the bits

So, the time of waiting has come and gone… We started packing on Monday. The plan we formulated a while ago is still intact… we’ll have everything loaded out by the end of the month. The packing will be better this time… we’ve got more time to do it, plus POWER TOOLS. Consequently, most of the stuff will occupy much less space than it did on the way over. We were going to break down the servers / desks today, but decided to postpone it until tomorrow.

Still gorgeous outside. I’m a bit more mindful of the climate here lately, as I’ll soon be returning to the great northwest. I don’t mind, though… there’s benefits and drawbacks to everything I guess ;) I actually kinda dig on the cold, as long as there is occasional respite (summers).

Spent a bit of time today going through my stuff, trying to whittle it down as much as possible. I’ve decided to finally toss out a bunch of my old shit… specifically, my old scsi equipment (my current cd burner is long overdue for replacement), my backpack from 6th grade (I might have actually kept it, had it not gotten totally moldy and funk-t-fied… seems to happen to anything around here if you just let it sit someplace without touching it for a while…), and a bunch of old serial and localtalk cables that I’ll never use. All in all, I simply don’t have that much stuff to begin with, which is good.

As usual, going through my stuff led to a bit of reminiscing… old letters, cards, pictures… Sometimes I pine for days past. Then I stop and instead think of what’s to come. I re-found a couple interesting recordings that I’ve made on my little portable cassette recorder… one is from the Phish 1999 new year’s eve show / 5 day camping event extravaganza / traffic jam from hell, and another is from one night when I cut work at VoiceStream and decided to party instead…I was pretty far out of my head, and it’s all on tape ;) I’ve taken the liberty of digitizing the Phish show, and the two tracks are currently being ripped to MP3 – should be done by the time I’m finished writing this ;) I figure I’ll go ahead and post them to the masses. It was easily the coolest extended concert / event that I’ve ever been a part of. I’m planning on finally doing up our NYE 2000 Phish website, just a tad bit late. We’ve got a bunch of great pictures… I think the plan is to use the pictures and the recordings, as well as plain ol’ narrative from yours truly and gren (if you’re up for it) to recap the entire event as best as possible…

In other news, there really is no other news at all :) As I’ve said before, nothing much of interest really happens around here.

I suppose I should start solidifying my plans for after we hit the states. I wanna get airline tickets as cheaply as possible, so that means as soon as possible… fortunately, I’ll have ample time in Ft. Lauderdale to deal with the shipping of my goods… just gonna stay at rob’s dad’s place again (lenox, we should hook up ;). From there, my stuff get shipped to Seattle, I fly to PA to visit folks (with a possible stop over in Bradenton area to visit friends), then out to Seattle.

All of this stuff immediately at hand is just busy work, and I’ve done it enough times that it’s fully automatic. Most of my attention these days is focused on Seattle, and what will happen once I return. I’m really anxious to see damon, amanda, nick, bender, and the rest of the seattle crew, too numerous to mention. I also eagerly await being in a place that is home to others (more) like me. Peers are more important than I thought… Even though I’ve had a pretty tight group of friends living / working here at the Islandless compound, I’ve still got a desire to just go and meet new, interesting people… at shows, hanging out, at parties… etc, etc.

Hmm, and it seems that when I digitized the tape it sorta screwed up… seems to have dropped a wad of samples every few seconds or so… I’ll do it differently and post the results when they’re ready.

More later.

I’ve been holding back on saying anything too negative about the state of Islandless, only because … well, I guess it kinda looks bad to do so. Money has been spent. If this turns out to be a bust, then I guess it goes in the “failed businesses” category.

Just found out today that the lawyers in the Attorney General’s office issued a letter to the chief minister (with whom we are eagerly awaiting a meeting) informing him that our proposal falls squarely within the bounds of the Cable and Wireless agreement. The bulk of our case is that our idea is *not* within the bounds of said agreement; namely, our use of un-licensed frequencies, and our provision of conduit for IP data, which is not considered a telecommunications service, strictly speaking (differences between circuit switched and packet switched networks, etc). In any case, we have what we consider a pretty solid case, in addition to the fact that c&w is basically pillaging these people as far as prices / services go. They need competition, badly. Many here understand that.

For some unspecified reason, the gov’t seems to be doing exactly the opposite of what would be good for the majority. While individually, almost everybody supports us, as a unified body they cannot support us? I can’t explain it. It’s a small government, and the rest of the people are all very close to them simply due to the size of this place… So one would think that the will of the people could easily be acted upon. That is probably overstating it a bit… it’s not the will of the people that islandless be allowed to operate, and that the c&w monopoly be abolished by allowing competition. In fact, most people are pretty ignorant about… lots of stuff, it seems to me. Like a battered wife, they don’t resist being pushed around and treated poorly by a large corporation. And it’s all done with a smile. People may tell you on the side that they wish things would change, but does anybody think they could possibly do anything about it? As I’ve said before, nobody calls bullshit on anything, it seems. Unfortunately, it takes more than a few Americans coming in and calling bullshit to change the state of affairs – in the BVI, anyway. All the other Caribbean nations / overseas territories have already opened their markets, most of which had very similar agreements with Cable & Wireless to the agreement the BVI has. The gov’t says that de-regulation is underway, and perhaps that is true… I expect it to be a long, legal process. Again, doesn’t make any sense to me… they’re the government, god dammit, grow some balls and do something! What’s stopping them from simply mandating that the market be opened, right now? It’s been done elsewhere, directly in the face of c&w, and with success. frustrating…

So, we’re still going to try to meet with the Chief Minister. We need to give him the chance to allow us to operate in spite of the c&w agreement. He does have the ability to do so, and to basically just mandate that it happen. There is the idea that the “innards” of the gov’t would never do anything at all if there wasn’t leadership pushing it in new directions. It would be pretty fly if telecommunications de-regulation in the BVI started with Islandless Network…. not outside the realm of possibility.

Can’t help like feeling it’s a nail in the coffin, though. We continue on.

I’m giving more thought to my back out plans, however. I think it will be a fairly smooth transition to whatever, simply because part of the BVI is about not really doing much of anything, thus not spending money, thus having sufficient savings for facilitating a change in plans, if necessary. I think that’s sorta expected for most people, but I guess I’m just not that good at saving money – plus I was usually fairly broke… my jobs have traditionally paid decently, but I never worked quite full time. In any case, I’m definitely less apprehensive about whatever happens now than I’ve been about previous moves when I was dependent on somebody else to basically float me. hoo ray!

In the mean time, I continue banging out more of an ISP back end and enjoying the quite spectacular visage out every window.

So, I was playing with itunes one evening when I noticed that you can specifiy a track start / stop time down to 1/1000th of a second resolution. Enable the crossfade, set to 0 seconds, toss some tracks together, tweak the shit out of the times… it’s possible to get things to hook up pretty well. During the process, I happened upon the idea of creating sort of a collage that conveys my musical tastes in a succinct format. Originally I planed to do the whole thing in iTunes, and in fact ended up with something that sounded pretty decent. The problem was the inability to export it… there’s no export plug for iTunes, and I could loop the g4’s audio out to the line in, but the cpu overhead of the recording application caused the track segs in itunes to get delayed by prescious 10th’s of a second. When I tried to line out from the ibook, I quickly discovered that the ibook’s disk i/o prevents the segs from occuring as quickly as they do on my g4… so I finally ditched iTunes and used an actual editor.

The final product is just over 10 minutes, and it pretty much runs the gamut… it’s a 256 Kbit mp3, about 18 megs… This one goes in my media vault ;)

the taste test

I finally got around to pulling out some stills from the video I recorded on New Year’s Eve 2001 at Trellis Bay: here  – they aren’t much, except for a few shots of a pretty sweet fire sculpture made by a local artist named Aragorn.

Spent a few hours last Sunday hanging @ trellis bay with Jeremy at his surf shop / cybercafe. He’s a pretty hip dude, and recently got himself a new iMac and a DV cam. Naturally, I took a few minutes of video home with me on my ibook, picked some music, and later that afternoon, came out with this: chillin_at_trellis-s.mov. This one’s about 36 MB… I’m in the process of posting another 160 MB version encoded with the Sorenson codec… plays a bit more smoothly :)

I’m going back down there for new year’s… there’s some festitivies planed :)

Today I got from my co-workers:
– a phat-ass CyberTool (think swiss army knife for today’s geek)
– the optional AV cable that doesn’t come with the new iBooks. We watched 4 episodes of southpark today :)

Happy holidays, all :)

-dre

Shouts out to celloish, friend from the Bradenton days. I coned her into checking out lj, and figured it’s only appropriate to provide a formal introduction…

We used to hang out often in circumstances surrounding the meetings of the local astronomy group in bradenton… many a stimulating conversation over the fine cuisine of Sonny’s All-U-Can-Eat BBQ, not to mention the frosty pleasures of everyone’s favorite Shake Pit. It’s always fun to be around people with whom enjoyment of the present doesn’t require some particular topic of conversation or event of interest. I believe the defining moment in our relationship came very shortly after we first met, when she said “you’re tall”, and I think I just kinda gave a grudging nod in the affirmative…

Anyway, welcome :)

-dre

Okay, so… I’m not making this up, I swear. The following words came from a single source, and it’s up to you to figure out where… if nobody guesses it, I’ll post the answer in a couple days…

she’s so heavy
save ferris
penelope pumpkins
fat joe
i’m horny
brutal
grandma
shucking my corn
osama bin laden
plug
Phil Collins
willy wonka
redd foxx
dick
jetsons
shit poop
any given
growing pains
i’ll be dat
THICK
BBW
HUGE
LARGE

We intended to rent a Hoby Cat on Sunday from this guy Jeremy that runs a surf shop out in Trellis Bay, but when we got up that morning, it was kinda dead out… not a lot of wind, so we decided against it. A friend of ours, Richard, told us about a boat launching that he and his family was going to, so we figured that would be cool… though I didn’t really know what kind of boat we’d be launching.

Turns out the boat was being launched right next to Jeremy’s place in Trellis Bay, from an art studio / boat-building shanty operated by this cat Aragorn. Upon arrival, I was immediately struck by the genuine nature of everything around me. Tradition influences much of what’s there, everything serves a functional purpose, yet it’s totally meshed with modern ways of living… it’s weird being able to be at a traditional Carribean boat building setup with like… actual Caribs hanging around, and then walk directly next door to Jeremy’s cybercafe and get on the ‘net (not your run of the mill cybercafe, to be sure).

As all boats do, this boat has a name: Gli Gli. At the time I didn’t know much about it, but I gathered that it was built in the traditional manner – dug out from a large tree trunk. I also didn’t know of the reason behind its existence, nor any of the surrounding story, but Google fixed me right up. The Carib Canoe project was created as a means of linking disparate Carib ancestry by constructing Gli Gli, a traditional dugout canoe, and sailing it about 800 miles from Dominica to Guyana and up the Orinoco river.

Even better was that we only knew about this launching because Richard (who’s friends with Aragorn) told us, so it was certainly not like a tourist attraction or anything. There were a few families, and a bunch of miscellaneous people… natives, guests, friends… etc, etc… maybe two dozen or so in all.

Anyway, after we ate some food (various local veges / fruit and some *killer* fish), it was time to move the boat. It was to be launched directly across the road from where it sat, through a neat little boat shelter. In order to get the boat into the water, we set up some hunks of tree trunks to use as rollers, and managed to get it in pretty quickly. Once it was in the water, we filled up a box with some rocks to use as ballast, got the mast up, got the sail up, and were off :) (though I did find time in there somewhere before we left to fix Jeremy’s iMac up… heh). The wind was light to moderate there in Trellis Bay, but we brought the oars just in case. We went out, around the point, and over maybe a mile or so… moving along fairly well (though I would have liked some serious wind). We turned around and had some trouble getting across some funky current interchange areas, even with the wind, so we broke out the oars and did some rowing. Took us a bit longer to get back, but we rolled in just before dark…. we were only out for maybe an hour or so, total.

There were maybe a dozen of us on Gli Gli… the four of us Islandless geeks, Richcard + family, Aragorn + family, a few others, and two Caribs – one of whom had a hand in building Gli Gli. It was totally a cool experience… the weather was perfect… and being in a boat, in close quarters with other people, away from everything else, with nothing to do but observe and communicate… I dunno, it’s just a totally different world out on the water :)

After we got back in and rolled Gli Gli into his shelter, we went and hung at Jeremy’s for a while, rapping about this and that. I spent some time there the night I first got to Tortola, and hadn’t been back since a few days ago, when brian and I were at the airport doing some biz. The downside about Trellis Bay is also the best thing about it: it’s on the far east side of the island. Takes a little while to get there (~25 minutes), but it’s completely separated from everything else :) In any case, there’s always a great deal of interesting discussion and eccentricity, both of which are absolutely required in any human interaction, imho… plus Jeremy’s got some cool ideas, and is all about actually pulling them off. Even better, he’s willing to trade his time for mine… I help him with his mac (soon to be plural), his website, his cybercafe… whatever, and he teaches me how to windsurf :) Great synergy, as far as I’m concerned…

Good times :)

After another two days of moving and shaking, the contents of container #2 are unloaded and in place. This means we finally have all of our stuff… personal effects as well as the office equipment, and other niceties like appliances (fridge / freezer, washer, drier, gas range). We’ve got more desks and chairs than we could possibly use… sort of a long story how we came to have them, but the short of it is that it was salvaged from a failed business venture.

We own this container, so we had to store it someplace… in previous pictures, you may have noticed us laying down blocks on which to rest the container. That is where it now sits, but getting it up there was somewhat adventurous. By the time we got it unloaded here at the house and the truckers came back with their crane truck to bring it to the storage site, it was almost dark. Finally get up there, and the semi with the container couldn’t back up to where the container was to rest, on account of a rather muddy grade. The crane truck made it just fine, though… in fact, needed to go first as it was situated back and to the right of where the container is now…. so the trucker and his two dudes hoisted the back of the semi up to the crane and pulled it up the hill. Seeing a large tractor trailer fishtailing backwards up a muddy slope, being pulled by a large crane was kinda cool… for a brief time I was convinced that they’d smash our rental car in the process, but they didn’t even come close.

In other news, the webcam is back online! woo! It’s running off of llariot, just like it used to. Once the OS X drivers come out for the iBot, I’m gonna pick up one of those…

Also, new pictures tonight.

it is getting late so I think I’m gonna crash soon, tho I do somewhat lament being even worse than an EST llama now that I’m 4 hours ahead of PST…. makes it tougher to keep in touch with folk back west…. it is kinda cool when we come back from the beach and are all kicked back and people over there still have hours left to work ;)

feh… couldn’t post until this morning due to some power “outage” at internap… heh

Decided to throw together a little photo gallery of the life and times of yours truly, during my adventure here in Tortola.

Things with Islandless are going well…as you can see in the photos, we finally got our stuff!! The second container comes on tuesday, which contains desks and whatnot… but for now I’m quite happy just sitting in my chair….. *aahhh*