My friend Chris read in an etiquette column that an open wireless network is preferable so that your house guests can connect to your network easily and use your connection. From a convenience standpoint it makes sense. You won’t always be around to help your guest use your connection. On the other hand, it might be a discourtesy to let your guests’ sensitive traffic fly around unencrypted, not to mention your data whenever you don’t have guests. It’s a good idea to secure your wireless network to keep your data private. But how to handle visitors?

Dear AT&T:

At AT&T’s store I contracted service for $30 a month. Later operators told me to go back to the store to figure out why they gave me the wrong price.

On August 20 I walked to the AT&T store near my house (located at 2180 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, Calif. 94704) to get pricing information for standalone DSL service. After talking with James (not his real name*), the sales representative who helped me, I signed up for AT&T DSL Direct Pro service at $30 per month. I received a printed confirmation and then email confirmation of this order (see enclosure). My activation date for my order () was set for Aug. 27, one week later.

On Aug. 27 my DSL modem could not detect a DSL signal by the end of the day. The next morning I made the first of many phone calls to AT&T support. The first person I spoke with told me that my service had been activated. I checked the phone line in my house, searching for obvious problems. When I turned up nothing, I called AT&T again, at which point I was told my service had not been activated. Getting these two short but conflicting messages consumed near an hour on the phone, so I decided to take the problem to the source and return to the AT&T store.

Probably the phrase we used most often, however, was “muchos toquis, pocos indios.” Toqui entered Spanish from the Mapuche language. The Mapuche were people indigenous to south and central Chile, and it refers to the chief or head of a group. Here indios best means tribesmen or workers. When we combine the elements, the saying is “too many chiefs, not enough workers,” a riff on too many cooks spoil the broth.

I was delighted the other day when my mom showed me a Chilean wine she found in Costco (of all places) called El Toqui. The symbol matches the meaning of the word I just described:

This El Toqui wine might introduce some confusion into the phrase, though: now having too much toqui could mean something completely different….

Most people hire a professional photographer for their weddings, but I thought you would see some great shots from guests simply because there are so many more of them. Besides, it often takes professionals weeks before you actually see their photos. Having immediate access to candid shots from the day would be nice for the couple.

But when everyone returned home, I found that there was no good way for all the guests to give Kate and Chris their photos. Email can’t accomodate such large files; posting them to Facebook or a free photos sharing site like Kodak doesn’t allow you access to the original files; and recording everything on a CD-R and dropping it in the mail is a hassle. What’s a solution?

The next time I would see the place would be when I arrived with all my belongings and furniture, so I wanted a way to size up the apartment to determine what would fit. I took a couple dozen measurements and made a rough sketch of the rooms in the house. The next day I turned these into a blueprint of the house using InDesign. Once I printed out this blueprint I could cut out paper rectangles to represent my furniture to see what would fit.

One of the things I miss most about Chile is the ability to walk and take public transportation almost anywhere. People probably arranged the system from necessity. I didn’t have a car, and most of the people I knew didn’t either. I didn’t drive for over two years and as my return date approached, I was itching to get back into the driver’s seat. I realized quickly that I had to be in the driver’s seat, or at least in a car; the area where I live is in Utah is just built for driving. Sure, there’s a supermarket just two miles away, but you have to brave a four-lane road without a sidewalk to get there. In one of those ironic twists, I realized shortly after I got back to my car that I didn’t want it.

Both schools are just a few blocks from the same highway, it’s just 2200 miles between them.

Fortunately I just drove the leg from Salt Lake City to Berkeley this time. My dad and I spent all day Wednesday and Thursday morning on the road. Now I’m unpacking and getting set up in my new home.

Seriously. This is as far as you should go.

When I went to see The Dark Knight—fantastic film, by the way—there was one part that stood out for me. Early in the movie Bruce Wayne and Alfred are planning an operation where Batman needs to board a flying plane from the ground. Alfred suggests a program that the CIA has been working on called Skyhook. After an action sequence, Batman uses this Skyhook apparatus, and given all the other far-fetched technology in the movie, you might think that Skyhook is imaginary too. It’s not. In fact, it’s old school.

My grandfather was a navigator aboard this MC-130E during the Vietnam War.

I know this through something of a coincidence. A few weeks ago I was visiting my grandfather in Massachusetts for his 80th birthday. We got to talking and he showed me some pictures from his days in the Air Force. During the Vietnam War, my grandfather served as a navigator aboard the MC-130, a modified version of the cargo plane. One of the pictures he showed me depicted the plane with a strange, Y-shaped protrusion from the front nose. When I asked about it, he explained the Fulton Recovery System, which sounded to me like something from a movie. Using this system, which is also called Skyhook, a person on the ground wears a harness which is connected by a nylon cable to a giant balloon hanging the in sky. The MC-130E flies into the cable, the V-shaped fork catches it, and the person on the ground shoots into the sky. The plane’s crew then opens the rear cargo bay door and retrieve the person dangling in the distance using a winch.

Although the maneuver sounds dangerous, it was actually quite safe. Robert Fulton invented the system in the 1950’s and in the dozens of years it was in use there were only 1 recorded fatality.

Time Magazine actually has an article in their archives from December 1964 describing the Fulton system.

This frame from The Dark Knight shows an aircraft about to pickup Batman with the same V-shaped fork as the MC-130E. © 2008 Warner Bros. Pictures

The Batmobile, Batman’s armor, and his other gadgets may be from a time in the future, but his Skyhook liftoff is over 40 years old.

This is my first step towards fixing that, or at least the writing portion. I’m making a commitment to write something for my site at least once a week for the foreseeable future. My goal is to make it more than just an account of what I’m doing; I’d like it to be about things that I think are interesting and that I’m thinking about. There’s no point in posting boring material just for the sake of meeting a deadline.

There is only one prison in Belize. It is filled with about 1300 inmates; Belize’s population is 300,000.

I visited the Mayan ruins at Caracól.

Belize doesn’t have any highway patrol police officers, so instead their highways have speed bumps. I’m not sure if I believe this one completely, but that’s what our driver said. And we did stop every 10 minutes or so for a speed bump, so maybe it’s legit.

Leaf cutter ants are fascinating. They march along the jungle floor, 50 feet up a tree, and come back with nickel-sized swatches of leaves.

Scorpions have to be one of the most sinister looking things out there. And I think you should double the sinister factor when you find one crawling on your bed. Anyway, I tried to capture it so that I could release it outside, but the trapping process lead to the accidental amputation of some important scorpion appendages.

Related to the previous point, it takes ants less than 6 hours to discover and complete devour a four-inch-long scorpion.

Underwater photography is much more difficult than I expected. It’s essentially like sports photography, except you’re holding your breath. I got a few good shots, but I found that movies were a better way to capture being underwater. It is fun to be able to submerge your camera in water, though.

Sea turtles have amazing jaws. In general you don’t hear much underwater, but I could hear crunching as I watched a turtle devour lobsters. If you turn up your speakers, you can too.

Before we left I was a bit disappointed to learn that English is the official language of Belize (Belize was part of British Honduras before its independence in 1982) because I wanted some Spanish practice. I was pleased to run into many Spanish-speakers; about 50% of the population speaks Spanish as a first language.

I think life is basically R-rated, and movies have a lot to say about it, though there’s certainly a difference between, say, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Blood Diamond. I’ve been looking for some opportunities to practice making info-graphics, so I thought I’d whip up a chart of Oscar nominees for best picture and their MPAA ratings. Even if the winners are disputed, as a group these movies are among the best made, so I thought it would be interesting to show them grouped by rating. I only covered the last 10 years, though it might be interesting to go back as far as ratings data will allow when I have more time.

In the last decade, 29 of the nominated films were rated R (58%), 19 were PG-13 (38%), and 2 were PG (4%). Of the winners, 6 were rated R and 4 were PG-13.

You can download a PDF copy of my chart or the original data. My sources were the Wikipedia listing of nominees and the IMDB entry for each movie.

I actually wrote about it here at the time, but I can’t be sure that I conveyed the intense rage the situation provoked. Around February, probably the hottest month of the Chilean summer, there ceased to be any distinction between ants outside and ants inside. Our floors were covered with ants and there was no obvious solution. If ants are streaming into your house, forming a black river across your floor, or counter, or whatever, then your task is simple: find what’s at the end of the ant stream, probably an open jar of Smuckers or a torn bag of sugar, remove it, and destroy the ants. Our ants, however, were wandering aimlessly through the kitchen, living room, and bathroom. When the ants are aimless, that’s when you know you’re screwed. You could sweep them all up—they’d form a pile of dirt that moved—and throw them out of the house, but their cousins, or college roommates, or great-grandkids would be back half an hour later.

I remember seeing this double rainbow over I-80 when my dad and I were driving back to college before my senior year. While I was organizing some old digital photos I found this shot and I was surprised by how vibrant the color was. The pavement is as black as I remember it, the sky as deep blue. I made a global levels adjustment in Photoshop, but I didn’t do anything special to highlight the rainbows. Thought you might enjoy the shot.

If you want to see the original, I put together a side-by-side comparison. It might look like I pumped up the blues, but the original has a yellow color cast.

I took this picture about a month ago but I haven’t gotten around to posting it. It struck me as a funny juxtaposition between Small Town America and Big City, U.S.A. While it might be unfair to compare the front page of the Post to the B section of the Standard Examiner, another moose did make an appearance on the front page two weeks ago. I don’t have a shot of that so you’ll have to take my word for it.