Wölfisch

...and no time to update LJ during the trip, thus an update to the map has to do for now:



Travel report will follow later, I hope.

And this is the final part of my vacation report.

Thursday, 2012-10-11: Shopping Again, and CA-1

I didn't know Eureka had a large mall, even one with some independent stores, and the only I've ever seen with a Walmart as an anchor store. Mendra was looking for a game store, which apparently has moved, I actually found two CDs and a BD at f.y.e., and we almost had to use physical force to get Zefiro out of the store selling old arcade game machines. We drove downtown for a toy store, while the dragons were looking for a game console and dragon plushies I had the pleasure to have an excellent burger and shake at Fresh Freeze, a former drive-in restaurant on F Street, corner Harris Street.

The rest of the day was spent on the road, a scenic drive down the US-101 and the CA-1. The Northern part of the CA-1 is described as poorly maintained in travel guides, but the highway has been improved during the last years. It is quite narrow and winding through the coast mountains for the first 20 miles, and Kayjay had to take a break afterwards, but we obviously aren't the only ones using the turnout for that.

Wazzup? Us!

We intended to spend the night at Gualala, but I missed that the campground is closed after Labor Day. So we moved on to Bodega Bay, driving the supposedly most scenic section of the CA-1 in the dark. Bodega Bay RV Park is greatly overpriced, but nobody had the nerve to look for another one, so we stayed there for the night.

Friday, 2012-10-12: Point Reyes Revisited

At least it is just a short distance from Bodega Bay to Point Reyes, but the street is quite narrow and bad, so I took over driving in Point Reyes Station. The good news about Sir Francis Drake Boulevard West of Inverness: they improved the road where I remembered it being very rough last time I was there. The bad news: every other stretch is now so rough it isn't really recommended to drive with large vehicle. The excellent point, however: this time, at last, the lighthouse was open. It's about 350 steps down the stairs from the former weather station to the lighthouse.


Point Reyes Lighthouse

The ranger gave a detailed presentation about the it. It's apparently the only lighthouse in the US with the original lens and clockwork in the original building. The lamp of course was changed from oil to electricity at some point. The foghorn is automated these days, but still operating.


Point Reyes Clockwork

Remembering that the CA-1 is very narrow between Muir Beach and Tamalpais, I stayed on the Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in Olema. Admittedly, it is wider, but they still haven't fixed the settling of the street at some point and it is extremely rough. Shortly before the Golden Gate Bridge we got into a traffic jam, but made it to the viewpoints West of the US-101 just before sunset. Surprisingly, the road is now completely rebuilt, the viewpoints signed and paved, they marked parking slots, and on the upper end they built a roundabout suitable for tour buses and large RVs. Of course, this makes the former virtually unknown views quite well known now, losing a bit of their exclusiveness. But the view is still great.


The Bridge

The traffic jam was gone when we continued our way to the last campground of the trip. Driving over the Golden Gate Bridge is always an experience, especially in the dark, despite heavy traffic driving through San Francisco was as smooth as always, and ignoring my satnav I did not end up in downtown as usual this time... It's strange, I know San Fran better than my hometown by now.

And I even got my In-N-Out burger on this trip, even though it meant driving in South San Francisco, which is something I clearly do not appreciate. The parking lot was overfilled, though, thus we parked at the nearby bank – we were short of cash anyway, because the gas station next to it doesn't take credit cards. As expected, the burger and fries were excellent. Also, on the same block there is a Krispy Kreme – is that place heaven or what?

But back on the road, for the last-but-one time, down the I-280 which I hate with my guts, even at night, but didn't miss the exit for a change, and to Candlestick Point RV Park. That place sure got expensive, the most expensive RV park on the whole trip. But there are only two commercial RV parks near enough to the rental station, the other one booked solid for months all year. The communal or state park campgrounds don't have warm showers, so Candlestick has a de facto monopoly in the region, and they know it.

We spent the night packing suitcases. Clean-up had to wait until the next day.

Saturday, 2012-10-13: It's All Over

Cleaning we did, after getting up at six and heaving a short breakfast consisting of the remaining donuts, bread and cheese. We managed to be at the rental station at half past nine, as there was virtually no traffic on the way. We amazed the staff at El Monte with a clean (on the inside) RV, filled up gas tank and emptied black and grey water tanks. Apparently not everyone does that, but it makes them overlook small scratches to the veneer and the few small things we inevitably broke during the trip.

Zlatko wasn't there, but got to the airport in time thanks to the driver whose name I unfortunately forgot. The flight home on United Airlines was uneventful, except that we had to wait almost an hour at the gate for some baggage of passengers having missed their connection being unloaded and getting a new start slot, but the pilot made up the time completely. The machine was an older 747 without in-seat entertainment and tight space, worsened by the arsehole in front of me forcefully lowering his backrest so I couldn't move anymore. The cabin crew, however, was very friendly and helpful.

The train home was diverted from the long distance station to the regional station and missing one section which got added in Frankfurt main station, causing me to change seats three times. On the other hand, a seat reservation in this situation would have been worthless anyway.

Arriving in Nuremberg tired, my vacation ended. Would I recommend traveling with seven adults in one motorhome? Only if everyone knows each other well enough and is able to compromise. It is quite tight, but it worked for us. The main issue however is that with this vehicle only the two passengers in the driver cabin are having a good view, which makes it a bit boring for the rest on scenic drive with addition programming. Also, it takes quite some additional time to get ready for and after a stop. Not to mention that everyone has different expectations and wishes for the programming, finding a good mix between shopping, scenic drives and hikes is a bit difficult with such a large crowd. What I can say I'm glad we did it with one vehicle instead of two, otherwise it wouldn't have worked at all. But, with exception to Mount Rainier, my impression is that this route works best with a small group in a car or small RV.

I didn't find the time to update my journal during the last week of the trip, but of course I took photos and notes.

Monday, 2012-10-08

We spent the night at the KOA campground in Otis, OR, beautifully located next to the antennas of KBCH, um, I mean, next to Devils Lake. Granted, we were not much interested in the lake, and it is one of the few KOAs that is not located directly at a major highway. Much more interesting were the Tanger Outlet Center nearby in Lincoln City. We didn't buy much, though.

Next on our tour we took the Otter Crest loop, a scenic byway of the US101, with great views of the ocean and strange rocks. For example Cape Foulweather or
Devil's Punch Bowl. We took a lot of photos, though the light wasn't that good. I would have preferred a bit more fog, not just a cloudy sky.


Volcanic rocks at Rocky Creek


Cape Foulweather


Devil's Punch Bowl

We arrived just in time for the Yaquina lighthouse before closing for the day, or so we thought. So we paid the entrance fee, only to hear that they closed early due to the large number of visitors when we arrived. I know the tour guides are all volunteers, and I appreciate their effort, but this is not how you treat your guests. So we just took a couple of pictures from the outside and moved on disappointed.


Yaquina Light

And the bad luck with lighthouses continues. I didn't expect the Heceta Head Lighthouse to be open when we arrived in the last light of the day, but the lighthouse was covered with a tarp due to reconstruction work. At least the beach is beautiful, as is the small creek running into the ocean and the viaduct of the US101. And they removed the pay station for the parking lot during renovation, which is a nice gesture. If only they'd posted some information about the renovation at the oversize vehicle parking I'd be perfectly fine with it.


Heceta Head

We arrived late at night at Ocean Side RV Park, Cape Arago, with free Wifi, but only for one device. But with a beautiful beach, as we discovered the next morning.

Tuesday, 2012-10-09: More Lighthouse Adventures

Another guest on the campground recommended Seven Devils State Recreation Site to watch birds. What he didn't tell us was that the direct way to it from the North turns into a winded gravel road not recommended for RVs at some point, so we stayed on the highway and approached the park from the South. The beach is really beautiful and long, but no other birds than a large flock of seagulls to be seen. A perfect place to relax nevertheless, at least at that time of year.


7 Devils Beach

Not expecting much we continued our way to Cape Blanco. To our surprise, the really well preserved lighthouse was open and we got the tour to the lense. Cape Blanco Light is the oldest lighthouse in Oregon and still active. It doesn't have the original lens anymore, the current one was installed 1936 and had to be repaired after an act of vandalism. Opposed to the guides at Yaquina Light those at Cape Blanco (two former coast guards on that day) are highly motivated and share their knowledge about the history of Oregon lighthouses and the development of technology.


Cape Blanco Lighthouse

Still lots of time left, but we skipped Humbung Mountain as nobody was in the mood for a mountain hike. Instead we took a break at a beach on the way down South, the exact position sliped my mind, I have to check the GPS log for the exact position. All I remember it being windy and cold-ish and Mendra climbing rocks again...


Mendra on the Rocks

Next stop: Dinner! We were looking for a fastfood joint, but didn't find any and ended up at a Chinese restaurant, Wing Wah, in Crescent City. The food there was a very positive surprise and quite different from what I'm used to. Half of the city seems to dine there, so it is safe to assume that it will be equally good on the next visit.

After quick visit to Home Depot for some more BBQ coal we went to our campground for the night, a KOA neatly located at the US101.

Wednesday, 2012-10-10: Redwood Hikes

Redwood National and State Parks is, as the name implies, not a single national park, but a collection of several federal and state parks. Unfortunately, the part with the famous big coastal sequoias is only accessible via a dirt road that is not recommended for RVs, so we went hiking at the less popular but equally beautiful Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. The Big Tree is big, at least for a coastal sequoia, but less spectacular than giant sequoias. However, it is a historic landmark, the starting point for the preservation of this incredible forest.

We hiked 8 kilometers along the Brown Creek/Rhododendron/South Fork trail loop. The description of the hikes was "easy, except for one short steep section". Well, the maximum height difference was 180 m according to my GPS, on very short distance. The trails are clearly marked, but not well maintained. We had to climb over or under fallen trees a couple of times that have been lying there for quite a while, apparently. Not much of an issue for us, but maybe one for less experienced hikers.


Not the Big Tree, it's boring.

My friends were impressed how silent this primeval forest is — I already had that experience at Sequoia Nat'l Park so it wasn't new to me, I found it more interesting what you can hear despite what we consider silence. Many wrens being slightly annoyed by our presence, for example. Banana slugs are silent of course, but found very often in these woods. The vegetation is quite what I expected, yet the atmosphere is surely unique. I think it was Lynard who quite appropriately compared it with Fangorn. We didn't see any trees moving from their position, though.


Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

It was a very refreshing hike. The trekking toe-shoes are very good on forest trails, as long as you take care to not walk into your own hiking poles (ow!), step on roots with the midfood (ouch!), or along sharp rocks above the rubber sole of the shoe (Ow-ow-OW!) On the other hand (or foot?) walking grades is way less strenuous to the knees and hip as normal shoes.

The night was spent at a KOA North of Eureka, neatly located (who would have guessed) next to the US-101...

Thursday, 2012-10-04: Bay and Waterfall

We spent the night at Crescent Bay RV Park and Beach, a small recreational area near Port Angeles directly at the Strait of Juan De Fuca. The RV park is a bit overpriced, at least for off-season, but the people running the place are very nice and warm-hearted, the park clean and well maintained, and the best thing: it has a long private beach just across the street. On clear days like this it is possible to see Canada across the strait. We spent the whole morning at the beach, taking photos and chatting.


Tongue Point from Crescent Beach

Later that day we went hiking in the mountains again, but only the short trail up to Marymere Falls. I used the Vibram Fivefingers hiking "shoes" for that. While I wouldn't recommend this kind of footwear for alpine hikes like the one at Mount Rainier, I found them very comfortable for mountain forests. Stepping on sharp stones doesn't hurt more than with traditional shoes. You just don't twist your ankles, no knee issues, less strain on leg muscles, no blisters, much more control about movement. The only downside is a larger strain on the tensions and joints of the toes, but it gets better after using them for a while.


Merymere Falls

Friday, 2012-10-05: Hoh

Located at the Quaillayute River, the rather primitive Mora campground is lovely and shady, and most of all: quiet. In the morning, we drove down the street to Rialoto Beach. It is good to be at the sea again.


Rialto Beach

We continued our way back into the mountains to the Hoh area. It is a cold rain forrest, at least that's what the brochure says. However, that day it was a warm and dry day... The vegetation indeed is that of a rainforest: mosses and lichen growing on the branches of the trees, mostly firs, spruces and maples. Many trees are growing on so called nurselogs, dead and fallen trees. This is mostly due to the thin layer of soil on the rock, which is even covered with ferns and shrubs that don't allow the trees to grow directly on the ground. We hiked the two short trails there, one meeting the Hoh River, before we continued to look for a campground for the night.


Hoh River

I intended to spend the night in Kalaloch near the ocean beach, but it was full. So we drove to Ocean City and chose the first campground we saw. The landlady was a bit strange. The dialog on arrival was this:

Me: Good evening, do you have space for this 31 ft RV?
She: Sure, how many people?
Me: Seven.
She: No.
Me (baffled): ... What, "no"?
She: What yer gonna do? Setup a tent?
Me (deadpan): This thing sleeps up to eight people.
She (looks doubtful): Come in.

Her husband directed us to the campsite, we set up shop, put out BBQ and had dinner.

Saturday, 2012-10-06: On the Road

The campground has direct access to the beach, where we spent the morning, and on checkout to our surprise the landlady was really nice.

We decided against driving back to Olympic Nat'l Park, instead did some groceries, filled up the tank and drove enjoyed the landscape on our trip to Cape Disappointment. We saw a lot of deer on the campground there which wasn't concerned about the campers at all.

Sunday, 2012-10-07: Cape Disappointment, Astoria and Cape Meares

I'm developing a bad cold and slept quite uneasy. Unfortunately, I woke up too late, too, and we had a very late start that morning. The only disappointing aspect of Cape Disappointment is Waikiki Beach (but then again, it's Washington and not Hawaii). The hike to the southern lighthouse across the hills is quite nice, and the lighthouse itself is a must-see, though you can do that only from the outside.


Cape Disappointment Light

Next we visited Astoria, a formerly wealthy city at the Columbia River. Unfortunately, after a short revival as a tourist attraction, many of the old buildings are decaying again. The trolley line is fun, though. A vintage tram car pulling a diesel generator for the motor commuting along the riverside...


Astoria Tram

Next we went to Cape Meares for a very nice sunset, but we had to skip Cape Lookout as it was way too dark. And what maniac is responsible for the road maintenance of the Three Capes Loop? The Lonely Planet describes the highway as "rough", and that's an euphemism. But regardless of that, the route is very scenic, indeed.


Cape Meares

Monday, 2012-10-01: Picking up the RV

We rented a 31 ft motorhome suitable for 8 passengers from El Monte. I wouldn't recommend to occupy it with 7 adults like we do, unless everyone involved can cope with the limited space and privacy. So far (after one day, I have to admit) it works out very smoothly and with way less hassle than with coordinating two RVs.

The only downer is that there are two rental stations in the Seattle area: one is in Seatac (the airport area between Seattle and Tacoma), the other one is in Ferndale, actually closer to Vancouver and a hundred miles away from Seattle. You can only book the later from a German travel agency. So we rented a large van, Lynard drove us to the RV rental station, we picked up the RV, Lynard and Kayjay brought back the van to Bellingham airport, and we picked them up again.

First shopping took way too long, some time last year Walmart apparently changed the layout of its stores. I never really liked them, but running around the shop for two hours trying to guess where the f... even the most basic articles are really pissed me off.

We arrived at Cougar Rock Campground, Mt Rainier National Park, at half past eleven in the night, properly stored our luggage and groceries, and set up the beds.

Tuesday, 2012-01-02: Paradise, Mount Rainier

Mount Rainier, apparently pronounced "mount rainy-er", is with 4300 meters the highest mountain South of the Canadian border. This pronunciation is appropriate: we took the hike to Panaroma Point in dense fog and only when we arrived at the highest point of the Skyline Trail the sun came out and we had a wonderful view at the peak of Mt Rainier, the glaciers and the valleys.


Peak of Mount Rainier

Though it was cold and wet (or maybe because of it) we saw deer, squirrels, marmots, grouse, and various songbirds.


Marmot in the Fog

The hike is listed as strenuous, with an elevation difference of 530 meters, but was fairly easy for us to handle.

Wednesday, 2012-01-03: Longmire, Mount Rainier

After a cold night, as we forgot to turn the heating on, we started relatively late for an easy forest hike along the Paradise River to Madcap Falls.


Madcap Falls

Afterwards, we hiked along Kautz Creek trail up to the point where the trail crosses the creek, or whatever is left of it after the river rerouted due to a landslide a couple of years back. A very nice and relaxing hike nevertheless.

But enough of the Cascades, off to the coast at last!

Thursday, 2012-09-27: Wolfhaven

Located South of Olympia, Wolfhaven is one of the oldest wolf sanctuaries in the US. Their tour mainly features some of their rescues from irresponsible owners. The enclosures are large and and they only keep two wolves in each. I guess trying to compose packs of individuals who didn't grow up with each other or aren't even properly socialized wouldn't work anyway. They are also part of a breeding program for highly endangered Red Wolves. They are quite shy though, and I didn't get any pictures of them. Unfortunately, due to the fences it is quite hard to photograph the wolves anyway.


Lazy Wolf

Thursday, 2012-09-27 to Sunday, 2012-09-30: Rainfurrest

Rainfurrest is a fast growing furry convention in the American Northwest. It takes place at the Hilton Seattle Airport and Convention Center. The hotel is nice, even though it seems to be roughly the same distance from our room to the ballroom as from the Westin to the DLCC at Anthrocon. Lots of very young attendees, and I have to admit having asked myself whether I ended up at a gay fetish rave instead of a furry convention — nothing wrong with that, but not quite what I expected, and not my cup of tea to be honest. But the atmosphere of the convention is excellent, the dances very good (even though I didn't feel like dancing), lots of self-made fursuits I haven't seen before, and fortunately also some friends at my age attending so I found enough people to chat with. I'll likely attend again, but we already have other plans for next year. It was an interesting experience and it is a good thing to get to know this side of the fandom a bit better, too.


Fursuits

Having skipped Further Confusion this year allows us to visit a different furry convention in the US. We are: Kayjay, Lynard and me spending a couple of days in Seattle, joined by Furvan, Tioh, Mendra and Zefiro at Rainfurrest.

Saturday, 2012-09-22: Missing Connection

I took the first tram of the day to get from my flat to the station hopped on ICE 822 to Frankfurt Airport. Lynard arrived shortly after me, followed by Kayjay. We got aboard LH402 to Newark and took off in time. The Boeing 747 was quite new, but the seat distance in cattle class got even smaller. I was able to live with the fact that my in-seat entertainment system offered only one Bollywood movie, as I refuse to watch movies on the tiny screen anyway. Everyone else hat a large collection of movies to choose from. The flight itself was calm, we landed almost on time in Newark, but it took the usual 15 minutes to get to the gate. Immigration was crowded, partly due to some technical problems with the fingerprint database. Even though we were offered to jump the line due to our short layover time, I arrived at the baggage claim three minutes after boarding of our connection started. Kayjay arrived shortly after me, but Lynard had to wait what seemed to be an eternity in Second Inspection. Not much of a problem as we missed our connection anyway. We got rebooked to the first flight to Seattle for the next day and checked in at the Best Western Newark West. At least the bar had Yuengling Lager, which made the evening acceptable.

Sunday, 2012-09-23: Seattle, At Last

After getting up at an ungodly hour we went to the airport, checked in and got aboard a United flight to Seattle. A six hour flight that required extra payment for the entertainment system (WTF?), and the cabin crew going through only twice with beverages... At least it was a mostly calm flight. We arrived in Seattle on time, got our luggage and picked up the rental car. Since we were way too early to check in we started with some shopping. Best Buy have reduced both their selection and stock even more, Fry's has a lot of empty shelves and none of what I wanted to purchase. We eventually made it to the hotel, after swearing at the GPS and the large amount of construction work in Seattle.

We stayed at the Best Western Executive Inn one block away from the Space Needle and got a room with a view of it.


The View from the Hotel Room

The rest of the day was spent riding the monorail and exploring Pikes Market and the waterfront. Pikes Market is a mix of Farmer's Market, tourist traps and small speciality shops. Similar to what Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco used to be years ago, but larger and more colorful.

Monday, 2012-09-24: More Shopping, more Seattle

I just had to buy another pay of toe shoes... So we went to REI, a large outdoor shop very much like the German Globetrotter chain. Their Seattle store even has a small park in front of the building so you don't realize it at first. Since it was nearby, we drove to the Japanese Tea Garden in the Arboretum park, swearing a lot again about the detours caused by road construction on the way. This tea garden seems to be more authentic than the one in San Francisco and has a more organic feeling. Very much worth the visit.


Japanese Tea Garden

And since we were already there we took a short hike at the Arboretum with its countless different species of trees, where I had the chance to use the toe shoes on a more natural ground.

The shoes stayed on, we went back to the hotel, took the monorail downtown, and got a T-Mobile SIM with a prepaid plan so we can have mobile Internet access. Then we explored Downtown Seattle even more until dinner at Red Robin. Having had our burger on the patio at the waterfront, we drove back and went to the Space Needle. The view at night from up there is simply breathtaking.


Downtown Seattle

Tuesday, 2012-09-24: A Day at the Zoo

Woodland Park Zoo is a bit North of Seattle. It is relatively large, has several aviaries, but they propably overdo it with the vegetation. It is sometimes really hard do get a good view of the animals. The staff is very nice though and gives demonstrations at various places throughout the zoo.


Falconer at the zoo

After a small detour into University district for a coffee, we drove to Kerry Park for a couple of photos.


Seattle from Kerry Park

Back to the hotel to park the car, another ride with the monorail, confusion about the underground bus system, and then Occidental Park with its sculptures. Unfortunately, the light wasn't really good for photography, so we just wandered around Pioneer district, visited China Town (and made a mental note to try the restaurants there next time), back to Pioneer Park, and finally dinner at Cafe Bengodi.

Wednesday, 2012-09-25: EMP and walks

The EMP is a large museum for music and pop culture next to the Space Needle. Their guitar collection gives a great overview about how guitars changes over time, especially the electric guitar. Both the exhibition about Jimmy Hendrix and Nirvana are great to learn more about how both have influence rock and pop music and pop culture in general, while showing from where the artists were coming. There are two great exhibitions in the basement, one about horror movies with exhibits like the original "Slaughtered Lamb" pub sign of An American Werewolf in London, an Alien costume, or a Critters hand-puppet. The other is about Science Fiction in general, with several original costumes and props from Star Trek, a Stargate mask, Neo's coat from The Matrix, and much more. Quite impressive, but I was missing information about the designer, builder and building materials.

Afterwards we walked to the sculpture park near Pier 70 and then North on the Elliott-Bay-Trail along the waterfront to Centennial Park and Kinnear Park. On the way back we had dinner at Roti Cuisine, an Indian restaurant which was great. Even got a couple of used CDs for cheap at Easy Street Records. Finally, when we got back to the hotel I wrote this report and started to pack my bags, as the next step on our journey will be Rainfurrest.


Space Needle, from other side

Cause: It crashed
Root Cause: The admin is an idiot

As some of my readers know, I'm a technical support engineer. Lately, I've observed a massive increase of customers asking for a Root Cause Analysis. Judging from the Wikipedia article, an RCA is a management tool, a process which needs a formal definition and uses standardized, best-practice or customer specific reports and methods.

As a technical support provider we cannot do this. We do not know the customer's formal expectations, RCA is a process the customers owns. It is not even the job of a vendor's technical support. We can try to find the cause, which is hard enough with most of information about the customer setup missing in the service requests.

When we do, a lot of customers (especially those of typical "offshore" countries) do not feel it is sufficent: "It crashed because of a bug in the kernel, here's a fixed one" or "it doesn't work this way, here's a better configuration" is technically correct, but doesn't qualify as an RCA. A 500 page report does. Most likely the customer's customer expects that, being fed up with incompetence, poor excuses and outright lies of their outsourced IT services. Though not able to understand the technical details, at least their management can judge the effort put into it. But the technical support service of a software provider is simply not the right party to assemble this information.

...have you seen this?

...but how do I always end up searching for hours and hours?

I just bought a new battery for my Sansa MP3 player, but where the heck is the USB cable to charge it? Hours later and I still haven't found the pouch it is in. I just ordered a new cable and hope to find the original one as soon as I've got the replacement.

Also, I need to bring my bicycle to the shop tomorrow, the shifter cable is stuck and I absolutely don't have the time to fix it myself.

Google has a small tool for GPS tracking on Android phones. It shows you some stats of your hike and records a GPS track of it. Unfortunately, what it writes to the SD card (basically) is this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<document>
<name><![CDATA[2011-10-09 13:43]]></name>
<description><![CDATA[Antelope island state park]]></description>
<!-- some style defintions -->

<placemark>
<!-- name and start point of the track -->
</Placemark>

<placemark>
<name><![CDATA[2011-10-09 13:43]]></name>
<description><![CDATA[Antelope island state park]]></description>
<multigeometry>
<linestring><coordinates>
-112.240134,41.02518,1268.0999755859375
-112.24009,41.025108,1270.4000244140625
<!-- etc -->
</coordinates>
</LineString>
</MultiGeometry>
</Placemark>

<placemark>
<name><![CDATA[(End)]]></name>
<description><![CDATA[Erstellt von <a href='http://mytracks.appspot.com'>My Tracks</a> für Android.<p>Gesamtentfernung: 12,57 km (7,8 mi)<br>Gesamtzeit: 2:22:39<br>Zeit in Bewegung: 2:08:25<br>Durchschnittsgeschw.: 5,29 km/h (3,3 mi/h)<br> Durchschnitt in Bew.: 5,87 km/h (3,6 mi/h)<br> Max. Geschwindigkeit: 10,06 km/h (6,3 mi/h)<br>Niedrigste Höhenlage: 1268 m (4160 Fuß)<br>Höchste Höhenlage: 1476 m (4844 Fuß)<br>Höhengewinn: 336 m (1101 Fuß)<br>Maximale Steigung: 0 %<br>Minimale Steigung: 0 %<br>Aufgezeichnet am: So. Okt 09 13:43:04 GMT-06:00 2011<br>Aktivität: White rock trail<br><img border="0" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?&chs=600x350&cht=lxy&chtt=Höhe&chxt=x,y&chxr=0,0,12,2|1,1200.0,1500.0,25&chco=009A00&chm=B,00AA00,0,0,0&chg=100000,8.333333333333334,1,0&chd=e:," />]]></description>
<styleurl>#sh_red-circle</styleUrl>
<point>
<coordinates>-112.240085,41.025051</coordinates>
</Point>
</Placemark>

</Document>
</kml>

It records the GPS coordinates without any time stamps except for the start time, and all the stats are in localized free-form text. Completely unusable except for drawing the track on Google Maps. No way to geo tag my photos.

My latest purchases, each highly recommended:

Kate Bush — Director's Cut

Released earlier this year, this album by Kate Bush contains new versions of older material. Not exactly a must have album, I only bought the MP3 version myself, and probably a bit disturbing for her hardcore fans. The sound appears to be a bit muffled at first, but the impression changes quickly to rather "earthy". It is quite interesting to listen to these alternative versions of old material. I like some better than the original recordings, for some songs I prefer the old versions. But it is never boring to hear how the artist interprets her own material with a distance of several years.

Kate Bush — 50 Words For Snow

This is her latest concept album. While Kate's previous regular album Aerial was like a summer breathe, 50 Words For Snow is about winter. While the sound again is earthy and warm, the songs give you little shivers. It's like sitting in a drafty cabin in front of the fire with a thick woolen blanket over the shoulders. Oh, and just listen to those wonderful obscure stories she tells!

Fox Amoore — Feel

I cannot recommend the music of Fox Amoore enough. He is a fantastic composer, pianist and arranger. His album Feel, purchased as the download version with bonus material, is his best to date. You can tell the music of Hans Zimmer has a great influence on his compositions, but every time you just start to realize the zimmeresque elements, Fox' songs turn into an entirely different direction. I bet he does that entirely on purpose. Anyway, if you like epic orchestral soundtrack music, you have to purchase this album.

Globus — Break From This World

Talking about epic, the second studio album of Immediate Music's side project Globus is just that. Very powerful, overboarding orchestral rock music with really depressive and bitter lyrics. While the music styles are more diverse than on their first album Epicon, which makes Break From This World a bit more fragmented, it is a concept album about violent conflicts in general and the Arab Spring in particular. A bit of a warning, though: the MP3 download version from Amazon comes without a booklet and thus you'll have to find the lyrics yourself. The physical CD is probably the better choice here.

Yesterday, my TV asked me:

For quality and improvement purposes, your usage statistics about the TV system and remote will be sent to the Sony server. It will exclude personal and individually identifiable information. Would you like to enable this setting?

At least they are asking, but it does leave a couple of questions:

• What exact information gets collected?
• What does Sony consider being "personal information"?
• How do they ensure that it is not "individually identifiable"?
• What exactly are those "improvement purposes"?
• Where exactly do they collect this information?
• How well is it secured, especially with Sony's less than stellar track record in this regard?
• How can I be sure that it's not collecting the data anyway regardless that I turned it off?

I guess the only way to answer the last question is to buy a managed network switch that lets me monitor traffic on specific ports...

Oh, and while I'm at it. If you are one of those who are dodging the TV licence fee ("Rundfunkgebühr" in Germany), you'd better not connect the TV to your network at all: That newfangled HbbTV thingy European public broadcasters are introducing apparently causes the TV to request the index for the online content each time you switch to such a channel. This doesn't mean much of course, unless your other network activity allows correlation between you or at least your household and your IP number.

I am paying the fee, of course, but I'm considering pulling the network cable anyway... This is the only way to be 100% sure that it cannot phone home. Even though I have to admit the online features are quite nifty, indeed.

This is of course an issue with all network connected appliances. But I'm not convinced that Sony understands privacy concerns at all. For example, their remote control application for Android phones sports ads and a recent version of it wanted access rights to the browser history of the phone. I declined that update and removed the app instead.

After being a loyal reader more than 20 years I finally canceled my subscription of the renowned weekly newspaper Die Zeit today. It's not that it has so much changed from the times Gerd Bucerius and Marion Dönhoff were in charge, or lacking distinguished authors nowadays. Granted, it is quite expensive just for the three or four articles per issue that I actually read, and only one that is really interesting to me. Sure, some authors are really annoying, but that's the whole point of this publication: start public debates. Yes, my generation is writing there now, but I know how we, as a generation, think. There is not much to learn for me. A lot of topics are repeating themselves over the years. But that's still not the reason.

I simply don't have the time anymore. I worked myself through seven old issues last week, not being able to remember what I just read. Reading it that way is a waste of time and somewhat disrespectful to the authors.

And with all breakups, I too will try to stay friends with her. Occasionally buying an issue, probably keeping the RSS feed. Even though it suffers the fate of the paper issue, just to a worse degree.

Most people these days call it Post Rock, but when I was young, we called it Kraut Rock. Or perhaps Progressive Rock. And besides, the music of the Japanese band Mono recently has evolved beyond this.

Yes, I'm late with my report of their concert on May, 25th in the Künstlerhaus (K4), organized by Musikverein Concerts, but I was just too busy. The concert wasn't really that well attended, perhaps 60 people in the audience, but taken into account that the location is rather small and poorly ventilated, it was just right. Not too empty, not too crowded. And the overall atmosphere was great (except for that idiot right of me trying to shove me away from where I stood, even though he had more than enough space, and I didn't, and the two assholes behind me chatting loudly during the whole concert.) A surprisingly young audience for this kind of music, mostly in their early twenties, and none of those emo type of posers. The musician playing before Mono was Dirk Serries, a very good guitarist who creates quite interesting soundscapes with his guitar, some effect devices, and a looper. I didn't thought it would work well as a live performance, but he proved me wrong. Yet, not quite my cup of tea, I have to admit.

And then Mono. A purely instrumental band with two guitarists, bass and drums. And heavy influences by Morricone, Beethoven, Russian folklore — not only due to Takaakira Goto playing the electric guitar with a tremolo reminding of a balalaika, but mainly due to what I perceive as typical central Asian harmonies — a bit of Mahler, Tchaikovsky, perhaps even Puccini, quite some early Kraftwerk (of course) and orchestral film music in general. The more you hear their music, the more you'll discover. And even though it is just guitars, bass and drums, a bit of glockenspiel and keyboards here and there, I wouldn't call it rock anymore. It is orchestral, symphonic, with generally quite complex drum patterns. Nothing of it sounds specifically Japanese, only if you listen very closely you'll find some chords that wouldn't be played that way in European or American music. And of course you can tell from the subject of their compositions. A common theme is the beauty and force of nature. From the first drops of rain to a heavy thunderstorm and then the sun comes out again: amazing how well instrumental music can transport the mood of changing weather across all cultural differences. Usually the songs start calm, on low sound level, with a sweet melody, develop an amazing crescendo, often ending in very complex soundscapes, but even with all that noise they never let lose of the melody. Within all that force there remains a hint of fragile beauty. Needless to say I'm a complete sucker for this trick. While this is a common theme of postrock, Mono add a certain complexity and variations to it so it never gets boring. And they like to break out of the pattern occasionally. Some of their compositions take a surprisingly different direction after a while.

The music of Mono works both ways: very intense music directly inducing emotions and pictures in your head, on the other hand something to analyze and think about.

But I want a software mixer. Pulseaudio to the rescue! Apart from the fact that the documentation of remap-sink leaves a bit to desire, this is fairly easy. First, our ~/.asoundrc reduces to

pcm.!default {
  type pulse
  hint.description "ALSA Pulse output"
}

ctl.!default {
  type pulse
}

pcm.ac3 {
  type rate
  slave {
    pcm {
      type a52
      format s16
      channels 6
      bitrate 448
    }
    rate 48000
  }
  hint {
    description "AC3 output"
  }
}

Next, we copy /etc/pulse/default.pa to ~/.pulse/ and add the following to the .fail section:

load-module module-alsa-sink sink_name=Surround5.1 device=ac3 rate=48000 channels=6 mmap=0 channel_map=front-left,front-right,rear-left,rear-right,center,lfe
load-module module-remap-sink sink_name=Stereo2.1 master=Surround5.1 channels=3 channel_map=front-left,front-right,lfe master_channel_map=front-left,front-right,lfe remix=0

Surprisingly, the remap-sink module automatically seems to do the right thing to the mono channels (i.e., sum of left and right)

Not directly related to the upmix task, but useful as we're going to disable auto detection:

load-module module-alsa-sink sink_name=Headphones device=hw:0,0 rate=48000 channels=2 mmap=0
load-module module-alsa-source device=hw:0,0

Also, I'd like to have Stereo2.1 being my default like:

set-default-sink Stereo2.1

Hmm, while we're at it, 4.1 upmix may be nice as well:

load-module module-remap-sink sink_name=Stereo4.1 master=Surround5.1 channels=5 channel_map=front-left,front-right,lfe,front-left,front-right master_channel_map=front-left,front-right,lfe,rear-left,rear-right remix=0

Talking about disabling auto detection, comment out module-udev-detect:

# load-module module-udev-detect

We may also want to avoid unnecessary conversion from 48k to 44k1 and back to 48k, thus edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf (or better copy it to ~/.pulse/ and edit it there) to set

default-sample-rate = 48000

And you know what I should have googled for to directly find the solution as outlined in this part of my little serial?

pulseaudio ac3

I cannot find any other tool that encodes AC3 to IEC958 than vlc and mplayer. Both are not suitable for the task for different reasons. One idea would be to modify the alsaplay (aplay) ALSA example application to do the encoding. But while researching the topic I asked myself: why couldn't just ALSA do it by itself? It's just wrapping AC3 into a bit stream, and the mplayer code for it looks fairly simple. Let's see how ALSA plugins are working anyway... So I downloaded the alsa-plugins source code and... WAIT, WHAT IS THAT?! There is a directory "a52". It contains exactly the module I was looking for. It does not encode an AC3 stream to an IEC958 transport stream, it creates the whole transport-encoded AC3 data from PCM data and writes it to the SPDIF device of the sound card. That's even more I asked for!

So I compiled it and added the following to ~/.asoundrc:

 pcm.ac3 {
   type a52;
}

and changed the slave PCM of stereo21 to:

  slave {
        pcm "ac3" # was iec958mux
        channels 6
  }

And... It did not work. Not out of the box.

Long story short and a debugging session later: current GIT versions of libav / ffmpeg have changed the default codec for AC3 encoding to floating point format, but the ALSA a52 plugin supports only the signed integer format. You need to get the current source code from GIT for alsa-plugins for a working a52 plugin.

Very sweet, that works, without any race conditions, yet one drawback: the ALSA "dmix" software mixer works only on hardware devices. Of course you cannot dmix an AC3 stream, thus only one application at a time will be able to play sound on this device. How annoying. Especially when knotify starts a kdeinit4 process that keeps blocking the sound interface.

The upmix pipe is nice, but quite complex and limited to applications which have piped output. Maybe we can get the latency down and probably can get sox out of the mix... ALSA can remix channels with the "route" plugin, and it can output to a pipe. Let's put the following in the ~/.asoundrc:

pcm.stereo21 {
  type route
  slave {
        pcm "iec958mux"
        channels 6
  }

  ttable.0.0 1;         # front left
  ttable.1.1 1;         # front right

  ttable.0.2 0;         # rear left
  ttable.1.3 0;         # rear right

  ttable.0.4 0;         # center left (muted)
  ttable.1.4 0;         # center right (muted)

  ttable.0.5 0.5;       # sub left
  ttable.1.5 0.5;       # sub right

  hint {
    description "Stereo to 2.1"
  }

}

pcm.iec958mux {
  type file
  slave.pcm null
  file "|/usr/local/bin/play-5.1"
  format wav
}

This is exactly the "sox" part of the pipe, and every audio player that can output to an ALSA "PCM" device can use it:

aplay -Dstereo21 test-stereo-48k.wav

The stereo21 PCM performs the upmix and sends the resulting stream to the iec958mux PCM, which will pipe it to /usr/local/bin/play-5.1

And here comes the surprisingly tricky part. In a first iteration it looked like this:

aften -v 0 - -  | \
mplayer -rawaudio format=0x2000 -demuxer rawaudio -ao alsa:device=iec958 -ac hwac3 -really-quiet -

We're using aften because of lower latency and that I couldn't find a way to tell ffmpeg to STFU — it keeps printing stuff to console whatever I do. As you can imagine, this only almost works. Mplayer complains about underruns. As "aften" is just a converter without being able to output to ALSA, it leaves us no choice than abusing vlc for the task:

aften -v 0 - -  | vlc -I dummy stream:///dev/stdin

But this results in a hanging vlc because it does not catch end of file of the pipe (it blocks SIGPIPE). We need to kill it explicitly. With SIGKILL. As vlc also blocks SIGCHLD, it is not enough to kill the script. Since the "dummy" interface of vlc isn't capable of writing the PID (only the interactive interfaces are), we need to write a wrapper vlc-pipe:

#!/bin/sh
echo $$ >$1
exec vlc -I dummy stream:///dev/stdin

The argument of the script is the file name to write the PID of vlc to. With some additional armor around it, our play-5.1 script looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

WAITTIME=0.5
PIDDIR="$HOME/.cache/play-5.1"
LOCKFILE="$PIDDIR/lock"
PLAYERPID="$PIDDIR/player"

[ -e "$PIDDIR" ] || mkdir "$PIDDIR"
while [ -e "$LOCKFILE" ] ; do sleep $WAITTIME ; done
echo $$ >"$LOCKFILE"

(aften -v 0 - - ; sleep $WAITTIME ; kill -9 $(cat "$PLAYERPID")) | \
vlc-pipe "$PLAYERPID"

sleep $WAITTIME
rm "$LOCKFILE" "$PLAYERPID"

We assume a maximum latency of half a second, which is indeed enough. Extremely ugly, but at first, it seems to work reliably. Thus, let's see what happens if we make it the default PCM. And of course add the automatic rate conversion to 48 kHz sampling rate. Just add the following few lines to ~/.asoundrc

pcm.!default {
  type plug;
  slave {
    pcm stereo21;
    rate 48000;
  }
}

Yes! That works! Until you start firefox and play flash animations.

We end up with hanging instances vlc again, because opposed to vlc the play-5.1 script does catch signals, and if a process closes the ALSA device before the half-second sleep is over, we'll have a hanging vlc again, and stale lock files on top of it. Ugh. Okay, we might be able to catch most races eventually, but I'd very much prefer to avoid using vlc altogether.

How to construct a 2.1 signal from a stereo signal? We are going to encode it as AC3 ("Dolby Digital"), with the original stereo channels left and right mapped to front left and right, center and rear channels being muted, and bass getting the sum of half of the level of left and right channel. Strictly speaking, we should run the the bass signal through a low pass, but it is not necessary for my speaker system, as the active bass box has a built in low pass with an adjustable cutoff frequency.

As a first attempt, let us just create such a signal. We're going to do this the Unix way: with pipes. Since sox has some issues with WAV streams on non-seekable input such as pipes, and it does not come with ffmpeg bindings on openSUSE for legal reasons, let's first create a PCM stream from anything with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i - -ar 48k -f s16le - 

It'll take anything from stdin and convert it to an 48 KHz sampling rate 16 bit signed little endian integer PCM stream. Thinking about it, it probably should only take the first two channels from the input, but let's ignore that for now. Now pipe that to sox to create a six channel WAV stream according to above mapping:

ffmpeg -i - -ar 48k -f s16le - | \
sox -t s16 -L -c 2 -r 48k - -t wav - remix 1 2 0 1,2 0 0

If you are wondering about the channel order for surround sound in WAV files (and thus expected by the AC3 encoder): it is front left, front right, front center, lfe (bass), rear left, rear right as defined by Microsoft. The channel order for AC3 is even weirder (ATSC A/52 standard, section 5.4.2.3, table 5.8), fortunately the encoder is taking care of this.

Talking about encoding, we need to convert it to AC3 with ffmpeg next:

ffmpeg -i - -ar 48k -f s16le - | \
sox -t s16 -L -c 2 -r 48k - -t wav - remix 1 2 0 1,2 0 0 | \
ffmpeg -i - -ab 192k -ac 6 -f ac3 -

Now we just need something to actually write the stream to the audio device. Mplayer can do this for us, however don't ask how long it took me to find all the options:

ffmpeg -i - -ar 48k -f s16le - | \
sox -t s16 -L -c 2 -r 48k - -t wav - remix 1 2 0 1,2 0 0 | \
ffmpeg -i - -ab 192k -ac 6 -f ac3 - | \
mplayer -rawaudio format=0x2000 -demuxer rawaudio -ao alsa:device=iec958 -ac hwac3 -really-quiet -

Let's try that and 'cat' an MP3 file to this pipe... Yes, we have sound! A quick test with Daft Punk — Tron Legacy Soundtrack: oomph oomph!!

The latency is even bearable.

Unfortunately, using the pipe as the output to VLC results in mplayer complaining about underruns frequently. Also, other applications don't even allow piping their audio output. But the approach is still good to play single files and experiment a bit without having to confuse the whole audio setup of the system.

I recently upgraded my set of speakers after my old Braun boxes finally reached their end of life. The "surrounds" of the speakers were degraded too far after almost 30 years. Given that the speaker system was from Braun's budget series of speakers (still relatively expensive at the time) it does not make sense to refurbish it. So I replaced the front speakers with a set of Nubert nuJubilee 35 (comparable to nuLine 32) speakers. If you are a fan of the 70th classic music sound like me: give Nubert speaker systems a try. At least the nuLine series is quite close to the sound of medium to large Brauns, though slightly more modern (i.e., more bass.)

The center, rear and bass speakers were from a Teufel Magnum E system, which barely worked well enough with the Braun speakers, but does not fit to the new speakers. The center was always far too small, so I replaced it with a nuLine WS-12. Could have a bit more bass, however as I can only mount the center hanging on a shelf and everything larger would be too heavy, this has to do. And it sounds great when watching movies! Alas, the sound of the bass box doesn't fit anymore, and the rears were also too limited, thus I ended up with two new rear speakers (nuLine DS-22) and a bass box (nuJubilee 35), completing the upgrade.

The new system sounds exactly the way I want it to sound. Probably way too dry for other people, but perfect for me. The only thing that buggers me is the AV receiver: With stereo signals, I can either have stereo output, but that won't feed the bass. Or I can have a Dolby ProLogic II upmix which does weird things. Luckily, the receiver can be configured to NOT send a sum signal to the center speaker in that mode, but it still has some phase shift and delay on the rears. This is usually okay for pop music, but I do not want to hear the trombone from almost-rear right when listening to an opera... I cannot get any analog line out signal from a digital source, either. Said opera recording, even though a digital production, was mastered with vinyl records in mind, so it doesn't have any frequencies low enough for the bass box to be needed, but I do have some recordings that would benefit from a 2.1 "upmix". Or even 4.1 with just the unmodified stereo signal sent to the rears.

Since I'm playing all recordings I own from a openSUSE 11.4 system via TOSLINK / SPDIF / IEC958, how about creating the upmix on the machine, encode it as AC3 and use SPDIF pass-through to send it to the AV receiver? Sounds simple, it even is, but information about how to do it is hard to find, unless you know that instead of googling for "alsa ac3", which gives you tons of information on how to split up a 5.1 signal to analog output, you have to google for... Nope, won't tell you yet. ;-)