So I woke up a bit better off than I went to bed. After our early morning croissants we headed out to find a pharmacy for Immodium or Pepto. I think France is full of hypocondriacs because pharmacies are everywhere. Actually a pharmacy there is more like a drug store is here where you can get your contact solution, tyllanol and perscription drugs in one place. We search the first pharmacy and find an empty shelf where the immodium should have been and a sign that says diarrhea which lets me know what to look for in the future. The next three pharmacies were closed and the fourth a hole in the wall had it behind the counter. The Pharmacy tech was able to speak a few words of English and tell me not to take more than 6 and with that we were off.

Wanting to put something in my stomach that was known (no more raw beef please) we bit the bullet and ate at McDonalds, that fine Irish establishment we have at home. I'm not sure why I thought food that makes me hurl when I'm healthy would do anything less when I'm sick but out of some sort of miracle I kept it down and the fading reasons of avoiding McDonalds came forth in my mind and became clear once again - it basically sucks.

We've been reeling over the exchange rate here for the last few days. A fish sandwich at McDonalds costs $8 US. That's right, that little sandwich costs as much as going to Red Robin or Appleby's. A Big Mac is about $9 and a can of soda is $3. This isn't special French soda that I'm referring to but Coke. A 12oz can of coke is $3. Tourism is down in France this year, even the French aren't going anywhere.

So after we scarfed down the crappiest food on the planet we waited to see what the results of our actions would be. While waiting word from the nether regions we decided to ride the giant ferris wheel at Place Bellecour which gave us a great view of the city. Not hearing anything back from Mother nature we decided to wander in the general direction of the Roman ruins. Also on the same hill is a building that looks strangly like an upturned elephant crossed by whitewashed castle. We were to learn later that it was in fact a church and was quite striking up close. Although it never stopped reminding me of an elephant recieving service from one of the Olsen twins.

At the base of the hill and the entrance to the Funicular there is a very nice tree lined street where we spent about an hour watching people wander by and wonder what it would be like to live here. Piper and Jade ventured into the local fruit market and managed to buy the best oranges I've ever had without speaking any French beyond combiene (how much?). They also came back with some oranges that weren't so great, a couple of pumellos and a plum.

Refreshed by fruit we rode the funicular up the hill and then wandered for about half an hour looking bewildered because none of the signs made any sense. I think if you just followed the arrows you'd go in circles and never make it down which may be the secret plot in case the Germans ever invade again. In the middle there's probably a huge abyse stacked full of bones from smarter, more obedient tourists that us. We decided to venture off toward anything that looked broken down and ended up at a Roman amphitheater. It seems the Romans were afflicted by the same disease as Seattleites because they built not one, but two amphiteaters next to each other. Amphitheaters are built in such a way as to amplify sound created within and as my kids embarasingly found out later as I lie asleep this includes snoring. The Museum of Gallo Roman Stuff (may not be the official name) was also good and it housed in 5 subteranean floors. The mosaics were awesome but most of the other stuff we'd seen in other Museums of Gallo Roman Stuff in other cities. Or maybe we'd seen it in the Asterix comics, I'm not sure which. I'm not entirely sure why the Romans built their city on the top of a hill instead of next to the water but I'm thinking it had to do with a newly aquired unlimited supply of free labor in the for of the local Vercingeterix faithfuls. If the Romans had to haul all of their Chaises and wine cabinets up those hills I think they would have reconsidered. There was a large building above the amphitheaters that was labeled "large building of unknown use". I believe it to be a breeding chamber for captured Gauls and Visigoths. If I can prove this then we can finally shed some light on the time endured question as to where the French came from - the Romans created them by forcing Gauls and Visigoths into compromising positions with each other several millinea ago. No doubt the Romans quickly realized that the best results were found by applying one male to each female or vice versa and that any other combination no matter how interesting bore little to no fruit.

After viewing the said upturned elephant church which in fact is very pretty we turned toward the center of the earth and started our expedition to find food. Halfway down the hill there was a rose garden of sorts but we were too hungry to bother for more than a few seconds. Our intention was to go back to Paul Bocuse' Le Nord restaurant and experience the creations of the master but the noise from the the screaming of our gastronomical tract overpowered any voice of planning and we stopped at one of the many Bouchon Lyonaisse resauarants along the way. The menu looked fantastic

Comment (0)

Today I'm sick, no it wasn't the hamburger. We did't really venture out much as I resemble an inverted Old Faithful from Yellowstone park. I got croissants for breakfast, took pictures of the Opera house and checked my email.

Amy my bank manager got the money thing straightened away, raised my limit and my cards work now. I paid for another night. We need to get a hold of our Concierge in Paris to let him know when we're coming. I emailed the apartment owner in the states knowing he won't get the email until late. We decided to be kind to my stomach and eat at the Chinese restaurant on the corner where we proceeded to order way too much food. The dim sum was ok (not great) and the fried food appetizer was decent. After we walked forever looking for a grocery that had bottled water and after getting directions from a local settled on the togo window of McDonalds which had Evian. Armed with Evian we returned to the Hotel Iris and went to bed.

Comment (0)

So we've arrived in Paris at CDG and went through immigration without anyone stamping our passports. That's a little strange and we've never had that happen before. I can only assume that they thought we had chipped passports and the computer logged us. The very first thing we do when entering a foreign country (actually there are only foreign people...) is get local currency so our search for an ATM begins. The one on the arrivals level was broken so after walking the entire length of the terminal and not finding another we ask information which informs us theres one on the departures level two floors down. We walk the entire length of the departures level without finding one so we ask the United Airlines lady and she gives us directions. Ten minutes later we're equiped with 300 Euros which should get us into the city where we can buy our train ticket to Lyon.

We want to go to Lyon because we've discovered (like Colobus discovered America) the Institute of Paul Bocuse and Natalya is interested in going to school there instead of or in addition to Corden Bleu in Paris. Lyon is the culinary capital of France so most great chefs come out of there. Our plan is to visit the institute and get information on it and possibly eat in one of Paul Bocuse' restaurants of which he has 5.

We head to the SNCF booth to get RER tickets into the city. The RER trains are the suburban rail trains that service the burbs as we'd call them. The trip into the city will take about 30 minutes. We're approached by a man wanting to sell us shuttle tickets for $22 ea for a total of $88. Yeah right buddy. Our RER tickets cost us $50 which was still way more than I expected. I was thinking they'd be about $30 but it's the airport right so they're way overpriced. We've actually been to this RER station before two years ago when we went to Parc Asterix so we knew our way around a bit.

Half hour later we're at Chatalet station to catch the number 1 metro. The Chatalex/Les Halles station is my least favorite because it's a maze of passages and levels and you never know just where you are. We've had to pay to get into the station before and then walked so far we had to pay again to get further into the station. It never made sense to me. Sometimes I've wondered whether it would be easier to walk to the next station to catch the metro instead of venturing into the labyrinth. So we walked and walked and walked and never saw a ticket booth. I asked and someone told me go straight and then turn left. I walked and only saw turnstyles. I go back to where I'd left the kids and ask someone there and he says to go straight and turn left. Once again I only saw turnstyles. I realized we have to exit the RER section and enter the Metro section, as soon as we got this little tidbit we ran into a metro ticket booth where we bought one adulte carne and one enfant carne. We proceed to the metro where we never go through a turnstyle and never pay. Like I said this station doesn't make sense.

Comment (0) Read More...

So as of Saturday we had our apartment and I'd scored plane tickets on Friday. The only date we could fly for a reasonable price was Sunday morning returning on Sept 2nd. If I wanted to fly on any other day it was going to cost me $2400 more for the 4 of us. That gave us one day to get ready, pack and to get as much work done as possible. I went to work while the kids packed the bags and made a list of things we needed. Things didn't go as well as planned at work and I left at 3:30 am and headed straight to Wallyworld to pick up what we needed for the trip. I left Walmart at 4:45, got home at 5 and woke everyone up. I finished packing at 6:00 and our friend Mo showed up to drive us to the airport.

We meandered toward Sea-tac airport at a comfortable pace but I wasn't worried as according to my calculations we would have 1hr 45min to get through security, get something to eat and board the plane. They recommend 2 hrs for international flights but we've squeezed this plenty of times before. On arrival to the airport we realized we didn't grab our daybag. Normally this wouldn't be a problem but this time in order to speed up our passage through security I put our boarding passes and passports in the daybag.

Comment (0) Read More...

As most of you know we are supposed to be in China/Southeast Asia right now. Actually we were supposed to be sitting at home now recovering from our Asian adventures. As a side effect of personal and technical problems associtated with my current work contract we were not able to leave on June 19th. By July 1st we were still hopeful and by August 1st we'd decided that we'd visit China for one month and return in the Winter for Southeast Asia. By August 10th we had accepted the fact that none of this was happening and we'd be lucky to go to Boring Oregon for vacation let alone somewhere foreign and exotic. I hadn't given up hope though and started studying the Baltic states and looking over VISA requirements for Russia because we could spend two weeks there and see quite a bit. Two weeks in China wouldn't have gotten us anywhere so it was out. My contract dragged and I finally decided to make our life easier and go somewhere we'd been before and what better place than France?

Comment (0) Read More...

Nikon has decided to release an update to the Coolpix P5100. Like the Panasonic LX-2 the Nikon P5100 had near perfect specs but fell down on such a major feature that I deamed it unbuyable. It was so painfully slow that you'd be religated to only taking static shots. It's took 2 seconds between shots and in continuous mode it could only muster .3 frames per second. That is in comparison to the G7s 2fps. The Panasonic LX-2 on the other hand had perfect specs but the over diligent noise suppression turned photos taken ISO 400 or higher into Degas paintings.

Now Panasonic has released the LX-3 which according to them has much nicer photos and Nikon has released the P6000. Because there aren't currently any reviews for either we have to speculate on whether they improve apon their forbearers.I've included a chart here that compares the two of them to the Canon G7. I use the G7 here because that's what I have and there's very little reason to buy a G9 if you already have the G7. The only improvements were extra resolution that nobody needed, the ability shoot in raw and a larger LCD screen. The larger screen has the same pixels and cramped some of the buttons and with the CHDK firmware you can shoot in raw with the G7. I did not include every comparison item as many are identical between the cameras so I've included the points where the three differ.

	Nikon Coolpix P6000	Canon PowerShot G7	Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3
Image
Max resolution	3648 x 2736	3648 x 2736	3648 x 2736
Low resolution	3648 x 2432, 3584 x 2016, 3264 x 2448, 2592 x 1944, 2048 x 1536, 1600 x 1200, 1280 x 960, 1024 x 768, 640 x 480	2816 x 2112, 2272 x 1704, 1600 x 1200, 640 x 480	3968 x 2232, 3776 x 2520, 3328 x 1872, 3168 x 2112, 3072 x 2304, 2784 x 1568, 2656 x 1768, 2560 x 1920, 2208 x 1248, 2112 x 1408, 2048 x 1536, 2048 x 1360, 1920 x 1080, 1600 x 1200, 640 x 480
Image ratio w:h

Comment (0) Read More...

A lot of really good Linux admins shy away from LVM because it's unfamiliar to them. This howto is the start of a page that outlines the most common LVM practices. LVM is really pretty easy once you understand it and get comfortable. The advantages of LVM far outweigh the complexity.

Get the Logical Volume name and path

So you gave your Xen virtual machine a 10GB Logical Volume and not it's not enough eh? This is easy to fix.

We start by using the lvdisplay command to get the path to the Logical Volume

[ root@vs /srv/xen ] lvdisplay
--- Logical volume ---
LV Name                /dev/vgsys/lvvirt
VG Name                vgsys
LV UUID                XMWzWW-oZih-A5uH-91Sa-7l1y-8cqf-18KcNB
LV Write Access        read/write
LV Status              available
# open                 1
LV Size                60.00 GB
Current LE             1920
Segments               2
Allocation             inherit
Read ahead sectors     auto
- currently set to     256
Block device           253:2

Comment (0) Read More...

University District Farmers Market

Ballard Sunday Farmers Market

Pike Place Market

Columbia City Farmer's Market

West Seattle Farmers Market

Capitol Hill Farmers Market--Broadway

Comment (0)

I really did like my Canon G7 but since I broke it I've been trying to figure out what to do. Canon will fix it for $160 but I've not had the time to send it off. They'll replace it for $275 if I send the old one in but again I don't know how long that takes. I have no problem replacing the camera if there is an alternative. I thought Nikons P series camera may be a contender but all the reviews have shown it to be dog slow. Before buying the G7 I seriously looked over the Panasonic DMC-LX1 but reviews showed it have outrageous overpowering noise cancelation to the point that any photo taken above ISO 200 looked like mud. The Panasonic DMC-LX2 came out with the hope that they'd fixed the noise situation but they only slightly improved it. Again any photo taken at ISO 100/200 looked as good as a Sony or Canon but as soon as that ISO reached 400 it was all over. I'm not sure why Panasonic's sensor is so noisy but it's really bad. Let it be known that on paper the Panasonic cameras have been virtually perfect for my needs in my eyes.

The reason I'm dwelling on the LX series once again is because Panasonic just announced the DMC-LX3. As usual the paper specs are just about ideal for what I want to do. The question is can it take photos without messing them up intentionally.

Here's what I like about it compared to the G7:

• Large 1/1.63 sensor for the camera size. This is larger than the G7s 1/1.8
• Shoots in raw - G7 does with chdk hack
• Built in 24 mm wide angle. Even with the huge wide angle adapter my G7 was 28mm
• Fast F2.0-2.8 Leica lens - G7 f2.8-4.8
• Hot shoe for flash
• 720p video at 24 fps
• 2.5 fps continuous drive (8 frames max)
• high burst mode of 6 frames a second, I don't know the limit
• 3.0" LCD with 480,000 pixels - G7 2.5" with 200,000 pixels
• Lighter, 9.3 oz - G7 13 oz
• Smaller, half inch smaller in two dimensions 4.3x2.4x1.1 - G7 4.2x2.8x1.7
• Extra wide angle conversion lens takes it to 18 mm
• All manual functions - aperature and shutter priority
• Has a grip

•  

Comment (0) Read More...

How to move from a tap:aio file to Logical Volume Management

In Xen we can provide virtualized hard drives several different ways. It's not uncommon to create a large empty file using dd and then specify it as the hard drive like this.

name = "mailserver"
memory = "1024"
disk = [ 'tap:aio:/srv/xen/mailserver.img,xvda,w', ]
vif = [ 'bridge=xenbr0', ]
bootloader="/usr/bin/pygrub"
vcpus=2
on_reboot = 'restart'
on_crash = 'restart'

In this example /srv/xen/mailserver.img is our file. In a lot of ways LVM is more powerful and faster so moving our test server to LVM makes sense once we've gotten serious about deploying it. Moving from tap:aio to LVM is much easier than you think, here's how.

1. Shutdown domain.

xm shutdown mailserver

2. Create the Logical Volume

You'll need a Logical Volume the same size as your Xen disk file. In this example the Xen disk file is 10GB and I'll assume you already created it. This could easily turn into an LVM tutorial if I don't.

10 GB Disk file: /srv/xen/mailserver.img
10 GB Logical Volume:  /dev/VolGroup00/LogVolMAIL

3. Copy disk file to Logical Volume

dd if=/srv/xen/mailserver.img of=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVolMAIL -bs 1024

4. Edit the Xen domain config file

name = "mailserver"
memory = "1024"
disk = [ 'phy:/dev/VolGroup00/LogVolMAIL,xvda,w', ]
vif = [ 'bridge=xenbr0', ]
bootloader="/usr/bin/pygrub"
vcpus=2
on_reboot = 'restart'
on_crash = 'restart'

5. Restart domain

xm create -c mailserver

Comment (0)