Brief Break From the Smoke

We had a very brief break from the smoke today. I went out a bit before noon and since there was a nice cool wind blowing all the smoke away, I decided to go for a walk (big surprise, eh). By about 1:30, the wind must have changed since it was smokey again. By the time I got back to the Butrovich building, the visibility was again under a mile and breathing was difficult. I almost took the shuttle bus from lower campus to avoid walking up to West Ridge. Pretty awful around here.

Later - The wind changed again and you can now see how close the fire is to Fairbanks. You can also see a hint of blue skies. I believe the paper said about 25 miles away and has burned about 85,000 acres. At least we can breath again. Unfortunately, the wind probably isn't helping those fighting the fire.

Later - Unfortunately, the break from the smoke didn't last very long. By the time I rode home, the smoke was back. Now, it is starting to sprinkle a bit. Not enough to really disperse the smoke but enough to make walking unpleasant. I had my son drop me off near the university since I need to take some video of a steel drum concert tonight. To muggy to wear a coat but wet enough to need one. Since I have some time before the concert, I thought I could getsome walking in but it isn't very nice outside. Too much smoke and now, wet and muggy.

Smoke...

The smoke is back in town from the brush fire about 20 miles to the south. The temperature was pretty cool this morning while riding in since the sun is pretty well blotted out by the smoke. There isn't much of a view from the Butrovich building on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus this morning. Usually, you can see all the way to the Alaska Range and occasionally all the way to Denali. Not today. The smokey smell is everywhere even inside the buildings brought in by the air handling system.

Fortunately, it was nice yesterday as I went on the noon and late afternoon WIN walks. Since the walks start from lower campus, I took the scenic route down, join the walk then take the scenic route back. Both walks added another 12 miles to my Nike+ total (now at 2411.89 miles). Predictably, my monthly totals have been dropping since May probably due to the warmer weather and using the bike instead of the bus.


It has gotten worse. This is 11:00 am...

I'm Glad I'm Not in Corvallis Anymore!

Last night, it was depressing to land in Fairbanks but after seeing the temperature in Corvallis, OR, I'm glad I'm not there anymore. I really have a hard time when temperatures get that hot. Last night, there was a ton of smoke in town and it was pretty grim but this morning, it was fairly clear with just a trace of smoke. It was a nice ride into work. This evening, the smoke is back. Whatever happened to the Fairbanks summers of old? It seems like the fires are much more common than they used to be. Even though it was smokey, I still enjoyed the ride. It has been two weeks since I've last ridden due to trips out of town.

Yesterday, when I was in line to get on the plane, someone pointed to the Seattle weather on the airport monitor. 96°F forcasted for Seattle today. I didn't think it ever got that warm in Seattle.

Too Much Internet?

Maybe this is an example of too much Internet. Right now I am sitting on a shuttle between Corvallis, OR, and PDX (HUT Shuttle) and they have Internet connectivity for the 2½ hour ride to the airport. I guess it does give you something to do on the ride but it was completely unexpected. The bus I took last Thursday didn't advertise the capability. They even have outlets available to plug in your laptop while you are using their service. The last 4 days, I was supposed to be on vacation but I have to admit that I was still somewhat connected. Even though wireless wasn't available, I still had my iPhone and was checking and processing email the entire time. The chain restaurant we went to last night even offered free, open wireless connectivity for you to use while you were waiting for your order. Corvallis does have HP and OSU so maybe it isn't typical to have this level of connectivity.

I must admit that it is pretty convenient but maybe I really need a break from technology....

Later in the afternoon - Maybe I spoke too soon. The shuttle bus overheated just north of Albany and we had to wait about 30 minutes for a replacement shuttle bus on the side of I5. Then there was also a major accident just north of Salem to add additional delay, so the bus took all these side streets to bypass the traffic slowdown. I have plenty of time as my flight isn't until 5:30 so I'm enjoying the ride. Plus there is time to charge my phone since I've been using the GPS to track our progress. All this use really drains the battery.

Corvallis Heat

It is really hot here in Corvallis, OR. Somewhere in the low to mid 90s (°F). This morning, I went for a walk before it got really warm. This is a nice, small town with just about any service you need available in the area. It is a challenge to stay hydrated. While I was walking, I was listening to an audiobook called "Zen and Now" by Mark Richardson. It is a story about the author following the same trip as Robert Pirsig on his trip outlined in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Good book. Almost as good as the original which I must have read 3 or 4 times in the last 30 years. I can't really remember much of the philosophy in the original book but it was interesting to hear the story of Pirsig and his family both before and after publication of the book. Don't read Richardson's book unless you've read Pirsig's first. It won't make as much sense. Also, Richardson's book is a story about his trip not another rehash of the original.

Airport Shuttle

Very early flight out of Indianapolis today but at least the shared ride shuttles to the airport are nice. Just like Chicago, they don't seem to use vans for the shuttles. These are about 1/3 of the cost of a cab ride.

Global NOC

A couple of blocks from the hotel is the Indiana University GlobalNOC which provides services to Internet2, NLR and others as well as the Indianapolis and Bloomington campuses. The video wall along the back shows current utilization along circuits that they manage as well as a continuous stream of alerts and issues. Tours were conducted as part of the ESCC/Internet2 Joint Tech meetings being held here. Today, an announcement was made that the Summer 2011 meeting was being hosted by UAF. Lots of positive response from the participants. Now to try and get folks on the Fairbanks campus psyched up.

One of the really cool demos was this 42" LCD with a glass touch screen in front of it that was displaying a 3D, real time traffic information overlaid on Google Earth. You controlled the perspective and overlays by using the touch screen so you can add detail, select different networks, add weather and highways, etc. It would be nice to have something like that showing network traffic (including history) for the UA network.

Day 2 ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs

I'm looking forward to the IVI presentation being done by Indiana University in an hour. IVI was deployed at Texas A&M at the last Joint Techs and it worked well enough that I was thinking of trying it out in Alaska. It has also been successfully used at Nanog and ARIN meetings but I have learned that they got it running on a host and ship that host around from meeting to meeting. At the joint Techs, the host institution has the responsibility for providing the network and each time, it is like starting from scratch. So here they are using SLAAC (Stateless Address Autoconfiguration) as opposed to IVI and dhco that they used at A&M. It is a given that most organizations, especially universities, would not be happy using SLAAC since they no longer have the information they need to identify users. Universities tend to want that information to address complaints. One thing that universities need to change, UA included, is some sort of anonymization of netflow data before it is presented publicly. That is why I have some security on the netflow tools on the Barrow server. We don't want anyone outside of the network group to be able to view the raw flows. It would be nice if there was a tool to correlate IP address with AS. With the removal of the last octet of local address, that may be sufficient for reporting of the flow data. Hmmm, time to look around.

1:45 pm - The main problem with IVI appears to be that it is built on a really old linux kernel from somewhere around 2002. Driver support is almost nonexistent. Apparently, once it is up and running, it works fine. Here they had a problem with getting it to run on the hardware identified and once it was running, IPv6 - IPv6 traffic wasn't routing properly and the OS X dhcp client wasn't updating the dns field in the config. The other problem seems to be the consumption of a /40 of address space. (/32 prefix, followed by FF, followed by the IPv4 destination address) Interesting software. Maybe it's worth looking into....

3:45 pm - There is a new version of the performance monitoring software out and I am currently downloading it. I have two machines running the older version and the new one has a lot more management capability including the ability to regularly schedule tests. This would allow regular testing to see if there are problems, you may be able to correlate it with a change in the network. Ironic that I just downloaded the ISO this morning right before the announcement of the new version.

10:31 pm - Another late evening. I just got back to my room. Nothing formal today just a reception followed by a pilots BoF. I learned how to fly over 25 years ago and according to them, that was close enough. There was a great DC-3 story as well as stories about flying gliders in Colorado and 170's in Anchorage. These Joint Tech meetings are great since I know a number of the other participants. Many are former students from the many IPv6 and multicast workshops I've taught over the years and the fact that they are having the meeting in Fairbanks in a couple of years. A lot of people want to come up to Alaska though very few want to come up in the winter...

I did get a little bit of walking in between the last session and the reception but nowhere near enough. I was thinking of going back and walking on the treadmill but I got sucked into the pilots BoF.

A Long Day

It is now 10:00 p.m. and the meetings have ended for the day after beginning at 8:30 this morning. There is only a limited time for these Joint Tech meetings and everyone wants to fit in as much as possible. Between meetings, I ran on the treadmill again and I'm pretty happy with my progress. I gave an Alaska update during one of the meetings tonight and tomorrow at noon, I have a working group meeting. I finally sent out the agenda for that meeting just a few minutes ago.

BTW, the Internet at this hotel is incredible. Yesterday, I thought that I needed the Xcode DVD and down loaded it from Apple. I downloaded over the hotel wireless in less than 20 minutes. And just now, I did an iTunes update and it downloaded in less than a minute. The Internet² global NOC is just a couple of blocks away and the hotel is getting it's Internet from the UIPUI campus which probably gets it from the I² CPS service. Pretty good for hotel wireless.

I am using the Dell Mini9 exclusively on this trip. I didn't even bring the Macbook Pro. So far so good. The battery easily last for my uses throughout the day though I do need to charge it before the evening meetings. Speed is perfectly adequate and I even have used it to watch a couple of movies. I even used it to meet the IPv6 challenge that is set up here at the meeting. Dual stack and stateless auto-configuration works as advertised, IVI didn't and I'm really interested in why...

Last Day of the Workshop

The workshop finished today by noon and we got all of the equipment packed up and ready to ship out within an hour. There was even time for a de-brief meeting on what went well and what went poorly. There were meetings lasting from then until about 8:15 this evening. A long day. This is a snapshot taken during the workshop roughly showing the setup. We had 18 students and three instructors. A pretty good ratio. Plus we had a former instructor come by to help out and present some of the new material that he had added last fall.

This afternoon, after the workshop and before the evening meeting, I used the treadmill in the hotel fitness room again. It was really raining hard this afternoon so I couldn't go outside even if I wanted to. I ran a bit but mostly walked about six miles. Since I ran yesterday, it seemed like a bad idea to run again today. I did just enough to get my heart rate up. The weather was still unseasonably cool again today though I haven't heard of any records being set.

Saturday in Indiana

There was a severe weather warning for Indianapolis this morning. They were expecting record cold temperatures beating the old record of 75°F set in 1883. It was pleasantly cool this morning but I think that they didn't set a new record. The workshop is going pretty well today and finishes up at noon tomorrow. This evening before dinner, I went back to the fitness center to try running again since I had more time than yesterday. I ended up running 5 miles which really made me feel pretty good. Of course this is my type of running where my speed varied from 4.1 to 6 mph. I think I spent most of my time right around 5 mph. I then finished up by walking 3 more miles. Felling pretty good about it now since I still am trying to move from walking to running. It makes better use of my time. Including the walk to town, I easily made my 10 mile goal for the day!

This evening we walked downtown to have dinner and there was some sort of big celebration going on. Police everywhere on foot, bicycles, motorcycles and on horseback. Cars cruising up and down the streets with their stereos booming, lots and lots of people, lots of energy and lots of activity. Things really changed by the time we got back to the hotel located on the IUPUI campus. It was completely dead by comparison. I finally found out what the acronym stands for Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).

Later - After looking around the hotel, I think it is the 39th Annual Indiana Black Expo Summer Celebration in Indianapolis.

Weber Grill

This evening, a group of us from the class went to the Weber Grill Restaurant in the downtown area. They grill most of their entrees over charcoal on these oversize Weber grills. I first heard about this chain on FoodTV but the kitchen here didn't look as impressive as the one on the show (the hostess said that one was in Chicago). The food was very good. I had a half rack of pork ribs with a salad and it was very good.

I did manage to get another three mile run in between the class and walking downtown for dinner. One of the high points (at least for me) is that I ran it continuously in about a half hour. I usually stop running and walk for a bit around 1½ miles but today, I didn't have enough time to walk and still make my three mile goal and, in fact, I was still feeling pretty good by the end that I could've kept going. Including the walk downtown, today was about a seven mile day. Not ten but good enough to make me feel like I did some exercise. Hopefully, I'll be able to get to sleep early tonight. We start again at 9:00 tomorrow morning and run all day. I really need to go through the slides so I am ready to present. I'm not at all happy with how I did today.

Indianapolis is the capitol of the state and there are some interesting monuments. Here is a view of the traffic circle from the perspective of the capitol building right behind me. There is also a shopping mall near here and located across a couple of blocks and above all the traffic. It seems to cut right through some of the buildings downtown. You can catch a glimpse of it in the Weber Grill picture above. The mall is the huge glassed in area.

It is very warm here in Indianapolis. Somewhere around 85°F and a little bit muggy. This is the view from my hotel room looking towards the Campus Center on the Indiana University campus where we are holding the IPv6 workshop. Today was supposed to be set up but it didn't really happen. We have tomorrow morning to set up as well and the workshop starts at 1:00 tomorrow afternoon. I really hope everything works. Chris from Ohio has confidence and I trust him. He knows what he is doing. I started looking through the slides and there are quite a few new ones and I have some homework to do.

On another note, the other instructor mentioned that he was going running outside since the weather is so nice. He is from Nebraska where it must be significantly warmer than it is here and probably a bit more humid. I guess it's all about where you're coming from. I did run three miles on the treadmill in the hotel so I did burn some calories today but nowhere near where I need to be. Especially since I missed the WIN walks yesterday! I also inadvertently walked around campus this morning looking for the Campus Center (before I knew it was across the street). I was following the road signs and they lead all around the campus on one way streets until I found myself right in front of the hotel...

Later - We walked from the hotel, which is located in the middle of the campus, to the downtown area for dinner so another three miles. I think I made my ten mile goal for today.

Very Smokey

The smoke came into Fairbanks big time today. I don't think the visibility is more than a mile if even that far and it is really hard to breath. Summer sports activities have been cancelled all over town. Didn't walk anywhere today. In fact, I didn't even ride the bike today. Pretty grim...

Too Hot to Walk....

Today was a very warm day somewhere in the high 80s and the day for the church picnic at Chena Lakes. This is another attempt using Autostitch on the iPhone. I probably should have used more than three pictures and probably shouldn't of had my son in two of the pictures. Kind of an interesting effect though. Sometimes it seems as if there is more than one of him around. (One is more than enough) As you can see, it was a beautiful day without a trace of smoke and only a few scattered high clouds. Typical summer day in Fairbanks. I started the day with a short walk to church and back, as usual for a Sunday, and followed that up with running a bunch of boys out to Lost Lake Boy Scout camp before heading to Chena Lakes. Not much walking in these really warm days. I occasionally see people out running and I don't see how they do it.

The cooler weather and the rain seem to have had some effect on the fires in the interior. It was a beautiful ride in this morning without a hint of smoke, cool temperatures and dark blue skies. If I had to complain about something, it would be the bright sun pointing out that I really need to clean my visor. I took the scenic route in which winds through the Goldstream Valley to the university. I think you may be hard pressed to find a more circuitous route in. The weather guessers are projecting more warm temperatures so I wanted to take advantage of the cool temperatures. This photo was taken from the little park like area next to the Butrovich Building at the university. I think that it is a pretty nice view. If it was really clear, there would be a nice view of the Alaska Range in the distance with occasional views of Denali. Mostly in the winter and spring when tourists tend not to come up.

Right now, we are spending a fair amount of time getting Shibboleth set up so the University of Alaska can join the InCommon Federation. Getting the IDP (identity provider) set up was yesterday. Actually, I had managed to figure out how to set one up in the past but since I'm really running short of time these days and we wanted to get it right. We have someone up from Texas helping us with the process and it is going pretty smooth. I had a really hard time with all the XML files figuring out what needs to be in all of the fields. No problems with the consultant here.

Still Smokey

After doing a Time Machine restore, quite a few files need to be regenerated such as iPhoto thumbnails and Spotlight indexes. These seemed to take forever. I really got spoiled with the speed of the SSD. It's only been a couple of months but now the Macbook Pro seems like a real dog. Even the Dell Mini-9 feels faster. Hopefully a new version of whatever firmware comes out soon. Apparantly, there isn't a way to restore a previous version. It is still smokey in the interior due to uncontrolled fires around the state. It makes one look forward to winter. In addition to the smoke, it feels pretty warm. This is the smokey view from the University at about 8:00 AM. It is stitched together by an iPhone app called Autostitch. No user intervention required (or allowed).

Wednesday Evening - We are getting a little bit of rain this evening so I hope things cool off a bit. I walked to the Farmers Market at noon, looked around for lunch but decided that the lines were too long so I just walked back to my office. I had a 1:30 meeting anyway. I had leftover red curry in the fridge from yesterday so that was a good lunch. This evening, went on another WIN walk for a total of 8 miles of WIN walks in one day. All this for a plastic water bottle. Pretty pathetic, eh? It was a nice walk except for the temperature. It was over 90°F today. I really felt it after the evening walk, getting on all my riding gear to ride to a church meeting. It was pretty hot with the armored pants, jacket, gloves and helmet. I guess that's why some people choose to ride without all the riding gear (ATGATT). By the end of the meeting, it was raining so a nice ride home in the rain.

Another first for me was riding down a dirt road to the home where the meeting was at. As I mentioned before in this blog, I don't feel comfortable riding on gravel and this was dirt not even gravel. No problems but still felt nervous especially when I had to turn around because I missed my turn. There was also a lot of fresh asphalt and oil on another road just to add to my discomfort. Overall, I still really enjoy riding the bike and would like to take some longer trips but I really don't see any opportunity this summer.

Macbook Pro SSD Issues

Today, I re-installed the original hard drive in my Macbook Pro because it wouldn't boot from the SSD. It would do the chime thing, then the gray screen with the apple, then shut down after about 10 seconds. It boots fine from the DVD drive or an external drive and I am able to do a restore to the SSD from Time Machine. Just not boot from the drive. After some "googling" (that's now a verb), I ran into a bunch of posts referring to a firmware update on June 23rd. My problems started on June 25th and that is about when I would have done the last update. I was out of the office from the 26th though July 6th. The last successful Time Machine backup was the morning of the 25th. Anyway, 21 tiny screws later, the original 160 GB drive is installed and I'm doing a restore from my last backup after testing to see if it would actually boot. No problem. Backups are a wonderful thing....

Miserably Warm & Smokey

I arrived back in Fairbanks in the early hours of the morning. As we got closer to Fairbanks, you can see the haze get thicker and thicker. Fire season has arrived. It was still near 80°F, a bit humid and very hazy. Horrible weather. This morning, the sky overhead was tending towards blue so after church, I took the long way home. The Nike+ gadget supposedly keeping track on the iPhone. Walking up Ballaine Road, I decided to look at a map looking for other roads in the area to add to my walk. Thirty minutes later, I looked at the phone again and the distance was still reading the same. Bug in the software I guess. I manually pause the workout and restarted and the odometer started moving again. Lost a couple of miles but now that I'm aware of the bug, I can avoid it happening again. This afternoon, the smoke started to move in again. My eyes are burning now and it is still too hot.

San Francisco

I walked to Pier 39 and Fisherman's Wharf from my hotel near the Financial District. About 7¼ miles round trip according to the Nike+ gadget. It was a beautiful day with temperatures in the low 70s and a nice breeze. I walked out to the end of a couple of piers to get away from the crowds for at least a few minutes. I think today was a holiday for many people. There was a Princess Cruise loading up so traffic along the Embarcadero was very congested with a lot of buses, limos and cabs dropping people (and their 20 suitcases) off at the pier. There were a lot of people at Pier 39 but no street entertainers. I went into a couple of shops but since I wasn't really looking for anything, I tended to keep walking.

I had lunch at the Fog City Diner at the intersection of Embarcadero and Battery St. This wasn't your typical diner as the menu included cioppino, an oyster bar and truffle fries. I had a burger and it was made of real beef coarse ground at the diner. It tasted like a steak instead of a burger. It looked like a diner on the outside but very well appointed on the inside with black leather and wood. Very nice with a nice view of the port right across the street. Right now, I'm back at the hotel waiting for my shuttle ride to the airport. San Francisco is a nice place to visit but it will be nice to get home.

Friday Afternoon - Walked many laps of the terminal in SFO to get my mileage up to 10 miles for the day. I feel like such a slacker this week since I only averaged about 3 miles per day.

Also, walked one lap of Seatac. That's at least a couple more miles.

Cisco Live! (day 3)

The real highlight of today was a guest keynote by Guy Kawasaki. He is now a venture capitalist and used to be in charge of software development at Apple back in the late '80s. His talk was on 10 things to keep in mind while developing new products or services. Excellent review with many humorous references and digs at technology. The first session of the day was on wired 802.1X authentication. This is something I really would like to get set up in Barrow to replace the NetReg system that was just installed. The presenter went into the problems and issues with deployment in a typical enterprise listing the "gotchas" with various operating systems. The first afternoon session is on multicast advancements and again the focus is on the service provider market focusing on video distribution. I guess this is a really common method to deliver cable TV at this time. The last afternoon session is on multicast deployment and it was one of the best sessions here. The speaker was knew his topic well and spoke not only the the service provider side but the enterprise as well. I would like to use a lot of his material and examples in the slide deck for the multicast workshops.

Later - Not getting much walking in today either besides back and forth between Moscone West, North and South in addition to the walk down and back. This week, I'm well below my 10 mile per day average that I have been striving for. Oh well. I'll be back in Fairbanks shortly and should be able to get going again without too much trouble. I had a wonderful dinner at a sushi restaurant just around the corner from the hotel. Tempura with a small bowl of buckwheat noodles in fish broth, ikura, maguro & tako (sushi). Finished up with mochi green tea ice cream. Just about the right amount of dinner for a change. What amazes me is that the sushi here is, as expected, very good but the sushi in Barrow is just as good. Both are way better than restaurants in Fairbanks (though I still haven't tried the one near the Bentley Mall carwash.) The Cisco conference is now officially over but not quite soon enough to catch the 7:00 PM flight out so I get to stick around until tomorrow and spend some time looking around before heading back. I walked around a couple of miles after dinner. One of the frustrating things about walking around here, besides the traffic, is all the stops waiting for the light to change. I think maybe tomorrow I'll head for the water I think the area is called the Embarcadero. It is the eastern waterfront road then on to Fisherman's Wharf. I think it is only about 2½ miles each way according to Google Maps. Should be a nice way to spend the tomorrow.

Cisco Live! (day 2)

As all of the other Cisco conferences I've attended, it is like trying to drink from a firehose. The sheer volume of technical content available here is staggering. Hundreds of technical sessions, very few marketing presentations except when they are releasing a new product. I've gotten a lot of questions answered but now have a bunch more. I did talk to the certification folks since I used to teach certification classes as part of the Cisco Academy at TVCC. The material has changed considerably and it will be a challenge if they wanted to start up the classes again. I've been out of it for three years (I think). The first session this morning was on IPv6 enterprise deployment and, like most of the other sessions, is taught by a Cisco engineer who has tons of experience with the topic working with numerous customers on their deployments. I am teaching an IPv6 workshop later this month and this really added some new information that I can use in the class. I just need to get my thoughts together on it. My free Cisco Press book was on IPv6 Security which is a topic that really needs more coverage in the workshop. Maybe I can read it on the flight back. The last session of the day was on multicast security. Another very good session with tons of real useful content. It makes me think that the material being presented in the Internet² Multicast Workshop needs revision. I was surprised at the number of service providers already using multicast but for their own use, such as video broadcasting, as opposed to making it available for their customers to get multicast content on their own. I guess I shouldn't be surprised after all it is all about revenue'

Not much walking as in "walking for exercise". I usually don't get done with the sessions until after 7:00 and I have been pretty tired. Plus I just don't feel like walking around much due to all the street traffic. The hills are a challenge but I really didn't bring enough clothes to do any serious walking. Maybe on Friday since I'm done by noon and my flight out isn't until 7:00. The iPhone has been working fine with the Nike+ transmitter though it does seem to take more time to detect the transmitter than the iPod Nano did.

Tonight is the "customer appreciation event" with entertainment being provided by bands called B-52s and Devo. I haven't heard of either but then again I'm pretty disconnected from music these days.

Wednesday evening - It was pretty cold and windy out on Treasure Island as it is located in the middle on the bay. There were a lot of bands switching out with some MTV personality as the host. A wide variety of music though all really loud. The food was so so so I didn't stay long.