Hiking in Zion

Just got back from hiking in Zion National Park. I have my pictures online here. I did a couple of hikes that I had never done before. Saturday, I did the Canyon Overlook Trail and the Upper and Middle Emerald Pools trails. Sunday, I had Easter brunch at the Zion Lodge and then tackled the Hidden Canyon Trail. They were all very beatiful.

Bumbleberries

I am writing this post live from Springdale, UT, just outside Zion National Park at the Bumbleberry Inn. God bless unsecured wireless networks. I just had dinner at the Bumbleberry Cafe where I ordered at slice of Bumbleberry Pie (ala mode, of course). So, what is a bumbleberry? I still don't know.

The pie wasn't bad (it wasn't great), but dinner was atrocious. My experience went like this:

Me: "Hi, I'd like a table for one"
Host: "That will be 30 minutes"

(45 minutes to an hour later)

Hostess: "Here is your booth, sir".
Me: "That's not really a booth; it's only half of a booth. Where did the other half of my booth go."
Hostess: "I'm sorry sir, that's all we have."

(15 minutes later, waitress shows up)

Waitress: "What would you like to drink?"
Me: "I'll have a beer please".
Waitress: "I'm sorry but we don't serve alcohol here".
Me: "Whatever, I'm ready to order. I'll have the New York Steak, Medium."
Waitress: "I'm sorry sir, but we are all out of the New York Steak".
Me: "Well, is there anything that you are not out of that you would reccomend?"
Waitress: "The Chicken Enchiladas are pretty good."
Me: "I'm not really sure that I want to order mexican food from a place called the 'Bumbleberry Cafe'. How about the Chicken Cordon Bleu?"
Waitress: "That's pretty good, but if you look more closely at the menu, it's actually just a 'Chicken Cordon', there is no 'Bleu', sir."
Me: "Fine"

15 minutes later the waitress shows up with my dinner. It consists of a grilled chicken breast, a slice of ham bought from the same section of the grocery store as Oscar Mayer bologne, and a piece of swiss cheese. The swiss cheese wasn't bad. The only good thing about dinner is that it left me hungry for what I hope will be a superb Easter Brunch at the Zion Lodge tomorrow morning.

Dilemna Resolved...

Well, I couldn't pass up the good weather. My sister Marci and I headed down to Canyonlands today to do some hiking. The weather was gorgeous... perfect hiking weather. However, today was a rude awakening of how out of shape I've become since last year. My heart nearly exploded trying to climb back up the syncline loop (which ended up being more of a semi-arc than a full loop). But it was a lot of fun anyway. On the way home we stopped for dinner at Grogg's brewpub in Price, UT. I would recommend it if you ever pass through.

A Weekend Dilemna

To work or not to work, that is the question. On one hand, I feel like I deserve the weekend off. I just demoed the project that I'm working on to the VP of our division today and things went much better than I had expected. It felt like validation of the last 3 months of late nights and working weekends. On the other hand, the success of the demo today is really no reason for reprieve. We still have hard deadlines to hit.

I do really want to go down to Southern Utah this weekend though. Canyonlands National Park is calling me. I was there briefly last summer on my bike. Unfortunately I didn't fuel up before turning off to the park and had to cut my visit short for fear of running out of gas. The weather is going to be really nice this weekend as well. Perfect weather for biking... well, perfect for early March anyway.

Snow covered hoodoos

I stopped by Bryce Canyon National Park on the way down to Vegas this weekend and was treated to some spectacular scenery of red rock dusted with snow.

Blog back online

After several weeks of not being able to publish my blog to my web server, I am finally back online. I've spent the last couple of weeks in Blogger support limbo trying to figure out why I got this error message every time that I tried to publish my site:

005 Unable to connect to SFTP server: Auth fail

The only advice that I got from blogger support was to make sure that my web server supports SFTP. Now, I don't know a ton about SFTP but I was pretty sure that it's just FTP over an SSH connection. My web server most definitely supports SSH.

I finally found the answer here, in someone else's blog. Apparently blogger tries to "tunnel" the password plaintext over the SSH connection (actually this may be part of the SFTP specification and not something peculiar to Blogger). By default, my version of SSHD (the version included with SuSE 9.3 Beta 1) was configured to disallow that. All I had to do was set the option "PasswordAuthentication = yes" in /etc/ssh/sshd_config and restart the server.

It seems like this is something that should make it into the Blogger FAQ. Until then, I've written this post to give whoever else encounters this problem one more chance of getting information from a Google search.

sony-svoid bites the dust

By the looks of this picture, I would say that sony-svoid actually choked on the dust. I really need to get some better ventilation. Of course it wouldn't hurt to crack open the case and blow out the dust every couple of years.



With the recent trouble that I had with sony-svoid getting hacked, I decided it was time for her to retire. She was running such an old version of Mandrake that I didn't believe that I was going to be able to get security updates and I didn't think that a pentium 133 could handle any of the modern bleeding edge linux distributions.

So, I've moved my webserver over to my other linux box... an Athlon 800 Mhz. It's still no speed demon, but then again for the 3 visitors that my sight gets a day, I think that it will be able to keep up with the load. I pulled the NIC from sony-svoid so that I can have an interface on both the internal and external network.

I had to update the OS as well as I was previously running Novell Linux Desktop (NLD) and it was not configured to be a web server. So, I grabbed the latest ISO's of SuSE Linux 9.3 Professional Beta1 and built me a new webserver. I wasn't kidding about bleeding edge :) I don't even know if the Beta is public yet but I work for Novell and have access to the ISO's on an internal FTP server. Cool!

All my base are belong to...

... some script kiddie. I had to take down my website for a couple of days due to it being hacked. It actually looks like it was compromised sometime around January 21st. It took me a short while to notice because nothing destructive was done to the website itself. It wasn't until I tried to copy some photos to my website that I noticed that samba wasn't running.

After ssh'ing into the box to restart the samba service, I noticed that not only was samba not running, it was no longer installed. I was beginning to get suspicious. I couldn't have unintstalled samba without remembering... could I? And then, I stumbled across this telltale sign:

ls -al .bash_history
-rw------- 1 root root 1387 Feb 26 12:52 .bash_history -> /dev/null

At that point, I dropped to runlevel 1 and yanked the ethernet cable from the back of the computer. The postmortem suggested that the attacker exploited a vulnerability in samba that was discovered in late December 2004. I would have been OK if I was only running samba on my local network. I used to run in this configuration, but I had just recently setup a router with my web server running outside of my private network. I should have installed a second NIC so that I could still copy files on the internal network... but I got lazy and just opened samba up to the world.

Shortly after breaking in, the attacker uninstalled samba (thus preventing someone else from breaking in in the same fashion) and installed a root kit which replaced certain key executable files such as /bin/login, /bin/ps, /bin/netstat, etc. and wiped out all of my log files. The strange thing is that this guy actually went through the trouble of doing an rpm uninstall of samba instead of just deleting smbd or disabling the service.

"For what purpose did all of this occur?", you may ask. Well, of course, for the purpose of running an IRC bot. Why else would a script kiddie break into a web server? I think that my attacker should be proud of himself. I mean any hacker can take on a dual opteron running the latest release of RedHat, but it takes some serious SKILLZ to violate a Pentium 133 running headless in a corner of my office with a 6 year old version of Linux. Congratulations!

Choice

I was searching for an old document that I wrote and came across these notes that I scribbled to myself one night in OpenOffice:

My head keeps wandering back to a line uttered in the movie "Fight Club" by Brad Pitt. “Our lives are our great depression”. He was speaking to the fact that the modern man has no great adversity to face. Nothing to spur him on. This ironically results in a middle class society that is bored with itself. A society that is searching for meaning, for purpose in life. Isn't it ironic that in times of better living circumstances that we long for times of hardship?

What is it about harder times that we find appealing? And why is it that so many prosperous people are bored, unsettled and unfulfilled by life? The answer is: choice. We have too many choices nowadays. In harder times choices are limited. Life is simple. It is amusing that choice, a tool that can bring infinite happiness and power, is also capable of making us so miserable.

Choice is the key to happiness.

One can achieve a level of happiness by removing the amount of choices in life.

The man who has the greatest capability for choice but chooses the least; he is the unhappiest of all.

The man who can and does choose in every facet of his life; he has found true happiness.

First bike ride of the year

I just got back from my first bike ride of the year... mountain bike not motorcycle... in early February. God bless Utah winters :) It's actually been over a year since I last had my bike out. It spent all last summer couped up in a corner of my garage. In fact, I still hadn't fixed the flat tire that I got in St. George last winter. So, I got her all patched up and went for a short ride in Provo Canyon. The weather was beautiful and it felt good to be on the bike again.

The ride was a little shorter than I had planned. There was a big ice slide that was covering the trail by Bridal Veil falls. It was really strange becuase there was no snow in the canyon at all... I can't imagine how there would be, it was so warm out. But when I got to Bridal Veil falls, the trail and river were covered by a mountain of ice 20 to 30 feet deep. I couldn't tell how much of the trail it covered but it was enough that there was no way to get around it.

Ouch!

I took the day off of work today and went cross country skiing with my sister Marci. It was my first time ever on a pair of a skis. I was actually fairly proud of myself that I only managed to fall on my ass 3 or 4 times. It wasn't necessarily pretty when I wasn't falling on my ass, but at least I was upright. I may actually go again sometime if I can manage to recover from my sore muscles... muscles that I didn't even know that I had before today.

Bottomless Friends

It just occurred to me what I really appreciated about my friends Chris and Shannon. They were bottomless friends. They were always up for doing something fun. It didn't matter if we had just done something the night before. It didn't matter if we had done something together every night for the last week.

Nowadays, I still have some good friends, but they are the kind where I have to pay for refills. Of course, not literally. But it feels like I wear out my welcome a lot quicker with my new friends. They are all married, or engaged; some of them have kids. They only have so much time that they are willing to spend with a bum like me.

A Year of Reading

I thought that now would be a good time to reflect on the books that I read in 2004. In the past I've kept a list on my website, but I've been too lazy to update it manually. It is so much easier to just blog it. So here goes, starting with the most recent completion and working backwards:

Selected Dialogues of Plato translated by Benjamin Jowett and revised by Hayden Peliccia
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
Poor Folk and Other Stories by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre
Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard

Year in Review

It's funny how easy it is to forget what you've done in the past year. As I first sat down to write this entry I thought to myself, "Hmm..., I really didn't do anything noteworthy this year". However, upon further reflection, it began to occur to me that this has actually been a fairly full and exciting year.

Starting in January, I was awarded "Employee of the Year" at Novell. OK, so the award was actually for the previous year but since it didn't actually get awarded until January, I'm counting it :) I've been with Novell for 3 and 1/2 years now and am still working as a Software Engineer on the GroupWise team.

On most days (i.e. excluding the days just prior to a release deadline) I will tell you that I really enjoy my job at Novell. It's fun, challenging and the work is varied enough that things are never boring. In the past year I've worked on such diverse projects as a Java/JNI client for Linux, a cross platform C++, .NET and Mono API, and I've wrapped up the year working on a MAPI provider and COM Add-In for Outlook on Windows.

In February I was able to meet one of my financial goals for the year: I made the final payment on my Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The Harley is really what motivates me to get up and go to work every day. I'm not just working for the sake of working; I'm working so that I can spend my summer's touring the country on my bike.

Also in February, I went on a snowmobiling mini-vacation in West Yellowstone, Montana with my friends Dale and Bethany. The trip was a blast. We rented two sleds for a couple of days and spent all day exploring the back country of Yellowstone. At night, we returned to our cabin and relaxed in front of the fireplace and roasted Marshmallows on makeshift skewers (a couple of chopsticks lashed together with twine).

Skipping forward a month to April, I bought a new house. Well, it was new to me anyway. It's a three bedroom, two bath and full basement in Spanish Fork, UT built in 2001. The full basement was really the selling point for me. It allowed me to get something that I've always wanted: a pool table. My basement and pool table have now become the weekly meeting place for "Guys Night Out". Of course, being single, every night is "Guys Night Out" for me. However, some of my married friends are not so fortunate :)

In May, just a couple of weeks after settling into my new house, I had my two good friends from Wisconsin, Chris and Shannon, come to visit. We took a week off and toured several of the National Parks in Southern Utah. We saw Bryce, Zions, Arches and then concluded the trip with a day of river rafting on the Colorado River. I always have such a good time when Chris and Shannon come to visit. It's too bad that they don't live a little closer.

The summer months of July and August were marked by a lot of touring on the Harley. A typical weekend consisted of bungee'ing a tent and sleeping bag to the back of the bike and heading off into the middle of nowhere. My sojourns this past summer took me to the Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce, Cedar Breaks, Capitol Reef, Glen Canyon, Kodachrome, Escalante Grand Staircase, Natural Bridges, Canyonlands, Dead Horse Point, Arches, Great Basin and Craters of the Moon.

My big trip on the Harley this year was in September. I took a week off of work starting with Labor Day weekend and went touring throughout the Western United States. In the course of 9 days, I hit 7 states (Utah, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana), 4 National Parks (Lassen Volcanic, Redwood, Crater Laker and Glacier) , 1 National Monument (Oregon Caves) and 3350 spectacular miles.

October brought me some company from Wisconsin. One of my friends from Wisconsin, Owen Swerkstrom, was offerred a job at Novell working for GroupWise. He was hired onto the API team, where originally we didn't have a whole lot of direct interaction. However, several weeks after he started, I was loaned out to API team to work on a special project and now we work quite closely.

November marked a first for me. I tried my hand at cooking Thanksgiving dinner for the family. Other than my timing (The bird was late coming out of the oven), everything turned out well and no one died from food poisoning. I guess that's something to be thankful for :)

That brings us to the current month of December. The biggest news this month is that I received a generous bonus and raise from Novell. The additional money should help me meet some of my financial goals for 2005.

Biking in December

I was out on my Harley today. Granted, I didn't go very far, but it still amuses me to be able to ride my Harley in the middle of December. With temperatures in the high 40's and low 50's I couldn't pass up the opportunity. So, clad in several layers of clothing and a full face helmet that I only wear when riding without it would give me frostbite, I headed out on a ride to Village Inn for breakfast.

Over breakfast there was a guy sitting behind me who was apparently just passing through the state of Utah. He sounded like he had an east coast accent. He was telling the person that he was speaking much too loudly on his cell phone with, what a dump Provo, Utah was. He made a particular comment about how the manager of the hotel that he was staying at was very classy and stylishly dressed and how she stood out like a sore thumb amongst all of us regular "Provo people".

I was tempted to turn around and tell the guy that he was welcome to leave Provo at any time if he didn't like it here. However, I figured that wouldn't improve his opinion of people here. As I got up to leave after eating breakfast I turned around to get a peek at this guy who was speaking so rudely. I was half expecting to see a couple of wise-guys from New York City dressed in $1000 dollar suits. I turn around and see two guys eating their breakfast in a pair of Dockers and a pair of Levis. It was hardly the epitome of style and sophistication. Minus the accent, they could have easily passed for a couple of regular "Provo People".

Disappointment

I am an unlikely fan of the TV show "Joan of Arcadia". I wouldn't imagine that a very large percentage of the demographic for that TV show consider themselves to be an atheist as I do. But, for some reason, I find the idea of God presenting him/herself to a confused teenager to be rather amusing. The show comes on at 7PM on Friday nights and for the last several months has been a core part of my Friday routine.

I am usually just getting home from work at about 7PM on Friday. In addition to being a source of entertainment the show serves as the line of demarcation between my work week and weekend. It was with disappointment tonight that I discovered that in the stead of my regularly scheduled "Joan of Arcadia" was the severely outdated and substantially less entertaining holiday special, "Frosty the Snowman". We've just barley crossed into December and already they are showing Christmas specials! What the Hell?

5 more minutes...

Late night at work today. I made the mistake of starting to debug a problem in the MAPI provider at 5:30 PM. The bug was teasing me. I kept thinking to myself, 5 more minutes and I should have this problem licked. Well, about 4 hours worth of 5 minutes later, I finally gave up and went home. At least I have something to look forward to in the morning :)

Hero

Tonight was Pool night. It's supposed to be the night several guys from work come over to shoot pool in my basement. Dale couldn't make it because he's been sick and wanted to turn in early. Owen couldn't make it because he was also not feeling well (hope that this is not related to him eating some of my leftover cooking for lunch). So, it ended up just being Scott and I.

We decided that instead of playing Pool that we would watch "Hero" on DVD. It was supposed to be like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". I wasn't all that impressed. The action scenes weren't as intense or engaging as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and there seemed to be a lot of filler in the movie.

The format of the movie was kind of strange. It reminded me of "Clue". You were told one version of the story and just when you thought you understood what was going on, you got the equivalent of, "... or it could have happened like this".