On Texas and San Antonio

A few details I forgot to mention yesterday. We left Houston and drove, without air conditioning, for something in the neighbourhood of 300 km. By the time we got to San Antonio keeping my eyes open was becoming difficult. Driving is mentally draining, not physical work in the slightest, but staying alert for three hours at time is very exhausting, sort of like trying to sit through a baseball game.

We arrived at a hotel that Lesley decided was (from outside appearance) in acceptable condition (it turned out the inside was in pretty bad shape). I checked in, at which time the woman at the front desk asked for ID, I showed her my driver's licence and remarked that she had probably never seen one of those (Ontario driver's licence) before. She looked at it a while and said:

• "Oh you're from Cah-ni-dahh"
• "Yeah"
• "There was a guy from Cah-ni-dahh here just a few days ago, but he didn't have this on his licence. [rubbing the top part of the licence, as if to erase, where it reads "Ontario"] His started with a.. uhm, M I think."
• "Manitoba?"
• "Yeah that was it, Man-it-ob-ah."

Canadians rest easy, the Americans have heard of us!

The following morning we went out for... brunch, yeah that's it brunch. I declared that as I was in Texas I wanted Mexican food, we can have proper Asian food anytime but if I'm within spitting distance of the border I want Mexican at least once.

It turns out that San Antonio was built along a river, called, if I am reading the map correctly, the San Antonio river, there are a number of picturesque shops and restaurants along the side. If you are thinking tourist trap, well yes it was, but it was pretty, and if you were driving from Houston to say, El Paso, stopping for a walk along the San Antonio river would make for a pleasant change.

After the San Antonio river we went to the Alamo. Now I've been told that the Alamo has special meaning to Texans that the rest of us cannot understand and I will concede that is probably very true. First it was painfully obvious that the Mexicans were the evil invaders who were being held at bay by the brave and gallant soldiers, who are to a man, heroes. Second it was made painfully apparent that I was walking on a shrine, as if I was prancing up and down the Church of the Nativity or perhaps the site where Moses encountered a burning bush. Everyone talked in a hushed whisper, besides Lesley and myself no one was under the age of 60. Clear instructions were posted that we were not to touch the walls, evidently the walls are sacred.

Frankly the entire experience was creepy. Maybe because Canada never fought for its independence, maybe because Canada is a nation of compromise where we use words rather than guns to establish a national direction, but this borderline nationalism that I see in the United States, and veneration of military, it is of great concern. How can America lay claim to any moral authority, when its citizens have understanding of only the sword? Yes I am sure the guys who fought at the Alamo were brave, perhaps even gallant, but this deification, its not healthy.

After the Alamo we started driving North to Dallas, stopping on route at a massive outlet mall. I bought some fudge then took a nap, Lesley was overwhelmed and gave up after just a few stores. While I was buying the fudge the woman in the store complained about the cold (the temperature had dropped to about 10 degrees). I told her:

• This is not cold, where I'm from is cold.
• This is cold.
• No, cold means snow and sleet and freezing rain, this is not cold.
• Where are you from?
• Canada.
• I could never live there, I just could not survive that.

The legend of The Great White North continues!

As we drove it started to rain, rain turned to snow that melted on contact that turned to snow that accumulated. We arrived in Dallas at around 8:30.

Lesley decided she wanted fresh fruit, I decided that I could use something that wasn't processed and didn't have corn syrup added for sweetness. After extensive searching, I found a banana, Lesley found a cup of soup and and ice-cream sandwich. I miss Toronto, I miss fresh fruits and vegetables. (Heck even preserved fruits and vegetables.) When we asked the guy at the front desk where we could get some fresh fruit he pointed us to a Sam's Club. I miss the corner fruit stores that dot so many residential areas of Toronto. Texas is a state where everything is a suburb, there is almost no downtown and apparently no fresh fruit either. To any Texans who might read this, I'm sorry, but I've already been to Los Angeles and your cities bare a striking resemblance to a city everyone already agrees is totally dysfunctional.

The weather here is an awful lot better than in Canada, but I am still glad I live in a place where, cold means, real cold, not 10 degrees above zero, maybe its the cold makes us realise that the past belongs in the past and should not be a guide to the future.

On Houston

It occurs to me that yesterday I said I was satisfied with a fuel economy of 9L/100km, which is actually pretty bad for highway standards, except (and this will piss off everyone in Toronto who might read this post in the next few days) we needed the A/C (Air Conditioning). I'm so used to sub zero temperatures that when we arrived in Texas to 25 degree heat we had to run the A/C. Ironically, in Toronto an August day of 25 degrees would be almost sweater weather, but right now its sandals and T-shirts!

You don't really realise how bad A/C is until its mid July and you are sitting in stop and go traffic, its 35 degrees and and the A/C is just blasting away - our car has climate control so it automatically goes to full blast just to sustain 21 degrees inside the passenger compartment. Every time the traffic moved there would be no pickup, first gear felt like second, or maybe even third. That one time it hit home, if you can drive with a window open you can really save gas for better things. Last night on the drive from Houston to San Antonio I stopped for gas, not because we were close to needing it, but because I needed a break from driving. According to my Atlas of distances, the drive we made last night was 322km for which an entire quarter tank (about 20L) of gas of used. So I want to know, if a V6 270hp engine can get that kind of mileage (about 6.5L/100km) why can't every car do that on the highway? Is it such an outrageous standard? I don't think so.

Anyway yesterday was Sunday March 2, we woke up, well I woke up, I typed the post that you can see below, from March 1 and showered, twice in fact (I like showers), I even shaved off my side-burns, I ate breakfast. Then Lesley woke up, it was almost noon Eastern time when she got out of bed.

Then, wait for it... we drove! The sad fact is you can't even cross a street in Texas without driving. When I get home I am going to walk (or bike or skate) everywhere for the next month, and I don't care if its snowing, hailing, sleeting, or just plain raining! Anyway we went to the South end of Houston to the Visitor Centre of the Johnson Space Flight Centre.

Here are a few words of advice for space flight nerds (not meaning that as an insult, I totally geeked out when I finally saw what I wanted to see). Don't go to the Visitor Centre, I know, if you haul your rear end all the way to Houston... don't go. Trust me, the drive to the Visitor's centre requires driving South on I-45 to exit 25, then going East on NASA road for about a kilometer or two to the big sign at 1601 NASA road. You make the left and enter a parking lot where you pay $5 to park, then you pay $18.50 to enter the actual centre where there is... well not very much. A mock-up of the Space Shuttle's crew compartment, a model of the new Ares Booster, photos of every flight crew from Alan B. Sheppard right to the most recent Space Shuttle. (Yes there are references to the horrible things that happened in Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia.) Every Shuttle mission patch is on the wall of the food court (the food looks frightful). And they have some real space suits, including Pete Conrad's dirty pants from his EVA on Apollo 12. You will have to watch From the Earth to the Moon to get that joke though. There is a gift shop, that is horribly over priced, but other than that, the Visitor's centre is a good way to feel ripped off.

Here is my advice to space flight enthusiasts, you are on NASA road. East bound, at Point Lookout Drive you are supposed to make a left onto the parking lot of 1601 NASA road, don't. Keep going one more light to Saturn Lane, then turn left. Now make a quick right to the guard booth, ask them if you can see the big rocket. They will point you to a parking lot and a long building. Parking is free, enter the long building and be dazzled. There is, on its side separated at each stage, a full 363 feet Saturn V (that's 5, not the letter) booster from the top of the escape rocket to the bottom of the mighty F-1 engines. The booster includes the Command and Service module although the LEM is not included. So it is basically another Apollo 8, but on its side, without the fuel.

If you enter by the parking lot you can start at the top of the Emergency escape rocket, walk down to the bottom of the F-1 engines and then exit the building. You can see a number of other photo worthy remnants from the early days. A full blown Redstone Missile with a Mercury capsule on the top, just like the arrangement that carried Alan B. Sheppard into the history books. An entire exposed J-2 engine is also outside, remember a modified J-2 engine will be the driver of the new Constellation Project. There is even an H-1 engine like the type used in the Saturn 1 missile. But the thing I found most remarkable was the F-1 engine even had a serial number, it brings home how real everything is. These aren't mock-ups, these could have been the machines that landed Neil Armstrong on the moon, just of quick of which came out of the factory first is the only reason this F-1 is in Houston and not at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean.

Once you are done with NASA, go to the Museum of Fine Art in Houston. They have a Monet and a few Picasso's. Skip the photo's and contemporary stuff, its not worth seeing, frankly its kind of scary. But be warned, as you travel about, if the speed limit is a suggestion in Quebec, then it's an insult in Texas.

Anyway I will have some pictures, but I forgot the SD card reader at home and for some strange reason I cannot copy and paste through the USB port. (I need to reinstall Winblows.)

On Texas Medium!

Lesley and I decided, some time ago, it would be fun to go camping in New Mexico and maybe see the Grand Canyon and slip in the Hoover damn for good measure. Plans evolved and it became a flight to DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth) with a quick drive to Houston, then San Antonio, then New Mexico via El Paso. Then we got hit with budget. Specifically, because the new upgraded, appliances were delivered this week to our new house we have a $10 thousand outstanding on the Visa bill. We have changed our return date from Friday to Tuesday and will turn back towards DFW after we see San Antonio. New Mexico, the whole reason we came will have to wait. But at least I can lay claim to seeing the place that created George Walker Bush, the man who lost the 2000 election yet still became President, to the detriment of a nation. (I also get to be in Texas just as the Obama v. Clinton grudge match hits full blast on the airwaves.)

Speaking of Politics for a second, we are at a modest hotel in Houston as I write this, not far from what was probably once called the Houston Intercontinental Airport. It is called the George Bush Intercontinental Airport. I have a real issue with that. Just as the depression started to hit real hard, President Hoover and the United States congress authorized construction of a damn on the Colorado river not far from the small town of Las Vegas Nevada. Originally called the Boulder damn, it was renamed, during the term of President Hoover, to the Hoover damn. When FDR became president in 1933 one of the first things he had done was change the name back to the Boulder damn, you just don't name things after sitting presidents, its the height of arrogance to do that. (Yes the name was changed back to Hoover damn many years later, I think after Hoover died, but the point is, you want to honour a president wait the 4 or 8 years for him to leave office and then honour him, or, hopefully not next year but, her.)

Anyway a summary of events so far is in order.

On Friday, February 29, we were supposed to leave Toronto via Air Canada flight 1048, direct service to DFW, departing at 18:55. It snowed, hard, the flight was cancelled which was alright with me. We were stuck in the afternoon rush-hour disaster and had not even made it to Avenue Road and St. Clair by 17:30 when Lesley got through on a cell phone to Air Canada and found out about the cancellation.

Saturday, March 1, things went very near picture perfect, as far as a trip to Texas can go picture perfect. Our flight even pushed off from the gate a few minutes early. Now DFW airport is a HUGE airport, I mean you might have seen Terminal 1 in Toronto and think, that's pretty big, especially if you have to walk all the way from the metal detectors to one of the distant gates, but that's just peanuts compared to DFW. DFW is, by traffic volume I think, the third busiest airport in the United States and the largest airport by floor space. It also occupies places in the top ten for size, World wide. You would think, an airport of that magnitude would have little trouble slotting our dinky little 73 passenger airplane in, but no, we had to wait a good twenty minutes on the tarmac seat-belts fastened - for reasons that escape me, since we weren't moving - while the plane that occupied our gate loaded up and got out of the way. Yes we had landed and we were safe, but its still frustrating to be trapped in a plane like that.

We rented a car, obviously, ended up getting a Rav-4. After a quick lunch (breakfast at noon?) we bought a tour book of Texas and another for New Mexico then we drove from Dallas to Houston. The drive is about 400 km, and used about 36L of gas, which, when you factor in getting lost trying to escape DFW and the mind boggling lack of road signs, 9L/100Km is pretty good fuel economy, especially for a V6 engine. I'd be curious what kind of gas mileage I could get back home, where I actually know all the roads.

Texas is an ugly state. Yes everything is bigger in Texas, the vehicles (our Rav-4 was one of the smaller things I crossed paths with on the highway), the food portions, the people. But here we are in early March and the afternoon high was more than 25 degrees, yet the grass is brown and the trees are barren. The whole thing reminded me of Toronto in November, except in November its never 25 degrees, sadly.

On the radio, as well as the billboards, there were numerous chances to cross paths with Christian Evangelism. Thanks to the fact that it is 2008 it was even easier to listen to campaign ads, the fact that Mr. Obama has spent twice as much on media buys in Texas as Mrs. Clinton is very obvious too. (Still at least in the ads I heard there was no attacking of the other guy, but the part where the girl in the Obama ad said he is cute, sorry I thought we were working out President of the United States, not Prom Queen.) If I listened to country music, (no I don't, but I was scanning and landed on a country station during commercials) I could have heard more of, "John Doe a true conservative, supports tax relief and executing baby killing abortion doctors, running in the Texas 54'th Congressional district."

Before we arrived I had an image of a state filled with very polite gun toting slow talking oil barons. Instead I found a good rule of thumb for drivers on the freeways. Take the posted speed limit, say 70 miles an hour, and ignore it! Or multiply by 10, - use the larger of the two values when in doubt. Mind you I'd pay good money to hear that Texas drawl.

We got to the hotel around 5pm, it was small, but for the price, not bad. Lesley decided she wanted Chinese food, naturally Texas has a large Chinese community, they live in Texan city of New York, in the North East part of the state. (I was actually sort of craving a burrito, oh well maybe I can get one from the large Mexican population in Toronto, in little Mexico, just south of Little Italy.)

There is actually a China Town in Houston, in the South West corner of town. Now we are in the North, mid section. Google Maps, suggested we use a ring road called the Sam Houston Toll Road. Now I've used toll roads plenty of times, I even have an E-Z Pass in my car for trips to New York or Boston, but the toll roads in Houston are brutal! To cover a about a quarter of the ring around Houston costs $4.50, but its not a get a piece of paper when you get on and pay when you get off deal like in New York, oh no, that would be too easy! Instead it's line up every so often at a toll plaza and cough up another $1.50. There's no lineup if you have an "E-Z Tag" but hey it's a rental car, nobody told me about E-Z Tags and why is the line to pay money so damned long? Can't Houston afford to hire more Toll both workers? With an 8.25% sales tax you would think, but then this is the same place some of the most corrupt and incompetent elected officials came from.

It occurs to me, this entire entry talks about driving, but then, this is Texas, what else is there to talk about? Today we are going to the Johnson Space Centre, named after the last good politician from Texas, then we are going to see some fine art. Hopefully the next entry will be a little less about driving and a little more positive too.

On 802.11 networking

Lately I've been having all sorts of Network layer issues on my laptop. For some reason although a Datalink connection is (as Professor Ma would say) entablished with the Access Point, the negotiation of a DHCP lease just isn't happening. I've had to steal access from a neighbour via a painfully slow Rogers connection.

For those aspiring Network Analysts, here is an interesting question. How did I know my neighbour is using Rogers? Well its actually pretty trivial but still useful to know. First using the website What is my IP gives me the address of the WAN interface on the neighbour's "Router". Next I go to Traceroute.org and inspect a few different Looking Glasses - why a few? Just be sure.

Lets consider this example, suppose the neighbour's IP address is, say 99.233.100.100 (from What is my IP). Now lets plug that IP address in to Quest USA (ASN 209) and Telus (ASN 852). (We ensure to select BGP not Ping or Traceroute, although those can be interesting too depending on what we are up to).

From Quest we see:

sh ip bgp 99.233.100.100
BGP routing table entry for 99.233.0.0/16, version 570055897
Paths: (2 available, best #1, table Default-IP-Routing-Table)
Not advertised to any peer
  174 812
 205.171.0.96 (metric 10) from 205.171.0.149 (205.171.0.149)
   Origin IGP, metric 0, localpref 80, valid, internal, best
   Community: 209:888 209:889
   Originator: 205.171.0.96, Cluster list: 205.171.0.149
174 812
 205.171.0.96 (metric 10) from 205.171.0.150 (205.171.0.150)
   Origin IGP, metric 0, localpref 80, valid, internal
   Community: 209:888 209:889
   Originator: 205.171.0.96, Cluster list: 205.171.0.149

And from Telus we get:

show ip bgp 99.233.100.100
BGP routing table entry for 99.233.0.0/16, version 11888182
Bestpath Modifiers: deterministic-med
Paths: (1 available, best #1)
Not advertised to any peer
  852 812
 154.11.63.85 from 154.11.63.85 (154.11.0.161)
   Origin IGP, localpref 100, valid, external, best

Now notice in both answers (Telus and Quest) the bolded lines, I did the bolding. Lets see those two lines:

Quest: 174 812
Telus: 852 812

In both cases ASN 812 appears, now interestingly Quest is supposed to be ASN 209, but they show up as 174 - which happens to be Cogent Communications. How do I know Cogent is ASN 174, because I have almost every damned ASN under 600 memorized... no I don't really, but I've been doing so much Border Gateway stuff lately that I feel like I've got them all memorized. But I do know that 174 is Cogent, not Quest, and even if I did not already know that, I could go to ARIN and ask my friendly neighbourhood RIR, use the string 'a 174' without the single quotes. What about 812? Well we know from the Looking Glass section that 812 is Rogers.

My neighbour is on a shitty Rogers connection, which is why I am not working on my article on space planes but am instead writing about the wonderful World of Internet Routing. As soon as I get my own wireless sorted out I'll get back to other things, I promise.

Now that I've done all that I notice something really interesting, Cogent's POC (Point of Contact) is a NOC (Network Operations Centre) that's very interesting, I always though POCs had to be individuals. Well maybe I can change my ASN POC to be a NOC, but in the meantime I really should be fixing the DHCP issues on my IBM so that I can use TCP, UDP, IP and all the wonderful applications like HTTP, FTP and my favorite, TCP port 17! (Yes the excessive use of acronyms there was intentional.)

Caught up in ideals

I've been doing a lot of research on airplanes, when I'm not watching CNN. But I just found something I hope my grandchildren can find one day.


Sometimes life does immitate art.


This is from Barack Obama in Baltimore MD. I'm not sure who BHO reminds me of more, Jack Kennedy or Jed Bartlet. But either way I hope he wins, the United States needs him.

On Flight and the limitations of the Jet Engine.

Even before World War II there were known limitations to the speed that aircraft could fly. Propellers would spin faster and faster and as they spin up the tips would go faster than sound. Now when an object breaks the sound barrier it causes shockwaves which unsettle the air and cause turbulence. The turbulence in turn destroys the airflow and hence the thrust of the propellers. The fastest propeller driven aircraft traveled about 400 mph. or about 650 km/h.

Prior to The War engineers on both sides of the English Channel were at work on a new type of engine. Using a turbine to draw air in and a jet of hot exhast gas to turn the tubine and push on the way out the turbojet (see the image below) rendered previous propeller aircraft obsolete by the end of The War.

Photo from Propulsion - Intermediate.

Within ten years of VE and VJ day turbojet aircraft like the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter (below) could fly almost twice the speed of sound.

(Photo from Wikipedia.)

Despite the tremendous improvements from the turbine driven Turbojet there were limitations. For one thing, turbojets are gas guzzlers. Newer technologies, like the Turbofan engine provide comparable, if not better thrust, while consuming fuel at a far more relaxed pace. (In fact very likely your holiday jet is driven by a Turbofan.) But fundamentally a Turbofan is in many respects little different from a traditional turbojet, both engines have a turbine and that turbine spins at a speed related to the forward speed of the aircraft. Now imagine, you are a turbine blade, I know its not the sort of position one imagines themselves in all that often. You are spinning round a shaft (turbine) thousands of times a minute, super highly compressed air is blasting past under such pressure that kerosene is igniting spontaneously. Now lets go faster. At some point the turbine blade will break, we just cannot make them strong enough and durable enough. That turbine breaking point corresponds very roughly to an aircraft forward speed of three and one half times the speed of sound.

Well jets are fast, until you spend 12 or 14 hours over the Pacific ocean in economy class, if you are more than about 4 feet tall, those 12 or 14 hours feel like eternity. There has to be a way to make airplanes go faster.

As it turns out long before Frank Whittle and Hans Von Ohain had dreamed up the jet engine Rene Lorin of France had already patented a faster technology.

The limit to the speed of a jet engine propelled aircraft is the turbine, so the obvious solution? Remove the turbine. Imgine an aircraft racing forward at something near, or faster than, the speed of sound. Now as the aircraft moves forward it displaces huge amounts of air, but some of that displaced air is directed down a tube. As the air rushes down the tube some kerosene or hydgrogen is injected into the tube, then suddenly the tube constricts. The temperature will shoot up causing the kerosene or hydrogen to ignite, pushing the temperature way up. The air cannot expand, there is no room, so the pressure builds, then suddenly the tube ends and the super dense, super hot air expands rapidly, creating thrust. Such an engine, or Ram Jet can accelerate an airplane to something between three and five times the speed of sound. Which sounds great until you realise you are still going to spend something like six or seven hours flying to New Zealand to tell Peter Jackson that Lord of the Rings needs a Tom Bombadil.

(Photo from Wikipedia.)

The problem with Ram Jets is that as the aircraft goes faster, the air compresses to higher pressures and temperatures which ultimately make the heat from the burning fuel a negligable factor. Put simply, as the heat from compression builds, the heat kills the engine's effiency to the point where speed will effectively shut the engine down.

What is required is an engine that will not compress air after the addition of fuel.

(Image from: Wikipedia.)

Such an engine was first conceived in the 1950s but only in recent years have the first Supersonic Combustion RAM or SCRAM Jet seen light of day.

The SCRAM Jet is significant becuase it makes possible a dream. A dream of affordable Earth Orbit. In my next posting I hope to describe what I believe space flight will look like in about 30 years, which when you think about, is almost the age of the Space Shuttle.

Super Duper Tuesday

Its Super Duper Tuesday. I tried to get some good informed data from The Daily Show. But Comedy Central's website SUCKS. I cannot watch reruns of old shows, I cannot watch clips linked to from other sites of old shows - the videos just don't work. Here in Canada, and I imagine in the States too, The Comedy network has been running an ad campagin for their website saying "with 95% less suckage", well, I've got really bad news guys. Release Youtube.com! At least The Daily Show on Youtube worked. I swear I'm gonna have to get a DVR becuase there is just no way I can stay up until 11:30 for my nightly fix of John Stewart. (They even stopped running a rerun of The Daily Show at 9:30pm, the rotten scum.)

In other news, would Billary come to his/her senses, the 90s are over. The country needs a real president, desperately. Cleaning up after four years of the first Bush was something Bill was clearly underqualified for, eight years of this spawn is going to take 30 years of great presidents and Clinton's appeal to an easy escape just won't work. The country needs to be modivated, the country needs hope, the country does not need another blow job flake.

I am going to watch CNN, with my fingers crossed. Any American's reading this, here's a big hint in a language that is natively American. You own a shop, business is doing badly, what's the first thing you do? Hang out a big sign "under new management" and hope to everything holy the World notices and comes back to do business with you. And by god, electing another white guy or a Clinton is so totally the message you don't want to be sending.