From My Cold Dead Fingers

This is why I could never be President of the United States.

Well weathered wanderlust

Summer ends on September 15^th. Technically, it ends on September 21^st, but for me, it ends on the 15^th. I have a plane ticket meant to depart that afternoon. With the oppressive St. Louis summer scorcher ebbing toward Seattle's September sixties, the beginning of my trip spells the end of this summer. So bring on the Fall.

The tentative plan is to explore the western coast. Starting in Seattle, I hope to migrate southward along the coast to places including Vancouver, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego. It may happen just like that, or I might find myself in Alaska in a few weeks. Or maybe even back home in three days. Either way, there is no adventure without a definitive sense of the unknown. So bring it on.

Here I Dreamt I Was a Traveler

Saint Louis, Missouri. USA

Here I dreamt I was a traveler. The skyline is a brand new sight to see. What secrets lie among your canyons?
No matter. That's a question for another time. First things first. I've got only a few hours to find a place to stay. Yes, it may have been a good idea to call ahead, but one doesn't always have that luxury.

At a time like this is when you realize that information is an extremely valuable commodity. There are a thousand--perhaps a million--places to sleep in this town, but at the moment, every single one is out of reach. Some of these places are available. Some aren't. It's time to find out.

I walk the city strets pushing a little button every few steps. This button, or more specifically the LED light right next to it tells me when I am a rich man. It lights up! I have a WiFi signal. A wealth of information is soon at my fingertips. Checking my surroundings, I'm in front of a St. Louis Bread Company. "Hmmm... this place looks a lot like Panera."

In less than ten minutes, I've found a bed and an Asiago Cheese Bagel (but not in that order). By the time my bagel is gone, I also have a list of the best that St. Louis has to offer. The Arch, Union Station, The Botanical Garden, The Anheusier Busch Brewery, and (perhaps best of all) the many different neighborhoods with their unique styles and personalities.

Seeing the sights is a funny goal. It's all done now and I have some beautiful pictures on my camera's memory card to prove it. But it's done. Perhaps what I take with me most of all at this point is the sense of how these people live. Of course there wasn't time to settle down, learn their lives in full. But I know enough now to tell you that baseball is very important to these people. It's so important in fact that St. Louisans are even willing to venture downtown to see a game. What a gesture of support for the Cards! I've learned enough to tell you that St. Louis has a lot more traffic than Little Rock, but a lot less than Atlanta. And I've learned enough to tell you that most everyone has this conflict of a sad optimism about their city, which they can't quite articulate. Once a place of great industrialization, wealth and prosperity, St. Louis has lost most of its wealthy patrons and passionate advocates to the fallout of a 50 year suburban winter. So what's left is only the best of the political vultures fighting over the scraps.

As I board a two-winged ticket to the next great destination, St. Louis starts to disolve into the broth of past experiences. But one thing this foreign traveler will not lose to the doldrums of experience is the sense of what could be. This burden of potential is something that I will share with this fair city for decades yet to come.

A Picture's With a Thousand Worlds

Pictures are great, but unless your subject is something iconic like the Eiffel Tower or the White House, it's hard to tell where the picture was taken. Fortunately, this is changing...

A brilliant site, Panoramio.com, invites you to upload your photographs and place them on a Google Map. Then they upload the best photos to Google to include in a special Google Earth Layer. All that means that you can open Google Earth and see pictures taken by normal people of whatever you are seeing on the map. It's a great example of how important not only the picture is, but also the location where the picture was taken. If you want to see an example of my Panoramio Pix on a web page, see the bottom of this one...

That's great, but if you have many pictures at all, it becomes really time consuming to manual locate them all. This is where GPS comes in.

I bought a Magellan eXplorist 400 the other day. This handy little GPS device will (among other things) track your location to within a few meters (usually). It also keeps track of what time you were at any given point. So when I use a little program like GPS Photo Linker for the Mac (in Windows, it seems the program to use is WWMX Location Stamper), it looks at the time the pictures were taken and where I was at that moment, then embeds the coordinates into the photograph. Now, when I upload the pix to Panoramio, they are automatically placed exactly at the place at which they were taken. Smart!

All this put together means that while traveling, I can sync my pictures with GPS data and do a quick little upload to show the world what pictures I have taken and where. It's almost like being there.

Counterintelligence: How to Travel Invisibly

The most difficult question I've had to answer before I leave on my year-long trip around the world is whether or not to take my laptop. After much soul searching and planning, I decided to leave it at home. I'll take some other technology, but no computer. So how will I keep everyone updated, you ask? How will I get pictures off my camera? How will Ryan survive without instant technology everywhere? The answer is Internet Cafe's.

The danger of using an Internet Cafe is that I don't know who will be watching. Since it's someone else's computer, there could be software installed to record everything I do, including passwords for my banking sites, email and every other private piece of information. If this gets out, it could mean a very early end to my trip (as well as ruined credit and abject poverty).

Enter: MojoPac. This is a program which essentially lets you turn any computer into your own computer. I'm taking an external hard drive on my trip. Once I plug it in to the potentially compromised Internet Cafe computer, the MojoPac login box appears. Once I log in to MojoPac then not only do I have all my programs, pictures, and iTunes library with me, I also have a big black wall between what I do and the program meant to watch me. MojoPac isolates everything done in the MojoPac environment from the host OS (the infected Windows computer). It basically bypasses any surveillance software and goes straight to the Internet or other place without ever touching the host OS. So keyloggers (spyware) see nothing. If they're taking screen shots, they get a picture of a black screen--even if I'm logged in to my bank account in MojoPac.

In case you're keeping score or into these kind of details, I have tested MojoPac against the following keyloggers: Advanced Invisible Keylogger v.1.9, All in One Keylogger v.2.42, Ardamax Keylogger v.2.6, Dark Keylogger, Ghost Keylogger v.3.80 and Golden Eye v.4.50. It defeated them all.

While MojoPac may isolate you from existing keyloggers, if you'd rather get rid of them in the first place, Dewasoft's KL-Detector will help you find them--or at least confirm the presence of a software keylogger. KL-Detector is also free, unlike MojoPac. But neither of these programs will help with hardware keyloggers or people looking over your shoulder. So while this software is pretty handy, there's no substitute for an old fashioned glance over your shoulder.

Happy covert computing.