Without a Traceroute

…one giant hit for awesome.





I don’t usually just post links or youtube videos, but this one is almost too amazing to pass up. Today is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and somebody pointed me to the above video. How I managed to go this long without seeing this or hearing about the incident is beyond me.

In the 2002 clip, a 72-year old Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, punches a guy named Bart Sibrel in the face. Sibrel is apparently a filmmaker who claims that the moon landing was a hoax. He invited Buzz Aldrin to do an interview for what Aldrin thought was a Japanese TV show, and then started harassing him.

The lesson: Buzz Aldrin is a total badass. He may be old, but he doesn’t put up with crap. Also, he has just rocketed to the top of my Favorite Astronauts List.

Alright, so this post is probably more of a service to the internet at large than to anyone who reads this blog regularly. The local Buenos Aires government has thoughtfully prepared twelve different free audio tours covering various neighborhoods in the city, in Spanish, English and Portuguese. I can vouch that the English-language ones are quite nice, and charmingly accented as well. I’m planning on taking the Spanish-language versions for a spin later this week to practice my Spanish-listening skills, so I’ll get back to you on that.

You can download the tours for free in mp3 format to play on any portable audio player. Alternatively, if for some reason you hate having money, there’s a phone number you can call to listen to any of the audioguides on your mobile phone at the touch of a button. Mobile phone rates here in Argentina are not nearly as obscene as they were in Europe, but a 40 minute call still starts to add up. Plus, if the choice is between “no cost” and “cost”, I’m guessing most people will opt for the former.

However, the BA government has done a rather poor job of promoting their audioguides. If I hadn’t been tipped off to their existence, I probably never would have found them. Google searches (at least on English-language google.com) for Buenos Aires audiotours turn up mostly a variety of commercial sites and blogs, not the governmental site. Consider this post my meager bid to try to improve the Porteños’ PageRank.

Don’t worry, you’re (probably) not a victim of DNS spoofing. As you may have noticed, the site looks a bit different. To celebrate my arrival on a brand-new continent, I’m relaunching this blog with a brand-new, custom, Wordpress theme. All of the design work, and the lion’s share of the PHP/CSS work, are courtesy of Monica Joyce. As you might expect, given the nature of this blog, the theme is GPL-licensed and you can download it from her site if you’d like to use it on your own blog.

I’m pretty pleased with the new design, I think it’s very clean and modern-looking without being too gimmicky. It does have some fancyness like transparency, and rounded corners and so forth, so if anyone out there is running into weird glitches (things overlapping, sections disappearing, etc.) I’d appreciate hearing about them. You can leave a comment, or email me. Please include your operating system and browser, too.

I’ve written up another interview I did for hackerspaces.org. I think the interviews are pretty interesting and I’m glad I’m doing them/contributing knowledge about the greater hacker community, but the actual process of writing, transcribing, finding appropriate links, sorting through photos, uploading everything is really time-intesnsive. I’m wondering if I’d be better off shooting video interviews and just uploading that, or something.

Also, if people reading here find it irritating to click over to the other site, there’s no real reason I couldn’t just cross-post these things here, too. Let me know.

I’ve posted an interview I did with one of the Swedish hackers in Malmö a few weeks ago. I was surprised at how demanding transcription is—trying to type quickly enough to keep up with the recording, while still inserting the correct punctuation to make it readable. The word count balloons quickly, too. The formal interview part of my talk with Olle was only about 20 minutes, but it wound up being close to 2,000 words.