I have taken foreign language classes before, but always found them to be very difficult. In particular, I never did well with the so called “immersion” classes where they don’t speak any English, just whatever language you are learning. Supposedly this is good “because that’s how you learned your first language; however if we had to learn everything from scratch I don’t think we would know as much. After taking this immersion class, I think the success or failure of the students largely rests on the skill of the instructor. In our case, the instructor was excellent and walking us through our mistakes until we understood them. My brain hurt after each class, but I can use more ASL after one semester than I could use Spanish after five semesters. The language itself is rather neat, but it is pretty hard to learn on your own. There aren’t any dictionaries that you can use to look up an unfamiliar sign that you see, and the ones for you to look up the sign for a word you know are often not very clear (video based ones on-line are much better.) Similarly, there’s no easy way to “take notes” in class.

ASL is “American Sign Language.” Sign language varies from one country to the next. ASL is based more on French Sign Language than on others. It is not very international, which was disappointing. No one knows for sure, but the best studies I have seen are that there are maybe 500,000 signers in the U.S. I’m betting that number will increase with the aging population and the Walkman and iPod generations loud music habits catching up with them. Despite Rush Limbaugh praising his cochlear implant, fixing deafness is not a quick, overnight, LASIK-like procedure.

Even though I use my fingers to type all the time, it was surprising how sore your hands could get after a few hours. Also, your eyes get sore from constant tracking. I’m sure it was good exercise.

With practice, it seemed pretty easy to pick up and after a few weeks I started having moments where I thought “hey, I can sign what I just said.”

Sadly, I’m not continuing with the classes because they were excessively inconvenient. They started in the middle of rush hour and were only in Clarkston. I can’t find any classes that go beyond one semester other than Georgia Perimeter College, and they only offer classes at the Clarkston campus.

I also really need some friends to do it too. Flipping through my notes, I realize that in just a few short months I have forgotten a lot of it. You really need to be able to use it to maintain it as a skill – it’s not like riding a bicycle.

If you want to learn sign language, start with fingerspelling. It is the first thing you will learn, and you will use it everyday. Proficient signers fingerspell so fast it is almost a blur. Find someone to practice with as reading it is much harder than signing it. With time, you will develop a Scrabble like mentality where you can miss some letters and will still figure out what it is. And, if you talk to someone who is deaf and don’t understand a sign, just repeat the sign back with a quizzical look and they’ll spell it out for you. :)

Perhaps if enough people are interested, we can hire an interpreter and get a class started in Dunwoody, Roswell, or Marietta? It wouldn’t be “accredited,” but it beats the pants off traffic. Let me know!

I haven’t been to DefCon in five years and a lot of things changed.

First, of course, is the change of venue to the Riviera. The Riv has a lot more space that allowed the convention to run five tracks, plus have breakout spaces for Q&A to continue after each panel – a very nice touch. It is spread out more, which made it seem like a smaller crowd at times, but the crowd at the closing ceremony was huge and I think Dark Tangent’s estimate of 7,500 people is probably about right.

While larger, the crowd has really changed. DefCon, overall, was much more subdued than in years past. To some degree, this was a necessity for DefCon to continue as some aspects were a out of control. I remember talking to Priest and DT before DC10 and the general opinion was that if were anything like DC9 that it would be the conference’s last year. There are some other reasons as well. For sure, money came and went from the scene, but it was still striking how the cDc’s presentation went from being nearly a rock concert to “hi, I’m with Cult of the Dead Cow. Here’s our presentation.”

The average age of a DefCon attendee has gone up. I don’t know if they are all the same people, but I think the average age is now around 33-35 and a good number of people have 2.5 kids, etc. so people are a little more responsible, I think. Someone said that Jinx sold out of all the kid/baby sized shirts in just a few hours.

There were also more women. Some of this is attributed us guys getting older and bringing significant others, but there were also quite a few women attending the show on their own. More power to you all. Bring your friends.

The Black and White Ball really shrunk, although it was still worthwhile and I had a great time. I enjoyed seeing Karen again and I hope some of the other DJs post mp3s.

No fire marshal problems this year. The goons were mostly well behaved. Even Priest has calmed down a little – complete with a running joke about being to “sensitivity training.”

Number of contests has really increased. The awards took almost 2 hours. The badges were cool (although a little large) and had a small LED sign that was programmable/hackable. Sadly, they ran out of the mod kits for them which included wireless and a 3 axis accelerometer!

Lock picking, while ever present at DefCon, was really big this year. DefCon provided permanent space for several “villages” including one for hacker spaces, wireless, and lock-picking.

My biggest complaint is that many of the panels ran out of time – largely because panelists didn’t appear to have tested or practiced their presentation. Sometimes this was due to loading or seating issues, and that isn’t the panelist’s fault. But, hey, I understand that it’s a little nerve-racking to stand up in front of a few thousand people – so if they get a little off track, that’s life. I just think that a few more of the presentations should have been two hour blocks – especially for a certain Shmoo who has great rants but always runs into overtime. Same goes for the Meet the Fed panel, which only had about 20 minutes of actual Q&A (is that a conspiracy?)

Highlights:

• Toxic BBQ looked really cool (or hot, depending on your point of view) and I wished I could have made it.


• Beer cooling contest (the winner only cooled at 2 degrees/second… surely I can do better? Nice excuse for a liquid nitrogen pump!)
• High security lock review – The Mul-T-Lock picking tool was just fantastic. I enjoyed showing my key ring to several people seated near me as many people have never even seen the keys for the locks talked about in the presentation.
• Update on radio scanning technologies.
• Several presentations on Tor issues., confirming all of my suspicions of various propellerhead vulnerabilities – and some cool ones I had not thought of.
• Review of quasi-multi-factor authentication for banks. Since I’m a security-application web developer, I didn’t learn anything new that I can apply to my own practice (i.e., I didn’t leave screaming “oh, shit, I need to login to my servers and fix this!), but I had no idea just how crappy some of these new systems were. I screamed at my bank a little and told them how stupid I thought it was, but quickly realized that this was the direction the industry was going and getting them to change would be like abolishing ATM fees. I really need to just start my own bank.
• I learned a lot in the Reanimating Hard Drives panel.
• The legal panels confirmed that I have a pretty good grasp on the areas that affect me.
• Black and White Balls were lots of fun. It was a small crowd, but the DJs were pretty good and there was a lot of cool people to dance with. Mad props to the two people who were contact juggling while dancing. Just, WOW! I would think you pretty much have to be able to do it with your eyes closed in order to not be distracted by strobes, etc. Very impressive.

The on-line thing it still doesn’t allow you to do a change of address, but I was pleased that I did not have to enter any information about my insurance or my emissions inspection – it pulled that up automatically. The system even allows you to purchase the “special” tags on-line, although I did not see an option for vanity plates.

The system does require you to enter a number from your registration papers, so if you didn’t get them you are shit out of luck and get to stand in the line on your birthday. Well, it’s progress even if it isn’t perfection. Best part for them… there’s no way to pay with pennies over the Internet.

This frog was on my driveway the other evening. His color pattern, when viewed from the top, looked so incredibly similar to a dried, fallen leaf that every time I see a leaf or a rock, I avoid stepping on it because it might be a frog.

I have recently become interested in different types of camouflage after seeing this page about dazzle camouflage and this photo from Wikipedia.

It’s kind of retro to think I now have to wait for my photos, just like when we used to “develop” our pictures.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting thought to step backwards like that.

We had a radio scanner to listen to the launch control, which is a good thing because if you don’t hear the countdown you might miss it. You don’t really hear the shuttle when it takes off because it takes sound some time to travel from the launch pad to you. In addition, the shuttle was surprisingly quiet, maybe as loud as a 747 or an F-14, but not as loud as a lot of other military jets. Building implosions are similarly not-loud.

It would be very difficult to make a launch photograph that truly shows the launch as we saw it. The flame from the engines was intensely bright, more than a welder or a magnesium flare but less than the sun. It was actually hard to look at because it was so bright. Some people had trouble looking at it, even with sunglasses. Some of our cameras produced almost night looking images in order to balacne the brightness. The flames lit up the smoke plumes.

The shuttle quickly becomes just a dot and it is difficult to see many of the events after 2 minutes. I could barely see the solid rocket boosters eject and deploy their parachutes. I could not follow them all the way to the ground. For several minutes, the shuttle was just a bright star in the daytime before it finally dissipated.

The smoke plume left at the launch pad was white on the outside but had an orange cast inside. Apparently, the SRB smoke reflects white but transmits orange.

On the delayed launch days we toured Kennedy Space Center, saw the IMAX movies, and hung out on Cocoa Beach.

Even though the space center is geared more toward kids, I did really enjoy it. Actually, I think I enjoyed the other visitors the most. I’ve always been a space buff and it was neat to be surrounded by people who shared that interest. KSC does allow you pretty close to a lot of stuff and has lots of toys to share. Everyone I know who works with NASA seems to really enjoy it and there is palpable sense of family.

NASA - Off-site viewing location tips

Information on Kennedy Space Center Passes for Launch Day

Other things to do in the area… in case of delay

Directions to one of the better public spaces

Technical information on Launches

A detailed explaination of KSC Passes

Best of luck to everyone at NASA. Blue skies!

I’m very pleased that the public is interested enough in this type of film for it to make it into mainstream theaters. Maybe there is some hope after all.

I think they did a good job explaining what global warming is and how we can use ice core samples to judge temperature and CO2 levels back thousands of years. While the film focuses on “consequences” of our inaction, Gore does remind us that there is plenty of time to act and that we have reversed our environmental damage before – the elimination of chlorofluorocarbons, for example.

The visuals do a good job keeping the audience’s attention, and I was excited to see them using an Apple computer. At the same time, there were several statistical flaws. The flaws are relatively minor, but this film is going to become the Fahrenheit 9/11 and you know that people are going to attack it. Whether Gore planned on it or not, he might end up being a poster child for the film. I can already see the oil industry saying “Al Gore says he invented Global Warming.” Among the errors I thought I caught:

• list of deaths did not add up to the same number Al Gore says in the narrative (35,000)
• Some of the temperature graphs indicated a range of only two degrees. The temperature in the theater probably fluctuated more than that.
• During the end sequence about technology, photos of the Very Large Array, a radio telescope, are used to represent “satellite communication”

I would feel better about the representations if they put the charts and graphs on their web site. Many of them fly by faster than you can read. “These are not the statistics you are looking for.” To make this even funnier, one of the commercials during the previews was about subliminal messages.

Whether you believe in global warming or not, I think it is easy to see that our society’s pollution is not a good thing. If you don’t understand what us environmentalists are talking about, seeing this film will help you understand our perspective. I recommend it, but you might want to wait for it to come out on DVD. Hopefully they will fix the above errors, plus you will be able to pause and back-up.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the “follow-up” movie Who Killed the Electric Car? that was advertised during the previews. I don’t think electric cars are the whole answer, after all we create carbons and nuclear waste to make our electricity, but it seems to me that it should be a commercially available option at this point.

• Tour the Georgia Dome – There is a “behind the scenes tour” that I think would be neat.


• Go back to the Aquarium – I have an annual pass and haven’t been in several months. I hear that they cut back on the number of people they allow at once. Also, I need to remember to bring my earplugs.


• Go to the BODIES exhibit Done – highly recommended!


• Hike/bike/skate the Alpharetta Greenway


• Go hiking in Cloudland Canyon


• Bike Repair class at REI


• Do something with fireworks for 4th of July


• Take a Segway Tour