First Impressions: Seattle

It's exactly like you imagine!

There really are bookstores everywhere. There really are coffee shops on every corner--but only half of them are Starbucks. I don't think I've seen the sun since I arrived. This hour is the first which hasn't rained, or at least drizzled. People really do wear socks with their sandals, and interestingly, coats with their shorts. A fleece and hiking boots seems to be the standard uniform around these parts.

My favorite is when all this comes together to form the quintessential Seattleite: hiking boots, tall wool socks, bare legs, khaki shorts, REI fleece vest over a long sleeve Banana Republic t-shirt, wearing a loose baseball hat advertising no baseball team he bought at Nordstrom's, with an umbrella in one hand and with the other, conscientiously throwing his Starbucks cup in the nearest recycling bin on his way out of the boutique bookstore where he had a meeting with his publisher as he heads for a hike in the nearby woodlands. The temperature is going up to 60 tomorrow, so he's going kayaking. When do these people get any work done?

There are a few things I am surprised at, however. Maybe it's the weather or the fallout from acid trips during the Grunge heydays of the 90's, but I didn't expect the large numbers of crazy people (many in their late 20's or early 30's) on the city streets begging money for beer and ice cream or trying to sell you used batteries.

At any rate, so far Seattle is a delight and the perfect place to begin my journey. Yes, the wind blowing in off the sound is chilly and rainy, but it's such a sensory experience that I find the best thing to do is savor it. What a rich feeling it is to have the cold fingers of raindrops gently brushing your face under the tree canopied city canyons. And the cold makes the caramel apple cider all the more satisfying as you recline inside and open a good book. Better make it a Venti.

A Tribute to the Saints

Since moving out of my parents' house, the longest I've lived anywhere is 14 months--but that was before I came to Saint Louis. I have to say that I'm a bit of a restless spirit. I can't stay in any one place too long. I need to find something new, and particularly, something unknown. The side effect to this is that I've gotten pretty good at leaving--but that was before I came to Saint Louis.

Saint Louis had the distinction of being the largest city I've lived in to this point, but as my friend Bob says, Saint Louis is the largest small town you'll ever find. The city may sprawl broadly between the rivers and beyond, but that distance did nothing to separate the fine people I found there.

In the three years I spent and everything I did while there, the greatest mark was left by these disparate people. The California Kodatts really brought me there, found me a job, and were almost my only friends in the city for a time. The Roberts were my local family (among whom I even looked the part: "Is this Noah? My how you've grown!") with an endlessly welcoming Sunday table. The Journey became my home and revealed the rich, subsurface Saint Louis dimension with far too many good friends to name, but here are just a few: the brilliant compassion, surprising insight and silly British vocabulary of Peter; Bob's much cherished conversation, hikes, wine, free legal advice, and multi-faceted friendship; and Rebecca whom, among everything, I appreciate simply for who she is.

Saint Louis surprised me with her charm, but took me in with her people--especially the people who took me in. I left very dear friends when I left the McIntoshes' house. Cora is indubitably the sweetest and most darling little girl this city has ever seen! Ashley has crafted and welcomed me into the warmest southern home to be found in all the Midwest (and is a cook to die for!). And Jonathan, with the many fitting descriptions at hand, I describe most simply and most profoundly as my friend.

Other parts of this country have their charms and appeal, as I'm starting to see, but Saint Louis rightly sits in the prime of the heartland. It's not a description of geography though, at least not in my mind. With the dear friends whom I have, for the moment, left behind, when I think of home, Saint Louis is where my heart is.

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 bus driver

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. USA

Here I dreamt I was a bus driver. Just one in ten thousand. Yes, there are that many. When so many residents opt for public transport, their chauffeurs are in high demand. All of my friends are bus drivers. All of their friends are bus drivers. But it wasn't always this way...

Once I worked in a factory--a steel factory. Not forty years ago, I was part of the grandest industry on the planet. Hell, we built this planet. Well, we built this city. We built every city. "Pittsburgh steel," they would say. If you want to build them tall, you need that Pittsburgh steel. And for that, you come to me.

I was the mind behind the machines that built the machines. My job was to control the emptying of the LD Converter (you know, the machine that replaced the Bessemer converter in the smelting process). At my command would the giant vat of steel lay down and give up it's payload. I direct it into a mold to form parts of a crane, a girder, or a bulldozer. At times, I would even guide the molten metal into a smaller vat, from which is poured the block of the very engine driving my bus.

Those days are no more. When the red day came, none of us were left standing. I think I saw it coming but refused to believe it. I was the last of my friends to go. In the end we were all gone, and so was the industry that built America.

At the time, I remember so many people protesting outside my industrial office. Cleaner air is what they wanted. Is that worth a man's livelihood? How about the livelihood of ten thousand men? Say nothing of their families... I remember hearing a picketer speak of 21 people who lay dead from the polluted air. Surely it was an exaggeration. An anomalous weather pattern supposedly failed to blow away the "Pittsburgh Cloud" and over just two days, he said those people breathed in enough steel smoke to breathe their last. Surely that can't be true.

Talk of death always make me think of religion. There is a church I pass on my route which comes to mind. I always wondered what the inside looked like--the exterior demands that much of me. It's a black stone like none I've ever seen. It's beautiful, not in the least for it's uniqueness. Although, when I try, I remember seeing several others built of this same stone. But let me not get side tracked. This church I finally entered last week. It was a happy occasion, mostly. A friend was getting married, again. But what I remember of the ceremony was the inside of the church--built in a beautiful limestone, almost white. It was such a contrast to the volcanic black of the exterior. As I left, I touched the stones and found them disturbingly similar, inside and out. Both limestone, but the inside shown in it's naked beauty. The outside wore the mourning veil of one hundred years' soot.

My city wears the scars of our nation's progress. Someone had to do it. No one said they did it. Now many are undoing it. I am undoing it. Pittsburgh saw it's own Renaissance. In fact, we saw two. The government rallied, the populous voted and spent, then "The Smoky City" was reborn from its ashes. With successions of public works and cleanup programs, this old fort towne is alive again. Her economic lifeblood flows through the arteries of mass transit. We all ride the bus and cough a sigh of relief. The dark clouds have left alright but left their mark.

I am a priest of the new Renaissance. Each day, I atone for the sins of many; I atone for the sins of one--to propitiate the pollution we all produce. Come worship in this temple and sing the praises of our mother, the city. Generations past have made her live, but it was this generation that made her livable.

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.