Jörg Reuter

I didn't find the time sorting pictures earlier. Here's a small collection I'm going to add to the individual journal entries later.


Looking at the pacific ocean from CA-1

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Meep meep!

I woke up on a murder of crows walking on the roof of the motorhome. And did I mention last night's coyote? We saw two very tame roadrunners at the visitor center. One even tried to get into our RV...

The weather isn't that nice anymore. Quite cloudy and even some rain. Most roads in the park are
closed due to flooding and reconstruction, thus we only visited Zabriski Point and the sand dunes.



On the way to Mojave we took the byway as it is easier to drive in bad weather, except for the flooded streets in Trona and Ridgecrest. On the other hand, rain in the desert is good weather, and not everyone can say that he has seen Death Valley in the rain.

And of course, we couldn't resist having dinner at the Sierra Cocktails in Inyokern. Thanks to Goldie insisting to store the location into my Tomtom two years ago we quickly found it and had an excellent steak. If you need a reason to visit the Eastern Sierra, this is a good one.

Zefiro and Mendra went back to the Excalibur hotel on their own and came back with a lot of dragon plushies and figurines. The rest of us had lunch at the Golden Gate hotel on Fremont Street. The huge display of the Fremont Experience was not running, but it's an impressive construction even then. We saw the Martin Luther King Day parade, which was also very entertaining.

The rest of the day was spent shopping at Fry's and driving to Death Valley. I wouldn't have stayed awake if I hadn't had an Oreo milk shake at Jack in the Box before (which I didn't finish). The weather here at Furnace Creek is very nice: clear sky and 16 °C. Let's hope it stays that way. And there is even a coyote roaming the campground.

It's always interesting to observe the reactions of people who come to Las Vegas for the first time... We were at the Venetian and Forum malls, the fountains of the Bellagio, briefly went to the Coyote Ugly (a silly, funny place... Just too loud for me), ate an awful chili hotdog, and took the bus back to the campground.

We got up quite early, well the Early Bird crew and Kayjay at least. I walked down the 200 meters to the Green River Overlook and enjoyed the solitude of an early morning there. This place just doesn't stop to amaze me.

After a much too long breakfast we took off for Arches National Park. The first stop there were The Windows and the Turette Arch. Very nice, but I've been there before. Next, Delicate Arch. For the first time I had the chance to hike all the way up there. Of course I didn't tell the others how far and especially how high it was, otherwise I'd had to have to go alone... Which would have been a pity, even though the hike is a bit strenuous and they way quite slippery due to ice, it was more than worse the effort. It sure is a spectacular view up there.

Unfortunately, nobody wanted to do another hike, so we just stopped at Balanced Rock, went back to town for propane and gas, and hit the road to Las Vegas, skipping the originally planed visit to Bryce Canyon. We arrived at 2 am at the KOA Circus Circus.

How to make a dragon speechless: drive to the view points of Canyonlands National Park. But the incredible view did not only impress Zefiro, but everyone of us. Even though I had been there twice before, it didn't lose it's breathtaking appeal to me. You may have seen photos, but they don't capture the beauty of the scenery.

And thus we stay on the campground up here for the night, even though we are quite low on propane. Let's hope it won't be a chilling surprise in the morning. But for now it's warm and cozy, and Lynard has the bratwurst on the BBQ.

I wanted to see the Navajo bridge for years and today I finally did! In fact, there are two bridges: the historic (one lane) bridge, and right next to it the new wider one. The new one has a very similar nice design. The bridges aren't exactly impressive from a technical point of view, until you take into account the time the historic bridge was built, that is.

Afterwards we drove to Page for a hike through Lower Antelope canyon. For those who never heard about it before: it is a narrow canyon with extremely interesting sandstone formations and light conditions. Not for people with claustrophobia.

Unfortunately, we spent way too much time shopping for groceries, so we had to skip the Monument Valley view point. A short stop during fading light at the border between Arizona and Utah had to do.

On the campground in Blanding we got stuck on the icy underground. Funny how this happens to us every single year at some point. Fortunately, a nice elderly man with a 4-wheel drive car pulled us out.

Fortunately, the weather was good until we departed, but that's when it got a bit annyoing: a mix of rain and snow on the drive back. But during the day, it was fine. We visited Mather Point, Yuvapei Observatorium and several view points along the road to Hermits Rest. At the latter, we saw a spectacular sunset. For me, Grand Canyon was surprisingly impressive, more than the previous two visits. The only mystery that remains: why does always a busload of Japanese tourists show up shortly after we arrive?

Tioh and Furvan posed for some photo and video fursuit shots at the Ryan rock. Lot's of fun and hiliarity. We then went to Keys Point view, admiring the view in the sunshine, and proceeded to the Barker Dam trail. The lake was dry, but a bit of water still at the reservoir. The dragons were climbing on the rocks and the dam, the rest of us shooting photos, of course. We had perfect light for photography at the cholla cactus garden and spent way too much time in the park. Arrived at the KOA Grand Canyon near Williams shortly after 1 AM.

A significant reason for delays is trouble with credit cards. No authorization possible, one gas station attendent even trying to authorize our cards through a call center - which I furiously interrupted after 20 minutes and numerous questions about home addresses, drivers licences and passport numbers. This is ridiculous. The most expensive gas station in the area and the customer gets treated like a con man. Sorry, they will not get our business again.

The RVs have some minor technical issues. Our stereo broke after 100 miles, the water pump of the other works only spuriously, filling up gas completely on both vehicles often doesn't work, probably due to a wrongly designed air vent, to name just the most annyoing ones. On the other hand, the new models have a much better layout and numerous improved details.

After a nice breakfast on the bench outside the RV in T-shirt we took off for California 1. A lot of fog, but I finally got to see Big Sur at day. And we saw elephant seals. Very impressive animals, and we got really close to see them. And did I mention the fog? Got some great shots of fog on the ocean! After way too many photo stops we arrived at Joshua Tree Nat'l Park at two AM and found two free spaces at the Ryan Rock campground.

Zlatko arrived at 6:50 this morning to pick us up. We, that are f_u_r_v_a_n, Kayjay, lynard_, Mendra, tioh, Zefiro, and myself. My crew, dubbed Early Birds for a reason, quickly finished breakfast and I called the Fire Dragons (Kayjay, Mendra and Zefiro) on the phone to get their behinds out of bed... We got the two RVs and hit the road at 10 am. On the agenda for today: Monterey. After visiting the Wharf we had lunch in an Italian restaurant and went to the aquarium afterwards. It's quite expensive, but worth every cent. Unfortunately I left my photo camera in the RV and was only recording video. Hence, no pictures for this journal.

After shopping for groceries with a bill of USD 622, for both parties of course, we proceeded to the Laguna Seca campground for the night. It's nicely located at a motor race track. But not only does it have a great view on the track, it's also embedded in a very scenic landscape and well maintained. I almost falling asleep over my beer now and will call it a day soon.

Despite ice and snow and all the media reports about the supposedly dangerous weather my train arrived in time at Frankfurt. Lynard joined me in Würzburg, Furvan and tioh were already at the Gate, and we met the others in front of the United check-in desk. Boarding started on time, however we had to wait half an hour for delayed or re-booked passengers and another hour for a slot to take off. The flight itself was quite pleasant, immigration and customs friendly as always (that's what I like about SFO). We arrived at the hotel around 7 pm, checked in and went off for a ride to Fisherman's Wharf with the cable car. Unfortunately, we spent too much time shopping and Lori's Diner was already closed for the day. Instead, we grabbed a burger at In'n'Out. We went to bed at 11 pm.

I'm back from Suhlvester. It was a very nice party, I met several people I never met in person before, Andre was dancing on the counter, Uncle Kage mixing drinks at the bar, the other hotel guests being very nice, the food excellent, the fireworks impressive... A great way to welcome the new year!

Personally, this year wasn't bad for me. In fact, I had a lot of fun: a great California roadtrip, Megaplex and Florida, Eurofurence, and numerous other great events. However, it was a hard year for many of my friends, which made the year much less enjoyable as it should have been. I'll depart to Suhlvester soon, to kick this weird year and decade out of the door. Have a safe New Year's Eve everyone!

And this year the dream comes true, at least on Christmas Eve at my parent's place:



Merry Christmas, everyone!

Many thanks to Lynard and TaniDaReal for inviting everyone to their birthday party. I had a blast!

Unfortunately, I lost my glasses. While I can see without them, I'm required to wear them while driving. And I didn't find the old (spare) glasses. Fortunately, Eisfuchs drove us home on Sunday. Would be a major PITA if I have to buy new ones, did anyone find them?

After more or less successfully upgrading three very different machines online and at least ending up with usable network afterwards, I dared to upgrade the machine in the data center at the other end of town. And promptly ran into bnc#546575, which earned me a trip to said data center as the machine wasn't accessible by network anymore.

If you want to upgrade a machine with a fixed network configuration, better check if /etc/udev/rules/70-persistent-net.rules contains the string ATTRS{address} and change it to ATTR{address} before starting the update.

Everything hosted on and provided by martes.yaina.de should be working again. I apologize for the downtime and like to thank you for your patience.

Something went wrong during the upgrade from openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2, thus martes.yaina.de is currently down for unscheduled maintenance. I'll drive to the data center tomorrow to take a look why the machine does not come up anymore.

(I tested the online upgrade with three different machines before, they all at least booted with working network afterwards.)

I've encountered some unusual obstacles during the upgrade from openSUSE 11.1 to 11.2. Apparently, my setup is a bit outside of the spec... This is what I had to do.

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I have the packman repository added and lots of packages installed from there. Packman sometimes changes package dependencies during the lifetime of an openSUSE release, which don't necessarily get resolved by zypper up. This can lead to zypper attempting to convert an x86_64 system to i586 on the actual upgrade to 11.2. With many packman packages installed it gets near impossible to find the cause. My advice: make sure to run zypper dup with the 11.1 repositories before the upgrade.

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After the update, the X11 server came up without working keyboard and mouse. It didn't work with the old xorg.conf configuration file, it didn't work with the server started by sax2. For upgrades, the option
Option "AutoAddDevices" "off" in the ServerFlags section of xorg.conf should had been added, but wasn't.

Manually adding that option at least gave me back a working server. But it should work without it. Looking at the process list revealed that I had hundreds of hald-addon-cpufreq processes, but not a single hald-addon-input process. Running hal-device revealed every single entry, including the one for the mice and keyboard, being and CPUFreq interface (info.interfaces = { org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.CPUFreq' }). Strange. But at least I had a working X11 server again.

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Oops, but what's that? Suspend doesn't work either? Okay, I have to go and fix the hald configuration after all. But how, I don't know anything about it and everyone I ask claims to know even less... So I reinstalled the rpm with zypper in -f hal and ran rchal restart, and... Wow, it works! And even the autoconfigured X11 works now.

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Sound needs an "rcalsasound restart" to work.I haven't investigated yet why. Speechd was blocking the sound card.

rcspeechd stop
insserv -r speechd