Credit: NASA/JHU APL/CIW

I've been supporting MESSENGER's third flyby of Mercury last week. I've got a description of how it went in a friends-locked entry. The contact-heavy work schedule has scrambled my circadian rhythm from day to day, so that one of the reasons I'm looking forward to my upcoming vacation is because I'll have the opportunity to resume a consistent sleep schedule. Since I've been subjected to a simulated sort of jet lag practically every day for the past few weeks, I don't expected to be fazed at all by the real thing.

Credit: DP

Last week I gave a HacDC Lightning Talk on Kōdō, the Japanese Way of Incense, in which I'm by no means an expert. But I know a little, enough to give a five-minute overview and demo. When I go to Kyoto later this month I'm going to attend a Kōdō demo by a genuine expert, and next month I'll be making kneaded incense (nerikō) at a Tankokai DC workshop. So in the near future I'll know a lot more. Let me know if you're interested in an informal demo of the wood-chip incense that's heated by charcoal in an ash-filled censer; I'm happy to share it. The Lightning Talks event was a great success, with a stimulating variety of topics and speakers.

Credit: Mackenzie

On Saturday I led the DC LinuxChix contingent of a group outing (along with AWC Maryland and GWU Women in Computer Science) to the National Cryptologic Museum. We tagged along with a docent-led tour and learned quite a bit, though we only scratched the surface of the museum's fascinating collection.

Credit: Mackenzie

On Saturday evening I joined seelevarcuzzo and Mackenzie at the Japan-America Society's Otsukimi, a traditional moon-viewing event held in this case at the National Arboretum. It was great fun, with a bento dinner, sake, haiku composition, some slightly-unseasonal-feeling bon odori dancing, and even a little practice of our Japanese. I brought a borrowed telescope and set it up to have a good look at the moon; we were lucky to have a clear sky with only a few thin clouds occasionally floating artistically in front of the moon. I wish the event had lasted longer, as we missed our chance to wander around the Bonsai & Penjing Museum and it felt like we were just getting started as it was announced that it was time to pack up and leave.

Credit: Indy

On Sunday I went climbing at White Rocks, a spur from the temporarily-closed Sugarloaf Mountain. The weather was fantastic. I attempted Sugar & Spice (a 5.2 on the Yosemite Decimal System) and Lucifer (a 5.10/5.11), summiting neither but enjoying the climbs nonetheless. I'd be tempted to buy my own climbing shoes and harness but I'm a little discouraged that the local climbing gym has discontinued their auto belay system that would have allowed me to practice on my own.

And now to prepare for Tankokai DC's Autumn Chakai this weekend and my upcoming Japan trip that starts next week. Ack! I don't quite feel prepared for either.

Since this past weekend wasn't terribly exciting, I'll offer a past-due recap of my weekend from several weeks ago, which was quite busy.

That Friday night I attended the charter membership meeting at HacDC, a new "hacker space" in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of DC. I haven't been able to visit the space very often with my busy schedule and distance from it, but it's an exciting effort nonetheless. At last night's organizational meeting, a bunch of new members who weren't present (including me) were approved, which had the weird effect of suddenly meaning that a quorum was no longer present, and so the meeting adjourned. :) I'm just amused by that.

On Saturday morning I attended a taiko workshop held by Nen Daiko. Being totally new not just to taiko but to drums in general, I had some trouble understanding what forces to apply to the drumsticks at what point in striking the drum. Nen Daiko is holding a series of beginner taiko classes on Sunday afternoons in June, but even if I had an accommodating schedule, Fairfax Station is awfully far for me to drive on a regular basis. It's too bad, because they seem like really friendly, fun people, and of course taiko's a blast.

Next was tea ceremony class, just a normal lesson, although it was the last time I got to see one of my classmates before he began his year off to care for his soon-to-be-newborn baby. As a congratulatory gift I made him a chenille-backed baby blanket with a temple festival motif. And I just learned that the baby was born yesterday evening!

From there I joined a group of Japanese-language learners at a noraebang (a predominantly Korean karaoke box) for an evening of singing. The idea is fun, but I recognized very few of the songs in their catalog, which included some Japanese and English-language songs along with many Korean songs. The other people I was with found Japanese songs they knew, whether from anime or from a familiarity with J-pop, I don't know. They also introduced me to the Numa Numa song, bringing to four the number of languages sung in that night. If I go again, I'd want to find a Japanese song that I know will be in the catalog and study it beforehand.

On Sunday I visited a home in Chevy Chase where a Kyoto-based kimono retailer, Sōjuan (双樹庵), had set up a showing. Nearly all of my kimono are secondhand, and even when I've visited Japan I've felt unsure about being able to assess the condition (for used ones), seasonality, and appropriateness for tea ceremony of a given kimono. But when I showed up to this house, I was happy to see a senior fellow tea ceremony student who's a professional kimono dresser open the door. She was like a fairy godmother for this situation! I tried on a number of gorgeous kimono and eventually decided on two: a relatively cheap, washable komon with a contemporary sakura motif; and the pièce de résistance, a light-green silk homongi with an ivy motif. Since their silk kimono were in karinui (仮縫い) form (just basted together), I'll be receiving that second kimono after they tailor it, sometime next month.

Having rung up possibly the highest single charge on my credit card to date, I took the metro over to Artomatic, on the other side of the city, for my second visit this season. There's so much interesting art there that I wouldn't know where to begin writing about it. I could spend hours and hours wandering around there, and I did, but eventually I grew hungry, and since none of the venue's food vendors showed any signs of being open, I wandered around the neighborhood. That's how I learned just how deserted the NoMa neighborhood is on Sundays. It's a ghost town. The few eateries I passed were all closed. So I kept walking, eventually wandering all the way to Chinatown and dining at Zengo before heading home.

Crap! Tonight's Presets show has been canceled! My night is going to be a lot quieter than anticipated.

My weekend was tea, tea, and more tea.

Tea the First: regular chanoyu class. I practiced a thin-tea ceremony using this shelf. We'll continue using the sunken hearth to heat water for another month or so, when we'll make the seasonal switch to a portable brazier.

Tea the Second: tea at Punitha's place as part of elwing2000's multi-stage bachelorette party, which also included dinner at The Melting Pot and drinks at Cafe Citron. With so many of my friends getting married, buying houses, having kids, and traveling around the world, I feel like the only one with nothing in particular to look forward to. Foreseeing those friendships dying away as the years go on and the friends with new families insulate themselves—not to mention looking back to my party-less wedding and the friends I've lost since then—is frankly depressing. So I'm trying to concentrate on celebrating elwing2000's marriage.

Tea the Third, a Cherry Blossom River Tea along with my parents, my brother's mother-in-law, seelevarcuzzo, Justin, and Eli. It had seemed like a good idea, but in practice, the cruise was overbooked, the service was poor, the view (through sheets of plastic because the air was too chilly for true al fresco dining) blurry, and the diesel fumes nearly sickening. On a different day, it might have been a completely different experience. We did see lots of gorgeous flowers blooming around the National Mall area, though, and we saw "the Castle" and a little of the Hirshhorn.

The Chado Urasenke Tankokai Washington D.C. Association—of which I'm a board member—will be holding a public tea ceremony open house on Sunday, 16 March 2008 from 2:30-4:30 p.m. at the McLean Community Center in McLean, Virginia. If you are curious as to what Japanese tea ceremony is about, please come and enjoy a bowl of tea and sweet with us! If you plan to come, we ask that you please e-mail Aiko to let her know, so we can plan for the appropriate number of attendees.

ShmooCon 2008 was great. Since I'm not a security professional, I felt a bit guilty about taking up one of a limited number of attendee slots, but not too guilty.

The badges looked like variations on this, evoking classic punchcards and comprising a puzzle that—as it was explained to us at the end of the con—evokes the phrase "too clever by half".

I attended all of the opening-day talks on Friday, from h1kari's presentation on interception of GSM traffic (a.k.a., "more cool stuff you can do with a bunch of FPGAs") to a talk on Forensic Image Analysis for Password Recovery (okay) to a guy's description of an unauthorized "phishing awareness exercise" he executed at a former employer... I should have skipped out for dinner during the web portal vulnerability talk, but I stuck it out and sustained myself on some nutritious conversation hearts. Hacking the Samurai Spirit didn't have much new information for me; I think it would have benefited from more specifics, but the speaker did have to cut down an hour-long talk to fit a half-hour slot. When the videos become available later this year, I'll (try to remember to) point everyone toward New Countermeasures to the Bump Key Attack for lock advice. Grad student Alex Halderman filled in for slated keynote speaker Ed Felten, who was too ill to come. Their research group has worked out a way for electronic voting to enhance election security rather than obliterate it (as Diebold has helped to do). Sandy Clark commented from the audience that her group had found a problem with it that they'd be explaining in their talk the next morning. Afterward, my walk up Connecticut Avenue to Dino was rewarded with the discovery of their delicious-beyond-deliciousness three-cheese polenta with grilled mushrooms.

The next morning I overslept and missed that e-voting talk alluded to the previous night. Did any of you readers attend it? I'd be interested to hear about it. Instead, I made it in time to see a talk on ISP port-blocking. The speakers, former ISP employees, have changed their stance since their block-happy corporate days. Since port-blocking is so variable based on telecom company, region, and other factors, I'm wondering whether there's some online database out there where people can research and enter information about the port-blocking they're experiencing. I stayed in the "Bring It On" room for G. Mark Hardy's A Hacker Looks Past 50, which was less entertaining to me than it seemed to be to the rest of the audience. He did give away a lot of swag.

Lunch was the largest-to-date meeting of DC LinuxChix at Tono Sushi. In total I think there were around 20 of us there. I didn't even meet all the 'chix who showed up, many of them con attendees. When calypso (of Lockpick Village) commented that she'd seen hardly any other women at the con, I had to express my surprise. It's not as though women even approached half of the con population, but they were a definite presence. Which made it especially weird when a staffer was giving away swag before one of the talks: he pulled a women's-style t-shirt out of his box and asked the audience, "Anyone have a wife who could use another t-shirt?" WTF.

Anyway, after the LinuxChix lunch, I came to Jason's Scott's talk previewing his GET LAMP documentary on text adventure games, particularly Colossal Cave Adventure, a favorite from my youth that was based on an actual cave. This was my favorite talk of ShmooCon 2008.

I stayed to catch You Must Be This Tall to Ride the Security Ride, but it was disappointing, so even though I was sitting in the front row, I made a brusque exit and headed to TOOOL's Lockpick Village. I learned some things and witnessed several hilarious rounds of their Gringo Warrior challenge.

After dinner at Trattoria Italiana with thewronghands, kyra_ojosverdes, and secretsoflife, I skipped the nightlife to commute back home.

I slept in again on Sunday morning, arriving in time to catch renderman's How do I Pwn Thee? Let Me Count the Ways? I don't own any Bluetooth devices, but if I ever do I'll be changing the default PIN right away and keeping it turned off when I'm not using it. For an example of what can happen otherwise, see carwhisperer.

The subsequent panel discussion On the Social Responsibility of Hackers was a frustrating re-hash of debates like what it means to be a 'hacker', how the hacker community can benefit the 'greater good', whatever that is... not a productive discussion, to my thinking. But things picked up again with the con's closing remarks, to the point that I was sad it was over already.

Following puzzlement's lead, I'm tentatively accepting the 365 Days challenge (I realize this year will have 366 days, not 365), which involves taking a self-portrait every day for a year. Starting on New Year's Day is convenient so that my photo numbering synchronizes with the day-of-year count that pops up quite a bit in my job. Note that I don't expect to be including each photo in a LiveJournal post.

I'd been looking for something to do in DC this past weekend—if I'd been thinking clearly when I learned pwinkler wouldn't be part of my plans, I'd have taken my four days with nothing to do and booked a flight to somewhere interesting—but Metro Connection and Sunday Source both failed me (by being a rebroadcast and not being published this past week, respectively). And I was getting tired of movies. So this afternoon I went to Hains Point with a picnic blanket, a thermos of hot tea, and a couple of books, but the wind made it bitterly cold and impossible to kick back and read. I retreated to the National Arboretum, where I drove and strolled around in relative peace; my photos here. Most of the camellia were in bloom, but my favorite surprise of a photogenic-in-winter plant was the hydrangea macrophylla with its bronzed-looking veined, withered leaves.

There apparently will be a BarCamp in the Washington, DC, area next month. It is being organized not by the BARCampDC group I've participated in but rather by a different group, BarCampWashingtonDC. Confusing, eh? It's not clear whether the latter is a splinter group that was very quiet about its dissatisfaction with "our" group, or whether it's a group of people who were unaware of the existing BARCampDC group. Either way, I wish them well and plan to come to the event if I can. Their not yet having secured a venue is a bit troubling, a month out, but at least they're giving it a try.

As weekends go, this past one was good preparation for my imminent Kyoto vacation: on Saturday I helped set up for my tea circle's Sunday tea ceremony event, and I dined with a local English/Japanese language club in between.

Here are my pictures from the tea ceremony event, which was held at the lovely Hillwood Museum and Gardens. I served as an all-around helper, doing things like wiping clean the tatami mats beforehand and things like serving the guests their sweets and tea during the three tea ceremony seatings. I'd definitely like to return to the Hillwood sometime to see their dacha and more of their gardens, but it would be hard to beat a day as pleasant and efflorescent as yesterday.

At yesterday's Japanese tea ceremony lesson, the sweets of the day were kibidango, the millet dumplings that folk character Momotarō shared with a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant in exchange for their help on his demon-fighting quest. They supposedly confer on anyone who eats them the strength of a hundred men. I didn't notice any sudden surge of strength, but that's just as well—there's not much I could do with brute force in a tea ceremony, anyway. :) You can listen to a reading of the story (mp3, in English, ~8 minutes).

After class, I had some time to kill, so I strolled in West Potomac Park, where the cherry trees had finished blossoming. I suppose I could have walked a few blocks north to the street festival, but I figured it'd be wrapping up, so instead I took a leisurely drive around Hains Point, an area I'd never before explored, and I was rewarded by finding The Awakening. Parking was plentiful all around the peninsula; I imagine that's not the case in better weather, when it must be a great area for picnicking, walking, biking, and such.

Making my way over to RFK Stadium, I attended DC United's home opener versus the Kansas City Wizards, thanks to tickets procured by some co-workers. When the heavens opened up at kickoff, I was really, really glad I'd picked up a rain poncho and a hand warmer. The match didn't go so well. The team has a lot of potential, and expectations were that they'd do much better. Afterwards, Ben Olsen was quoted as saying, "All these people sit and watch us play in the rain and support us; I just feel embarrassed." Which makes me want to pat him on the back and assure him things will get better.