The Richter Scale^®

While on our travels in Fiji recently, a small creative streak overtook us, and we (the Bonaire-based Richters) decided to assemble an image for Christmas time and our annual greeting to friends, family, and associates alike. See below.

The above image is composed using the bark of a coconut tree, flower blossoms (including that of a Plumeria/Frangipani on top), and shells of small cowries found while wandering the beach, as well as a cork we found). The result is our Tropical Christmas Tree.

With that, we’d like to wish you all (early) a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Jake, Linda, Krystyana, and Bas Richter

Life as a home schooling parent has been rather busy of late, hence the lack of posts here in this blog. However, as part of our homeschooling efforts, we are also traveling quite a bit more now. To document those travels, we have now set up a new blog and web site to share our experiences with our friends and family, and anyone else interested.

That site is located at http://www.TheTravelingRichters.com. Please check it out.

All travel related posts and reviews that would have otherwise gone here in this blog will now appear there. I will continue posting technology comments and reviews here, however.

Living on a small Dutch Caribbean island (we hit 10 years of living on Bonaire in a couple of weeks) is quite an interesting experience, especially as we have a blend of two cultures here - a Caribbean influence as well as a Dutch one. For as long as I recall, Herman Wouk’s Don’t Stop the Carnival was recommended reading for anyone thinking of living here on Bonaire, but now thanks to dear Dutch friends (that’s you, Martin & Angela), we have found a new tome to help us understand the Dutch-ness of Bonaire.

The book is called The UnDutchables, and it’s a humorous dissection of Dutch culture as well as the drivers and motivators behind observable Dutch behavior.

While The UnDutchables has an obviously strong link to mother Holland and activities there, and is intended primarily for English speaking expats living in The Netherlands, I have found that many of the examples apply equally well in the Dutch Caribbean. We have Dutch friends on Bonaire, as well as on neighboring Curacao and Aruba, and boy, does this book nail some of their traits to a tee! And some of those behaviors have rubbed off on some of the Antilleans we know here too. If only we had had a copy of this book 10 years ago, we might have dealt with certain situations better!

The authors also have a web site - http://www.UnDutchables.com - to accompany the book. Ironically, the book is also available writtin in Dutch to help so-called “Cloggies” understand their fellow “Kikkerlanders”. The Dutch friends who gave us this book found much of the content to be dead-on accurate (and funny) as well, incidentally.

Highly recommended with a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

I wonder if and when a similar book, written in Dutch, about Americans, will be produced to help the Dutch understand our frailties, foibles, and motivations?

One of my many projects includes playing with WebCams in interesting places. In the last few weeks, with help from friends, I have managed to install a new underwater WebCam and move another one as well as install another top side WebCam here on the island of Bonaire.

View from the new Bonaire Pier ReefCam

View from the updated Bonaire Wreck ReefCam

The new Yellow Sub PierCam

The above are images from these various cameras. The Pier ReefCam is an interesting design. I used a waterproof NTSC bullet camera (so named because of its shape), encased it in resin, protected the cable with an off-the-shelf garden hose, and then mounted it on a 2x4. It’s not pretty, as seen below, but it gets the job done.

The new Bonaire Pier ReefCam

Live images from these cameras can be found at http://www.BonaireWebCams.com.

In case any of my readers, family, and friends were planning on visiting with Linda and myself for our traditional annual New Year’s Day pot-luck event, to which one and all have always been openly invited, I regretfully hereby inform you that Linda and I have decided to cancel this event, indefinitely.

This past New Year’s Day pot-luck marked our 22nd year of having an annual pot luck event. It first originated as the Wing-Ding-A-Thon (due to my addiction to Buffalo Wings) held each October starting in 1985 for a few years, and then evolved into the “Yeah! It’s Summer Party” (and potluck). That continued until 1997 when Linda and I moved to Bonaire. The first year the party was held on January 1st was in 1998, and it has continued to be held that day without fail, even when we had to struggle to get back on-island in time to finalize our shopping for the party, or when, like in 2006, I had to leave early the next morning to attend a conference in the U.S.

Our lives have slowly been changing, and with a recent decision to home school our children starting this summer and Linda’s recent knee replacement surgery, we find ourselves in need of some other changes, among them ones which include the flexibility of possibly missing our first Bonaire New Year’s Eve in the coming year or two because we’re off doing something interesting and unusual with the children in some exotic location.

We figured it would be better to give a lot of advanced notice on this subject since there are folks on BT and elsewhere that have planned their vacations to Bonaire in order to join us on that nice day. Bless them.

We have enjoyed the company of many of you, both at the potluck as well as various BBQs we hosted over the years, never mind dinner’s at Gibi’s and elsewhere, but it’s time for us to move on from the big party into a more sedate socializing mode, like small dinners out.

We are also looking forward to opening a small private art gallery in our home here on Bonaire to show off Linda’s and my art and will have small wine & cheese-type gatherings there on occasion between travels and other commitments. Construction is going on as we speak - see the image below from our private WebCam:

Jake’s Construction Cam

At some point we may resume some sort of annual event, but until we fully understand and embrace all the challenges of schooling both kids at home (which we expect to take the equivalent of at least one person working full time) we are hesitant to make any further or future commitments to a regular event like that now.

Our apologies to any folks that have already made plans, but if we’re home on January 1st, feel free to drop in and say hi but don’t expect a party to be going on

The timing is interesting. A few weeks ago I got a notice from the U.S. Consulate on the neighboring island of Curaçao requesting that I register on a U.S. State Department web site:

If you are an American citizen living or traveling in Aruba or the Netherlands Antilles, the U.S. State Department and the Consulate General in Curaçao strongly encourage you to register your trip on the State Department’s travel registration website at https://travelregistration.state.gov/. 

Since then I have seen a number of blogs run by military strategists discuss the possible invasion of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao by Venezuelan dictator and madman President Hugo Chavez.

The various blogs are:

- Strategy Page - The Dutch Defend Their World Empire
- The Dignified Rant - Dutch Treat
- Strategy Page - Might Venezuela Looks for Justice
- Pito’s Blog - What Would Happen If Venezuela Invaded Curacao

In reviewing the above blogs, it appears the primary source for this topic of Venezuela invading the ABC islands stems from the Strategy Page web site. But I find this particular quote chilling:

But for the last two years, Venezuelan officials, including the country’s demagogic president, Hugo Chavez, have made numerous public statements about the “reunification” of the islands of the Dutch West Indies (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaτao) with Venezuela.

The reality is that Venezuela is only 50 miles from Bonaire, and they could invade and take over the island in mere hours. The other reality is that such hostilities would probably give the West a great excuse to remove Chavez from power. But Chavez, at least from where I sit, is a cowboy - a socialist cowboy with far too much oil money in his hands - and thus capable of most anything the rest of us would consider crazy.

Bonaire’s change of status from being part of the Netherlands Antilles to being a remote municipality of The Netherlands, scheduled for December 15, 2008, can’t come soon enough for my taste, assuming that at the very least it serves as a further deterrent to Chavez’s purported desire to reunify the islands with Venezuela. However, the blogs I list above stress Holland’s inability to respond militarily to any incursion, so as an American living abroad, I can only hope that my registering with the State Department as requested will make sure the U.S. military knows where to find me should Chavez decide he wants to claim the ABCs for his own.

Registering your trip allows Embassies and Consulates abroad to send you newsletters and time-sensitive travel warnings and public announcements specific to the areas in which you will be traveling or living.  The information you provide also makes it easier for them to contact you in case of emergency, or to contact your family or friends in the United States in the event of an emergency abroad.  Registration will also allow residents of Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles to receive notification when the vice consul will be on your island.

But still, the timing of the registration request is curious. Maybe the U.S. Consulate over in Curaçao knows something we don’t?

As some of you know, my wife Linda suffers from Rheumatoid Arthritis in her right knee. During her recent semi-annual visit back to New Hampshire to see her Rheumatologist, it was decided that it was time for her to get her knee completely replaced. That much needed surgery has now been scheduled for April 5th - just about 5 weeks from now, back in New Hampshire.

The net result is that Linda will be off-island for about 2 months for pre-surgery, surgery, recovery, and physical therapy.

And during that time, I will be both mom and dad to the kids, providing the chauffeur services that Linda normally provides (to/from school and activities).

During the week that Linda was gone in January, I learned quickly that I could manage about 3-4 hours of working time during the average day, and the rest of it was shot. And working late at night is not an option because I need to be up at 6:30am to get the kids ready and off to school.

So, in anticipation of not being able to get a lot of work done when Linda leaves towards the end of March, I had to cancel my planned press trips to attend the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in San Francisco and the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show in Las Vegas, both starting next week. As such, I will necessarily be reporting from afar. And I still have a huge backlog of blog items and other projects to work on too, so maybe it’s good that I’m not going.

I am not sure how soon I will be able to travel after Linda (our very own Bionic Woman after surgery) returns to Bonaire in late May - a lot depends on how mobile she is, and whether she can drive, but I suspect I will be staying with the kids (and home with Linda) through the end of June, which is when school ends here on Bonaire. That’s a good thing though, as I am already starting to spend part of my afternoons getting our daughter ready for home schooling (she starts 7th grade as a home schooler in August), and doing projects with our son as well. This will also be the longest contiguous stretch I have spent with the kids since 2001 or so. That part’s a bit sad in retrospect - the last few years have been a whirlwind of travel, with me typically being away more often than not, although last year we did manage to spend almost three months traveling with the kids.

This morning a friend called to say that humpback whales had been spotted in the water off Bonaire’s Pink Beach area, which is only about a 10 minute drive from my house. Humpbacks are exceedingly rare here, so I grabbed Linda, a tripod, and a camera with a big lens, and headed out.

We saw two whales breach right as we arrived, but did not get a chance to take pictures - they went back under too quickly.

So while waiting for them to resurface (they didn’t do that where we could see them, and we had to leave after about 25 minutes), I spotted the above pictured special denizens of Bonaire, Caribbean Flamingos - more exactly a flight of them - coming back from feeding in nearby Venezuela to nest here on Bonaire.

The wide shot is what I shot with my Nikon D2x with a Nikon 80-400mm VR lens at 400mm. The close-up is a crop of that same image. Note the nice Bonaire scene in the cropped shot - blue and turquoise waters, sunny skies, a dive boat in the background, and of course, flamingos.

I know over the years I have subjected many of my readers to the “woes” of living on Bonaire, a small Caribbean island with, among other things, lousy TV service, and obviously no U.S. ZIP code. You might ask why TV is even important when living in paradise, and would answer that mindless entertainment is needed even here.

The reason the ZIP code (or more specifically, not having one) is important is because it means we cannot get Electronic Program Guides - EPGs - see my post on “TV Time Shifting in Paradise” from over a year ago about this.

I have managed to cobble together a partial EPG on my new HP z565 Digital Home Entertainment Center (a Windows XP Media Center Edition PC that’s designed to sit in your living room) by using a Miami-area ZIP code, and then renumbering and deleting channels as best I can. It at least works for three major U.S. networks, Cartoon Channel, HBO, Showtime, and Disney, and has already been useful. As an added bonus, I can stream recorded shows to the Xbox 360 in my bedroom should I choose to.

However, an acquaintance recently reminded me that I am paying for an expensive business connection for DirecTV in my office in Marshall, Texas, where I only spent a few weeks last year, with the TV there being unwatched the rest of the time (and I only watch it for background noise in the evenings when I am there). The Samsung DirecTV decoder also has an 80GB driver and TiVo service. But, still it’s rather expensive per-hour viewing cost.

Around the same time as I was reminded of this, a couple of other friends mentioned that they had installed Slingbox devices so they could watch their home TV signals remotely while traveling. Ding ding ding - bells went off in my addled brain.

So, during my most recent visit to Marshall a few weeks ago, I installed a Slingbox Pro box (ordered from Amazon.com - about $218), and I couldn’t be much happier. The Slingbox Pro device takes video signal input in the form of either a cable TV signal, composite video or S-Video plus audio, or HDMI (with an optional cable) digital input for HD signals. I plugged in my DirecTV TiVo box, hooked up the infrared transmitters that come with the Slingbox Pro so they could control the DirecTV box, and I was off.

The Slingbox software, which maker Slingmedia calls “SlingPlayer”, was easy to set up - both to control the Slingbox itself, as well as provide the necessary controls on my notebook to view my TV signal. I also had Linda try it back on Bonaire after I set it up, and she was able to get it going there too. The really neat thing about SlingPlayer is that it knows all about the particular DirecTV decoder I have, and even has a virtual remote control (looks identical to the physical remote) that I can manipulate with my mouse. That in turns means I can access all the TiVo functionality of the box remotely too. And it all works over an Internet connection. The more upstream capability you have to send out a signal, the better. In my case the DSL connection at my office in Texas offers 768Kbps upstream, sufficient for a pretty reasonable 640x480 video stream from the Slingbox.

After I got back from Texas and CES I went and set up Slingplayer software on the HP z565 in my living room, and can now watch live TV from Texas in my living room. Full screen on my 61” TV is too grainy and jumpy, but I can get a decent image at about 24” diagonal, which is just fine to catch up on missed shows and programming I would otherwise not get. It also means I can stop paying $1.99 for missed episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, and Lost. And, I can also watch it from any PC with the SlingPlayer software. And for certain handheld devices, there’s even Slingplayer Mobile version for mobile phones and PDAs running the Windows Mobile operating system.

I’m also considering installing another Slingbox at my in-laws in New Hampshire so I can watch their TV signal here on Bonaire, kind of as a back-up of sorts (no TiVo there yet, though, but I can fix that too).

My biggest regret with the Slingbox is that I didn’t think of getting one sooner.

My next issue to solve is how to get a video signal from the output of my big screen TV in my living room to the small TV in my kitchen without running cables (my wife hates cables across the floor or ceiling). We have concrete walls, so there’s no good way to run them inside the walls. The concrete walls also effectively destroy my use of a wireless AV transmitter - those really need to be line of sight, or at least through a wood/drywall panel, not eight inches of concrete in order to have an interference free image.

However, if I wait long enough, Sling Media will be selling the SlingCatcher - a box which will let me use my network connection (wired or wireless) to receive TV input from a Slingbox either in the same building or anywhere else there’s a Slingbox I have access to.

I give the Sling Media Slingbox Pro a 9.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

My family and I had a rare experience yesterday - we were invited to a friend’s home on Bonaire to meet former NASA Astronaut Charles Bolden. Charlie, as he asked us to call him, is on Bonaire with his wife and daughter as part of a week long visit to share his experiences - both on terra firma and in space - with children, teens, and anyone else interested, in the hopes that they will see that the sky truly is the limit in what one can accomplish if one works hard enough towards achieving one’s goals. 

Pictured above, in a photo by Bob Lassiter, are my family (Linda, Bas, Krystyana, and myself) with Astronaut Charles Bolden.

As part of his visit to Bonaire, Bolden will be announce the winners of several space related contests set up to coincide with his visit.

Never having knowingly met an astronaut before, we were pleasantly surprised to find Charlie to be a very warm, engaging, and just plain nice person. His friendly demeanor was even able to crack the usually shy facade our son Bas puts up when strangers try to engage him in conversation, and to my mind, that’s saying a lot. Charlie is sure to be a big hit with the schools he is visiting next week with his obvious charm and delight in sharing his world with children and adults alike.

The other thing which was unexpected, but in hindsight should not have been, was that Charlie was shorter than I had expected - and this was a common comment heard at the small reception we attended. One just assumes that someone who has exited the Earth’s atmosphere would be tall and imposing, but the hindsight comes in that U.S. Air Force pilots, and by extension, astronauts, have maximum height requirements due to the limited cockpit space and the extreme cost of space suits, which I understand to be produced to fit a limited range of body types.

My wife and I are pleased to have been able to help sponsor Charles Bolden’s trip to Bonaire, and hope that he will inspire at least a few of the youths on the island to reach for the stars.