My First Rattle Snake! It finally happened, I saw a rattlesnake while mountain biking in Sycamore Canyon Park this afternoon!!!
I am not a snake expert but according to the description and habitat location described on Desert USA and this page on yahoo, it really looks like a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox), mainly because of the black and white bands in the tail.

Quote:

It was slowly crossing the trail, I had the time to take a picture of a half snake:-) If you look carefully you can see the rattle at the extremity of the tail. It is kind of yellow transparent. The snake was about 3 or 4 foot long. I was about 30ft away, I did not want to get any closer! According to DesertUSA, if you are bitten, unless you receive proper medical attention and antipoison, the death rate ranges from 15 to 25%. 25% of bytes are "dry" (no poison injected by the snake), I don't know if they took that into account in their stats... Anyways, the US mortality rate is pretty low, about 8000 people bitten each year, and "only" 15 die of it...

To make the experience complete, I wish it had rattled a little. Stupid snake, I don't even scare you? You don't feel like you need to rattle? I feel so humiliated!
To hear it, go there: http://www.desertusa.com/mag98/mar/stories/rattlesin.html. God, that sounds good!

This week-end I finally bought a wireless router and a PCMCIA wireless card for my laptop (802.11 network). Prices are so low now, you can have that for almost the same price as two stops to the gas station ($2.15 a gallon here in California, yuks)! The router is connected to the DSL modem (or cable), and you don't even need an ethernet cable to surf the web. Finally I can surf the internet from my bathroom. A big improvement in the quality of life!:-)
Saturday I got everything working, it does not seem to care much about walls, perfect reception in every room of my apartment. It is also pretty easy to configure, the default settings work just fine.
The next day, I turn my computer on in the morning to check my emails, and after a few minutes of websurfing, I realize my router was turned off?!?!?! It still works!

I check the status of my wireless card and realized it found another wireless access point and connected to it without any problem. I am assuming my neighbor has a compatible equipment;-)
So basically this is what happens if you let your router run with the default settings, everybody close enough could potentially connect to it and surf the web. Someone could download mp3s all night long, go to child pornographic web sites and you will be the one liable, it is your IP address. To the least it may be a real pain to prove it was not you. So my advice if you switch to wireless don't be lazy, change those defaults and add some security! You are never too paranoid so I just changed mine to the maximum security available on my router, MAC filtering, 128-bit encryption, etc...

Good tips to protect your wireless network:
http://www.arstechnica.com/paedia/w/wireless-security-howto/home-802.11b-1.html

Advertisment for a pretty good photography site: Terragalleria. I really like the US section, especially for the national parks which is very complete and the pictures are beautiful.
Check it out: http://www.terragalleria.com/

A little of auto-satisfaction... I have added a statistics page to my photo album last night. Shows the most viewed albums (top ten) and photos (top twenty). The cool thing is that the script I did in perl uses the same templates as the album (php based) to blend in. I am pretty happy about it :-) It also runs 4 to 5 times faster than a prototype I initially did in a mix of php and shell scripting!

"I supported and was prepared to vote for amnesty from 1986. And it is essential to have immigration reform. Anyone who has been in this country for five or six years, who's paid their taxes, who has stayed out of trouble, ought to be able to translate into an American citizenship immediately, not waiting."

- John Kerry

Sources: http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/3/3/224520.shtml

I want this guy to be president! He is talking about giving citizenship to any immigrants that has been here for 5 to 6 years, even illegal immigrants... It seems a little extreme, though. This is the problem in this country, immigration is not tough enough for illegal immigrants but too tough for legal immigrants. Cross the Mexican border to work illegaly in Texas, California or New Mexico and you will end up a US citizen. Be a high-qualified engineer working under H1-B visa and you are not better than a "foreign worker stealing american jobs" even though they would be more or less no high-tech industry without people like you.

Anyways, once again, GO KERRY!

Summer is just around the corner in southern California. Today, in Riverside, the temperature went up to 88F with a crystal clear blue sky and shining sun of course. Hottest day of 2004 so far.
What was the weather like today where you live?
He he he he he:-)

Small Roadtrip in Utah this week-end. The goal was to visit two national parks, Zion and Bryce Canyon.
This was my first time in Utah. God it is beautiful. southern Utah, the part located on the Colorado plateau is really another world.

Le Colorado plateau (green on the map), is a big one (130000 square miles, 330000km²). It consists of southern Utah, Northern Arizona, South-western Colorado and north-western New Mexico.

The number of national parks in this area is impressive: Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest, Mesa Verde, Zion and Bryce Canyon, not to mention all the other ones that are not National parks like the Monument valley (a Navajo tribal park) or Canyon de chilly, Glen Canyon, natural bridges, etc...

Bryce Canyon is known for its unique geology: horseshoe-shaped amphitheaters.
Erosion has shaped colorful Claron limestones, sandstones, and mudstones into thousands of spires, fins, pinnacles called "hoodoos". Ponderosa pines, high-elevation meadows, and fir-spruce forests border the rim of this canyon

A lot of snow there in winter, it is a high elevation park, about 9000ft(2700m).

Few links:

• My pictures of Bryce Canyon
• National Park Service.

Zion, in ancient Hebrew means place of refuge or sanctuary.
From the green valley to the soaring red and white sandstone cliffs, Zion is really a visual wonderland. The color mix, from red, green, to white and blue is a truly a beautiful palette and the vistas made of sculpted rocks, pines and small rivers are really awesome.

The most popular feature of the Park is the Zion Canyon. Very impressive canyon, made with white and red cliffs about 2200ft (750m) high, I have been told the best in Utah.
I advise anyone to take the East entrance. From the East, you access the canyon driving through a small tunnel about a mile long. The tunnel exit is quite impressive. It ends on one side of the canyon, about half way through its height facing a vibrant red huge cliff, with the virgin river at the bottom.

Another good thing with Zion is that it is greener than usual. Most canyons, are more like deserts, it is not the case with Zion, quite a few trees there, some even managed to grow in the rocks.

My pictures of Zion

Neat way to write your email address on your homepage without having the spambots scanning it. Instead of writing the standard mailto:youremailaddress, have javascript split the string so that it is not recognizable unless you run the script. Javascript runs on the client side so your browser will be able to rebuild the string because it has a javascript interpretor which spambots don't have (yet)...

Instead of:

<a href="mailto:johndoe@hotmail.com">johndoe@hotmail.com</a>

Write something like:

<script TYPE="text/javascript">
<!--
emailE=('jo' + 'hn' + 'do' + 'e@' + 'hot' + 'mail' + '.com')
document.write('<a href="mailto:' + emailE + '">' + emailE + '</a>')
//-->
</script>

Neat isn't it? Saw it on TechTV.