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You can take a helicopter tour of many of the Hawaiian islands. However Kauai's super rugged terrain is supposed to be especially amazing from the air. And so it was that we splurged for a one-hour joy ride at over $250 per seat. It seems even more expensive considering that we had recently paid just $100 to fly from San Francisco to Boston.

Our helicopter was a Hughes 500 with all the doors removed. Supposedly the only company that offers tours in this aircraft is Jack Harter Helicopters. This helicopter seats 5 people with three seats in the front (pilot on the left) and two in the rear. All aerial tours circle the island in a clockwise direction and so seats on the right side are better however seating assignment is determined by the company based on passenger weight so as to keep the aircraft balanced. Luckily we got the two front passenger seats! Susanne was in the middle and I was on the right which was really an ideal arrangement.

Helicopter shots

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Later on Monday 12/28 we headed to the National Tropical Botanical Garden visitor center which is on the southern shore of the island near the resort town of Poipu. The NTBG is a nonprofit organization that runs multiple gardens in Hawaii and one in Florida. You can take a self-guided tour or a tour led by one of their guides depending on which garden you visit.

On Monday we got to the visitor center in the afternoon. The tours seemed a bit expensive and it was late enough in the day that a guided tour was no longer an option. But I grabbed a brochure and we wandered the small area surrounding the visitor center before leaving.

In the grounds near the visitor center was a palm tree and a sign with a dire warning. Danger makes me curious so I had to take a closer look.

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Monday December 28 we ventured south from Lihue and managed to make it to the Koloa Sunshine market shortly after its noon opening. This market is held in the parking lot for a baseball field. Lots of local fruit, veggies, and flowers for sale.

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On Saturday I did my November century which came in at 106 miles and 5500' of climbing including Sierra, Calaveras, and Welch Creek roads. Warning, long post without many pictures!

Counter-clockwise starting at the bottom in Los Gatos. Click for interactive map

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Click for a bigger map

I've loved the Pacific Ocean and the California coast for as long as I can remember so what better way to spend a Saturday than ride alongside the water for 80 miles from San Francisco to Santa Cruz? No better ways came to my mind and so this is how I spent my Halloween 2009.

Due to the logistics of doing this ride I ended up logging 127 miles for the day (a double metric century) with about 5300 feet of climbing.

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Click for a bigger map

I had a really good time out on the bike Saturday and felt much better than the Bohlman/Hicks ride. Rather than do a full ride report I think I'll just give some highlights this time.

Ron, another rider, took some pictures which are here

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A few days ago I mistyped a URL that I entered in the Firefox address bar. Usually this would result in the usual "Server not found" error message from Firefox. But instead I got an ad-chocked web page served up by Comcast saying they couldn't find the url. More about this at Ars Technica and plenty of other sites via Google

At the top of Comcast's page is a link to opt-out of this "service". I visited the opt-out page and entered my name, contact info, and cable modem MAC address and submitted the info. This was on August 24. I got an email from them that day and clicked the link therein to confirm my request.

Today (eight days later) I got another email saying that the MAC address I had entered wasn't recognized and that my request was therefore unsuccessful. It turns out I had actually put the router's WAN interface MAC address, not that of the cable modem. My error. So I revisited the opt-out page to try again. It seems they had changed it in the past week and now it requires you to log in with your Comcast username in order to do anything.

The Comcast account at my house is in someone else's name. They're not technical at all. To try and get their username and password or try to get them to complete the opt-out process would be way too much trouble. So I initiated a chat with a Comcast support technician and ultimately got them to opt me out.

At the end of our chat they had me run "ipconfig /flushdns" which I pretended to do on my Linux box. At that point I suspected that the way the opt-out worked was to simply send my cable modem a different DNS server via DHCP. Before all of this, my DNS server was 68.87.76.182. Afterward it changed to 68.87.76.178. Sure enough, they're different. Let's take a look at what hostnames those IP addresses equate to:

[bweir@surge ~]$ host 68.87.76.182
182.76.87.68.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer cns.sanjose.ca.sanfran.comcast.net.
[bweir@surge ~]$ host 68.87.76.178
178.76.87.68.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer nrcns.sanjose.ca.sanfran.comcast.net.

A-ha! So the "domain helper" server is called "cns" and the regular undefiled name server is called "nrcns". This should make it really easy for any Comcast user to opt-out without having to go through Comcast customer service or using some third party DNS server. Simply find out what DNS server IP address Comcast is assigning you, reverse resolve it to a hostname, change "cns" to "nrcns", resolve that hostname back to an IP address, and then manually specify that new IP as your DNS server.

So to go from the "domain helper" name server to using a good one, the steps would look something like this:

[bweir@surge ~]$ cat /etc/resolv.conf 
search hsd1.ca.comcast.net
nameserver 68.87.76.182
[bweir@surge ~]$ host 68.87.76.182
182.76.87.68.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer cns.sanjose.ca.sanfran.comcast.net.
[bweir@surge ~]$ host nrcns.sanjose.ca.sanfran.comcast.net
nrcns.sanjose.ca.sanfran.comcast.net has address 68.87.76.178

Edit: I also found Comcast's DNS servers page as well as a discussion on the topic at dslreports.com

I finally got the commuting century done! The green marker on the map below is where I live and the red one is where I work. My usual commute between these points is two miles each direction but yesterday I took 59 miles to get to work and 45 to get home.

Commuting century route (click for bigger)

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This was a spur of the moment flight to Merced (KMCE) to meet Susanne (who had driven up from Fresno) for dinner. And by spur of the moment I mean that I made the "go" decision on the same afternoon as the flight. I still got in a good hour of flight planning - figuring out my routes to get there and back, drawing them on the charts, preparing the navlog, checking weather, notams and TFRs and so on. So it was relatively short notice but not exactly like I just headed down to the airport and took off.

A direct route from Palo Alto to Merced goes straight over some mountains which I wanted to avoid. It's possible to get around the high terrain by going to either side so I decided to make things interesting by taking both different routes. I took the northern route there and the southern route back thus making a sort of loop.

Click to view the map interactively

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Last week my video card died while I was trying to fly practice instrument approaches in FlightGear. Instead of simply replacing it I took this as an opportunity to upgrade. So I ordered a new motherboard, cpu, memory, and video card. The parts arrived yesterday and everything is installed. After fixing one minor issue with the SATA controller kernel module everything is working great now. Things feel very fast since it's a quad core cpu running at 2.66Ghz compared to my old single cpu at 1.8Ghz.

One application that greatly benefits from the multiple cores is stitching panoramic photos. So in honor of how fast this now is, here's a long-lost panorama from way back in March. I shot it at Bayfront Park (which has since been renamed to "Bedwell Bayfront Park") after I had a little disaster there with a kite and a (different) camera.

The image above links to a 1600 pixel wide version. I also have a 2400px copy