Sometime very recently, the Albuquerque airport installed public wireless throughout the terminal. I only discovered this about 2 minutes before I boarded, but it was nice for those two minutes. Now I'm in Phoenix with a 3-hour layover, and I discover that they have free wireless as well. This is good. Phoenix is doing something weird to my SSH packets that is making mouser.org refuse my SSH login requests; worked fine in ABQ. But I'll settle for web access.

Anyway, the Hawaiian Airlines check-in booth (of which there was exactly one) was staffed by no less than 8 people, all wearing loud Hawaiian shirts and firing off Alohas at speeds exceeding R26. In addition, there were two older folks playing ukeleles and a greeter woman in what i must assume is a "traditional" hawaiian outfit sort of like a kimono, only louder. Hawaiian Airlines: friendliest check-in ever.

2.5 hours to go...

You may notice that this long layover is incongruous with my itinerary description in the previous post. This is largely due to the fact that I didn't pay much attention to my actual itinerary. The short connection is on the way back, where it will matter even less if my bag arrives a day late. So that's good news. Also, my bag was the first one off the plane today... and I guess that's a good sign too. The travel gods are with me. As are a phalanx of loudly-shirted aloha-weilding smiley people.

Update:
I arrived here so early that they hadn't yet done seat assignments so I was told to go to the gate and just wait around for a bit and they would call us up when seat assignments were ready to be given. This just happened, and being the first person here for this flight, I got my pick of the available seats. Window seat, exit row (== leg room)—its even a rear exit row (seats in front of an exit row don't recline, so only the rear row of a set of exit rows is desireable). Sweet.

And I have secured an electrical outlit for myself. Life is good, here in the Phoenix airport.

Speaking of power, only yesterday while packing did I discover that the second battery that came with my mini travel laptop was larger capacity than the one I had been using. With the power settings I have configurede right now, I can get a wopping 6.5 hours of runtime out of this thing on the larger battery. And an additional 4 hours on the backup battery. I wonder if they make a taser option for the accessory bay, because I've got Joules, baby.

One other comment, as long as I'm sitting here people-watching... A flight to Honolulu in December is definitely the first time I've seen so many people who seem really excited about traveling. Pretty much everyone in this little estuary of the terminal looks really stoked. It more or less eliminates the depressing feeling that most airports carry.

Time remaining: 2 hours.

..and in other news... the Phoenix airport has cops on mountain bikes that ride through the concourses. I think they should be outfitted with those irritating beepers that the little golfcart-bus things have, or at least old-school Model T horns. aah-WOOO-gah!

Update 2:
With just under 2 hours to go until the flight, the ukelele players and greeter woman arrived at the gate and started doing songs for everyone. Then, without being prompted, native Hawaiians from the passenger crowd came forward and asked if they could perform dances or songs. So for two hours I was entertained by random Hawaiians; it was awesome. I made some audio recordings with my iRiver and I tried to get some pictures, but I don't think they came out. I may post one later.

OK I'm done packing and I'm going to take a nap. The great Hawai'i adventure will begin in rather poor form with me waking up at about 3:00am to drive down to ABQ and getting on a 7:00am flight. Boo. The next exciting adventure will be changing airlines in Phoenix (which means getting my luggage and re-checking it) without a lot of time to spare. It might work. All of this was done in the interest of cheap tickets. But hey, should my bag not make the transfer in time... I survived a week in backwoods Kazakhstan with no luggage, I'm sure I can handle a day in Hawai'i. :)

And then, it's fun in the sun with Nina for 12 days. Very excited.

Due to grad school commitments, Nina's going to have to bring her computer and do some work while we're there. The bright side of this is that I will likely have access to the intornet and can post some photos and banal commentary while she's working.

Manta rays, lava, huge telescopes. That's all I'm saying for now.

Parker just introduced me to the game of handball, which is similar to racquetball (which I play a lot) but played sans tools. A game of simians, if you will. It has a significant learning curve so it'll be some time before I'm capable of offering any sort of challenge to Bob. But for today, after three games, my fingers are about twice their normal diameter and strangely purple. Ice pack time.

Oh and yesterday Cari and I climbed Cabezon, marking the second time in a few days (and ever) that I've re-climbed a mountain. And of course it was again motivated by geocaching. Me == dorkus.

I've actually been getting a lot of exercise and sun since break started. The weather has been excellent and I've been hiking, climbing, or damaging my hands every day so far. And yet I still seem to have the flu. Ironic that I hardly ever get sick and this is the first year I've ever had a flu shot. Oh well. I think tomorrow I'll do nothing at all in the hope of not having a cold when I arrive in Hawai'i Friday afternoon.

I leave for Hawai'i early Friday morning. Hawai'i sits comfortably at UTC-10 whereas New Mexico is at UTC-7, so I am three hours ahead here. In order to be awake at the right time of day during my vacation, I've been slowly pushing my schedule forward over the last week. Now I am waking up at 8:30am and going to bed at 1:00am. This should translate nicely to a reasonable schedule when I get to Hawai'i. A note to Nina: You have 5 hours to shift; please don't make me wake up at 3am local time when we get there. :) Anyway, it feels weird forcing myself to sleep in and stay up really late.

Bob and I just went and climbed up Pajarito Mountain to nab the geocache at the summit. It's not a huge hike at ~1,300' of vertical gain and 7 miles round trip via the route we took (from the ski lodge, hike up east service road, across summit ridge to west service road and down through Camp May). But as I put the trip into my cummulative hiking statistics, I noticed something rather odd—this is the first time ever (as far as I can remember) that I have climbed a peak twice. I find that very strange, but I guess it just reflects my desire to see something new as part of my outdoor wanderings. If it weren't for the geocache up there, I probably wouldn't have done it.

Broxton came over this evening and we took our camera gear out to Barranca Mesa to take pictures of the luminaria-o-rama. It's a Christmas Eve tradition here, and the entire street (~2km long) puts out luminarias for the duration of the evening. In this shot, a guy (who turned out to be Parker from work) was walking by with a flashlight.

Mike got a good shot with Sirius rising over a well-luminari'd house. We also saw some of the worst christmas lawn junk in existence, though we didn't stop to take pictures of it.

I use a program called ClrMAME Pro to audit the game ROMs that I have in my collection against a list of known ROMs. The list of know ROMs is stored in a file called a DAT file, and there are different DAT files for each system for which I have ROMs. For the bulk of the gaming consoles and handhelds that I am interested in emulating, the DATs are produced from a set of tools called "GoodTools" made by some guy called Cowering.

The trouble with GoodTools is that they are intended to be used to identify unknown ROMs, not for auditing a collection. If a ROM were to be dumped poorly such that it wouldn't work in an emulator, the checksum for that fle would still be found in GoodTools so that you could identify it as a bad ROM. People have a tendancy to use GoodTools to monitor the completeness of their ROM collection, and the result is that when you download a set of ROMs for a given system, it tends to have a bunch of broken ROMs included with it which just wastes space. This can be a real problem for systems with lots of known bad dumps and/or large ROM sizes. The quintessential example is the Nintendo 64, which has ROM sizes around ~10MB and lots of known bad dumps/overdumps/hacks/modified ROMs. Here are the known versions of the ROM for the game "1080 Snowboarding" for the N64:

As you can see, there are two valid versions of the game, a version released in Europe that includes multilanguage support for 4 languages and a version released in Japan and the United States. The first of these includes two bad dumps and two "fixed" roms (modified to work with a particular imperfect emulator). For the second version there are 10 bad dumps, 7 fixed roms, and two hacked roms. The grand total, then, is 25 versions of this ROM, only 2 of which are valid. And at ~11MB per version, that's about 253MB wasted on this game. Even worse is the fact that 12 of these versions (~132MB) will never work on any emulator ever, as they are broken dumps. I finally got fed up with having all this crap data on my harddrive and wrote some PERL to cull the chaff from my DAT files.

I eliminated anything that was a broken dump, an overdump, a fixed rom, a translation, a trained rom (modified to allow cheating), a cracked rom, or anything with a bad checksum. While I was at it, I nuked all the public domain ROMs (playable ROMs that were never available as actual games for the system). I really just want to be able to emulate what could have been played on the original hardware.

Implementing the new DATs in ClrMAME has resulted in a massive reduction in junk on my harddrive. The four GoodTools systems with the largest ROM collections are Nintendo 64 (27GB), Super Nintendo (10GB), Gameboy Advance (7GB), and Sega Genesis (3GB). The combined total size taken up by the GoodTools complete sets for these four systems is almost 50 gigabytes. After implementing the new MouserDATs, they drop down in size to 11GB, 3GB, 5GB, and 1GB, respectively, for a grand total of about 20 gigabytes and a reduction of 60% in size.

Yeah so I nuked 30GB of crap from my harddrive without losing any desired functionality from my emulators.

The process of producing the new DAT files and re-scanning the ROMs takes some time, so I haven't done it for all of the GoodTools yet. But the ROMs audit page now reflects the new DATs where I've implemented them.

Last year's birthday journal article made reference to the fact that I was at work, furiously attempting to finish my thesis data code by the end of the year. It did not mention what I did once I left work, but I have a distinct memory that Dan and Broxton were over and that we spent a lot of time on the PS2. In fact, this seems to have been the case for the last few years.

Despite the fact that Broxton now lives in California and works for NASA Ames, and Dan lives near Seattle and works for Microsoft, they managed to be here for the big fiesta de la me. Dan and Layla drove down for the holidays to visit various friends and family, and I convinced them to come over last night. Broxton, in typical Mike form, just appeared randomly after about a year of being on the dark side of the moon. We spent the evening playing arcade games, Katamari, and dorking around with the cats. Fun was had by all and it was a nice chill birthday.

Some of the gift highlights include a binary LED clock, a down comforter, an origami book that shows you how to make scale model paper airplanes out of dollar bills ("Another way to throw your money away"), and a book called "How To: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, Fully Illustrated."

In honor of my birthday, here are the Top Thirtry Facts Concerning Chuck Norris.

When I went to Kazakhstan, lab travel did the arrangements and royally screwed me on frequent flier miles by putting me on three different carries who don't share miles. This trip, I did my own itinerary and took Delta for the entire thing (except for the Moscow -> Vienna flight, which they don't offer). As a result, I netted just over 19,000 frequent flier miles from the flights on this trip. This brings my current Delta total to 27,626. Also, my five nights at the Marriott Grand in Moscow will also give me additional miles, but they won't be credited for some time.

The theshold for their lowest perks club membership is 25,000 miles ("Silver Medallion Member"), which I gather I should now have... though my online statement still says I'm in the base membership class. Maybe that upgrade takes time too, dunno...

Never having been a frequent flier before, I didn't really understand what good miles were other than trading in for discounts on tickets. I can certainly spend my miles on free tickets; I already have enough miles for a free round-trip ticket anywhere in the US. Another flight to Russia or Kazakhstan and I'll have enough for a round-trip ticket to Europe. However, the benefits of having frequent flier status on the airline really comes into play for free upgrades on my routine business travel.

Mike's been flying across the Atlantic several times a year for the last few years, and now he's "Platinum" status, so he basically gets upgraded to business class every time. While I was sitting at the back of the plane, smelling the bathroom and listening to the screaming kids, he was in the first row being served free drinks and enjoying the ability of his plush chair to fully recline. He didn't even request the upgrade; they just automagically do it for any available business class seats, starting with the people in economy who have the most miles and working down until they run out of nice seats. And the best part is that it doesn't cost him miles to get the upgrade.

Also, once you are in the higher eschelons of frequent flier status, the rewards are exponential. He gets double miles for every flight he takes just for being Platinum, so it's even easier for him to acrue miles for free flights. I figure by the time I'm no longer a postdoc, I should at least be Gold status and hopefully won't always be in the worst seat on the plane.

1) it rules.

2) Vienna has the best public transportation system I have ever seen. A week-long pass cost me about $13 (a monthly pass is $40), and was good for unlimited rides on any subway, bus, or tramway. There is no one who checks to see if you have a ticket, and there are no turnstiles or anything to prevent you from just getting on the subway, but everyone follows the rules anyway. The subway system is very extensive, and you can get almost anywhere without much walking. It is also very reliable. The signs at the station indicate how many minutes until the next train, and they're accurate.

3) These people eat nothing but meat and beer, but there aren't very many fat people. I'm not sure how that works. I put on 2kg in 2 weeks, and I didn't have any beer.

4) Kinderpunsch is really good. Take a cup of water, add half a cup of sugar, two pinches of ground clove, and a pinch of ground cinnamon (or a whole cinnamon stick) and bring to a boil. Then dump in three cups of apple juice and serve once it gets hot (don't let the apple juice boil). Then make more and more and eat it all. YUM! It's really just mulled cider. But yum regardless.

5) I want some peanuts.

6) I'm suffering from severe jetlag, and am not doing well in recalling my experiences in Vienna. But I recommend that everyone go to Vienna, at once. And visit the VIC, home of the IAEA; it's awesome.

Now reporting live from Vienna, Austria. I've been here since Thursday morning, but there have been certain issues with getting network access. Vienna is a great city, and I've had a lot of fun wandering around. Here's some hot cathedral action:

Stephansdom, the centerpiece of the old city

Thursday was a national holiday, and much of the IAEA staff took Friday off to get a four-day weekend. I went to the IAEA headquarters on Friday but it was mostly empty. With El Baradai's acceptance of the Nobel peace prize yesterday, I've been seeing a lot of Vienna and the IAEA facility on CNN. Mike arrived (from Kazakhstan) yesterday and we begin work at the IAEA on Monday.

The Church of the Emmaculate Reception

This isn't the best picture ever, but what you're looking at here is the infamous church across the street from the American Embassy in Moscow. The employees of the embassy refer to it by a number of humorous names (see above) on account of the fact that it hasn't held a service in decades, instead being owned by the state and at one point being encrusted with so many antennas that the bell tower was difficult to make out. Today it looks pretty run down and I didn't see anything that struck me as an obvious antenna. But who knows, maybe they just want you to think that they're not listening anymore.

Also, during lunch at the embassy cafeteria, they had the kitchen closed off for rennovation (where did our food get cooked??) and there was, at one point, the distinct sound of someone in there falling off a tall ladder and lots of moaning. Weird.

Me in Red Square, Moscow, Russia

Let's see... from left to right: The GUM department store (despite name, ultra-posh), Saint Basil's Cathedral, my big melon, Spasskaya Tower, Lenin's mausoleum, and the red wall of the Moscow Kremlin. Behind the wall you can see the top of the building that contains the equivalent of the Russian senate.

The center of Red Square was closed; you had to walk around the GUM to get to St. Basil's and only a narrow path below the Kremlin wall was open to get to Lenin's tomb. Nice for photos though; it looks it like I was the only one there. I had to wait awhile to get up to the barrier, there were about 1000 people right in front of me when this picture was taken.

I have arrived alive and well and with only minor jetlag. All of my luggage arrived on time, as did I. In fact, everything has gone perfectly so far with a few minor exceptions.

Most notably is the fact that the high-speed internet access in my hotel is *exclusively* wireless, and the old loaner crap laptop that I have with me only has a 100bT NIC (which, btw is not even built into the laptop; this thing is ancient). So for the time being I am borrowing Doug's computer and my access will be sporadic.

The other problem is that it is really freakin cold here. This isn't actually a problem, I just hadn't unpacked my big down jacket yet when we went out for a walk yesterday afternoon and my softshell was insufficient. There was a light snow and very low clouds (to the point of it being foggy) when we arrived, so we didn't do much sight-seeing. We just wandered around looking for resturaunts with English-speeking waitors (took two tries). We ended up at the humorous "Cafe Americanskiy American Bar & Grill." Food was good, if not really American. Decor was humorous—license plates for Colorado and Nevada flanking a... sombrero... yeah. I had chicken carbonara, a decidedly Italian dish. Quite good. Waitresses name was Nina, so I found out how to spell that in cyrillic. (HNHA, but the N is "backwards" and I don't want to look up how to do goofy unicode characters right now).

After dinner, at about 5pm, we both just went back to the hotel and crashed. I woke up at midnight, took an Ambien, and went right back to sleep. Perfect. This morning, we're meeting one of the LANL interpreters, Nellie, for breakfast. Then it's a full day of wandering aroudn Red Square and shopping. Fuzzy hats, concentric dolls, tombs of Lenin, onion domes. And freezing coldness. Wooo!