Fall Foliage Long Drives

It's cool to be in mountains when fall is just still arriving and you are among the first to feel it. This year my First Of Autumn hikes happened in Adirondacks. This area in upper state New York is probably among the most scenic part on East Coast. You got choice of 46 high peaks to climb (a High Peak is a mountain taller then 4000 ft) apart from countless small mountains and hills, several small and huge lakes to canoe and kayak or just relax on cruise, quite a few waterfalls and quint towns. The best part is you can even take small plane like Cessna 152 and fly over those mountains covered with fresh yellow, red, violet colors. It's probably someof the most scenic experience you can ever have in this part of the country. But behold! Fall is just beginning. The next best thing to do is probably long drives on colorful lonely snaky roads passing through mountains, valleys and lakes. But.. where would you go? Here's some of the best picks for autumn fall foliage road trips!

• Citysearch has their picks of top 10 fall foliage spots


• Visit GORP's Autumn kickoff. They have the great sets of scenic driving routes.


• This is commercial fall tours site but they have good adventure section and you can "steal" some of their iteneries :)


• America's Best also have small list


• If you are in New Jersey, pick your road trip from this great routes through out NJ.


• Last thing: How would you know when and where it's peak of fall colors? There are 3 sites which can tell you when it's time to go: Foliage Network, USDA Forest Services and this other site.
  

Barenaked Ladies Live!

Barenaked Ladies will be performing live at New York on 22nd Oct. These guys concerts (there's no female members in the band - for the unawares) are among the most fun live events, so don't delay in getting tickets! Even more, these are the few of rare artists who prefer to perform live and then put the song in a album rather then other way around. I didn't thought they would be doing any tours. Pinch me if I'm still asleep :)

Will AIers Ever Stop Being Dumb?

Every time I read and hear something in AI research, it freaks me out. These "research" people just keeps formulating laws out of thin air without having any strong logical grounds. Every researcher seems to have their own minuscule world of hard and fast rules that they think is capable to explain everything. What's even worse is that they keep day dreaming that if they keep going like this they are not too far from the finally glory. These people have essentially transformed the "science" of Artificial Intelligence in to a never ending empirical guess game. And this disease is spreading fast everywhere. Now most research studies simply means collecting data, do some statistics and throw some sketchy laws with lots of "might be" to hungry scientific generals. All you need is some post at Stanford or MIT and you can at least expect that your garbage will occupy shelves of library all over the world. A good example is this lecture by Doug Lenat of Stanford. You will see how lots of "principles" are drawn right away out of the thin air without any justification for their validity and completeness. I think these guys should step back for a while and read Newton's Principia or Euclid's Elements just to get feeling of how important it is to approach problem with strong logical grounds rather then "just thoughts out of my mind". We don't have HAL. But seeing current state of AI, that doesn't surprises me.

Voyager Is Missing

Star Trek Voyager is off-air since past few months. So I went to Netflix, my DVD subscription, just to find that Paramount hasn't produced DVDs yet. So I went to Amazon to buy VHS version, just to find that the video cassets are one episod per casset (consider having 150+ episodes). So all these have almost ruined my hopes to get back to Voyager, just when I needed the most. As my last resort, I looked up in Kazza and found some of the cool episodes floating around but it gonna take days to get them.

Moral of the story: If it is still on-air in your area, watch it while you still can. Don't mess with your luck.

Evanescence @ Webster Hall, NYC

Evanescence will be performing live at Webster Hall on 16th Sep in New York City as part of their tour. This is little unusual because even the Webster Hall is kind of the top dance club in the City, I never heard any concerts happening there. But probably thats what makes this cool. Check for tickets and other tour locations. But beaware, tickets are being distributed by the worst ticketing site in the world.

Some Awesome Destinations

I recently went to Sierra Club's meeting/presentation on California's Route 1. This road trip certainly seems to be the queen of all. The presenter been touring this route every couple of years since last 3 decades and had some really awesome photographs - some taken in different seasons and time of the days and some even different decades! Here are some tips from the guru himself: The road trip to CA1 can be done any month, never let weather stop you. Still if you are too picky, in summer (through September) it's kind of hot. From December to March is good time except that El-Nino may strike the Pacific coast and parts of CA1 suddenly merges in to ocean, yet Feb-March is the best time. This is also the time when you can see lots of white whales in the ocean floating around while watching sunset in Pacific Ocean. The good place to stay overnight on this route is Ragged Point Inn. You might want to frequently take exists in between, specifically for San Simeon Castle. It's good idea to stay around this gorgeous huge architecture (they have even special tour for just bathrooms among others!). To stay around this building is San Simeon Pines is a good resort. The route is 90 miles long and totally worth an entire day trip.

While in presentation, I also stumbled upon list of really gorgeous places to visit in United States. They are special because they have specific times when you should be there. Also they are very diverse (from flower covered moutains to canyons in Utah!). If you get a chance, don't even think about missing out on them. I certainly won't :).
Here's my filtered list:

• Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah Canyon valleys partially gets covered in snow. Not for faint hearted.Best Time: Jan/Feb


• Cottonwood Lake, Alaska Clear waters and ice formations in lake like a huge starfish from end to endBest Time: Feb


• Glenn Canyon National Recreation Area, Arizona Best Time: Feb


• Tehachapi Mountains, California Absolute gorgeous mountains completely covered with flowers. Yes, just like you had dreamed once :). Best Time: April


• Isla Espirita Santo, Sea of Cortes, Maxico urrr... this one is non-US.Best Time: May


• Painted Hills, Oregon yes, hills that actually looks like someone painted them outBest Time: May


• Elives Chasm, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona Best Time: June


• Moraine Lake, Banff National Park, Alberta Best Time: Aug


• Cohutta Wilderness Area, Georgia Best Time: Sep


• Kennebec River, Main Best Time: Oct


• Snake River, Wyoming Best Time: Nov


• Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park, California Best Time: Nov


• Talkeetna Mountains, Alaska A special place where you can see Aurora Borealis! Best Time: Nov


• West Indian Manatees, Florida Best Time: Dec


• Owens Valley near Laws, California Best Time: Dec/Jan


• Weddell Sea, Antarctica urrrr... this is non-US, again


• Cannon Beach, Ecola State Park, Oregon Best Time: Dec/Jan

Things To Remember When Building Your PC

I recently upgraded my custom build 2.5 year old beast. When I started out that time, I wanted to make something really powerful, enviable and which kind of had everything. After burning $3500 in this endeavor I enjoyed owning something that exceeded what Microsoft and others just recently "innovated" as Media Center PC. But this time upgrade wasn't easy and I kept messing up things many times and calling up other gurus. So here's the list for the benefit of someone not-so-skilled:
1. Usually motherboards have 3 special screws that would touch the chassis and provide the grounding. Don't mix up (aha, screw up) those screws.
2. When you lay PC on its side (motherboard top facing you), remember all IDE cable's red-line side faces you but floppy's faces down. If you mess this up, drives won't be detected and you might keep thinking that you blew up power supply and run to buy another one.
3. Power cables to all IDE drives would have yellow side facing you and red side facing IDE cable's red-line. Usually you can't plug other way, unless, uhhh... you push really hard!
4. It's important to see which drive is master and which one is slave (ALWAYS look at the jumper settings before you put drives in bays wire everything up). I didn't bothered and just keep trying until they all were detected (real reason being I'd lost my flashlight). This won't blow up your drives but it's very unreliable.
5. Don't forget to connect CD digital and DVD SPDF connectors to sound card. Former allows digital ripping of audio CDs in MP3s and later allows Dolby Digital sound if you have the card that supports that and have hooked up to Home Theater system. Also if you want to listen modem noises on speakers (or home theater as in my case), don't forget to connect modem and sound card. Many cheap modems don't support this any longer however.
6. If power light blinks then probably you have power supply set on 230V (European style) rather then 115V (US style).

Sunset And Moonrise

On Tuesday, Sep 9, Sunset is at 7:16 PM and moonrise is also at 7:16 PM. Cool right? Good way to see this would be at High Point State Park or a special hike from Sierra Club. My preference is former, undoubtably the best place in NJ to see this!

A Visit To The Temple

I'd to just help my neighbour to find her run-away cat. Now a last blogbit... before I really really go to bed!

This Labor Day weekend I was thinking about spending 3 days in programming few stuff I'd planned but such things just can't happen. Suddenly a plan came around out of nowhere for 12+ hours of road trip to West Virginia and a visit to an ISKCON temple. Submitting to spontaneous weird idea seems to be my weakness. This one was weird because, well, who can think of visiting an ISKCON temple out of nowhere? While I'm not affiliated to ISKCON (or for that matter any religious organization whatsoever), I was curious about them anyway (watching Hare Krishna group dancing on Leicester Square in London is very cool) and so I joined my gang. This indeed turned out to be great road trip. We almost started at sun rise, passed through valleys and mountains covered with mist and made few stops. The temple located on the mountain top in hilly state of West Virginia has some good views. We also realized that day was little special being the last day of a festival called Paryushan from Jain religion and first day of another festival Ganesh Chaturthi and the last day when the temple remains open until 8 PM and a day when free feast is served and of course, it was the last day of summer. As if all these coincidences weren't enough, I ran in to one of my classmates in the temple who had left his job to be a full time ISKCON person serving as deputy director of a charity hospital (it's amazing how I keep meeting my classmates by coincidences. Last time I met one in a strip club, this time it was in a temple! And we always say this first to each other: "what the hack you doing here?"). We also took the tour of Palace Of Gold which is the memorial built for the founder of ISKCON. It's funny though to build a memorial buried under gold for a person who probably spent his entire life fighting against materialistic world and achieving nirvana.

You can view some photos of this trip, some are really cool including one with beatles procreating right inside the rose!

MTV VMAs

Before I go to bed, few more bits...
This is to announce that this year's VMA sucked. I used to see this show for it being totally different from other award functions (i.e. freaky, weird, explicit and eye-popping). It seems to be the general opinion that if it hadn't been for Britney-Madonna's kiss, this would have been the worse so far.

Sticky Chapter

I'm stuck on Chaper 8 of Brief History Of Time again. This is happening for the 3rd time. Everytime I read this book I get until this chapter and then eventually give up. This time I tried to track down the fault and realized this chapter is so much unorganized and has apparently unrelated thoughts, though interesting - which keeps me coming back to it. Okay... let's start again. Shall we?

Should Virus Creators Be Punished?

I and Don Rittenburg of Groove Networks went in to intense arguments over lunch whether person who creates viruses be punished. I took the side that they shouldn't be. My point of view was that cyberspace isn't exactly the real world. It's man-made, designed to be anonymous and most importantly by it's inherent nature it's not supposed to be limited by laws. It gives you immense freedom and if you can be stopped by creating bunch of laws by old fat ignorant politicians then it isn't the same. Of course, freedom isn't a free lunch and you have to accept the associated risk and resposibility. I put the virus creation activities as the inherent part of cyber culture and implicit right of cyber-citizens just like free-speech. Don happens to be really good logician and put some really good arguments. His central idea was that just because it's possible, it can't be just allowed. If your car tires are not secured by lock and key, would you let a person to blow air out of them just to demonstrate that it is not secured or just for fun? Is it worth to live under constant fear that your stuff is not really secured and someone somewhere is gonna come and get you and may destroy your life time of work and get away with it without getting punished or even detected? And multiply the hassle by millions who gets affected, loss of hours, possibly life or career threatening consequences to many and lots of not-so-geeky people who just won't be able to get their computers back to normal. Would that be acceptable? From Don's argument, I think I see the aftermath that typical virus author would fail to see or doesn't won't to. I realized that cyberworld isn't just the world of universities and nerds anymore but is now married to the real world and is inseperable part of it. And that marriage would mean loss of inherent freedom and bring the laws in. I'm now in agreement that they might be allowed to be punished but still believe that punishment shouldn't be stiff: just few months of community services would suffice. That did settle our 40 mins long logical wrestling (or I lost, to put it correctly). My apologies to cyber-citizens for my failure to defend this supposed-to-be law free culture, however :(.