Trip Report: Part 1: Backstory (or what I did on my summer vacation)

Hello from islands of Malta.

You are receiving this email because you are or were once subscribed to the cam-list, a discussion-style mailing list I have been maintaining for about four years now. I have re-purposed the cam-list to be a broadcast-style mailing list to keep my Web site readers, friends, and family up-to-date about my recent world travels.

Back in July I was in the midst of planning my Fall vacation schedule and was about ready to book flights to Las Vegas and Portland in September when I realized that I did not want to spend yet another vacation in the continental U.S. How boring! I mentioned this to my very good Russian friend, Irina in Brooklyn and she replied "Cam, you go to Siberia. You be the only American there."

At first I was reluctant. I mean, who in their right mind goes to Siberia for vacation? But then I did some research online and the idea started to grow on me. I argued with Irina that I would have a lot of difficulty because I do not speak Russian and she countered with the name and Yahoo ID of her best friend Lena, who stills lives in Krasnoyarsk -- a city of about a million people in south-central Siberia, just north of Mongolia. Lena agreed to be my translator and her years of studying English would help tremendously.

And so the plan was formed, as was a good friendship between Lena and I. Two months of chatting via Instant Messaging and numerous emails later, I embarked on my adventure in Russia with nothing more than two bags stuffed with clothes, some gifts, and my trusty-and-dented Titanium Powerbook G4.

Twenty-four hours of travel time later I arrived in Krasnoyarsk at 9:00 AM where Lena was waiting for me. I will not write much about this trip, but I will summarize it. Since I had hired Lena to be my translator I also needed her to travel around with me to the places I wanted to go. We visited Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, the Stolby Nature Preserve and a lot of Krasnoyarsk including a 18-hour overnight trip on the famous Trans-Siberian railway. You can view the pictures and commentary of this trip here:

http://www.camworld.org/trips/2002/siberia/

After two weeks of bouncing around southern Siberia, it was time to return to New York. I arrived back to discover that the company I was working for as a contractor was planning widespread lay-offs, though I was to be spared -- at least for the time being. But I smelled the smoke in the air and started making contingency plans in case I was suddenly became unemployed with no job prospects. It is no surprise my contingency plans turned out to be more world travel and some time off.

And I was right. I learned November 1 that my contract was to end November 15. This neatly tied into my already-planned November 21 departure date to spend two weeks in Malta.

The two week trip to Malta turned into 3 weeks with an additional week in Moscow, Russia. I wanted to see more of Lena so I invited her to come to Malta and be a tourist with me. She happily agreed and on November 22 I met her at the Malta International Airport, exhausted but happy to see me again.

Up next: Part 2: The islands of Malta and Cam learns how to drive a 5-speed Fiat Punto on the left side of the road.

End-of-Year Hiatus: Sorry ...

End-of-Year Hiatus: Sorry about the lack of updates. I have been incredibly busy. I have been planning a lengthy vacation which coincides with the end of my year-long contract job I finished last Friday. This means a few things. The first is that I am once again available for work and am searching for both freelance work and full-time job opportunities. The job market is not so great right now so the pickings are slim. Secondly, I am taking this opportunity in my life to leave the U.S. for an extended period of time and see more of the world. This Thursday, I am leaving for London where I will catch a flight to Malta. I will be in Malta for three weeks and then fly to Moscow for a week. I will be gone for four weeks total and arrive back in New York just before Christmas and drive back to Michign with my brother to see the family.

• November 21-22: London
• November 23 - December 13: Malta
• December 13-20: Moscow, Russia
• December 21: London
• December 22: New York City
• December 23-27: Kalkaska, Michigan

Because I don't expect to have regular Internet access in either Malta or Moscow I am putting Camworld on hiatus until I get back. However I am taking my Powerbook with me so I will be able to write and work on some overdue personal projects. Being disconnected from always-on Internet access is actually a goal of mine for this trip. It will allow me to forget about the online world I have been jacked into for the past 6+ years and focus on the places I am in.

I am also going to spend time while I am gone converting Camworld to a CSS-based layout and importing 6+ years of entries into MoveableType. I expect this new design to launch January 1, 2003 when I resume updates.

Cam-List: I am reviving the cam-list while I am gone, but it will not be a discussion list. Instead it will be a distribution list I send my travel updates to, which I will also try to post on Camworld. If you're interested in receiving my travel updates you can email me to be added.

PayPal Scam! If ...

PayPal Scam! If you receive this email from the people at www.paypal-ebay.com, it is a scam. Do not follow their instructions. If you do, you will be giving the scam artists access to your real PayPal account.

Things are a ...

Things are a little hectic this week. Postings may be sporadic.

NY Times: Pentagon ...

NY Times: Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans. This makes me wonder if I should start thinking about getting a fake identity, regardless of how illegal it might be. I have fake online identities I use all the time, since it is easy to be anonymous. If corporations can create fake shelter companies to hide their losses and cheat on their taxes, then citizens should be able to do the same thing. It's silly logic, but it's how I feel sometimes.

Think about it this way. For things like grocery shopping, e-commerce, and other seemingly harmless activities I could use my alternate identity without fearing that I am giving away too much personal information. And for things like taxes, business communication, and airplane tickets I could use my real identity since it makes more sense. The problem with the Pentagon's plan is instead of becoming smarter about the intelligence and information they already have, they are opting to just gather more intelligence. No matter what they do, there will be ways around the safeguards they have put in place. Fake indentities can be bought in any large city for a couple hundred bucks. I fail to see how implementing a system that simply gathers more data is going to prevent terrorism, and this leads me to think that the Pentagon has a hidden agenda the American public does not yet know about.

Macromedia Contribute: The public beta version has been released today, Windows only. I've been told the Mac OS X version should be out in early 2003.

A List Apart: This is an great article that show you exactly how to make your Flash embed markup standards-compliant. Excellent work! Unfortunately, making it standards-compliant means you have to wave goodbye to supporting Netscape 4.x browsers. Ah well, maybe that is for the best.

Newsfactor: Developer's Dilemma: Perl or PHP?

Femme Fatale: Please do not see this movie. I repeat, please refrain from seeing this movie unless you like laughing out loud at a movie that is supposed to be suspenseful. Brian De Palma should be ashamed for making such crap and foisting it on the American movie-going public. This movie has forever ruined Ravel's Bolero for me, a song beautifully introduced to many people through the great love scene in "10" with Dudley Moore and Bo Derek.

Spinsanity: Making Bush tell the truth. [via dangerousmeta]

UIWeb.com: Best of CHI-WEB & SIGIA-L. I think I've linked to this before but it's worth repeating. If you (like me) don't have time to read all the threads on CHI-WEB and SIGIA-L, this is a collection of all the best posts with links directly to each archived posting. Excellent!

Craigslist: Christian Gun Owner Seeks Young Man to Help Around House. I can't tell if this is a joke. I don't think it is.

Federal Computer Week: Open-source code rife at DOD. "But what if open-source software applications and development were banned in DOD?"

Why the Left ...

Why the Left Hates America: A reader sent me a note telling me that I need to read this book, Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured Our Nation's Greatness. Oh goodie, more airplane reading. I wonder if I will get singled out at security checkpoints for carrying both of these books about "hating America" (see yesterday's post).

Popularity Contest: Remember in high school there was that one popular kid who everyone liked, but then s/he went away for the summer and came back with a different perspective. At some point the popular kid who everyone liked turned into a flaming asshole that nobody liked. As in high school, if you do things that are going to make people dislike you then you will not be elected King or Queen of the prom. I wonder if the GOP realize this.

NY Times: The Left Dumbs Down

Salon Books: How ...

Salon Books: How the world sees Americans. This is a great author interview, and I look forward to reading this book. [via MrBarrett]

Macromedia's New Product: The worst-kept secret right now in the world of web design and production management is Macromedia's supposedly super-secret project that everyone already seems to know about. Yesterday at Meet-the-Makers, I saw a live demo of this product and it looks very promising. My only major complaint is that you cannot easily use it with existing large sites that already have a template-based content management system. You also cannot import legacy Microsoft Word documents that have not been meta-tagged. It looks perfect for maintaining a small-to-medium sized Web site but is likely a nightmare to use for maintaining larger sites with lots of dynamic content and modular templates. It also seems silly that Macromedia is making anyone who sees a demo sign an NDA, since a lot of people already know about the product and even the news sites are writing about it now. I'm thinking that the NDA business is just another subtle marketing ploy.

I know that with time there will be conversion tools built that allows their new product to interface directly with some of the larger CMS solutions like Vignette, Interwoven and Documentum but there is little compatibility right out of the box. It's mostly geared towards sites that have simple template structures and/or are static HTML or use Dreamweaver templates.

Downward Spiral: Now that the GOP has majority control over all three branches of the government, the next two years will be very interesting to watch. It is very likely the United States economy will continue in a downward spiral, and unemployment will continue to rise. Unhappy Americans will turn out in force in 2004 to erase the existing government from office. After all, the politicians in office right now can be held responsible (can't blame it on bi-partisan bickering/stalling) for any major issues that arise between now and 2004 -- the biggest one being foreign policy. It is clearly an issue that the Bush administration does not have a handle on, and likely never will -- at least as long as it is driven by special interest needs like Big Oil. If there was ever a need for the emergence of a third political party (probably the Independent Party), 2004 is a prime year for it.

Vote Today! If ...

Vote Today! If you are a U.S. citizen please do not forget to vote today. I found out this morning that since I have moved since my last voter registration that I can only vote via affidavit. Remember that your vote does count.

Wired: FTC: Where Spam Goes Off to Die. Great article. Apparently the uce@ftc.gov email address has been receiving so much spam recently they can't afford to store it any longer. Yeah, this is indicative of a bigger problem. From October 23 to November 5, my installation of SpamAssassin has caught 10.2 MB of spam, which equals exactly 1234 pieces of spam (80k file) after I filtered out the false-positives.

MSNBC: Online job listing an ID theft scam. Never give out any more information than you have to, even if it's not a scam.

Solo Travel: The Serendipitous Life of the Solo Voyager. This collection of anecdotes hits home for me since there is a strong chance I will be traveling solo to many, many places in the next 4-6 months. As I have already mentioned I plan to be in London on November 22 and 23 and will be going to Malta from there for 3-4 weeks with a potential week-long side-trip to Egypt and/or Tunisia. Back to the U.S. in time for the Christmas holidays.

Glasnost: Oh my, someone is selling a Russian MIG 21 fighter jet on eBay Motors. Yes, it's real.

XUL Planet: 101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that IE cannot. "Giant lizards are cool. Much more exciting than a blue e." I can't even remember the last time I launched Netscape 4.x., not even for testing purposes.

Jury Duty: Very ...

Jury Duty: Very few updates this week, as I begin jury duty today for the Supreme Court of New York. Hopefully I can be excused early so I can attend Meet-the-Makers event on Wednesday.

Update: I was able to postpone my jury duty service another six months because I have pre-arranged travel plans, leaving November 22 for Malta, via London. Any case I would have been picked for had a chance of running for 1-2 weeks, which would have caused problems with my trip.

BusinessWeek: How to Undo AOL Time Warner

AIFIA: A new industry organization called the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture looks to be a promising resource for professionals practicing user experience design and information architecture. My only question: What does "Asilomar" mean? Is the organization named after the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Monterey, California? On further reading, the word asilomar is Spanish for "refuge from the sea." Karl Fast, one of the founding members responds:

In May a group of us (the instigators are listed on the web site) went to Asilomar, just outside Monterey, to talk about The Future of Information Architecture (tm). It was a weekend pow-wow. We talked about how IA is emerging as a profession. We wanted to help this continue. How best to do this?

Prediction: I'm going to make a daring prediction and say that the Republican party is going to lose a lot of power in tomorrow's elections. I don't have any proof except that many people are frustrated with the way the Bush administration has been running this country. Most polls show a pretty even split with the Democrats leading by a few percentage points. When the people are frustrated they vote for change, and right now the GOP does not reflect positive change for the majority of the population.

Science Fiction Contest: The International Technologies from Science Fiction organization is holding a contest for writers aged 15-30. Entries are due February 28, 2003. Hmmm, I am not quite 30 years old yet. I'll think about entering this.

Open Source Book: There is also a call for chapters for a new book being published next year that deals with Open Source software development.

PayPal Email and Spambots: A friend who works at PayPal sent me a tip which will help reduce the number of times my PayPal email address gets scraped by spambots. It's easiest to just show the before and after HREF attribute code.

Before:
https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=example@example.com
&no_shipping=1&item_name=CamWorld%20Tip

After:
https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=VTD8JYPBY6338
&no_shipping=1&item_name=CamWorld%20Tip

The business ID you see in the After string can be found by logging into your PayPal account and clicking 'Referrals' in the page footer. My email address is still visible if you click through to the PayPal page, but by requiring at least one click through from Camworld I can at least prevent some spambots (but not all) from getting it. My suggestion to PayPal is to engineer a workaround for this so that member email addresses are not available to automated bots.

Recent Camworld Searches: Here are some of the more bizarre search terms people have been looking for that results in a page from my site:

• fistbang
• msn messenger black jumbo dog
• scientology tupperware
• fold dollar bill washington penis
• beastiality safety guide

Game Button Arcade: ...

Game Button Arcade: These are small Javascript games that are played entirely with the form button. You won't understand until you try to play them. Go ahead and try it. This makes my head hurt. [via Boing Boing]

New Book on Japanese Society: The New Japan: Debunking Seven Cultural Stereotypes. More info.