phone bill, suggesting that you add a cell phone contact named ICE. The intent is that if you are in an accident, or incapacitated, or the like that public safety people who encounter you in that condition can check your phone for the ICE contact, and call the person (or people) you designate there to let someone know about your situation. Presumably you have informed that person of any medical conditions that apply to you. That way the people responding to your situation will have additional information available sooner.

It’s a good idea, with a rather critical flaw. The major flaw is that many people do not want to leave their phone available for just anyone to place calls. Additionally with the amount of personal data that you may be keeping on your phone, including your browsing history and such, a large number of people have put screen locks on their cell phone. You can accept calls, and in many cases place something like a 911 call, but general phone numbers are out, and it’s almost a given that an ICE contact would not be available.

ICE – In Case of Emergency, the application does more than just provide a contact. First up you have an instructions page. You can also set up special instructions of your own on the page. There is a row of buttons down the left that read “Who to Call”, “ID & Insurance”, “Allergies”, “Conditions”, and “Medication”.

Within the application the ‘who to call’ contacts are directly callable. You press the contact, and the phone calls them. Pretty much the same way that any contact you set up in your phone is expected to work. However the application only lists those you want to consider your emergency contacts.

ID & Insurance is pretty self explanatory. who are you, where do you live, what is your health insurance numbers in case that will speed up medical assistance. Some hospitals won’t accept you without insurance. Som have to bill differently. You get the picture.

Allergies. If you are alergic to Bee stings or peanuts, this is where you add that information. Want people to know your alergic to asprin? Might be a good idea. Anephelactic Shock is not something you want to go through if at all possible to avoid.

Conditions. Are you diabetic? Have High Blood Preasure? Do you suffer from a specific sleep disorder, or have fragile bones due to osteoperosis? Note all that applies here. Someone going into insulin shock looks a lot like someone having a stroke, or any of a large number of other conditions. Many times seconds matter in getting the appropriate treatment. And knowing what you do know is already wrong with you will make a difference in how medics will try to treat you.

Medications. Again what you take, dossage, schedule if it’s multiple times a day, or once a day, when. It matters, and can make a difference with treatment. My own advice is to also add any herbal remedies you may be taking that are not ‘prescribed.’ If you are taking St. Johns Wart, that will affect some medication in surprising ways.

Note that there are quite a few places to record things that perhaps the developers hadn’t thought of. If you are a vegitarian, or vegan, note that in special instructions on the first page, and possibly in your ID block. If you have been a vegan long enough that you have adverse reactions to something like bacon bits accidentally added to your salad, it might be a good idea to add that information to your allergies.

I’m also inclined to suggest recording ‘lifestyle’ information if you think it might make a difference in what sort of treatment you might get. As an example, if you are a runner, you may have a higher risk of being hit by a car when you are some distance from home, or even when you are ‘almost home’ and SSS hits. SSS is Sudden Stupid Syndrome. Signs include suddenly not paying attention to what’s going on around you, having a sense of elation, and so on. If you look at the record for people driving long distances for commuting or even on a vacation, most ‘accidents’ happen within 5 miles of getting ‘home’. That’s because you’re almost home. You could drive this portion of the trip almost in your sleep. In fact that’s often what you’ve started doing. Oh, you’re awake, but you’re probably paying attention to a different set of things than you were when you were driving the freeway in an unfamiliar state or driving through those towns on old route 66. As a result you miss seeing the unusually large pot hole that opened up in the road last night and rips a tire off your car. Or you miss the kid down the street who just got his permit this week and is trying to show off to mom or dad just how good of a driver he can be. It happens to runners to. You’ve run for 20 min, or so, you’re just about home. You might even be in your warm down walk. Whatever. You’re not paying attention any more, and as you cross the final street, you miss the fact that you’re walking out infront of a bus that’s getting ready to go.

Running does do a few different things to your body as well. If you’ve started long distance running, you may have experienced a runners high. It’s a release of Dopamine into your blood stream. That reduces your sensitivity to pain, and can affect how you process stimulus as well. If you regularly experience that state while running, make sure it’s noted. James Fixx died of a major heart attack during his <a href=”http://bystander.homestead.com/run_heart_attack.html”>daily run</a>. The conditions of the heart attack, and the symptoms that had been happening in the weeks prior to the heart attack suggest that it may have been from before he started running, also there is a history of heart disease in his family. One thing to remember though is that a runners high can mask the symptoms to you, so it might be a good idea to have those conditions documented on the off chance that ambulance personel can respond appropriately.

So back to that major flaw. Many of us prefer to ‘lock’ our phones when we are not actively using it. It may kick in when the screen saver starts, or you may be almost automatically locking the phone, who knows. What ICE can do is hook directly into the screen lock program and if you don’t provide the appropriate password/gesture, the ICE application can come up anyway. That way you can carry the phone with you always, and anyone who needs to contact someone for you, can.

The application comes from <a href=”http://www.appventive.com/”>Appventive.</a> It’s in the Android Marketplace and I think it’s well worth the $0.99 they are asking.

Note that I’ve had the app for almost 3 months. It took me 2 months to figure out how to enable the screen lock access to the application. So if you are having trouble, take heart. You are not alone. Go into Settings on the first page, and go into the dialogs for setting up a delay for the screen lock. That’s where you enable the ICE lock which will allow you to set the phone to display that by default, and you can hit the unlock button there, or you can set a delay to allow you to unlock the phone, or if you don’t successfully unlock the phone the ICE lock comes up which allows the bearer of the phone to place the appropriate calls.

I hope that in the end I never need this application to save my life. However I happen to think that $0.99 is very much a great value for what this app does.

…90% to go.

I posted a half humorous note on my facebook page Friday (or was it Saturday morning?) that had a list of tasks I wanted to do this weekend. Asside from a bit of formatting, I’ve gotten what I think should be the most important part of the list done.

One of the problems I have at work is that I can’t exactly launch any IM client and start chatting with people. I have a few philisophical problems with the Microsoft Communicator client at work. But am happy to use it for the most part. The biggest issue I have is that you can’t update contact information to display a custom identifier for someone. If it isn’t published in the domain the way you want it to appear, too bad so sad. Oh, I understand some of the reasoning behind that. No labeling your boss the ‘idiot in charge’ and stuff like that. But if there are two John Smith’s in your business, it can take significant additional knowledge to confirm that you have selected the right John Smith to send a message to. If you know that one of them preferrs to be called Jonathan, it makes sense to be able to put that in an alias for the user in the IM client. But that’s locked out at the moment. I’m not holding out a lot of hope that it will change either.

However that’s still not the significant issue for me. The real issue is that I can’t connect to the resources I would like to. Particularily my own jabber server.

So I have had to come up with a kludge. And the first half works for now.

The kludge is that I have put together a monitoring client for my jabber server that attaches as one of my resources, and simply collects each IM that I receive, and tosses it into a tab separated values file. (I’ve had issues with comma separated values in the tool that I use to read the messages, so rather than fight with them, I’ve set up the tool to work with me.

The other issue I’ve had over the years or so has been that I’m never really sure what happens to an IM sent to me while I am away, or if I get something and the client dumps for some reason. This way I should get a reasonably comprehensive copy of my IMs while I am otherwise occupied. In theory I could set up the client so that at any time I could pull up a list of messages on another session, sort of using it as a secretary within jabber. Who knows, I may just do that at some point. Not tody though.

On top of that I needed a way of displaying those messages. I have that now too. I was able to use some of the code I wrote a while back. Ok, I basically grabbed something out of a php tutorial at some point, and I’ve been re-arranging things ever since. In any case I revised the code again, and now I can view the contents of the capture file. Basicly the tool I’m using displays the contents of the formatted text file in a table.

Things ain’t quite perfect yet. The script crashes out on unicode character issues, which I’m not sure I have a good way to get arround, but until it dies, I can at least see most of the messages I get.

The second half of that list should be easier. Well, the actual sending of messages will be. However I am not building the sender code without adding some security wrapper to the system. That URL will need authentication before it should accept a message to send. The reality is that I need to build the authorization and authentication system in such a way that it can not easily be spoofed. One of the problems with the easiest sollution I can come up with is that I don’t know if there is a way to maintain authentication without adding some sort of SSL or https sollution to the mix.

This is a ’solved problem’ you may be saying. Use https or ssl. Not so fast. First of all I need to build the platform so that I can get such a solution through the firewall at work. Not necesarily trivial, however that on it’s own is not a serious problem. The greater problem is that to use the appropriate ports on my server, I need ot abandon features that I very much do not want to abandon. so not so easy.

The next obvious sollution is to use gpg to encrtype the user credentials and then base 64 encode the encrypted credentials and send that off as a cookie that can be asked for at any time. The problem here is that with the exception of a user on a public internet server, the encrypted credentials could be used by anyone on a nat traversing link. Capture the cookie with airsnort or the like, and you suddenly have everything you need to look like me to my server. So that’s not a solution I’m happy with.

I suppose I could implement a variation of a kerberose solution. Point the user at a third party location for logging in using a ssl or https session there, then that system provides a token back to the local web server that is provided to the user’s workstation in a cookie that is only good for a few minutes, and the user needs to re-authenticate again if they exceed that time. A varriation would be to only allow the user to post if a persistent authenticated secure session exists with the third party server. (separate tab or window that could be minimized) One possible variation would be to build in open-id/open-auth. I’m already using that at one level for this blog, however I’m not sure that either have a system that works well with passing arround jabber credentials securely.

I don’t think I’m going to get that part of the solution implemented this weekend.

Oh well.

First of all some disclaimers. I won’t say that this is going to be ’simple’ or the best solution possible. If you are comfortable with jaws, which I have never used, this may be an ‘easy’ alternative, or it may be a situation where you need help from other users.

I’m a very happy G1 Google Phone user. Other than editing some scripts, I have not done significant development on the G1 platform, but I’m hoping that this is a reasonably simple set of steps to follow. One of the advantages of the G1 is that it has a keyboard that is laid out in the Qwerty format, so you may find typing reasonably familiar compared to using a screen keyboard. From what I am seeing, the G2 phone does not have this feature. However both phones should accept a bluetooth keyboard.

You will need an account on a jabber server. This may also be called xmpp. Gtalk from gmail will work but will cause minor issues with the g1 phone (you’ll get a notification every time a message goes to the phone in addition to the tts functioning.) You can create free accounts on many jabber servers, including jabber.org, or if you would like I host a server at jabber.beresourceful.net

Create an identi.ca account and in the ‘Connect’ page go to the Twitter tab add a Twitter Account. You will have to go through a verification step which I’ve forgotten what it is. Now on the same tab select ‘Import my Friends Timeline’ which tells identi.ca to start tracking all the postings of the people on Twitter that you are following.

Also in Connect page, go to the IM tab. You will need to give the identi.ca platform your jabber/xmpp account information to forward notices to. Also check the box ‘Send me notices through Jabber/GTalk’.

At this point you should not need to do anything further with identi.ca.

At your desktop you can confirm that you are receiving twitter updates from the user update@identi.ca. You will need a jabber/xmpp client to do that. If you were using gtalk you can simply launch google talk. There are a number of other clients that will work with jabber/xmpp servers as well. Pidgin is one that is available on many platforms. iTalk on OS X should also work, however I have never used it, so I can’t provide any assistance.

Moving on to the G1, you need to install the TTS libraries and the Android Scripting Engine. ASE is still in development, but is at version 0.9 so it is getting close. ASE is available by using the barcode at http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/ which is also a great starting point for learning more about ASE and writing scripts for Android based phones and devices. Besides ASE you will need to install the python interpreter and I would recommend the scripts as well.

Within the ASE sample scripts there is a script ’saychat.py’ that is the base of the following.

"""Say chat messages aloud as they are received."""

__author__ = 'Damon Kohler <damonkohler@gmail.com>'

__copyright__ = 'Copyright (c) 2009, Google Inc.'

__license__ = 'Apache License, Version 2.0'

import android

import xmpp

class SayChat(object):

  def __init__(self):

    self.droid = android.Android()

    username = 'Username'      # replace Username with your user name. Leave quotes.

    password = 'Password'      # Same for Password.

    jid = xmpp.protocol.JID(username)

    self.client = xmpp.Client('jabber.server.fqdn') # replace with your server name.

    self.client.connect(server='jabber.server.fqdn', 5223) # replace server name again, 5223 may need to be 5222 for some servers.

    self.client.RegisterHandler('message', self.message_cb)

    if not self.client:

      print 'Connection failed!'

      return

    auth = self.client.auth(username, password, 'botty')

    if not auth:

      print 'Authentication failed!'

      return

    self.client.sendInitPresence()

  def message_cb(self, session, message):

    jid = xmpp.protocol.JID(message.getFrom())

    username = jid.getNode()

    text = message.getBody()

    self.droid.speak('%s says %s' % (username, text))

  def run(self):

    try:

      while True:

        self.client.Process(1)

    except KeyboardInterrupt:

      pass

saychat = SayChat()

saychat.run()

You may want to modify the self.droid.speak line further, or even the entire block of code. As it stands it will essentially read of ‘update@identi.ca says ….’ which may not be what you are looking for. It is possible to break out the twitter id and message out of the ‘text’ variable which may work better. I will update the above script with a breakout that makes a bit more sense once I am in front of a system where I can see the output. (I’m at work where the firewall doesn’t give me access to my jabber server at the moment.)

There are scripts available to post directly to Twitter from the G1, as well as Twitter specific applications. (Which may be worth reviewing to see if any of them support TTS directly.)

I’ve written my own twitter posting script that allows me to add a specific tag #cvg2009, #cvg2010, #tcfmc, etc. that basically reverses several of these steps.

The above is a script that I suspect can be run as a service without too many problems. As a result you could be walking around,

The software for identi.ca is open source and can be downloaded from laconi.ca if you would rather run your own server for both the identi.ca and jabber services. Explaining how to get either set up or configured is a little beyond the scope of this one blog entry. There are several people hosting one or both though, so you may very well find that all of the resources you need are very much available. If you are looking for a desktop solution, Pidgin has a plug-in for the Festival text to speech engine which may suite your needs as well. Festival has a variety of voices available if you are not happy with the tts engine on the G1 or the default voice installed with Festival. It is also available in several languages so if you are going to follow a twitter like resource that only speaks Spanish, or French, it can be done through that platform as well.

…flesh out a business idea in the age of social media?

I have an idea. I would like to make it available to friends to help me work out the problems with the idea. I know there are some. I wouldn’t mind having partners in implementing the program, as there are several areas I really don’t feel competent to take on myself today.

Ok, something simple. I own an Android G1 cell phone. I know several people who do as well. I also know several people with iPhones. And I’m sure that there are a few friends with the Palm Pre phone. Each of these phones has the ability to gather and post it’s location. An App could be built for each, to an open standard that says ‘Hey, I’m here.’ and the app could display other users of the app on a map of the area, centered on you, and you could chat with those users within the app, or see that they are driving and not available for chat. You might even discover that the person sitting across from you on the bus or train is another user of the app and strike up a conversation, completely outside of the app.

As noted, if you are driving, it’s probably not something you want to be running. But also there is that possibility of two people riding the bus, so just because you are in motion should not prevent you from being able to use the app.

Side note, the one thing I really dislike about the app Waze is that a huge dialog shows up telling you about things happening 700 miles away or more, and some idiot wanting to ‘Chat’ because they are on a computer at home or something. Give me a break. No notifications for events more than 100 miles away, and if I’m attempting to use the platform for navigation, I certainly don’t want to ‘chat’ with someone.

Back to the business idea. Let’s say we get the app built. Since this really is a social app, rather than a user safety app, or navigation aid, I’m thinking that the price should be something like $2.00, possibly with a free limited functionality trial version of the app. I don’t generally like nag ware, so the added functionality would have to be something like profile support where you could decide what info of you gets shared, or in the paid version you can share pictures, or even video, wthout having to link to a third party web page or service. Another option would be to build in twiter or facebook interoperability in the pay edition, not in the free.

The idea is to make the ‘free’ version functional. Just not feature rich. One concern would be to make sure that if you discover a significant flaw in the pay edition that also exists in the free edition, the update should happen for both at the same time.

Anyone want to work on this with me?

First of all I want to say that I probably buy more books online through you than everyone els combined. Online. I do tend to buy books at book stores more, particularily B&N, but that’s a different matter.

About this Kindle book reader you have. I’m sure it’s an excelent book reader. Sounds like some very nice features for readers, and in a few cases ok for authors as well.

That said, nothing I ever write will be published so that it may be sold to be read on the Kindle. At least not while Amazon maintains control over what a Kindle owner/carrier may have on his or her Kindel.

Further, unless you publicly anounce that you are completely dropping all digital rights management on the platform, I will be treating all e-mail advertising the Kindel as spam. It doesn’t matter to me if you find some way to bring the cost to the customer down to $1 for shiping and the hardware is free. You can have as many celebrities as you wish promoting it. If an e-mail shows up in my e-mail box promoting the Kindel, I will treat it as spam.

Thank you.

I’m currently living in a place where the bike I have probably isn’t the best choice. I’ve posted a bit about riding in the past, but bear with me a bit.

For new readers, I ride a Suzuki Katana 600 from 1993. The photos from the dealer are at http://motorcycleminnesota.com/020108/11/11.htm

I like the bike, but it probably was a bit big for me to buy at the time. I think I would have done just a bit better learning wise with a 250 Ninja, or perhaps a 400 cc or so cruiser, but the price at the time was about what I was looking for, and I had decided that for learning I wanted a sport bike I could later on look back on and tell people that Yes, I used to ride one of those, but now I ride… whatever it is that I have at the time, probably a cruiser.

Working nights means that it’s a bit of a concern to ride the bike to work. Most of the street level parking lots won’t let you park overnight, because they don’t want the liability of a stolen bike. Most of the Ramps don’t want you to park in them because they don’t want the problem of a damaged bike that someone tried to park on. Also some ramps have automated systems for entry/exit that a rider could just drive around, and they don’t want to have to deal with the potential for unscrupules riders taking up parking they are not paying for.

That sort of means leaving the bike in the street. I don’t know about you, but that has never left me feeling comfortable about riding the motorcycle to work. I’ll do it, but still.

Where in the TC area that I Live is also a bit tedius for riding. Minnesota is widely hailed as the land of 10000 lakes. Ok, a few of them might more rightly be called large ponds, but that’s beside the point. No lakes can be entertaining to ride around. Presuming that they have an ‘around’ to ride on of course. But the reason that we are known as the land of 10000 lakes is because we are on the edge of where the glaciers reached to during the last great ice age. In fact a much more interesting part of the state from a riders perspective is where the melt water eroded the ground. Much of the upper Mississippi valley to the south and east of the twin cities is known as bluff country and in some circles as the Greate Unglaciated area. Whether it truely was unglaciated and there was a lot of errosion from the melt water alone, or if it had been glaciate, and was litterally ripped out by melt water under the glaciers really isn’t all that important. What is interesting is the topology.

If you take US 61 from the twin cities and just follow it for a while, you initially don’t see all that much that is very exciting. Ok, if you are using google earth, and have the elevation features turned on, you will see a lot of up and down portions of the road as you leave Hastings and head into Red Wing, but even from there on down to Lake City, it’s pretty much flat and long stretches of straight road. You’ll probably need to hit the rest stop at Lake City, just to get the cobwebs out of your brain. But to tell the truth, that’s also where the road conditions have some serious changes happening. For about 5 to 10 miles south of Lake City, the highway is on the side of the hill between the bluffs and Lake Pepin or the Mississippi. Now a few years ago the Highway Department for the State of MN did a lot of work on that stretch of highway. Widening the road, and taking out a few of the sharper corners, but it’s still a beautiful stretch of highway to drive on, and on a lighter traffic day can be a challenging place to ride.

The ‘bad’ part is that it’s a good hour to an hour and a half of riding just to get there, and it’s a fairly short stretch.

Ok, I hear it “Yeah Rusty, but you’re riding a bullet bike! Go Fast!” Going ‘fast’ doesn’t really hold much attraction for me. Brief bit of calculation here. The ‘redline’ on my bike is 13000 rpm. 55 mph in 6th gear has the moter spinning along at about 5000 rpm. So I have a theoretical max of  150 mph, give or take a bit. Let’s say 140 mph. On highways in Minnesota today I will could theoretically see that speed. Briefly. I’ll disabuse you of the freeways first. I-94 from Minneapolis to Fargo just has too much traffic. Alexandria is about half way between Fargo and Minneapolis. Furgus Falls is a little less than half way between Alexandria and Fargo. Rothsay is a small community on the Fargo side of Furgus Falls. I-94 passes Rothsay to the east of the community. Now pull up the satelite view of the community and pan over to I-94. See those specks on the freeway? Traffic. Any of it will turn a 120 mph 435 lb hunk of metal and attached 200 lb rider into a piece of 65 mph rubble and associated blood spot. I’m 45 years old. I may not be the smartest or best motorcyle rider in the Minneapolis area, but I know that I’m not interested in being that blood spot. My reflexes are not what they were 20 years ago, and even then I probably wouldn’t have considered that to be a fun way to go.

About the only stretch of Interstate that might pose a possibility is I90 between Albert Lee and the South Dakota border. But I’ll let you take a look at the satelite imagery for yourself. I personally think there is too much traffic there. What about I-35? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

So excluding the interstate freeway system, we end up with the US Highway system and State Highways. For the most part both are primarily interested in interconnecting towns and cities. US 169 has some limited access sections. Mostly beteen where it crosses the Minnesota River and where it crosses the Mississippi. Pretty much everywhere else it has at least some traffic entering and exiting for communities along it’s path, and a lot of that traffic actually crosses the highway. Not good for high speed riding. US 10 is much the same. 55 and most of the other US highways are far worse. When a US or State Highway goes through a city, it’s speed limit drops. It is not quite universal that it will drop to 30. Some places it will only drop to 35, a few places only down to 45, but those speeds are strictly enforced. Often more by the physics of collision dynamics than by the police, but the Police do their part as well. And considering the size of these communities, it’s a good idea anyway.

It really doesn’t matter if I have a ‘bullet bike’ or ‘crotch rocket’ the upper limits of it’s speed capabilities are anything but what I’m concerned about riding at.

So why a sport bike? If you’ve seen any motor cycle racing in the past couple of decades, you’ve noticed that unlike auto racing, it’s almost never on an oval track. The challenge in motorcycle racing is not to go ‘fast.’ In fact the real top end of the bike’s speed is almost never achieved, and never sustained for a lap. The driver would be dead. Motorcycle courses are a mass of tight turns and corners. There may be one or two straight aways, but the real challenge is to maintain control of the bike through the bends. The straight aways are the dull spots that take you from the corner you just came out of to the next corner. If you build up too much speed, you can’t slow down in time to take the next corner well.

There are roads a bit like that in MN. Saddly too many of them are gravel. Perhaps my favorite, though I’ve never ridden it on a motorcycle is a stretch of MN 76 between Caledonia and Houston, MN. Starting out in Caledonia, it looks like almost any stretch of paved highway in MN. Long, straight stretches with some rolling hills. Don’t let that decieve you. After a right turn where MN 1 jumps down to Bever Creek State Park, and a left turn about 3 miles north of there, you drop into Badger Creek. for a 4 or 5 mile stretch you are on the part of Highway 76 that truckers of old called 29 corners. The speed limit signs are not just the law. They really are a very good idea of what speed you should be going into most of the corners at.

There are a couple of other stretches like that in the area, including a stretch you could end up on if you turn about 1.7 miles earlier than the turn into Badger Creek. The road to Sheldon MN also contains a lot of tight twists and turns. You could make a 16.7 mile loop of the two roads if you wanted to. However if you are interested in a loop, there are a few longer loops in the area that are nearly as challenging.

It looks like they are trying to take a lot of the corners out of it, but if you start in Caledonia, on Main street, and head east, you will ultimately have a 400 foot elevation drop down to the Mississippi at Brownsville, MN. Bit of history in that town. It was once a very large river city, that had a fire about the same time as the great Chicago fire. Unlike Chicago, it didn’t recover quite the same way. You can still find foundations for buildings in the hills around the existing community. After comming to a stop you will find you’ve come to Highway 26. The Great River Road. Turn South and follwo 26 until about half a mile out of Genoa, or another 3 miles south, and take either 249 or 14 (respectively) and you will end up back in Caledonia on Winebago Avenue. (intersection at the south east corner of town.)

Honestly, there are a lot of really great roads to ride in Houston County, and a few as will in Winona and Filmore Counties. From what I’ve been able to see on the maps, Wabasha and Goodhue counties offer their share of windey roads, and I have no doubt that on the Wisconsin side of the river the same is true.

Those are the fun spots for sports bikes. If all you want to do is go or accellerate fast, the trick is to get a power to weight ratio that is power high, and weight low. Given limitations on production bikes, you are going to have to get down to a very low body weight to reduce the load on the bike for accelleration. If you are a normal American male, you are probably going to be beaten handily by the kid down the street, or the hot babe next door. But if that’s your idea of fun, Ok, that’s your idea of fun.

While I have a personal preference for the roads in South Eastern MN, you can find windy roads pretty much anywhere tributaries are feeding a river or body of water that’s at a lower elevation than the surounding area.

As noted in the begining, at some point I hope to get a different bike. Possibly a cruiser, possibly something like a gold wing. Even a Pacific Coast looks interesting. Something that it is comfortable to ride 200 miles at a stretch on. Or at least 100 with a lunch break at the end. I have a few ‘longer’ routes that I would like to take at some point. 94 up to Fargo, 29 from Fargo to Souix Falls, 90 from there to Albert Lee, or possibly even Tomah, Wi. And from whichever the appropriate interstate (35 or 94) back to the Twin Cities. No matter what, that’s a 3 or 4 day ride. Oh it can probably be driven in a day or at most 2, but I would like to make a few stops along the way. Say hello to people, and who knows, maybe do a bit of fishing, or something. There are a couple of stretches within MN that are pretty much 2 day rides for me today on the Katana. For example, take 169 up to Grand Rapids, then US 2 over to Bemidji. It’s just over 200 miles. Then down 71 to US 10 back to the Twin Cities for the second leg. At an average speed of 45 mph, that’s about 5 hours of riding each way. Especially if you take breaks for gas, food and well the motorcycle pants are really comfy, but I doubt that will be the case so much when soiled.

There are a few other interesting tour ideas I have for 2 day rides. For example US12 from the twin cities to Ortinville, then back along the Minnesota River Valley. Unfortunately there isn’t really a road that follows the Minnesota River, so it would be a hodge podge of 7, 212, 71, 14 and 169. I suspect I would not see nearly as much of the river valley as I would like.

Well, this has rambled on a bit. You’re more than welcome to suggest other routes. Since I live in the TC area, routes that start and end here are of immediate interest to me. A long day route might be 169 to 14, to 52 back to the cities. For the moment I’m riding on a permit. That means no passengers, a helmet on at all times, no riding at night, and stay off the Interstate. I’m not interested in multi-day rides because I have 2 dogs at home, and while they have gone over 12 hours without me, I really don’t like to do that to them.

If you’ve stuck with me to this point, thank you. This is really one of those posts that I get into from time to time. A friend has posted the quote/question ‘What would you do if you knew you could not fail? Robert H. Schuler’ Unfortunately for me the question is too open. Walk to the moon. Make love daily to the most beautiful women ever. A more interesting question in my mind is ‘Knowing that you could fail, what would you make the effort to complete?’

Go, challenge yourself, fix the world, and ride safe.

Took a few pictures of my pups this weekend. I figure there will be enough pictures of #cvg2009 to sate most appetites, so here goes.

Not sure how well this will present. Pictures are clickable for full size images. they were taken with an HTC G1 Android based phone. Mindy is an 11 year old Black Lab Cross (no idea what dad was, I adopted her at the age of 1 and 1/2.) Nick is a 13 year old American Eskimo. I adopted Nick at the age of 3.

Just to get a feel fro submitting to a writing contest, I put together a quick story a couple of months ago and submitted it to the Misfits Writing Contest.

There is a bit of an influence of Corey Doctrow in here, as I had just finished reading Little Brother. That said, I would not say that it is fanfic by any means.

I would direct you to the http://www.misfit.org web site for more information on Misfits as an organization, as well as additional information on the writing contest. The feedback I personally received at the 2009 CONvergence convention was that every submission that was received this year was of substantially higher quality than much of the material they have received in the past. I believe it was an effort to say that while what I wrote was very good in their eyes, they did receive even higher quality writing that went forward and ended up winning the contest. I also gather that the top 5 entries in each catagory were all agreed to by the judges, thought there may have been some disagreement on the order.

I tend to limit myself to short fiction. There is a fair amount of writing formats that I do not do well. As an example I know that I Need to do a lot of work on Dialog, as well as character development. Dialog can help the story move along very well. I would have to say that most of my writing at this point is more narrative than anything else. As a result it often will feel that someone sat down and ‘gave testimony’ when reading my writing. That said, I will try to write to a wider variety of styles in the future. I shan’t be submitting novels by any means. I don’t expect the judges to consider such worthy of inclusion. Their time is limited, and should be devoted to being able to review and consider each contestant’s writing.

If you happen to like my writing, or story telling, I would have to suggest finding a copy of the Misfits Writing Contest book, and read some of the other writing as well. I am a poor judge of my own writing. I have been told to continue, and to submit further pieces. I know I will do the former, and I’m hoping to do the latter as well.

If you are interested in a completely separate piece, and I’m not really happy with the ending of it, so I may re-write it in the future, I have published here as well, http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/blog/2008/10/short-story-time/

Both stories can be considered a bit dark, though I hope you will find humor in them as well.

I know people who have worked for The Department of Homeland Security. I’m pretty sure that if they wished to they could poke holes in this story that you could pilot the Queen Mary through. I do not hate what they stand for, though I don’t always agree with everything they have done so far, and strongly disagree with some of their policies and recommendations. That said, the people of the USA as a group as well as as represented by or representatives and senators, has elected to effectively eliminate certain ‘rights’ that some consider as included in the Declaration, the Constitution and the bill of rights. Whether you agree with those people or not, we will be experiencing issues for some time to come that we can point directly at those decisions, and recognize that what we ended up with was the logical outcome.

Without further foreshadowing, or other writing…

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