benweir.com

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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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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

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

The boots were too wide and I shipped them back. I haven't ordered another pair yet because I need to wait until they receive my return shipment and issue me store credit (110% - yay!)

The bike arrived in San Pablo four hours ago but for some reason is not scheduled to arrive at my house for three more days. Hopefully it comes sooner!

I sold another book. Actually it's a boxed set of three books and I sold the set for $15. I looked up a post office nearby and when I got there it was actually some third party shipping store. Even though they sent it media mail the cost to send the books to Florida was $6.54 . This is $3 more than the last book I shipped across country. I'm not going back to that place.

Tonight I went on a bike ride with my co-worker from a long time ago. We climbed Soda Springs Rd and rode around Lexington reservoir. I've been doing a lot of commuting on my road bike wearing street clothes and shoes. So to get geared up properly (mainly the shoes) it felt like I could really fly along effortlessly.

Flying directly in the face of my recent "eliminate possessions" craze, I just made two online purchases.

First, I got a new pair of moto boots. I already have a beefy pair of boots. In fact they're so beefy that they come halfway up to my knees and they have toe sliders. They aren't comfortable to wear off the bike and they squeak when I walk in them. I can wear them under jeans but they look kind of dorky and not at all like normal shoes. I like them a lot for serious riding and their waterproofness is great but they're no good for wearing on quick trips around town. In the past I've just ridden around in regular shoes. But in the last few years I've gradually shifted away from tennis/athletic shoes and towards slightly dressier and lots more delicate leatherish shoes. I don't want to ride in them. Obviously there's a NEED for new boots. So my new moto boots are low cut and a lot less conspicuous looking. They should be comfy enough to wear all day too.

Second, I got a new bike. Part of the justification for this is that I am getting rid of my old hybrid bike this weekend! So this one doesn't count as new stuff, it's just "refreshing" something that I already have. Plus it's a folding bike and so it will take up a lot less space. I am getting the silver model and I also ordered the Crossrack. This will let me mount a standard pannier from the seat post.

Both of these purchases are further justified by two fairly recent changes in my life. I moved and I got rid of my car. These two things have me riding the two wheeled machines a lot more and so it seems wise to invest in them.

I still had notes, tests, homework assignments from the few college classes I took long ago. The oldest ones I found were almost 13 years old. After skimming through them I threw them in the trash.

Also I found more old CDs to toss. One CD that I am hanging onto though is my very first Linux cd. Redhat 5.0 (Hurricane) from cheapbytes.com .

Since moving on Sunday my new bedroom is still in total disarray. Normally I would pack away all my useless boxes in the closet out of sight. But this time I'm leaving them strewn across my floor until I'm finished culling the herd so to speak.

Five boxes of books. Many of them old textbooks. I entered the ISBN numbers on amazon.com to see what used ones were selling for and most had copies selling for a penny. But one of my old Volkswagen manuals seemed more sought after. I posted it for $20 and it sold within a few hours.

Anyway I've sorted my books into three categories: Keepers, Junkers, and ones that might be sold. The Junkers will be given away at Susanne's yard sale and then recycled if they still don't find homes. The Keepers are on my bookcase. The ones that could be sold are sitting in a pile on my floor. I'm still trying to decide if it's worth it to try and sell them online for $3-5 each.