The Richter Scale^®

Back at the end of March, my family and I took a one week vacation aboard the S/V Polynesia, one of the ships of the Windjammer fleet. These four masted schooners are small cruise ships in their own right, holding around 100 passengers (capacity varies based on which ship you’re on), and are pretty campy and persona(ble). Definitely not as formal, rigid, stuffy, or impersonal as the big cities-on-the-sea from cruise lines such as Carnival. No black tie nights on a Windjammer cruise. Windjammer cruising is also called “Bare Foot Cruising”.

Anyhow, we had a great time with Capt. Casey and his crew, seeing Sint Maarten, Anguilla, Nevis, St. Kitts, and St. Barths. Highly recommended.

But, the point of this blog post is that on that trip, we took some pictures, and my ever talented painting wife recently finished paintings based loosely on those photos.

You can find these paintings under the titles “Windjammer” (how apropos!) and “O Sunset” on her web site at www.LindaRichter.com (I won’t repost the pictures here because they are too large).

An interesting footnote is that the S/V Polynesia is now calling on Bonaire every week for a couple of days. We’ll have to hook up with Captain Casey once we’re all back on island at the same time and show him the paintings.

I had over two weeks in July where I vacationed in New England, visiting with my in-laws, checking out an inn in Vermont where Linda and I took some cooking classes, heading out to the coast for lobsters, and visiting with a couple of friends. I’ll cover some of these in future blog entries.

However for now, let me share one of the highlights of my time away from most work and from this blog - trying out a Segway Human Transporter.

Turns out one of the friends we visited has an “in” with Segway, based in nearby (to them and us at the time) Manchester, New Hampshire, and managed to bring home a couple of loaner Segway HTs for us to try out.

What a blast! Segways have been out long enough so that the idea of being able to balance on two wheels doesn’t seem so outlandish any more, but actually trying one is still a thing of new found joy - I felt like a big kid playing around on one. After our hosts felt I had shown enough aptitude, I even managed to graduate to “fast” mode (peak of 12.5 miles per hour) from training mode (5 mph max).  That’s done by using a different magnetic key to “start” the Segway HT.

Driving one of these requires a bit of practice. You move forward by leaning forward, and slow down or even go back by leaning back. Turning is accomplished by turning the left handle on the handle bar. Turning gave me the most trouble - I kept twisting the handle in the wrong direction - that’s problematic when moving at a good clip, as I discovered. Once you get in the groove it’s pretty easy to operate. I only wish there were an even faster mode available.

Linda and both the kids tried out the Segway HT as well. Linda was okay with it, Bas (age 8) loved it until he collided with a park car at a low velocity (turns out he was also a bit too lightweight for the unit and it couldn’t easily detect his weight shifts), and Krystyana (age 10) took to it as well as I did.

I am contemplating one of these for back home on Bonaire, but am concerned if I had one, I’d just get lazy - I should be riding my bike instead of using powered transport. For folks in urban areas, I would think the Segway HT would be a great thing though - you can use it on the sidewalk in some cities even.

On The Richter Scale, I give the Segway HT an 8.5 out of 10.0, especially for being fun and cool (never mind practical).

I’m in Washington DC at the present, and as I was wandering back to my hotel about 30 minutes ago, a motorcade with about a half dozen motorcycle cops, a couple of limos, and several Suburbans with lots of antennae and a bullet-proof-vested military guy in one open window, drive by. One of the limos looks like it has the Presidential Seal flying on one of its flags (the other being an American flag). All vehicles that had flashing lights and sirens had them going.

Here’s the odd thing - second to last in the entourage was an ambulance, also with lights flashing.

Anyone know if this is normal?

On a footnote to the previous blog entry, my camera was tucked away too deep in my backpack, and I couldn’t get it out in time to snap pictures - but I did get intensly stared at by the military-type person looking out of one of the giant SUVs. I fear he might have yelled at me that photos were not allowed due to heightened security concerns, although I doubt they would have stopped the motorcade just for that.

So here I was today, at the McPherson Square Metro station (the Metro being the Washington, DC subway system), awed by the cavernous hall of the station.

I pull out my camera with wide angle lens, intent on capturing the scene for posterity, planning a long exposure to capture all the subtle lighting, when a uniformed official comes up to me and (politely) explains that as the Metro is under heightened security, no photography
is permitted.

I grumbled a bit and put my camera away, and as I stewed about not being able to take my picture, the situation struck me as more and more ludicrous. I realized I was only approached because I had a real camera in hand.

After all, with multi-megapixel cell phone cameras now on sale everywhere, it would be very easy for a determined doer of no good to take all the detailed pictures they wanted.

Heck, if they wanted to be truly thorough, a pocket video recorder with a tiny low lux security camera would do the trick. You could even have one person carry the tiny recorder and another handle the small camera transmitting the image wirelessly. Anyone remember the annoying pop-up advertisements for the X-10 cameras? Those thing were wireless and
worked okay at short range.

And what about those darned sketch artists? You don’t need a camera to capture imagery - a notebook and pencil work just fine and add the ability to annotate in real time.

So, as with much of the “official security” I see during my travels, this enforcement in the Metro stations is feel-good from a PR and self-congratulatory perspective, but truly shallow and ineffective when it comes to protecting against truly determined people.

I wonder if anyone will get incensed enough by all this false security and the related ill-conceived and executed policies to start creating photo flash mobs as a form of mass civil disobedience, with all images posted to Flickr for widest distribution.

Imagine a single security guard dealing with hundreds of people simultaneously whipping out their photo cell phones, camcorders, and digital cameras and taking pictures in public places where someone has bizarrely determined photography could be a security risk.

--------------
Update 1 - July 31, 2005 - 17:29 EDT

My experience above reminded me of a similar experience related on BoingBoing a couple of months ago about a photographer in Pittsburgh who was asked to stop taking pictures of a building (non-governement at that) for security reasons. Here’s the link to the blog entry.

--------------
Update 2 - July 31, 2005 - 19:18 EDT

Okay. There must have been some sort of vibe in the air today.

As I read through the last couple of days of BoingBoing postings a few minutes ago, lo and behold, there’s a report of a photography flashmob in San Francisco yesterday, as the result of a photographer harrassed by a security guard for taking pictures in a public place a few days ago.

Photos of the event have even been posted to Flickr here and also here too.

Weird coincidence (mind you I submitted the initial commentary in this entry via my Sidekick II cellphone (moblog) completely unaware of the event in San Francisco - I would have also included a pic from the Sidekick to prove my point but the camera is the Sidekick is pretty crappy and doesn’t deal well at all with low light conditions such as those in man made caverns).

Yay for the concept of photography flashmobs and the first successful implementation! Photographers everwhere should rejoice that their First Amendment rights are being defended.

An annual Dutch tradition is the catch of the season’s first herring, a small fish which some consider a delicacy. The first herring harvest, something which typically occurs in May, is called “Hollandse Nieuwe” (means “Dutch New"), and the Dutch celebrate this by event by gorging themselves on the raw (or nearly so) herring, along with liberal amount of Genever (a Dutch gin), and perhaps raw onions and pickles.

Living, as I do, on an island which is part of the Dutch Kingdom, and thus has a lot of Dutchmen (and women) living on it, I’ve been privileged to join in the celebration of Hollandse Nieuwe, and am usually the only American present. This year, the first “haaring” showed up on June 1st at the Mai-Mai restaurant on Bonaire, accompanies by load Dutch music:

Pictured above is a plate of fresh Dutch herring right off the KLM flight from Amsterdam, served with pickles, raw onions, and bread.

To eat the herring, you pick it up by the tail (it has been scaled and deboned, incidentally), optionally rubs it up against the finely chopped onions on the plate (so as to have some adhere to the herring), then tilts your head back, open your mouth and lower the herring into it, taking as big a bite as you can. See my demonstration below:

The more timid will cut their herring into smaller bite size pieces and eat it with a fork.

It’s not nearly as fishy as one might think, and I am sure the fish oils are very good for you. If you eat sushi or sashimi, this is not far removed from that.

More on this tradition can be found here.

USA Today ran an article in it’s Life section today entitled The Caribbean: Leaving is taxing, which showed the departure taxes for various Caribbean islands.

The island I live on, Bonaire, is often criticized for its high departure tax of $20, but compared to Aruba ($37), Turks and Caicos ($30), St. Maarten ($30), Jamaica (soon to be $30 or 35), and others, Bonaire’s cheap.

What makes Bonaire seem expensive is that due to historical reasons, airport tax is sold independent of airline tickets, whereas most other destinations include (hide?) the airport departure tax in the ticket price you pay the airline.

If you’re like me - married, with two pre-teen kids whose hands never seem to be clean enough, and whose abilities to put things away without being asked are utterly lacking - you have undoubtedly seen your CDs or DVDs get damaged or even lost.

Further, if you travel a lot, while it’s nice that most notebook computers now have DVD drives, they suck a noticable amount of extra power if you want to play a movie while in flight and power jacks aren’t available.

For CDs, you can simply back them up by ripping them to your computer - my whole collection of hundreds of CDs is stored digitally on my system at home, and the original CDs are put in my storage room.

With DVDs no such simple option exists, or should I say, existed. That’s because the movie industry decided to encrypt DVDs, and then using its political clout, got the U.S. Congress to pass a bill (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - the DMCA) which made it illegal to circumvent encryption. By doing that they technically robbed consumers of the right to make back-ups.

It didn’t take long for ingenious teenagers to figure out the encryption and break it, for the stated purpose of being able to play DVDs on Linux systems. While the simple code needed to break the CSS decryption spread over the Internet like wildfire, the movie industry and U.S. government worked hard to try and curtial this dissemination of information (and failed, in my opinion).

There are now dozens of programs which let one rip a DVD to one’s hard disk (one of the better ones, as I understand it is DVD Decrypter, but the problem is that the resulting files run 4.5-9GB on average, and even with today’s latest 500GB drives, it makes ripping a whole DVD collection (we have over 300 DVDs in ours here at home) unfeasible.

Enter a program called RatDVD, which will take a non-encrypted DVD image and produce a 1.3GB (on average) .ratDVD file which is the entire DVD movie with all menus and controls. The output quality is surprisingly good, with .ratDVD files playing back in Windows Media Player 10 on Windows-based machine.

It takes a couple of hours to convert a 4.7GB DVD to a .ratDVD file on a moderatly fast PC.

The only drawback I have found is that there appears to be no way to fast forward or rewind a movie.

One added bonus - you can take a RatDVD file and expand it to burn back onto a DVD should you want to have a physical back-up instead of one on your hard disk.

In any event, for a free piece of software it’s pretty good, and it meets a so-far unfulfilled need, namely making back-ups of DVDs in a reasonable amount of space. No doubt the movie industry will not be happy with RatDVD, but since it actually does not circumvent encryption, it’s unlikely they will have much ability to stop RatDVD from proliferating. Plus it can be used for archiving home-made DVDs.

I’ve already started using RatDVD to archive DVDs I have made from my own home videos and slide shows I have made of group vacations for friends. And yes, I am making back-ups of some of the movies I plan to watch during my next set of travels so I don’t have to waste power and face potential damage to my original DVDs in transit.

I give RatDVD an 8.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

I have watched with some amusement as gasoline prices increase in the U.S. to new highs, then back off before rising again.

I’m not amused because I like seeing people suffer, but more that those complaining about high prices are apparently unaware that U.S. gas prices are still among the lowest in the western world.

Prices in Europe, for example, are typically at least 2x the prices in the U.S.

But, for a more accurate comparison, let’s take a look at gasoline prices here on Bonaire - we’re only 50 miles from Venezuela - the biggest oil producer in the region, but it might as well be a thousand miles for all the good it does us price-wise.

Gasoline is sold by the liter here. One U.S. gallon (liquid) is 3.7854 liters according to an online conversion I found.

A liter of Super costs 1.933 NAF, while a liter of Regular is 1.898 NAF. A NAF is a Netherlands Antillean Florin, also referred to as a Guilder. There are 1.78 of these to a U.S. dollar.

So, using all those numbers we end up with a cost of US$4.04 for a gallon of Regular gasoline and $4.11 for a gallon of Super. The average per capita income on Bonaire is probably around US$800/month after taxes, but on the flip side, it’s a small island, so you can’t drive too far without falling into the Caribbean Sea. However, with all the driving to/from school, work, and soccer momming my wife does, she has to fill the tank on her Toyota Corolla every 5-7 days.

Here’s the kicker - in neighboring Curacao, where we get all of our fuel from, the prices (which are all government regulated mind you) are 0.30 NAF lower per liter (based on personal observation about 16 days ago). This could lead into a huge discussion about how Curacao is always shafting its small sister island Bonaire, and that being one of the many reasons a referendum in Bonaire showed most want to separate from the Netherlands Antilles and Curacao and join more closely with Holland, but I’ll leave that for another day.

So, if your gas prices are under less than $3.00 per gallon, be happy - you’re still paying a lot less than the residents of Bonaire. Of course, higher gas prices are one of the many things we suffer with in exchange for the privilege of living on a small beautiful island in the Caribbean… Poor Internet service is another, but I’ll leave that for future discussion as well…

--

Update - June 27, 2005: A reader pointed out that I said the per capita income of the average Bonairean worker was $800/year. That was wrong - it’s about $800/month! It’s been corrected above.

Back in our naive days before we discovered the island of Bonaire, my wife and I purchased a time share at the Plaza Las Glorias in Cozumel, Mexico. It wasn’t a bad deal - it included about 30 weeks of vacations there or in trade via RCI. We enjoyed our stays there the few times we went, but then got busy, and then discovered Bonaire. That’s when we started using our weeks via RCI.

The RCI vacation exchanges were great, and in fact, we enjoyed them enough to go and regularly prepay our maintenance fees for several years at a time to lock in the rates.

Well, earlier this year I get a letter from a company, Palace Resorts which claimed that it was the new owner of our time share, and I needed to pony up close to a thousand dollars in “extraordinary fees”, plus a doubling of our old maintenance fees, or they would unilaterally cancel our time share agreement. Basically, this was pure blackmail, at least as it was presented. I e-mailed the recommended contact about our prepaid maintenance fees and asking for verification of their ownership of our contract, and never got a response. Repeated that process a month later and still no response.

Since then I attempted to deposit the 2006 week I had already paid the maintenance fee for, only to get a letter today which said my deposit encountered problems and we should contact the resort. So I sent off another e-mail to try an establish contact.

We also started doing some research on this issue on the web and came across all sorts of interesting things. Maybe this will help others who are just now starting to look at this issue in detail.

First, there is a Yahoo! Group - Palace Resorts Predicament - where there are about 800 messages dealing with this mess (which applies to a number of former SunClub properties in Mexico).

Next, there’s the site of the Plaza Las Glorias Time Share Owners Association (PLG-TSOA) - but if you click on the Home link, you get a notice that the site owner, Jim Van Gorder, closed the site for legal reasons (which, according to a post on the Yahoo! group mentioned above) was a cease and desist letter from Palace Resorts’ lawyers. Not sure what Jim had on his site that raised their wrath, but I would love to have a copy. (The cached version of this site’s home page on Google is non-offensive, although there is mention of a discussion group, so that may have been what raised Palace Resort’s ire.)

I also found a summary of the Palace Resort blackmail at The Timeshare Beat which was pretty informative in a general way.

However, the most interesting site we stumbled across was the Palace Resorts spite site, which appears to do an excellent job describing the issues and the moral and business character of Palace Resorts, at least in my limited experience with their “responsiveness”. I’ve gone and grabbed a PDF copy of that entire site in case the Palace Resort lawyers intimidate the site owner into shutting down too.

Via the above sites we have learned that they have been offering “vacation certificates” to some people, but not others, but seeing as we can’t even get them to reply to our correspondence, I’m not sure what we’ll find out. At this point we are out at least one year’s maintenance fees - effectively stolen from us, so needless to say (but I’ll say it anyhow), we’re not impressed or thrilled by Palace Resorts.

In any event, considering their non-existant customer service (from my perspective anyhow), as well as the heaps of complaints about them on-line, I would strongly urge anyone looking to vacation in Mexico to steer well clear of Palace Resorts.

Palace Resorts gets a big fat raspberry and 0.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale, the only goose egg I’ve ever awarded in my review and observation of things and places in this world.

After the Nintendo Media Briefing last Tuesday, held above the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland, a trendy open-air mall with a great view of the HOLLYWOOD sign in the hills, I found myself rather hungry.

As I am low-carbing it, my options are occasionally limited, with sashimi (that’s sushi without the rice) usually a pretty safe bet.

So I wander into this place several floors up called Koji’s Japan, where the words Sushi and Shabu Shabu are boldly displayed next to the restaurant name.

Most folks know what Sushi is (although on Bonaire, where I live, that word, and a variant, “Shushi”, means trash, of all things), but Shabu Shabu, and its cousin, Sukiyaki, is less well known.

Modern Shabu Shabu involves boiling a meal in a pan of water, and then eating the cooked food dipped in sauce, with rice. The last time I had Shabu Shabu, it was a rather elaborate set-up for two, at the Osaka Tea Garden in Nashua, New Hampshire, about a decade ago. My wife and I greatly enjoyed it, so I was thrilled to see that Koji’s was set up for individual-size Shabu Shabu.

As you can see in the above pictures, Koji’s Shabu Shabu includes the pot of boiling water, a platter with meats (that’s that part you order), a platter of vegetables to add to the meat, two dipping sauces (a sesame based one and a soy/vinegar based one), and some additional sauce condiments (scallions, fresh minced garlic, and minced daikon radish for texture).

They also provide a bowl of edamame (boiled and salted soy bean pods) which you can eat whenever - you pop the soy beans out of the pod (the pod is too chewy to eat).

When the water starts boiling you add things to the pot, let them cook, then take them out, dip them in sauce, and eat them (I skipped the rice because it is decidedly carb laden).

I ordered the mixed meat and seafood Shabu-Shabu, with came with premium beef, chicken, salmon, and tiger shrimp.

All the meat and seafood was very fresh, as were the vegetables.

Made for a great meal. And with the hamachi (yellowtail) sashimi appetizer I had, it made for a most excellent lunch. The service was excellent too, and the prices were very reasonable - $39.00 for everything including a nice tip and some green tea.

I give Koji’s Japan at Hollywood & Highland a stunning 9.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale (note that I have never given a 10.0, since that implies perfection, and I doubt there is such a thing).