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.

I took the train up to New York City to attend The Last HOPE this past weekend. It was a smooth, comfortable ride to Penn Station, right across the street from the hotel where I shared a room with a couple other HacDC folks. One thing I did not do was spent much time at the hackersmart run by HacDC; when there's so much exciting stuff going on—and I've paid good money to participate—it just didn't seem like a good use of my time to try to sell vintage linesman's handsets to random passersby.

My preparations for this trip: instead of making a point to leave behind my pocket knife and any liquids of greater than three ounces as I would on a plane trip, I strategically removed any RFID tags and read up on using a SOCKS proxy to foil eavesdropping on my websurfing traffic. (I even filed a bug on that topic as I was testing it out.) I arrived too late on Thursday to register that evening, so after getting a bite to eat at Tic Toc Diner and trying unsuccessfully to use wifi from my hotel room (dozens of wifi networks were visible, but I couldn't successfully connect to any of them), I hit the sack.

On Friday morning I sat in the back of a few talks and realized I'd need to be more aggressive in beating the hordes of fellow attendees to decent seats. I think I can now appreciate why the ShmooCon organizers insist on capping the number of registrations. I did spend some time hanging out with other HacDC people, pretty much all of whom were more dedicated in their running of the hackersmart than I was. On Friday afternoon I attended The Attendee Meta-Data Project where we learned what would be done with the data collected from the RFID tags many of us chose to wear. amd.hope.net may be (back) up in the near future with more information on that. The team managed to barely scratch the surface of applications for that system, and I'm happy that they're being so open with the platform and the (non-personal-information) data collected on it. I hope they open up some public discussion area on it.

Next I attended Monumental Women Who Influenced Today's Technology. I found it rather disappointing because of the speaker's encyclopedic style of reciting names, dates, and facts supplemented by bullet-point-filled slides. Ugh. Weirder was that the second half of her talk was about "Women of the Phone", which profiled some voice actresses who were "famous" for being the voice of the date/time announcement or the voice menu on your provider's voicemail system. To me, these profiles just didn't make sense in a discussion of technical women. During the question-and-answer period, some audience members enlivened the hour with questions and comments about women in the IT sector today. I was surprised that the speaker hadn't even read Unlocking the Clubhouse, and I suspect the hour would have been more enlightening if it had been entirely based on audience participation.

After a short nap (yay for staying at the con hotel despite its dinginess), I went to Hacker Space Design Patterns and then A Collaborative Approach to Hardware Hacking: NYCResistor. The latter was an awesome panel talk that made me excited about HacDC and likely to hang out there more in the near future, in the hopes that HacDC can be half as cool as NYCResistor. I wandered back down to the hackersmart, picked up my spiffy black HacDC lab coat, and caught up with Andrew and friends for dinner at Soul Fixins'. On our way back, we randomly passed an historical plaque marking the place where Nikola Tesla died and picked up an impressively-constructed fake television sporting "Yo! MTV Raps!" on the screen. The latter was set out in the trash on the sidewalk, the volume of which piled up every evening was impressive, but not in a good way. I intended to check out digital music night, but I was feeling sleepy again—I should've tried a bottle of the Club-Mate they were selling.

On Saturday morning, I started out with Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM)-A Brief Primer on the Arcane Art and Science of Electronics Surveillance and Bug Detection by Marty Kaiser, the kind of old character who could tell you all kinds of fascinating stories from his life if you sit down to listen. I learned more about FBI politics than about surveillance countermeasures (which are apparently quite expensive), but it was a worthwhile talk. Next up was "Off the Grid" Voice/Data Communications, sort of an overview of two-way radio technologies. Incidentally, amateur radio is a sizable presence at HOPE, with a special event station on the air and all levels of license exams being offered. In such a privacy-conscious crowd, I'm surprised I've never heard any grumblings about the fact that getting an amateur radio license (in the US, anyway) means having your name and address added to a public domain database run by the FCC.

I sat in on some of the Debian OpenSSL Debacle talk, but I failed at getting a decent seat, so I couldn't really see the slides or follow the discussion. I left to wander the neighborhood for lunch. When I returned, I was determined to get a better seat at the next talk I wanted to attend, so in order to get a good seat for the Port Knocking and Single Packet Authorization talk, I showed up to the panel on Reprimand, an e-zine of which I'd never heard. It wasn't bad, but I wasn't really engaged with it. By the time the talk I'd really come for rolled around, I was feeling like—guess what!—taking a nap. If I felt the need for so much sleep on a regular basis I might be alarmed, but I suspect I was feeling exhausted by the sheer crush of people. I ended up sleeping through elwing2000's talk (sorry!). I felt pretty refreshed, though, for the dinner at Ninja I'd organized with a bunch of friends, including but not limited to elwing2000, princessleia2, and sfllaw. Sorry we missed you, searchingbuddha and secretsoflife! We had our own private dungeon dining room with ninja waiters and all. Okay, maybe they weren't real ninjas. The lighting was too dim for my camera (at least without the flash that I think makes most photos look awful), so I'm hoping to see some of the shots from those of us with snazzier cameras. I had a flight of Hanzo sakes, Clam Bombshells, a negitoro roll, and sashimi perched over a bowl of mist. Oh, and part of a "Ninja Star" for dessert, but I won't spoil the surprise by telling you what it is. :) I agreed with the consensus that the food wasn't great—this place is more about flash than about awesome food. The visit by a magician to our table toward the end of dinner underscored that point. It was entertaining, and I'm glad I went, but I wouldn't make any particular effort to return. Afterward we wandered TriBeCa, eventually settling down in Cowgirl and inadvertently crashing a birthday party. Wacky western fun ensued. :)

On Sunday, I wasn't sure whether to regret the few drinks at Cowgirl or the clams at Ninja (almost everyone had sushi too, so that's not high on my suspect list), but my stomach protested violently. We scrambled to check out even as I asked myself whether I should be giving up the only well air-conditioned place I could lay down and recover in proximity to a restroom. Everyone else had checked out of their rooms, too, yet the festivities wouldn't end until 7 p.m. or later. Resting on the floor of the anteroom to the ladies' restroom will not go on record as a high point in my life, but I felt much less queasy when I got up and caught the second half of Johnny Long's No-Tech Hacking talk. He walks a thin line between profiling and stereotyping in some of his "hacking", and it's inevitably based on the assumption that he's the only dissembler in a given situation. It irks me to see cases of social profiling that are smugly presented as successful without any evidence of their accuracy. That said, much of his work is solid.

I also caught the Attendee Meta-Data and Network summary parts of the closing ceremonies. I left early to enjoy my first real food of the day, a shepherd's pie, over at Stout before catching the train home.

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.