To the Front

Javascript munging broken? Here's a solution

2009-06-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

As pointed out in this slashdot article, Google has broken javascript email munging as suggested by projecthoneypot.org.

Of course, there are a few easy ways around this, and lots of not-as-easy methods.

Since Google obeys robots.txt, move the munging javascript to obfusmail.js and add it to the disallow list in robots.txt.
Use onmousemove or onmouseover on the body or even on an image displaying the email to swap said image or a blank text area for the email in question.
AFAIK google doesn't use cookies when spidering; store a randomly generated piece of data in a cookie, and xor the the password with it on both sides.
Use an ascii font to display the email. Dynamically, if you feel like really having fun with it.
And so on and so forth...

So the short version? Swap the most naive js mungers for something a bit smarter. An extra five lines of code or of annotations. It's not the end of the world. And when that gets beaten... move to the next solution. There will always be problems with usability for the visually impaired, for those who refuse to use js or cookies, and so on, and that's why you have a separate direct contact form. Right?

Creepcam

2009-01-28T23:55:00.001-08:00

Without further ado, I present to you... the creepcam

Yes, that IS a camera in a stuffed dog's nose.

SANS' top 25 errors

2009-01-13T17:14:00.000-08:00

SANS' top 25 list of coding errors is chock-full of rudimentary mistakes. It should be required reading for second year students in CS, or second term students in IT/CS diploma programs. Now, there are a couple of things that a half-decent programmer might miss - exploiting unspecified encoding, race conditions in underlying code - but if you're passing sensitive data in plaintext, or not validating and parsing user-supplied data, or not sanitizing your *&^%# SQL, you need to be educated. And it'd be better to have that happen in class than on the job.

Bits of the article are amusing, too: "all your code are belong to them," indeed.

In short: people still make these kinds of mistakes? Needless and frightening. Your information online is not secure, and at this rate it never will be.

2008-12-28T15:59:00.000-08:00

Woo, the clip on the Gadget Show is up, and it's fun (if not entirely correct - eg. 8' gorilla). http://fwd.five.tv/videos/mondospider if you're curious. I'd be the one in the red shirt.

Bartle

2008-12-15T23:36:00.000-08:00

Richard Bartle, who I've mentioned before, rises yet more points in my mind. Why?

"I'm not growing a vagina (I checked)." - Richard Bartle, responding to trolls

2008-11-28T10:55:00.001-08:00

Microsoft is getting creepy. From their malicious software removal tool:

"Malicious Software Removal. Before execution of the software, the software will check for and remove certain malicious software (“Malware”) from your device, which is listed and periodically updated by family at www.support.microsoft.com/?kbid=890830."

...listed and periodically updated by family? Am I the only one whose first thought was "please don't try to pretend like you're family, Microsoft, I'd rather keep you at arm's length"? Or does nobody actually read licence agreements but me? The best part is that no software is listed at that link, let alone categorized by family (which is, I assume, what they were trying to say.)

email

2008-11-25T21:32:00.000-08:00

I'm amazed at how productive I can be when I'm at work and waiting for a compile to finish. Something to do with the huge code restructuring we've recently had broke my build entirely, and I've spent the last four or five hours trying to get it to work - and it takes at least five minutes to test every attempted fix, but those five minutes aren't really enough to get into a problem, so I've been working on little things. Once those ran out, it was time to check emails! So I'm proud to say that from the day's start of just over 1700 unread emails in my inbox, I'm now down to 1565! Woo.

2008-11-16T22:16:00.000-08:00

http://vancouver.ca/electionresults2008/ has the yesterday's municipal election - particularly interesting, to me, is how the mayoral vote maps across the city.

MUDs turn 30

2008-10-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

Today marks the 30th birthday of MMORPGs. No, EverQuest isn't that old.

Richard Bartle, of the infamous Bartle test, comments on it briefly.

If you've never played a MUD or a MOO, I highly recommend it. My first exposure to one was in grade 8, when some politician gave a 'speech' to a bunch of educators and students in one, and I was building (M**-speak for writing the code and descriptions that provide rooms, characters, objects, actions, etc. that populate a text-based virtual world) that week, if not the very next day. The good ones are strange, fascinating places populated by wild people who act in-character the whole time (and the best ones have some extraordinarily strange characters). The worst are mere hack-and-slash, with no room for expression amongst the players (vs. participants). There's a middle ground, where direction is provided by challenges and advancement but where you're not stuck fighting orc 1, orc 2, orc 3...

Anyways. Happy birthday, MUD1.

Elections stock market!

2008-10-08T12:50:00.000-07:00

In a wonderful example of synchronicity, I was pointed at the UBC Elections Stock Market today. This is an amazing little thing - when I was a kid I worked this market hard for three or four elections, back on that monochrome computer in the basement, and then on my 386 when I got my first computer. I never lost money; once I only barely broke even, and once I roughly doubled my initial investment, and the rest varied. They used to have a $100 investment cap unless some conditions were met, iirc.

The method is straightforward: a stock for a given party in the MP market will be worth, after the election, the %age of the seats that that party got. A stock in the majority market is worth $1 if that guess is correct (eg. if it's a minority, then all majority stocks are worth nothing except for the 'no majority' option). This means that you can always buy a block of all parties or of all possible majority outcomes.

Unfortunately, my best former strategy - buy loads of blocks of majority stocks, sell the ones that are very unlikely whenever they spike, then in the last day or two as that gambler's choice becomes more and more certainly false, buying them back at fractions of the price (and cashing whole blocks back in before the actual election, not that it matters either way once a set is held) - doesn't work very well when the majority options are reduced to liberal, cpc, and neither. C'mon, if people will give me 4% odds that the NDP will take a majority, let me take those people's money!

In any case, there isn't much time left, but if you've always fancied yourself a good political analyst and you'd like to give day-trading a shot, I used to have a *lot* of fun with this, and I highly recommend it.

ATDT 1992

2008-10-06T15:47:00.000-07:00

Imagine it's 1992, more or less. It's five AM, and it's a wet Canadian winter; it's pitch black outside, but a thirteen year old boy sits in a desk chair, not feeling the chill of the drafty house, mesmerized. Folders, sheafs and scraps are stacked monstrously high in a miniature cityscape; skyscrapers brush the bottom of the desk, tottering dangerously in the breeze from his unconsciously swinging legs, and the valuable real estate surrounding the chair has been parcelled off. There is a screen, glowing amber, and letters and glyphs stream across it at roughly reading speed.

This morning, like every morning, the boy made sure to silence the modem's squeals and squelches, and he dials out to dozens of other homes, trying them in rapid sequence until he finds one that doesn't ring busy, and the machines connect. Information! This is no library; this is raw, chaotic information. Libraries don't have sections for some of these topics. Opinion and fact mix, chemistry and politics and ad hominems swirling crazily from across the globe, and he swims in it, no more aware of time or the dusty-smelling room than he is of the colour of the letters on the screen. He's a curiousity junkie who's found a never-ending hit.

Even the games enthrall him: he is a space trader, surviving like a mouse that darts from hungry owls; he is a brute who fights magical creatures daily in the forest, looting their corpses for coins to pay healers and to buy tougher leather to protect him, sharper weapons to let him slaughter faster; he is a survivor in a fallout-stricken world, where desolate outposts of sanity wall themselves from expanses of radioactive wasteland populated by humans driven violently mad and by dangerous and unpredictable mutants.

Before this, he used to write programs for a computer that saved software with a tape deck onto cassettes, often transcribing line from line from books, but those games held nothing to vivid depictions of mothers gone insane, clutching rolling pins like clubs, of inns where a bard and a wench flirt, but not with each other, or of the creation of a new world in an empty solar system. How could making a car dodge other cars compare to the desperate hope that no pirates or ransackers would stumble across your new home planet, fertile and green? How could copying lines from books compare to recipes for pyrotechnics, descriptions of how to distill banana peels, and stories of secret government organizations?

But eventually he'd be startled as grey light brightened outside. He'd snap up, turn everything off in a hurry, and run to get dressed for school in a rainy world that somehow had less colour than those monochrome words.

(Two points to anyone who understands the post title. Yes, this is obviously a story about me, but I doubt first-person would've worked at all. No, I don't think it's all that good, but I do need to write more to get back into the swing of it.)

Atwood on the Arts

2008-10-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes one of the mailing lists I'm on sends a gem my way. This is one such item:

MARGARET ATWOOD

From the Globe and Mail, September 24, 2008

What sort of country do we want to live in? What sort of country do we already live in? What do we like? Who are we?

At present, we are a very creative country. For decades, we've been punching above our weight on the world stage - in writing, in popular music and in many other fields. Canada was once a cultural void on the world map, now it's a force. In addition, the arts are a large segment of our economy: The Conference Board estimates Canada's cultural sector generated $46-billion, or 3.8 per cent of Canada's GDP, in 2007. And, according to the Canada Council, in 2003-2004, the sector accounted for an "estimated 600,000 jobs (roughly the same as agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, oil & gas and utilities combined)."

But we've just been sent a signal by Prime Minister Stephen Harper that he gives not a toss for these facts. Tuesday, he told us that some group called "ordinary people" didn't care about something called "the arts." His idea of "the arts" is a bunch of rich people gathering at galas whining about their grants. Well, I can count the number of moderately rich writers who live in Canada on the fingers of one hand: I'm one of them, and I'm no Warren Buffett. I don't whine about my grants because I don't get any grants. I whine about other grants - grants for young people, that may help them to turn into me, and thus pay to the federal and provincial governments the kinds of taxes I pay, and cover off the salaries of such as Mr. Harper. In fact, less than 10 per cent of writers actually make a living by their writing, however modest that living may be. They have other jobs. But people write, and want to write, and pack into creative writing classes, because they love this activity – not because they think they'll be millionaires.

Every single one of those people is an "ordinary person." Mr. Harper's idea of an ordinary person is that of an envious hater without a scrap of artistic talent or creativity or curiosity, and no appreciation for anything that's attractive or beautiful. My idea of an ordinary person is quite different. Human beings are creative by nature. For millenniums we have been putting our creativity into our cultures - cultures with unique languages, architecture, religious ceremonies, dances, music, furnishings, textiles, clothing and special cuisines. "Ordinary people" pack into the cheap seats at concerts and fill theatres where operas are brought to them live. The total attendance for "the arts" in Canada in fact exceeds that for sports events. "The arts" are not a "niche interest." They are part of being human.

Moreover, "ordinary people" are participants. They form book clubs and join classes of all kinds - painting, dancing, drawing, pottery, photography - for the sheer joy of it. They sing in choirs, church and other, and play in marching bands. Kids start garage bands and make their own videos and web art, and put their music on the Net, and draw their own graphic novels. "Ordinary people" have other outlets for their creativity, as well: Knitting and quilting have made comebacks; gardening is taken very seriously; the home woodworking shop is active. Add origami, costume design, egg decorating, flower arranging, and on and on ... Canadians, it seems, like making things, and they like appreciating things that are made.

They show their appreciation by contributing. Canadians of all ages volunteer in vast numbers for local and city museums, for their art galleries and for countless cultural festivals - I think immediately of the Chinese New Year and the Caribana festival in Toronto, but there are so many others. Literary festivals have sprung up all over the country - volunteers set them up and provide the food, and "ordinary people" will drag their lawn chairs into a field - as in Nova Scotia's Read by the Sea - in order to listen to writers both local and national read and discuss their work. Mr. Harper has signalled that as far as he is concerned, those millions of hours of volunteer activity are a waste of time. He holds them in contempt.

I suggest that considering the huge amount of energy we spend on creative activity, to be creative is "ordinary." It is an age-long and normal human characteristic: All children are born creative. It's the lack of any appreciation of these activities that is not ordinary. Mr. Harper has demonstrated that he has no knowledge of, or respect for, the capacities and interests of "ordinary people." He's the "niche interest." Not us.

It's been suggested that Mr. Harper's disdain for the arts is not merely a result of ignorance or a tin ear - that it is "ideologically motivated." Now, I wonder what could be meant by that? Mr. Harper has said quite rightly that people understand we ought to keep within a budget. But his own contribution to that budget has been to heave the Liberal-generated surplus overboard so we have nothing left for a rainy day, and now, in addition, he wants to jeopardize those 600,000 arts jobs and those billions of dollars they generate for Canadians. What's the idea here? That arts jobs should not exist because artists are naughty and might not vote for Mr. Harper? That Canadians ought not to make money from the wicked arts, but only from virtuous oil? That artists don't all live in one constituency, so who cares? Or is it that the majority of those arts jobs are located in Ontario and Quebec, and Mr. Harper is peeved at those provinces, and wants to increase his ongoing gutting of Ontario - $20-billion a year of Ontario taxpayers' money going out, a dribble grudgingly allowed back in - and spank Quebec for being so disobedient as not to appreciate his magnificence? He likes punishing, so maybe the arts-squashing is part of that: Whack the Heartland.

Or is it even worse? Every budding dictatorship begins by muzzling the artists, because they're a mouthy lot and they don't line up and salute very easily. Of course, you can always get some tame artists to design the uniforms and flags and the documentary about you, and so forth - the only kind of art you might need - but individual voices must be silenced, because there shall be only One Voice: Our Master's Voice. Maybe that's why Mr. Harper began by shutting down funding for our artists abroad. He didn't like the competition for media space.

The Conservative caucus has already learned that lesson. Rumour has it that Mr. Harper's idea of what sort of art you should hang on your wall was signalled by his removal of all pictures of previous Conservative prime ministers from their lobby room - including John A. and Dief the Chief - and their replacement by pictures of none other than Mr. Harper himself. History, it seems, is to begin with him. In communist countries, this used to be called the Cult of Personality. Mr. Harper is a guy who - rumour has it, again - tried to disband the student union in high school and then tried the same thing in college. Destiny is calling him, the way it called Qin Shi Huang, the Chinese emperor who burnt all records of the rulers before himself. It's an impulse that's been repeated many times since, the list is very long. Tear it down and level it flat, is the common motto. Then build a big statue of yourself. Now that would be Art!

Adapted from the 2008 Hurtig Lecture, to be delivered in Edmonton on Oct. 1

2008-09-20T01:07:00.000-07:00

You've probably heard of the spider/drug/spiderweb experiments. You probably haven't seen this video.

Bacon in the news

2008-09-08T09:08:00.000-07:00

Bacon strikes again, this time in alcoholic form. Yes, bacon-infused Vodka. Genius! Or something. Possibly genius.

bacon papers

2008-07-23T19:05:00.000-07:00

Bacon image of the day:

2008-07-20T22:24:00.000-07:00

Today's bacon link: Celebrity Canned Bacon. Makes me wonder which celebrity has sunk to canning bacon for a living.

Flickr pro!

2008-06-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Diego, Leigh, Lisa, and Leon I've now got a flickr pro account. If you're reading this blog, you've probably got too much time on your hands; head on over to http://www.flickr.com/photos/tothefront/ and check out some shots in full rez, or look at some of the ones that had been pushed out of the normal flickr account by newer shots.

2008-06-03T22:36:00.000-07:00

You'd think you wouldn't need an introduction if you were presented as the discoverer of Stigler's law of eponymy. Poor Robert K. Merton.

Wikiquote: Gra/ey

2008-05-28T20:25:00.000-07:00

From the "things that only wikipedia would have under 'gray' and 'grey', and yet this once saved me from going on two hours of website bugs" category:

Web colors

There are several shades of grey available for use with HTML and CSS in word form, while there are 254 true greys available through Hex triplet. All are spelled with an a: using the e spelling can cause unexpected errors with outdated browsers (this discrepancy was inherited from the X11 color list), and to this day, Internet Explorer's Trident browser engine does not recognize "grey" and will not render it. Another anomaly is that "gray" is in fact much darker than the X11 color marked "darkgray;" this is because of a conflict with the original HTML gray and the X11's "gray," which is closer to HTML's "silver." The three "slategray" colors are not themselves on the greyscale, but are slightly saturated towards cyan (green + blue). Note that since there are an even (256, including black and white) number of unsaturated shades of grey, there are actually two grey tones straddling the midpoint in the 8-bit grayscale. The color name "gray" has been assigned the lighter of the two shades (128 also known as #808080), due to rounding up. In browsers that support it, "grey" has the same color as "gray."

Also, I'm now working for Zeugma Systems. No link, because I like to keep life and work seperate in a way that trackbacks would never understand - and they they are actually looking at those, since they have a contest going between some of their HR guys as to who can get the most links from their blogs. Still, that's just for now - they've just released their first major press release, and beforehand it wasn't really clear what they were doing, and HR just finished working as hard to get "the good word" out. It's a decent looking product too, for sure ahead of the market, but nothing world-changing.

FOR SCIENCE!

2008-05-18T10:22:00.000-07:00

*** NEW! In advance celebration of the firstborn sale (expected gestation period: long enough for interest to have made over a pound of chocolate be worth far more than the trivial price of $14.99), Anderson Porcine Industries is proud to announce our new Premier Porcine Partnership Plan with no less than Google. Which is to say that there's now google ads on the page - and if you "Want a chance to win movies at the 2008 MTV Movie Awards!" or feel a burning desire to "Check out Chocolat Solutions From A Trusted Source" or have been hunting for a "Healthy Chocolate Home Business Turn Key Automated Marketing System", well, I guess now's your big chance. ***

*** NEW! Anderson Porcine Industries' Deluxe Choco-Porcine Culinary Kit, Mark I is for sale! ***

*** NEW! Someone has bacon-related data that's under a creative commons license! ***

Experiment time!

Perhaps spurred on by xkcd, Eliza and I began to talk about pig, chocolate, and deliciousness. A quick google reveals that we're not the first to conceive of such an idea, Vogel's chocolate actually makes some, and some guy experimented a bit. But the spirit of experimentation lay within us, and we could not deny its power. Also, Eliza is a genius: she brought that most explosive weapon in the culinary arsenal, Pop Rocks. Just as steel superceded iron, we are certain that bacon, chocolate, and Pop Rocks shall soon replace bacon and chocolate in both industry and the household. In these annals we shall present a process as well as clinical results.

This is so not our fault. Science agrees!

At the decreed time, we convened in the alchemist's lab (colloquially known as 'the boghouse kitchen') and assembled the calorie-laden raw materials that would be transformed into succulent culinary gold.

Step 1: gather components. 500g smoked bacon. 304g Callebaut milk chocolate, 282g Callebaut dark chocolate. 9.5g Tropical Punch Pop Rocks, 9.5g Wild Berry Pop Rocks (35% more!). 5.7g sprinkles. One helluva good idea.

Mouths watered, eyes gazed longingly, and hands were washed in a manner conveying hunger. We were read for step 2: prepare the bacon. We gingerly breached* the bacon containment system, then watched and waited, but it rapidly became evident that we would actually need to do something to spark the alchemical process; some form of application of energy to meet the activation energy needs of the reaction. (Note to chemists: your godless electron-worshipping graphs with activation energy humps and reaction energy results have no place in our bacon-fearing world. Conversion of tasty to golden deliciousness is a zero-order reaction, proceeding at the speed of hunger, that is beyond your simple mechanical tricks.)

The radioactive material in the smoke detector was immediately ruled out; the mighty power of pork would surely set the detector off, and we had serious concerns about initiating pop-rock fission chain reactions. We'd been told that matter is energy, so we put the bacon in a pan made of matter. But twice the power is twice as, er, powerful, so we cranked the oven and threw 'em on. Pink and... frothy? Must be extra-special bacon.

Makin' bacon: possibly the single most important thing I did that day.

Step 3: refine the process.Process engineering is important. Parallel bacon processing results in fewer bottlenecks and greater olfactory output. We deemed conveyor belts inappropriate, partly because we didn't have enough toilet paper tubes to really get a good line going.

The bacon is ready when it's crispy but not burnt - it must have enough cohesion; if it disintegrates into bacon bits, you'll end up with bacon-chocolate sprinkles, which makes the actual sprinkles unneccessary.

Placing a crucible over a cauldron filled with boiling water increases bubbling but reduces burning, toil and trouble.

Step 4: Stir mercilessly. The chocolate is ready when it has all given in, at which point it is easy to mold to your will.

Melted chocolate can cause tasty workplace accidents. Be sure to keep melted chocolate well seperated, or scrumptious but entropic mixing may occur.

Step 5: Insert bacon into chocolate. Cackle maniacally.

Step 6: Cover the bacon in chocolate. Allow to cool.

Of course, while it's cooling... more experimentation! Premade "pizza spinaci" seemed like such a good idea... but the pizza appeard to have once been pictured on the box, long long ago, long before the zombies came and ate the tomato sauce and passed the zombie disease on to the pizza itself.

And there's only one thing that could make pizza better.

Spinach pizza with milk chocolate. Verdicts:Eliza
Mmm... do you want to help me finish this?Dan
Ah, I guess I will if I need to.

Spinach pizza with dark chocolate. Verdicts:Eliza
This... isn't so good.Dan
It's ok, I guess. It tastes like chocolate mostly. Too rich.

Final conclusion: avoid mixing spinach pizza with chocolate in your mouth.

Delicious, dipped-once bacon. All that's missing is the second dipping and the crown popping jewels.

Step 7 and 8: dip a second time. Post-secondary-dip, apply Pop Rocks. Be careful, it's easy to get excited and overpour.

Step 9: allow the bars to cool while eating ice cream. A most critical step. Besides, due to the No Chocolate Left Behind law, there is no such thing as an acceptable chocolate loss. It must be vigorously applied to all foodstuffs. Our chocolates are our future, after all.

Ice cream conclusion: simple, tasty and cold.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of blue pop rocks, I shall fear no taste explosion.

Step 10: CONSUME!Eliza
Initially fruity, spicy tones followed by a rich chocolate body with a bold bacon finish.Dan
An interesting combination of creamy and candy. Intruiging subtle notes of light crystalline sugar highlight the mellow start and body, finishing with a smooth transition to porcine.

And in the other corner of the ring, the challenger, in pink rocks and dark chocolate... moooooooore baaaaaacon!

Dan
Hmm. Deep chocolate flavour with effervescent highlights. Very gentle hints of smoky meat and - dare I suggest? - a hint of musk. Fascinating crunchy texture.Eliza
Striking. A very complex blend of flavours: sweet berries with a breeze of smoke and salt. Decisively rounded. Held its chocolate better [than green pop rocks/milk chocolate].

Conclusion

"I'm drunk on bacon. Egads." - Eliza"The frontiers of culinary art must be pushed. Pop rocks, chocolate, and bacon make about as much sense to traditional chefs as impressionism did to romanticists. The pizza was gross, though." - Dan

NEW! More feedback!

"If you didn't tell me it had bacon, I wouldn't know it had bacon. Until later. Actually, now I'm, ah, kind of tasting the bacon. [pause] If I was stoned, I would love this. This is beautiful stoner food. It has a weird aftertaste though... [pause] ...did, did you just feed me chocolate-covered bacon?" - Rachael

Footnotes

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends," means "let’s charge into the gap in the enemy’s defenses," not "let’s reach into our pants again." - http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/breach.html

*** NEW! Anderson Porcine Industries' Deluxe Choco-Porcine Culinary Kit, Mark I is for sale! ***

woo

2008-03-19T08:55:00.000-07:00

I didn't see much of the Amazon between the triple frontier and Manaus due to being reasonably ill - it's mostly passed, pun unintended, though puking and shitting my way down the river wasn't quite how I'd hoped to go. Manaus is a little sketchy but pretty cool, and I head out in a couple of hours on a new boat... this time, bank-cardless. Time to really make that budget stick...

border crossings

2008-03-11T06:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got off a boat coming down the Amazon and landed in Peru. I got my exit stamp, and then got on another boat, and about ten minutes later I landed in Brazil. I got my entrance to Brazil stamp, with double the days that the visa I paid for allowed, and then walked across a border to Colombia. Eventually I returned to Brazil to sleep. Now I'm back in Colombia, where literally mere meters away prices are 1/4 of what they are in Brazil, still unstamped, and I'm printing out some quick Portugese phrases, for when my Spanish just won't cut it, which I expect will be lots. Tonight I'll sleep in a hammock in a boat that's in international waters, in a way, and tomorrow I go deeper into Brazil. Farewell, Peru, I hardly knew ye. Farewell, Colombia, I'll miss you!

shitty deal

2008-02-11T11:01:00.000-08:00

The last week hasn't been so great for me. My notebook is missing. Sketches, doodles, Spanish lessons, lousy poetry and somewhat better prose, notes from museums and sketches from ones which didn't allow photography, lyrics, musical ideas including a few nearly completed pieces in letters or messy tabs or both, art ideas and thoughts, quotes from novels and nonfiction that I wanted to remember and that I wanted to think on later, project ideas, geek notes, contact information, some diary stuff (though thankfully not all of it)... all of my creative output from the last three and a half months, gone. I know where it was: I'm anal about this book, and it and one novel were left in a hostel in Otavalo, I'm sure, when I repacked before running for a bus. Two friends went back to look for it, twice, and it's not there now. Three months, gone. The day before yesterday I got ripped off by a scamming bar manager, pushed around by an asshole statesider, then treated like shit by someone who I thought was a friend in a way that enhanced the actions of the manager and the statesider. Three days ago I got ripped off by a guide. Promised horses that would want to run, I got a mare with a greying mane and my friend's horse refused to even trot without being switched in the flank repeatedly. My saddle had buckles in a stupid spot - I think it was a child's saddle - meaning that my thighs got bruises where they touched it, making galloping impossible and trotting only possible in an uncomfortable and unsafe position with my thighs off the saddle. What was supposed to be a three hour ride with maybe an hour of checking stuff out on food was seven and a half hours, with maybe a half hour on foot. It ended up costing so much that my friend and I didn't even have enough for our busses the next day. What I like about horseback riding is galloping and being in touch with the horse, not having to convince it to walk at all, not being able to feel it underneath me, and riding in pitch black which was dangerous for it and I. And today the first version of this post got deleted because control-C, while IE claims means "copy", actually means "delete and don't allow ctrl-Z to bring back." Also, I hate Quito. And there's been lots of other small things that've just sucked but that aren't worth typing in. So. I have a blog. No blog is complete without some measure of emo whining. Here's hoping the quotient is full. /whine

photos

2008-02-10T19:23:00.000-08:00

There's about a hundred photos up on my flickr. I haven't got time to actually write stuff up for them now, sadly. Also, older photos are apparently no longer available. Huzzah. Short version: wish I'd known that at 200 photos, old photos start being hidden. Old posts might now have links that don't work, I apologize. Anyways, new photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/tothefront

FARC protests

2008-02-05T15:43:00.000-08:00

Anti-FARC protests were in every major Colombian city yesterday. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/world/americas/05colombiaweb.html?em&ex=1202360400&en=18b1dc0346d81a93&ei=5087%0A http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0206/p25s01-woam.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7227532.stm

spidernews

2008-01-30T18:25:00.001-08:00

The Mondo Spider was on the Discovery Channel. And I have no way to watch it, as apparently if your IP is from Colombia you don't get to use that online service. I damned well hope it's still working when I get back, though. In the meantime, the eatART opening is this Friday. http://www.eatart.org/ has some contact info if you want to go. Hint: you want to go.

More photomabos.

2008-01-05T13:56:00.000-08:00

In Tsuraku, parrots were the only non-bug wildlife we saw (that I can recall, at least). Then we found out that they were vaguely tame and regularly fed by the neighbours. The other parrot that the neighbours sometimes fed. I'm really sad, I messed up the field of focus on this. I thought I'd focussed on his head, but I guess the camera refocussed afterwards, so... not bad when it's not at 100%, but not amazing. Hiking down from one of the Banos miradors, I interrupted these two, and got a little voyeuristic. On the coast of Ecuador there's a national park called Machililla. I rented a bike and headed there from the nearest town, down this road: There's an archaeological reserve in the park called Agua Blanca. It's not terribly amazing, but there were about a hundred goats crossing the road to there. I like rocks. (On the beach in Machalilla.) This cactus seems to grow all over the place randomly. This shot was taken in Machalilla, but two days ago I was walking with some friends along a river in Colombia and we came across one with a deep red fruit on it. We plucked and ate it, and it was rich and delicious. Also, it was covered in tiny pointy needles, which were somewhat less tasty and somewhat more painful. A shot from a cliffside walk in Machalilla: More scenery from Machalilla: I'm really choked about this shot. I'd been shooting birds, and thought I'd left the aperture at a setting which I clearly hadn't left it at. This was shot wide-open. At f8.0 or f11 this would've been a great shot. Damnit! It's hard to tell (since I can't post-prod it) but this crab was practically glowing it was coloured such a bright and vivid orange. More pufferfish shots from the Ruta del Sol. Check out his nasty looking teeth, especially: Ruta del Sol barnacles: There were a LOT of birds on Ecuador's coast. A bunch did this weird, oscillating dive where it looked like they turned into skip ropes being twitched. I'll put a video up eventually and you'll see what I mean. There were also pelicans, and islands. Wreckage! This boat fascinated me. I haven't seen many wrecked boats outside of Nova Scotia. More wreckage: More boat: This washed up one night when we were in the super touristy surf town of Montañita. It had more meat, but the vultures got to it. Note the egg by it's head. The turtle was probably killed by local dogs, and the eggs were mostly dug up by crabs after dogs opened the hole. These guys were getting dressed outside a museum in Guayaquil. I asked this one, and she was delighted to have her picture taken. The group is called Circus Taller, which in Spanish means Circus Workshop. Monkey. Need I say more? A fertility charm very similar to the rightmost one in this collection was part of the inspiration for the graf piece. Carvings of shamanic figures vary wildly across S. American cultures. Some are anthropomorphic, some are humans with animalistic features, some are just strangely styled. I liked this one, particularly. When we came out of the museum, the clowns rounded a corner and we walked right into them. They grabbed Em and started dancing with her, and I threw my camera in my bag (wish I'd snapped one of Em with them first!) and jumped into the fray. After a bit we extracted ourselves and I started snapping. In hindsight, I should've been shooting at ISO 200, since though it was a bright day and I needed at least a shutter speed of 1/200 to keep things crisp, a bit more depth of field would've been nice in many of these. One of my faves: This guy got dragged in the same way Em did, but after a bit of protest he got pretty into it: So cute! Here's most of Circus Taller (which translates to Circus Workshop), though the backdrop sucks. They didn't want to move, understandably, but they wanted a group shot. Funnily enough, afterwards I was packing my bag and chatting with Em, and this little kid comes up and asks for a photo with her. Not with the clowns, jesters, drummers and stiltwalkers who are a few metres away. No, with Emily. Aaaand that's the 38 pics I get to upload to Flickr this month. And it's only the 5th or so. But hey, highspeed and a major city. Love ya, miss ya, and stay healthy.

Martin Sikes

2007-12-27T18:05:00.000-08:00

Martin Sikes is dead. If you knew him, you don't need me to tell you how great he was, or what kind of man we've lost, or how much he'll be missed.

Cherry Mishmash

2007-12-25T11:42:00.000-08:00

Cherry Mishmash, Eberyvody! To celebrate, and since sending llamas by post is expensive, I hereby gift you the present of a huge long post to waste your time with. Think of it as being like a book, only not written as well and with a protagonist who can't resort to Deus Ex Mechina in the end. The little camera's photos are now all saved safely on a server somewhere (thanks again, Chris!), and I dug through most if not all of the non-Emily-in-the-Galapagos shot from it. Thus, we have some flashbacking, and some new stuff, and, er, yeah. I don't think I've lost any, though it kind of feels like I have, there's a lot of spotty, er, spots. Since uploading got the order a little mixed up, in somewhat random order we have: (Click to enlarge any photo) In the Ruta del Sol, there was a dead and puffed pufferfish lying on the beach. The Ruta del Sol starts at Puerto Lopez and runs down the coast of Ecuador, with tiny towns every half hour or so. It's really quite nice as long as it's the quiet season. When it's busy, apparently it's packed. In Puerto Lopez, Em got sick. Sick-sick. There was no hospital, but the local doctors were pretty good. It was amusing to carry her IV as we walked, and it was funnier still holding it up in the taximoto, which is a kind of bumpy motorcycle-tricycle-cart. She got better, but we had to stick around town for four days while she recuperated. After the South end of the Ruta del Sol, we stopped in Guayaquil, from where Emily was originally supposed to go to the Galapagos. Her trip got cancelled because the person she arranged it with decided to give the bunk to someone else, so she came back to Quito briefly before going with a different boat. It worked out better in the end; she had an amazing time on a sailboat done up as a pirate ship, with great people, and ended up extending her flight and sticking around a few more days. When she puts her pics up I'll link to them - the Galapagos look absolutely amazing. But, back on track. In Guayaquil, we hiked up a hill in the Las Peñas neighbourhood. Luckily I followed the right-explore rule (hug the righthand wall and eventually you'll have travelled the perimeter) and we didn't go up the normal way, which involves stairs with numbers on them and tourist shops. Instead we walked up little back roads and alleys, most of which had amazing views, and it was tranquil and beautiful. Going down we went the other way, and we barely stopped. At the top there was a lighthouse and a church. Zip back in time about a month... I went to Baños with a bunch of people from our language school (Escuela Simon Bolivar, I actually highly recommend them). The first night, we went out, and the cheapest drinks were shots that they lit on fire. We went biking on our first actual day in Baños. We started biking through the town, then quickly hit some nice downhills. Bikes broke and I kept fixing them as best I could - not much you can do when a rear derailleur is hanging limply because the mount has snapped - and there was lots of downhill coasting. Em kept braking down to about 30kph, so she brought up the rear most of the time. At about eleven, we came to a bridge where people were bungee jumping. I told Em I'd do it if she did it, so after she went I plummeted. For those of you that don't know... I'm deathly afraid of heights, it's one of the reasons I found Parkour so hard but so fun. There was a mild wardrobe malfunction, as well, so the video of my dive won't be posted here. Maybe I'll save it for the next Skulk. A couple of the girls jumped tied together, too, which I thought was great. At around noon we stopped and ate some great food, biked a bit further, then locked the bikes up at about noon and crossed a suspension bridge over a river: We hiked for an hour, then whipped across a canyon in a rickety-feeling cart on a cable. Back to biking, there were more great views, and some waterfalls: To get back to Baños we tossed the bikes in the back of one truck and hopped into the back of another. Flode (in the hat) and I leaned off the bumper and hung onto the rails for most of the way back, it was chilly but fun. Baños was fun, and most of us who went stayed in touch and became reasonably good friends while we were in Quito. I've probably mentioned the Sasquisili market before, but in case I haven't, it's probably the most important indigenous market in Ecuador. Once a week, several huge market squares get filled with everything from textiles to food. Live animals, as well. I pretty firmly believe that if you can't handle how meat is processed, you shouldn't eat it, and long story short I bought, killed, and cooked a cuy. First (with much help from one of the very kind Simon Bolivar instructors, who correctly pointed out that if I skinned it as originally planned there'd be precious little left to eat) we removed its hair: Which took forever. We even ended up buying a bic razor to shave it with, after plucking post-boiling-water left a fair few short and difficult to remove hairs. The bic didn't work at all, so we kept plucking. Finally it was dehaired: And then of course gutted: We let it marinate overnight, and cooked and ate it the next day. It tasted rather like guinea pig (the English name for cuy) smells. Not entirely unpleasant, but not terribly appetizing either. Back in Sasquisili, I snagged a few shots of the locals, whose traditional dress I really liked. At this point I'd only had two days of Spanish lessons (I think) so my conversations were pretty broken, but I really enjoyed haggling, since I had numbers down and it was a way of communicating. Some of the vendors were really funny, making different amusing claims to support the worth of their goods. Others acted sad, tragically saying they couldn't go lower than a certain price. Some focussed entirely on the pull, some mostly on keeping interest from people who came by - I found it really fascinating, when I could understand it, but the body language of hagglers made it much easier. This woman was selling pig heads. Cries of "Vente pescados, uno dollar!" (twenty fish for a dollar) rang out, but there were few takers for the fishmongers whose sun-warmed offerings had quite the strong odour. Llamas were auctioned off. Llamas make strange noises. Nice animals, though: Pigs were for sale. I have a two-second clip of one screaming as it was shoved into a truck. Later! For now... pig drool: Also, pigs: Waaay back in Costa Rica, there was a bull, a traditionally painted cart, and two small children: In Tsuraku, the place in the Amazon where we volounteered, we went for a walk on our last-ish day there. The forest was pretty nifty, but nowhere near the ecological density of Osa. Still, it's a beautiful forest: A beautiful forest with weird bugs. This guy walked in a most strange way: The houses in the Shuar community of Tsuraku, where we were volounteering by the way, looked mostly like this: The hut where we spent way too much time reading and playing cards: I'm a sucker for butterflies: For those who've seen the horror movies of caged chickens... free range chickens naturally look that way too, sometimes. Of course, their feet don't grow around the cages, but... One day, when it didn't rain and we actually got to work, the kids of one of the volounteer coordinators came with us into the jungle. Fun, funny kids. They spoke far more Shuar than Spanish. More bugs? But of course! Em and I cut down more trees than we planted. We moved a nursery, but apart from that it felt like most of the work was makework. We ended up leaving two weeks into the month, but I didn't feel guilty. We weren't exactly doing much. Five hours of work a day if it didn't rain, and it rained almost every day. Still, we did swing some machetes: Oh look, an amazonian bug: "Yeah, most of these are poisonous, but probably wouldn't kill you. Just don't molest/bother them." (Roughly translated from Spanish) Bugs? Bugs! Mantis: Butterflies count as bugs, right? Em and I, working to move the nursery: One night I saw a crazy, glowing bug. It glowed in several colours, in intricate patterns. Alas, non-flash shots didn't work, but maybe this gives an idea of what it looked like: Back in Baños for a weekend, I climbed a local mirador, which had a big statue of Mary with Baby Jesus on her knee. It seems like most South American towns of a given size or more have such religious artifacts on hills. The view from the top wasn't bad, and the rain evaporated pretty fast: Creepy house (succinctness wins): In Quito, the language school said they were having a tour that would walk around the Old Town, which has crazy architechture and old buildings and winding steep streets. Alas, it turned out to be a bus tour, where we'd occasionally walk off the bus, mill about, then walk back on. Still, I tried my first cañelazo there, and it was nice to see the Old Town at night. Some of the churches were more impressive at night: Walls with glass cemented to the top are a common burglar deterrant in South America. I find them interesting and beautiful but disturbing: In the airport in Costa Rica, you're basically not allowed to use the escalator: And... yes, pretty clouds. I'm a sucker, all right? Another shot of the caiman: The Costa Rican rainforest is quite beautiful: Bugs, doors, the sky... add wet stone to the list: A snake that Em didn't step on: A weird bug in a museum: The mist cleared over this Costa Rican volcanic crater-lagoon for about 45 seconds. Note the plume of smoke from the bottom right. Em took this pic. Bugs, doors, the sky, wet stone... paths. I'd never seen coffee beans on the plant before: Em pushing up to catch a wave: Em on the left, board on the right: Instead of taking a picture of me surfing, Em took a picture of me holding a surfboard. Too bad, too - I was catching lots of small waves, and when I ventured into 1.5m smashing, crashing surf, I cought more than I expected. Horrible foam longboard, though. In Ecuador I used a handcrafted balsawood longboard, and it was a treat to ride. I talked to the guy who makes them, and they're crazy-cheap and amazing boards, way harder to break than fiberglass. I don't know how much I've talked about Panama, and I'm too lazy to read everything I wrote. We went straight to Boca del Toro, which I think was a mistake. These tiny frogs are apparently all over a place called Red Frog Beach, which we didn't go to. We saw lots of red, orange, yellow and green ones on a different island, though, at the top of a graveyard. We actually took the wrong path going to a spot called Wizard Beach. We walked for a couple of hours through tiny mud paths, followed barbed wire fences, and briefly had shoes claimed by mud. We'd been warned against going the wrong way, too. One day was Em's birthday, and when that came out, the two people we were splitting a boat with whipped out a chocolate cupcake from a backpack and gave her a tasty birthday cake! Some ludicrously sunny Carribean scenery: Boca del Toro was an atrociously touristy place. Once away from the main drags, though, once given a bit of space from clamouring hotel pullers, boat owners, and drug dealers, it had moments of beauty. Also, snorkelling was incredible. Back in Costa Rica... I'd gone into Puerto Jiminez on a very bumpy three hour collectivo with bare metal seats. Half an hour before we got there, it started to rain. By the time we arrived, it was a deluge... and I'd forgotten my raincoat, as it'd been a beautiful day when I left. I ran around town trying to get in touch with the parks people, but they'd closed for lunch - normally the collectivo was only two hours, and it wouldn't have been a problem. I ended up buying food in a little grocery store, dripping wet. As a puddle grew into a pond around me, an elderly gentleman approached and laughingly gave me a short Spanish lesson, including mojado (wet), seco (dry), ropas (clothes), and pura vida (THE Costa Rican phrase, which means cool, pure life, wicked, great, hello, nice to see you, goodbye, be happy, nice to meet you, and a few other things). I walked around town some more, getting laughed at by a fair few locals, and not getting much done. Finally someone came and talked to me through the gate's bars at the parks office, and they said that there were no spaces to camp in Corcovado for about a week. Em and I had over and over been told that there'd be space, to not worry about reserving it... and we were planning on going in the next day. Didn't happen, obviously. we did a short day hike instead, and afterwards packed out walking along the beach. Corcovado was amazing for the day hike, though. For starters, there were Coatis hunting for turtle eggs: Em, oblivious to wildlife (there's a pattern here) stepped on this snake. She was in front, but when I noticed I stayed quiet, thinking that it was probably best if she kept calmly walking away from it rather than making a lot of noise and acting agitatedly and probably stepping on it more. Going back in time again, we get once again to Carate. I spotted this basilisk one night - the photo doesn't do it justice, it's a beautiful creature: When working with eggs, we dug by hand. When we dug new nests, we'd keep our fingers tight together and dig with a swivelling motion to most closely approximate a turtle flipper digging, no joke. The plastic bag is to put the eggs in, the tape to measure the depth and width of the nest so that our new nest would be about the same size. The hand in the hole is gloved: it's best to have no human juice on eggs, and no egg juice on humans. We wore dark clothes because turtles have pretty lousy vision, and they identify towards-water and away-from-water partly by the fact that towards the forest is darker and the surf and the open ocean sky are brighter. Our headlamps could only be used with red LEDs for the same reason. Em clearly used a flash, but because it was a quiet night, turtlewise, and there was lightning, we hoped that no amphibians would be hurt in the taking of the picture. The eggs were about the size and feel of slightly flat ping-pong balls covered in baby oil and sand. Bugs, doors, the sky, wet stone, paths... oh wait, the sky: Chris complained about his bites. Starting at the ankles - well, as you can see, below the shoe line, actually - my legs were covered in bites. There's more than 50 in this shot, and I'm tall, so my legs go quite a bit higher. Flowers are pretty. Coatis are these weird, raccoon-like animals that travel in huge packs. It wasn't uncommon to see 20 walking along. This guy, though, was on his lonesome: Every now and then, something reminds me that I'm not in Canada anymore. One day that something was a dog in a wheelbarrow: This triple waterfall was a quick one hour hike away from the ANAI turtle-camp. Going past it was actually quite dangerous, but that's a long and cliff-involving story. Short version: pretty waterfall! The foreground plants don't give it good perspective, it was about 20m tall. On the hike to the waterfalls: Aaaand ocean: There were hundreds of nests in the hatchery, all moved by hand from locations on the beach (most because otherwise they'd be washed away by the tide). We'd watch it in shifts, since if baby turtles came out mid-day - very rare - they'd not be able to escape, and even if they did, they'd probably burn to death before getting to the water, if vultures and crabs didn't get them. I think Em took this pic. Em obliviously walked right past this bird of prey - wish I could remember exactly what it was, I think it was a falcon. The tents are where we "dried" clothes. Clothes went mouldy frequently, and stank of mold even more often. Aaaand one last beach shot: Ok, I don't really feel like this was a super-informative post, but hey - photos!

More mysteries solved

2007-11-23T18:16:00.000-08:00

The mysterious spot on my photos? No matter how much I cleaned my lens, it was still there. A huge deep breath and a lifted internal mirror later, I wiped a speck off my sensor. To those of you who don't know much about digital cameras: destroying the sensor, which is far too easy to do, would make the camera body useless, and probably cost me as much to fix as it would cost to buy a new one. Which is horrendous, but I digress. Did you know that digress can mean two things? It can mean to stop a tangent, or to start one. Um... the coast has been OK? Guayaquil's rather like Vancouver? I'm at a loss for things to say. Emily is dying less, though I've got a great shot of her walking back to the hostel carrying her IV bag aloft. Which I carried most of the way, but hey, that wouldn't have photographed as well. More to come when the net cafe isn't closing in 12 minutes and I've got pics, or am feeling more eloquent, or something.

deadtreeware, felled trees, convention says threes

2007-11-18T10:25:00.000-08:00

(This was originally a reply to Sunshine's comment, but it got out of hand, so here you go.) Books have been great, especially at those times when there's not much else to do but swat mosquitoes (ie. when it's raining hard in the jungle). Thankfully my slightly literature-centric attitude has paid off well in such matters: I've read, for the first time, On the Road, The Maltese Falcon, A Confederacy of Dunces, The Catcher in the Rye, and a bunch of others that I've been meaning to read once a copy landed in my lap. Sam Spade, Sal Paradise, Holden Caulfield, and especially Ignatius Reilly mixing it up in jumbled, bumpy bus ride thoughts is an interesting way to spark creativity, and I'm hoping I'm hitting a manic phase. I've got a bunch of random geek ideas down, an short story outline with some character notes and a couple of bits of dialogue, a music video idea that I think I can swing (Matt, if you're reading this, I'm gonna be picking your brain when I get back), and lots of other random stuff, which is good. We're done volounteering in the Amazon. The work wasn't rewarding, there was very little of it (5h a day if it didn't rain, uncommon), and it didn't really feel like we were making a difference. As Em pointed out, we cut down more plants than we planted; I've hacked enough trees down with a machete. At least we moved a nursery... but that's done. Really, it felt like we were paying to be ecotourists that cleared land from time to time but mostly sat around waiting to work. Oh, and exciting news! Eliza, who went to volounteer with turtles in Osa, partly because of me (yay, I did good!) has solved the dead bug bits mystery! She said: "I also stayed in the cabin with the scattered bug bits, the culprit is a foot long gecko that can periodically be seen hanging around in the rafters. It still owned the bed when I was there, apparently if you sleep there with a mosquito net it still rains bug bits down on you when eating on top of the net." We're on the coast now, and couldn't rent bikes today. So... soon we go down the Sun Road, slowly, to Guyaquil, the biggest city in Ecuador, before I go back to Quito and Em goes to the Galapagos (for which I'm jealous, but I don't have the money and I haven't really researched how bad tourist damage to the area is). Love ya and miss ya! -Dan

La Selva

2007-11-09T12:58:00.001-08:00

The Amazon is less Amazonian than expected. Vaguely the middle of the jungle, amidst verdant hills with streams that finger their sides, tickling down, Tsuraku is vibrant, but not that different from any other forests I've been in in the last couple of months, save in Osa, which astounded me far more regularly. The people are welcoming and friendly, though prone to looking in our window at 7am when we're hoping to get up and get changed, and the children are particularly full of smiles. Today, we moved hundreds of plants - a bit of a relief, the work so far has to a large degree felt like make-work - and one boy of eight or so, Christian, always ran and walked beside me as I hustled the wheelbarrow along, grinning and holding a bag of plants. Work seems to be for only five hours a day, six if there's actually much to do. The food is quite good, though I suspect I have an ulcer. The unrelenting heartburn, present even when I sleep, is my only clue though, and I hope I'm misinterpreting. An upshot of all the free time is that I finally read Kerouac's On the Road. I devoured it in four hours straight, in all its photocopied and strung together glory, and I think there couldn't be a better way to read it. Ironic, though, that there was an eensy bit of escapism to North America from the Amazon, but my head needed it in every sense. For now, I'm out in Puyo for the weekend... and I got into the travel writing boot camp. If I can crank out workable print at the end then I might get my expenses paid to travel, which would be tremendous in many many ways!

M n I

2007-11-05T10:56:00.000-08:00

Em broke up with me this morning. Huzzah. Lesson learned for me: act on thoughts, not emotions. [Edited for brevity and because some details are worse than all details are worse than no details.]

At long last... PHOTOS!

2007-11-04T16:03:00.000-08:00

Finally, some shots for y'all. I haven't got the small point-and-shoot here. My SLR has got a fixed 50mm on it (translation: it shoots pics that look "normal", but they can't be wide angles nor can they zoom in at all) and the point-and-shoot has a 7x optical zoom with vibration reduction (fancy little bugger, I can't even buy an SLR lens with its range for what it cost). The short version, which those of you into photography will already have guessed, is that almost all of the nature shots - which invariably require a zoom - aren't going to be in this post. Worse still, the card that I've been dumping photos onto... um... seems to not have the directory for the point and shoot. Where I thought I'd left a gig of photos last week. Which'd be essentially all of our nature shots, including endangered species left, right, and centre of shot. So... fingers crossed. Also, caveat: no photoshop, so no colour correcting, cropping, or even rotating, which in some of these is clearly pretty neccessary. Now that I've shared that oh-shit-I-hope-everything's-ok moment, some actual photos!
Cookies, sometimes called Meg, very kindly offered to help me pack before I left. She was perhaps not expecting quite how frantic it'd be, the night before the Seattle debacle. This is her angry face; she actually cannot avoid smiling, I think it's some facial stucture problem. To be fair, though she's not bad looking in this photo, she's much prettier when it's not 4am and she's not exhausted. And angry.

Puerto Jiminez is a small town in the Osa Peninsula, close to Carate where Em and I were volounteering. It's interesting in its own way, and this is the beach there, replete with small boat in the water. From there, we took a harrowing and painful two hour ride in the back of a collectivo, which is a pickup truck with metal bars and a tarp forming a canopy in the back.

Our first night in Jungle Camp, Carate (also known as "el casa de Benito"), we hit the beach near sunset. The clouds on the coast here amaze me every time I see them.

Skinks like this were everywhere. I honestly believe that these are probably the largest fauna species by biomass in the area, giant tapirs (that we saw tracks of!) nonwithstanding.

Scarlet macaws are a beautifully coloured parrot. They're quite common on the coast, though they had some population problems in the past and may or may not be *quite* as well-represented as would be good right now. They're very loud, and normally fly in twos or threes, squawking madly, sounding vaguely "macaaaw"ish. The birds there are amazing, they're incredibly plentiful and interesting.

When we were in Carate, we volounteered. It was pretty fun; I worked 13 days in a row. It was very hard work, we'd walk the beach for seven to ten hours a night, tagging and measuring turtles ("tortugas"), moving nests that were going to get washed away, measuring tracks, triangulating nest positions, releasing hatchlings ("tortugitas") and so forth. The nearby Corcovado national forest was voted most biointense place on earth by National Geographic, and when or if I get photos off of the little camera I'll put a whole lot from it up, including a video of a very endangered anteater lumbering towards me. In the jungle we were in, a kilometer or so from the national park, the wildlife was almost as absurd, and so were the insects. We got moved from a bunkhouse that had a scorpion in it to a bunkhouse with roughly a circular meter of insect wings and legs and other parts on one of the beds. The pile even included a dead but whole stick insect. We never became certain what kind of creature made the disc-o-death, but this guy, whose limbless body was roughly the same length as my palm, was waiting to greet us when we arrived.

We saw monkeys pretty much every day, though how many and which kinds varied from day to day. The day we moved bunks, this guy hung out in the trees around us for quite some time. He's a titi, or red-backed squirrel monkey. There were also howlers, spider monkeys, and capuchins, and of course loads of other mammals. The second bunkhouse had a field behind it, in fact, which was a favoured crossing spot for a squad (family? drove? murder?) of coatis. Of course, coatis are one of the species that predates turtle eggs, but one can't really argue.

We had heard of a nearby triple waterfall, and decided, with a fellow volounteer, to head up to them. On the path before it met the stream we saw several butterflies, including this blue morpheus, which has absolutely beautiful blue irridescent wings - on the top halves. On the bottom, it looks like a leaf. Still gorgeous, and huge - palm-sized.

A blue morpho got unlucky a few days earlier, it seems, and I saw this on the forest floor. It gives you a rough idea of what the tops look like, and I rather like the aesthetic of it, too.

This huge dragonfly (noticing a pattern for the insects, yet?) had crystal-clear wings with black and white on the tips, and the four wings made a mesmerizing and beautiful pattern when it flew.

We finally reached the stream, which was actualy quite lovely. The path was at times slightly treacherous, but what can you do?

Our friend and fellow volounteer Bex and Em, underneath the waterfall. Hopefully the small camera's pics are intact, since zoomed out it actually shows how high the waterfall was.

After the waterfall, since we'd heard there were three, we kept climbing. Em and Bex turned back after a little bit, but I pushed forward. After more than half an hour of climbing very treacherous paths, I came across another set of waterfalls which were quite nice but which I couldn't *quite* get to. I turned back, and on the way saw this guy, who just hung out for a while. Alas, I somehow forgot to put my lens cap back on in my rush to get back for daytime hatchery duty - come to think of it I probably had equipment cleaning duty, too. Shortly after this I was trying to get to the bottom of the triple-waterfall and almost died a couple of times. See, when about 15m above rocks on an almost-vertical face, one would've done well to remember that rainforest rock here is not like BC rock. It crumbles in your hand. When it crumbles in one's hand and one starts to fall and grabs a tree, one would do well to know that trees deeply rooted in it will deroot as it crumbles in their roots. When one frantically scrambles, trying not to fall or start sliding, but everything one is grabbing and stepping upon, earth or flora, is crumbling, one would do well to get lucky and grab a plant that somehow manages to cling to the surface better than the very sparse trees. Well, I got the last one right.

This is an orb-web spider. Its body is roughly the size of my thumb, with legs - surprise! - it was roughly the size of my palm, fingers excluded. I got more and better quality shots with the point-and-shoot and its lovely zoom, but I doubt the bokeh will be as pretty.

Back at camp, the sky was of course beautiful. And at times, I can't resist taking pretty pictures. You should see this at full rez, not the flikr-max of 1024x683. Lots of days while on hatchery duty there'd be no hatchlings, so I'd just hang out and read and play the harmonica and beatbox and watch the wildlife and the sky. Can't say I was often sad about hatchery duty, to be honest. At night, there was often phosphorescent nautiluca plankton, and throwing sand and watching glowing waves come in was beautiful too, though impossible to take a picture of, sadly. In our last couple of days volounteering, Em and I switched camps to one 100m from Corcovado. There was a kid there, Kevin, who couldn't help but be afraid of everything. Of course it was he and a research coordinator that saw a coral snake, not Em and I. They saw it from barely a meter away, too, which blows my mind. For those of you not in the know... coral snakes: very poisonous. Also, pretty.

We went on a hike into Corcovado, of course. We were going to do an overnight stay, but despite a full-day trip into Puerto Jiminez - in which I forgot my rain coat, no less, and it poured - and being sworn to that we'd only need to register a day ahead to get a camping spot, they were all out. We ended up doing a short three-hour hike, instead, which was still great. And Emily stepped on a snake. Completely obliviously, too. After she was a safe distance away from it, I pointed it out to her, and she missed a lot of interesting scenery afterwards because she was too busy looking at the ground for more. This plant was hanging in the center of the path about 1.25m above the forest floor by a very thin vine. It attached to something high enough up that it was obscured by other plants. I have absolutely no idea what it is, but it intruigued me. I might use the upper-right thing in some art later. Mmm, bokeh. Anyways, if anyone has a clue what this dangling thing was, please let me know.

This tree looked like a throne, and I liked it.

There were parts of an old engine next to the path at one point. I found it rather beautiful.

The path crossed the beach a few times, and at one point the beach was strewn with some stones that were surprisingly different from each other. Later Emily and I sat down and ate on a log. While we were eating, a coconut fell from a tree and with a threating thump it crushed into the sand in front of us. It was half-buried, and coconuts aren't what I used to think them to be. Brown and furry and kinda big? That's dried after removing most of the outside. Yeah. They weigh a good 5kg when they're small. And until then, I'd thought that most of the dangers would come from my own stupidity, or maybe the wildlife. No, no. One mustn't discount palm trees.

Oh, yeah, and I might've taken more pictures of rocks. Don't worry, I won't subject you to any more of them. I like this one because it was taken with top surfaces of the rocks in a plane, but because of their sizes and shapes it looks like the camera is angled, top-close bottom-far. After the hike was done, we booked it back to camp, grabbed our packs, hiked quickly to the collectivo, and started on our way to San Jose, from where we'd go to Bocas Del Toro and then Tamarindo, both touristy places that have their merits, but neither of which is Monteverde, Montezuma, or Mal Pais, all of which would've been amazing... if roads hadn't been washed out. Though in Bocas Emily got a random chocolate-frosted cupcake from a stranger on her birthday while sitting on a patio over the Carribean, and in Tamarindo I got much better at surfing. And I got an ear infection, but meh.

Emily and I went to some museums in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. While I wasn't a huge fan of the city, the museums weren't half bad. This is Em against the wall in the metropolitan museum of art, if I recall the name correctly.

Hector Burke is a Costa Rican artist. This one is not once of his subtler paintings. Most of his work really is, it's abstract and textured and one only gets it when one steps back and relaxes for a moment. I like those. I also like this, though, which kind of hits you right upside the head.

Note: at this point I ran out of Flikr space. The rest have been downsampled and compressed in MSPaint, of all things. Please forgive me. Also, thanks Chris, I really appreciate the space... and they're still uploading.

A staff head in a Quito museum.

A grinding table. These were common funerary offerings, and very often exquisitely ornate. Carved from solid volcanic stone, too.

The variety of muscial instruments was impressive.

The Incan gold techniques were actually around before the Incan conquests, but alas I don't recall from which period this came from. This one was made using lost wax.

Butterfly. There's lots. Um, I'm tired and these are getting shorter.

Owl-eye butterfly, I believe.

Three, three, three times the butterfly.

Some signs amuse me. Security area dancefloor... in the plants! Warning, there is no way you're looking at a madman's secret lab.

The view from our hallway in Tamarindo.

A reasonably typical San Jose street.

A flower then a butterfly. Somewhere in Costa Rica.

In our last days in Costa Rica, unable to get to many places due to washed out roads, Em and I went on a day tour thing. On the river, we saw this cayman, just hanging out, and very, very slowly moving.

"What? Why do you want to take a picture of me? We're on a boat, not... I don't know, bungee jumping." <-not an actual Em quote.

One of many, many spires on the Basilica del Voto Nacional in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. Then another.

This is "A virgin angel, standing on the earth, stomping on a snake." Give or take. Visible from many high points in Quito, made of over a hundred pieces of treated aluminum, and very very very tall. Very tall.

From near the foot of the virgin angel. The view is actually astounding, this doesn't do it justice.

Taken from the cobblestoned central plaza in Quito, where huge trading markets used to take place.

A building in Quito's Old Town.

Doorways distract me. I like this one.

Oh no! Pop art has been imprisoned! Tomato soup won't taste as good behind bars! Part of a Warhol showing, though closed, that can is over a story tall. Note the railing; the gallery has quite high ceilings. The internet cafe's closing: outside pics at http://flickr.com/photos/tothefront/1866231445/in/photostream/

Some of the churches here are smothered in gold. One has over 100 tonnes of gold. Subtle. I liked this column, but it needs some 'shopping.

Flode, a wicked guy whose real name I won't give up here, is a Norwegian guy I met in language school. Rad person. Wish I had a better shot of him.

Flode did the hippo (his signature animal) and the FMS, which is his crew name, which means From My Soul, among other things. The thing to the right, near his can, was done by me. We had a quarter can of dark green left when we were done, everything else was as dry as can be imagined.

Flode & graf in Parque La Carolina, Quito.

Flode & graf in Parque La Carolina, Quito. The reference? "These are new shoes." "That way to the beach." "I like my haircut."

For my first piece this big outside, I'm pretty happy with it. It's loosely based off of a geometric pattern that's common in bricks and on a fertility charm carved by an indigenous Ecuadorian hundreds of years ago. The bricks, when layed out, go on and on and on, breeding into eternity, and he was carved in stone. I could ramble more, but...

Oijos

2007-10-31T06:32:00.000-07:00

When Em and I bought travel insurance, one of the big criteria was that we would be able to just not pay, and they'd pay the bill on the spot. Not exactly the way things have worked out. My ear infection wasn't doing well the afternoon after I took the last of the amoxycillin tablets. I went to a doc, who prescribed a new one, cefuroxime (aka axetil, Zinnat). Yes, he said, it is fine to take the doxycycline antimalarials concurrently. That was Monday; last night at 5am I gave up on sleeping. The pain wasn't letting it happen, and the clear but slightly yellowish liquid emanating from my ear at a rapid rate was worrisome. Did I mention that last time the doc removed a bunch of necrotic flesh from inside, and said that the infection is in the outer and middle ears? Yeah. Anyways, I go back in half an hour; emergency gave me some pain meds and told me to keep it hot, which seems to be helping a lot, though the liquid's still coming out reasonably fast. Gurk. Long story short: out over $200, probably more after this upcoming visit. Volounteering in the rainforest might be postponed. We'll see. Edit: yup, can't leave the city until Monday at the earliest. Pain, swelling, aggravation. Upside: gives me more time to work on my travel writer's resume - there's a pilot program that I'm hoping to get into. It's a one-week travel writer's course, with the possibility of later employment, for the absurdly cheap price of $20.

Short notes:

2007-10-22T17:00:00.000-07:00

Post offices are hard to find in Central America. Mandriva as a desktop distro is great... but not the best when you want to get photos off of a windows-drivered-cardreader and you don't have su access. Tamarindo sucks except for surfing. It could be southern Florida, easily. Surfing wears your sunscreen off very fast, but is very fun. Next time I'm in Tofino, I'm saying no when they try to rent me a frickin foam board. Plastic and fiberglass are so much more fun. Also, rocks are hard. San Jose has two great cultural venues a block from each other: the Museo National and the Centre Des Artes Contemporaria or something similar. Hector Burke's seemingly abstract pieces are both powerful and most definitely not abstract, if you take the time to notice. Snakes and insects are cool. Neurotoxins and hemotoxins are neck and neck for best category of fluids that can kill you. Up to probably 200 Spanish words. My conjugation is atrocious. I really hope this isn't an ear infection, as we fly tomorrow. Sentence fragments are sucky, but. More to come when the monitor's at a refresh rate above 60hz and I can actually get photos up. Love and rushing red cells, -Dan

Of cloacas and coral

2007-10-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

Costa Rica, in particular the Osa Peninsula, is breathtakingly beautiful, and the variety and density of flora and fauna was constantly surprising. The food at camp was pretty exclusively rice and beans, and the nearby Corcovado park held anteaters (saw one!) taipirs (only saw tracks), snakes (Emily stepped on one) and lots of other good naturey stuff. On one collectivo trip (you sit in the back of a truck for 2-3h to get to and from Puerto Jiminez), I saw five kinds of bird of prey; a king vulture, flying away with a frog that bounced like a bungee cord. A few red-headed vultures, doing their rounds. Two zone-tailed hawks, one just hanging out right at the edge of the road. A falcon or kite, which hung out in a tree before zipping off. And a black and yellow toucan, which up until a few days ago I didn´t know ate other birds, but apparently they sure do. On our busiest night we had 93 turtles, not counting false crawls I believe. At 5:30am, 10m from where the path to camp starts, of course there was one last turtle - the only one I´ve seen during the day. 95% of them were Olive Ridleys, but we had a few greens, and one leatherback track, which was exciting but frustrating, as we were mere meters away when it came up, but there was a sand dune in the way. I´d released some baby turtles just a few minutes before it crawled up, too. Osa in general was full of awesomeness; parts are alost untouched by modernity and by humans, and... well, go if you can, I doubt there are many places like it remaining on Earth, if any. Pura vida. At the end of our time volounteering we weren´t able to stay in Corcovado overnight, as they were booked up despite it being the low season, so we did a six-hour day hike then went out that night and started the trip to Bocas del Toro, arriving last night. It´s really touristy, and we´ve been accosted pretty much every five minutes since we got here, but we went out on a boat today and, post-haggling-and-being-constantly-lied-to, snorkelling and deserted islands evened things out. That said, I don´t think we´ll be here too long. Em´s not interested in diving, is done with snorkelling (which is nothing new to her), doesn´t want to party, neither of us is interested in the local ganj, and... well, that seems to be just about all Bocas has to offer. Plus, it´s not the cheapest place in the world, booze excluded. My Spanish is veeery slowly improvinga, Em´s has bounced back to quite good after some months of disuse, and she seems to be enjoying her birthday thus far. No pics yet, sorry. I´ll put some up when it´s convenient. Hope you´re all well, and such.

2007-09-20T15:34:00.000-07:00

Mmm, the warm beach of Costa Rica. It's sweltering, people are glistening and smiling and moving slowly in the heat. Aaaah... Wish I was there. Seattle is cold and mostly cement and has no turtles. Continental Airlines and our travel agent mucked up le big time, and at 5:30am, we were trying - without success, obviously - to get on the first plane on the way to San Jose, Costa Rica. Now we're hoping to fly out tomorrow. On the upside... comped food.

2007-09-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

Biking has been embraced by a family in Southern (one capitalizes South; should one capitalize Southern?) California, with wonderfully positive results: http://www.ocregister.com/life/erick-says-car-1847068-bike-jess Also, I suppose my travel updates will be going here.

2007-04-11T21:13:00.000-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

2007-03-21T17:09:00.000-07:00

I know, I know. I'm supposed to put interesting, thought-provoking things here. Instead, you get this: "When you come to the U.S. you have to become an American. You can't flaunt your culture on us." Guess I shouldn't travel South again anytime soon.

2007-01-24T04:37:00.000-08:00

There's an odd association that newest-wave feminists (by which I mean: feminists with a web presence) seem prone to making. It's self-association with young girls gleefully and confidently exhibiting guiltless power. Feministe, and Bitch, Ph.D., and Feministing for example, all have images in this vein. Only the latter's image suggests post-pubescence. Is it because they believe feminism, as a whole, has finally gone post-nascent and has figured out how to put on its overalls and tie its runners? Is it because they wishfully identify with the images themselves, wanting to regain childlike freedom and innocence? Is it to demonstrate that it seems out of character, when a young boy doing the same would be a bit of a hellion - but that character archetype exists for such boys, and so they themselves must exist to some degree, and no such archetype exists for women? ('Tomboy' doesn't count, as rebellion and rulebreaking aren't associated.) Is it that they feel full of childish optimism and rebellious spirit? Of course, while ruminating and reading a lot of great and not-so-great feminist and pseudo-feminist stuff, it's not all roses and waiting soil. "If you have ever wanted to tell a girl to go put on a sweater, this is your chance to do so — anonymously," for example - from a very slick, pop culture oriented site. Still, there is hope, even for cunning linguists. All of this, if it interests you, was sparked by a recent flurry of writing due to the Roe vs. Wade anniversary, and of course the Pussy Posse, which is currently very active.

2007-01-24T04:08:00.000-08:00

Wow. I never thought finding a name would be so hard. I have lists of names for songs, groups, books, short stories, poems, art pieces... I'll often name something before I've fully fleshed it out, and use it's name as inspiration. But finding a name for this blog has been hard. Fumer is no good; I want a fresh tack, and it's Baufort calm. The need to fume is now secondary, besides. Lots of ideas that I thought were original were clearly not. Thumos, pastiche, allthatissolid, meltsintoair, thedice, halfwit, recidivist (& recidivism), justatest, twoways, bothways, khanum (a misnomer, to be sure, but I couldn't bring myself to try khagan or shahanshah), front, and more were found worthy by others first. Seditious and pensez seemed too forward, many more seemed too single-faceted. And then it hit me. To the Front, of course! Expect roughly a post a week.