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When I was planning my trip to New Jersey I'd planned on taking the train from JFK down to the beach. The hard part was always in getting from JFK to Manhattan. I've done the Penn Station to the Shore run a few times and never had any trouble but my family was concerned about how that would work out and in the wake of the London bombings I would up using alternative transportation (that led to two trips over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge which I'd been under, but never over).
I figured I'd write up something about the JFK AirTrain system anyway (I'd looked into it a bit) for those who are looking for this kind of thing when I found the article on Wikipedia that sums up the AirTrain quite a bit better than the official AirTrain site. Even my lingering question about the required MetroCard value is answered, a basic $5 card seems to do it.
Things are relatively straight forward once you reach Jamaica Station. The Port Authority site mentions two possibilities; either a Long Island Rail Road train or the E subway to Penn Station. The train sounds easiest, leaving about every ten to fifteen minutes (in the afternoon) and taking slightly more than twenty minutes to get to Penn Station. If you are headed somewhere in Jersey, NJ Transit handles the rest of it using the same basic routes and methods that have been in place for all my life.
It was pretty weird how little I knew about Long Island. Until recently I had JFK and La Guardia backwards in my mind for some reason. When I mentioned that to one of my aunts, she giggled. I was once interested in a girl who lived out near Port Washington and figured out how to get there, but that was a long, long time ago. I was onboard for several fishing trips out to the vicinity of Fire Island, but all that told me was how to get to the middle of the Island from New Jersey via the water. I was also party to a fall surfing trip to a cove out near Montauk (good waves as I recall) but all I remember now are basic directions; north to the city, hang a right and drive until land ends, look for a southwest facing cove.
The last few weeks have helped my knowledge of Queens and how it connects to the rest of the island considerably.
It's been a whirlwind couple of days.
The whole flight via jetBlue was a bit off. Driving to Burbank at just before 5 in the morning, Sarah and I were both kind of punchy (but it was a lot easier than coming via LAX).
The departure from Burbank seemed really odd. We took off heading SSE and made a wide swooping turn over Glendale and wound up heading nearly NW over the 405 pass into the valley. I had my first viewing ever of Van Nuys Airport out the left window and got to see Simi Valley and the Santa Susana area in a whole new light. It was pretty neat to see the fog layer still sitting over Thousand Oaks, parts of Moorpark and the whole valley below Lake Piru. And then we finally began to gently bank right and head east (more or less).
The flight plan may have been conceived to use atmospheric effects as best as possible, but it seemed like a child who loved arcs had drawn it. I still don't quite grasp how a flight from SoCal to JFK wanders over Canadian air space and makes land fall just about right over Erie, PA along the way.
Looping had become a pattern, so we swooped southwest over the Brooklyn Bridge (hey, I see something I know!) still at 20,000 feet (are we going to dive?) and then did a long banking dive over Long Island, out over the Atlantic and eventually around past Sandy Hook with a nice view of the Amboy's and then a bit further around the Verrazano Bridge (partly obscured by fog, then and later when we drove over it) and then dropped into Jamaica Bay. This was my first ever flight into JFK and the Manhattan skyline seemed so familiar and yet quite odd.
As we dropped lower the city begins to emerge. Lots of tenements. When we fly over some lower density housing, we're missing one common ingredient from all of California. The familiar opal spots that litter the landscape are not here; unlike Florida and California there are very few pools.
When we finally hit the Parkway, I was actually a little stunned. It took a little while to figure it out, but I was awed by how green everything was. Even the grass on the median was a wonderful, lush green. Trees? Yeah, that's normal. But all the grass? Wow. Did I forget something?
We had a great dinner last night at a place called the Bamboo Leaf (a Thai restaurant in Bradley? color me surprised!) I introduced everyone to Lemon Grass Soup and we all learned that they do take out.
The fog and humidity last night was like a warm damp gauze wrapper around everything. It's so humid here, I was beginning to think that I forgotten what it could be like. Not so I learned, this has been a very warm and wet spring and summer. The early morning fog burned off a bit today but the marine layer (I never called it that until I moved to SoCal) never really retreated and the overcast remains with us. Despite the normal summer breeze, by mid day it was more than muggy. I've always loved this kind of weather in the fall, when it helped to drive off the last off the summer people with soggy nights and you could walk along the waters edge early in the day in nearly complete isolation; sometimes you'd see the boardwalk, but mostly not. My memories of this weather during the sumer all come back to fishing. Being offshore, the boat in a swampy haze and running around the boat doing various sweat producing activities; chumming, gaffing and just talking.
We've had several long and winding conversations about everything and anything.
I explained Vonage and the general idea behind it. We'll be talking more about it in the coming days. I'm shocked by the telecom costs Jean and Carol are dealing with.
I've also learned that a relative (great uncle Steve?) did arrangements for George Gershwin before he learned how to do it himself (that explains some of the family craziness about his music).
We had a long discussion about crazy children and further revelations about my own childhood adventures like swimming across Shark River many times and the night we swam out to the Belmar channel buoy. Oddly, our swimming across Shark River (about a quarter mile wide) multiple times over the years (always during the day) was somehow more horrifying than swimming out a half mile to a buoy in the middle of the night (to prove we weren't afraid of Jaws). I've always thought the latter was one of the more moronic stunts I've ever pulled.
We also revisited the LaReine Hotel fire (it seems it was 1974, not 1973 as I'd mentioned before). As an adult I would have been terrified to see burning embers landing in the street in front of the house, but as kids we were only interested in what was burning. The fire had started not long after dark and it was probably 3 AM by the time things had calmed down and I dragged myself home (the whole town was out there that night).
I need to make a big deal of Adam's first 600 series which happened last Wednesday evening. We all get there at different times (he was about 9 years old when I did it for the first time) and this was his. He blasted through the barrier in a way that should eliminate it from his mind.
It was a really fun night of family bowling.
Oddly enough, this was the first time I'd ever bowled with Adam as an adult. We'd bowled together in adult-junior tournaments over the years but he'd continued to bowl as a junior until leaving for college. When I begged off on bowling for the summer (enough already!), Adam volunteered and was accepted. He and I talked about it early in the evening and realized that this was the first time in at least a couple years that we'd bowled together in any way. I was there because I was asked to sub for the daughter of a team member (Mark's daughter was off celebrating her birthday). Oddly enough, we played against a team that includes Mark's wife. Another member of the opposition is a recent high school graduate whose father I'd played against for several years in scratch leagues and Adam had known and played against since he started bowling. Typical.
Nearly everyone knows everyone in this league. Stick around a couple years and the family tree gets added to the rest of known people. It's friendly and informal. It wasn't one of the things we were looking for when we joined our first league nearly a dozen years ago but within a couple years, it was a part of our family life (at one point it seemed that Jonathan was doing all his learning about people in a bowling alley, he's come of age there in many respects). Bowling families are actually pretty common in this area. That was the reason I got to know Robert Smith (and his game) the year before he went out on tour. He'd bowled with his mother and a couple others in a limited average scratch league I was bowling in at the time and we bumped into each other from time to time.
Back to Wednesday...
Adam was doing well in warm up and continued his form and line at the start with a strike which he ran to a five bagger before leaving a seven pin. He finished with a very nice 254. In the next game, our whole team fell apart and he joined in. In the third game, he and I once again got into it, playing a game of one-upmanship which he finished with a 232.
In the 10th frame of the last game, I knew I was shooting for 700 and I g'acked it, leaving the first 10 pin of the evening. I picked it off and struck out (where was that ball the first time around!) for 695, but I also realized that Adam wasn't too far behind me.
After a bit of accounting, we realized that Adam had a 650, wow!
I was really surprised that it was his first 600. What made the last game more fun (and perhaps a bit easier for all of us) was a lot of kidding around, teasing and frame by frame comparison (none of us knew what my handicap would be, although I was assuming it would be pretty small and with my last game I wound up with nothing) that left us mostly caught up in the moment and left him little time to realize where he was. He'd strike and I had to match it; when I did, I told him he had to match it. And on it went. He had little of the threshold awareness that can make numerical hurdles so difficult (I was intensely aware of the 650 and 700 barriers as I approached them, but they faded after I took them out).
Now that he's done 600 (and then some!), it's no longer a big deal and the rest is in front of him. He's got good rev's on the ball (something I was surprised to see) and once he learns to do it repetitively (he was doing it pretty well last week), he'll be a very good amateur bowler.
Adam mentioned that I'd once told him that he'd kick my butt (while we were playing basketball, oh, about a decade ago). He still will, very shortly I think. But not quite yet...
I'd been meaning to look into mod_security for use on my weblog and a post by Mir a couple weeks back finally got me going. I still need to look into how it'll work as a front end to web services front end to web services, which sounds like a really useful idea, but on the weblog side, it's worked out quite well.
Getting it up and running (even on the cranky old system I'm using) wasn't a big deal. Mostly just knowing how to use apxs (and I've been down that road often enough) and a small fix for an old compiler and system.
Once I had it working without croaking on 'apachectl configtest', it was time to figure out how to use it more effectively.
I wound up using Peter Woods perl module blacklist_to_modsec to create an import black list from the materials I already had at my disposal. The result mostly worked but I had some more work to do. Extra cruft (whitespace) needed to be trimmed and blank lines eliminated (apparently newer version of MTBL do a better job in that area). After making those changes, it worked.
Almost. None of my regular expressions worked. Hmm, there's a function for fixing up regex data, but it doesn't seem to be called (do I need it? it appears to do some interesting things). I hooked that up and it fixed the issues I'd seen.
So what's the difference? Mostly, it was a matter of replacing searches for "\w" (the 'word characters' I believe they are called) with the POSIX equivalent "[:alnum:]". According to Peter, Apache 1.x uses a POSIX-style regex engine internally. It would probably have been just as effective to replace it with [A-Za-z0-9] but that would have likely sacrificed some performance. Having no idea how the Apache regex actually works, I think I'll just leave things alone for now.
The end result has been quite satisfactory. I've turned off my 'after the fact' trackback cleanup script and have gone back to the default trackback implementation. I've also seen a bunch of really weird stuff get blocked in mod_security rather than falling through to Apache (today's example: an attempt to exploit an old fp30reg.dll weakness). By moving the blacklist concept up the stack, MTBL doesn't even play a part in the normal operation of this site. It's now used only as a mechanism to address new problems and scan for (and delete) the comments and pings which leak through (which seems appropriate).
The July issue of IEEE Spectrum contains a pretty complete retrospective on AT&T. [via IP]
It's unlikely that an equivalent research organization will ever again be assembled. The question is, do we need that kind of organization in this age of unfettered network communities? There certainly were benefits accrued to society by the Bell Labs inability to capitalize on some of its most world changing inventions.
It's an interesting question to ponder as we watch AT&T disappear into SBC.
