Declan’s Blog

Today’s lunch in Santa Barbara. Holly kept it to make into a hat.

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I am not a Mac head, but we’ve had some additions to the toy cache. The campus bookstore had a great deal on a 24″ iMac, with a rebate on an iPod. So Elaine got the big Mac and I got an iPod Touch. It’s a ton of fun!

Our newest arrival is an iPhone 3g that I got for work. It is even cooler than the Touch because it has a camera. I’ll have a lot of lower quality photos now, but it’s super convenient.

A couple complaints about the phone, that I’m sure I’ll get the whine about on the MacVeritas podcast soon:

Battery life - with 3g, wifi, and heavy use, don’t expect this thing to last more than 5 hours.

Charging change - this just kills me. The device won’t charge in my car now. Lots of discussion on the forums that Apple decided to drop the pins where most car systems charge the phone. I’m hoping there can be a firmware fix. If not, maybe my car device has a switch, or I can build a little wire switching dongle. Either way, shame on Apple for messing with this with no real warning.

Exchange email set up was a snap - but I think I’m missing some emails… It’s being a little flaky with the ActiveSync. More experience with the device is needed.

Calendar confusion - some recurring events that have canceled exceptions are showing up as valid meetings. I know this is complicated programming from the WirelessKnowledge days. Apple needs to get ahead of this or people will lose confidence in their data.

Apps crash a lot - and have to be reinstalled. AIM, Twinkle, and others just try to start, then go back to the home dock. I’ll even get an occasional reboot.

Other than that, the device is nice! It’s sleek, so it slips in and out of pockets nicely. So far it is way more resistant to scratches than my 60G iPod.

Now that I have the phone, I don’t know if I need the Touch. The girl wants it, but I might sell it and the cool Surefire flashlights I won and buy a proper lens for the camera.

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We tried a new place for lunch yesterday called Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot (address: 4718 Clairemont Mesa Blvd, San Diego, CA 92117). It was very niiiice!

Phelan (@imagium), a BarCampSD buddy, had requested a while back that when we declare a BarLunch on Twitter that we pick somewhere in the Kearny Mesa area, closer to him so he could join us. Being a good manager, I put the work back on him and he suggested this great new place.

Here’s Phelan and surprise guest luncher Erika!

Paige was there too, but we kept her under the table.

First, they bring out a big pot of soup (original, spicy, or a split pot with both) and set it to boil on a hot plate in the middle of the table:

Then they bring out a platter of thinly sliced meat, vegetables, tufu, noodles, string mushrooms, and monkey brains.

Ok, maybe not monkey brains - fish balls and meat balls.

Then you cook. Yer own lunch. Why do we have to pay if we’re doing all the work?

Mmm! It was very good! Gabe give’s it a thumbs up:

Even the boy liked it!

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I got to go to ALA (American Library Association) in Anaheim, CA this year. I’ve worked in Libraries IT for the last 5 years, but have never made it to an ALA. Anaheim is just under two hour’s drive from San Diego, and Robert tricked me into teaching a class, so I went and had a great time. Man, those librarians can drink!

I got to see one of my favorite geek librarians, and fellow photographer, Cindi Trainor:

She takes lots of portraits, I’m more of the candid shot guy:

Although, if the light is right, even I can’t resist a pose:

That’s Tombriarian on the left.

Another Harvard buddy I ran into is Kenley Neufeld:

He’s a hoot and gave me a Twitter fix on his iPhone when my Blackberry was giving me trouble.

Dan Suchy from UCSD also came up for a day:

He was in the “special librarians” seminars all day.

More pictures, lots of new librarian twitter friends met:

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Way back in June, Robert McDonald, David Minor, Ardys Kozbial, Chris Jordan, and I taught a day long seminar on Data Grids in Libraries for LITA (Library & Information Technology Association) in Anaheim, CA as a pre-conference for ALA (American Library Association).

Anaheim = Disney, don’tcha know?

All of the images from the class:

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Those first few images are of a mystery device that was installed over my hotel room door. Never did figure out what it was. I’m not interesting enough to surveil…

The class was a lot of fun, especially because it was small and the attendees got really involved in asking questions.

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I’m way behind on blogging, so I set aside some time this morning.

It’s been a hectic couple of months, and appears to be the same in the near future. Lots of work and personal travel, Nathan graduating high school and getting ready for college, kid management during the no-school summer months, skunks, new toys… The list goes on

Today we’re getting ready for Robert McDonald’s going away party, my trip to the UCCSC, then off to Illinois for 10 days to visit family and celebrate Rich and Judy Koch’s 50th wedding anniversary. We did a blitz house cleaning last week so Robert could house sit without dealing with our mess. Makes for a nice house for the last week

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To all of my fans across the world, especially the adolescent Chinese girls constantly IMing me, I’m not Declan Galbraith.

Yes, I AM hot, and yes I can carry a tune, but I’m no Declan Galbraith:

(5:56:54 AM) NAME: this is declan. right?! IM be back plzz!!!!! ilyssssm<333333
(5:56:54 AM) declansnwl : I’m not here right now
(6:33:03 AM) NAME: i love all of your songs! mostly nothing else mattters<3333
(6:33:03 AM) declansnwl : I’m not here right now
(7:54:54 AM) declansnwl: heh, wrong declan
(7:54:55 AM) NAME : Planss
maybee txtt mee??
< .3.3.3.3 < < < < dayumm hes hot!!! < < < <
be backk laterr
txt meh_!

Sadly, I’m betting that this post only confuses more of his fans…

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So many times I visit a city and think, “man, I wish I had my bike!” Well, with a little planning and the generosity and height of Joe Gross, I was able to borrow a bike and we did 55 miles from the Mission district, across the Golden Gate Bridge, then through Sausalito, past Larkin, then along the Paradise Loop.

Here’s the map from Motion Based:

Here we are by the bridge:

Here I am crossing:

I call this one: Find the Bike:

It’s a study in vertical lines and horizontal curves.

Thanks so much to Joe and Lorah!

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A few weeks ago, San Diego held its third BarCamp and Dan Tentler (@Viss) and Billy Marsh (@cannibal) made a mini-defcamp challenge. Gabe (@gebl), Holly (@pomopants), and I (@declan) won last year in about 2 hours, so Dan vowed to make this year’s challenge much harder.

He succeeded.

Short version: We spent 8 straight hours and won a $200 flashlight each! Thanks Surefire!

Long version: Our team included me, Robert, and Jonathan. We were up against some young punks from #sdcolleges, and I was sure they’d cream us. In fact, it’s a sad shame on them they didn’t. What self respecting protohacker can’t pick a lock in under a minute… There was also a team of people I hadn’t met, and one more team of kids who were around last year.

The challenge started out with a url to 9 subdirectories of starting clues and problems to solve. These included passworded zip files, sound files with hidden messages in the ID3 tags, and many hashes that took John the Ripper quite some time to hash out. We were certainly stymied by the lack of access to ssh to a proper computer to run John, and SOMEone set up my laptop with virus scanning software that wouldn’t let me install John. Damn IT people…

Anyway, after 4 hours of discovering all the places Dan “oopsied” the challenges, we got to the physical box challenge designed by Billy. He’s made a nice couple of movies of the challenge:

Any bad language you hear is all Jonathan.

Here’s more footage of some LOOOOzers:

Watch for the sad @numist and @djcapelis as they snip the wrong wires… priceless

I’d planned on crowing more about the victory, but after 8 hours of grueling hacking, I was dead tired. I think I put my head on the pillow at 5am that night. But there was so much more going on Sunday morning, that I was back by 10:30!

Thanks to Dan and Billy for a great challenge. Thanks to my teammates for the win!

And thank goodness those punk kids didn’t beat me…

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