9pm is kinda late to be eating dinner -- for me, at least. But I got off to a pretty slow start today (out of bed a little before 10, breakfast at 1pm...) so I guess it's not too bad. Anyhow, it's 8pm now, and there's just under an hour left on the oven's timer, so my goal is to write for an hour, then eat a yummy meal of a Cornish game hen and some baby potatos. Its mostly the yummy part that's up in the air, though it's a hard dish to screw up, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

Anyhow, last week (err, last time I posted...) I'd finished describing my trip to Boston, and left off with a cryptic comment about a "jailbreak". I'm sure my techie friends probably had a good idea of what I was talking about, and any Apple fanboys probably even had strong opinions about it, but for the rest of you, I'm gonna disappoint you by explaining that I have not been inside a jail lately, let alone broken out of one. Rather, it's my iPod that I broke out of its jail; Apple ships iPods like mine and iPhones with a stripped down version of their operating system, but the lock them down much more than they do their computers, so there's no way to add non-Apple-approved software to them, or to access most parts of the filesystem. The protections that they put in place to prevent this are known as a software "jail", and the process of slipping past those protections and unlocking access to the full features of the system is called a "jailbreak". Why isn't it just called "unlocking"? I'm not sure; the obvious answer is that the geeks who figured out how to do it thought jailbreak sounded cooler, but a more reasoned answer is that since this applies mostly to iPhones, the term "unlocking" already applies to a different function, that of freeing a cellular phone from dependence on a particular wireless provider, so that had to come up with a different term, and jailbreak already had the aforementioned cool factor going for it. So anyway, I can now do arcane things like create SSH tunnels, perform nmap scans, and connect to VNC servers from my iPod. Mostly useless, but fun, and I imagine that I will (every once in a rare while) come across a situation where I'm glad I have these "features". So, that pretty much covers the jailbreak. I did pretty much immediately after getting back from Boston, as I'd somewhat scared myself while trying to ressurect my laptop; what if I'd been stuck there for a week with a dead laptop!? I know, it may not sound all that bad to most of you, but trust me, it would be my own personal version Abu Ghraib... I'd make up and spill my innermost secrets in a heartbeat...

Moving on, I spent the 4th of July and a couple of surrounding days in California -- I rode my scooter out to Twentynine Palms to meet up with Matt and Jason, a couple of military buddies of mine, who for their own demented reasons both decided to stay in the Marine Corps for the long haul. Anyhow, we had a packed few days. Not wanting to stay in the triple-digit heat of the desert, we drove out to Temecula and went to a handful of wineries, where we discovered the delightful fact that most of the wineries had military discounts, and one (incidentally, the best winery we visited) even offered free tastings to active-duty military (prompting Ian, another Marine who went with us) to suggest making it a daily destination.) After the wine tasting, we went over to the San Diego County Fair, where we scared ourselves silly on the rides, particularly this one, called the Evolution, which had us harnessed in to benches, then spinning around and turning over; towards the end, something holding the benches in place is let loose, and we ended up falling off the benches and basically screaming for our while holding on to our harnesses windering what possesed us to go on the ride.

The next day was the 4th, and we spent it at Del Mar beach, a military beach on Camp Pendleton, which is where we've spent the 4th of July for the last three years. We took a couple of tarps and a lot of Margaritas, and just hung out in the sand all day. It was cloudy and a tiny bit chilly, so I didn't spend much time in the water, but we had a blast. The only downside to this year's trip was that about a half hour before the firework show, the fog rolled back in, and we didn't really get to see more than a few of the biggest fireworks.

Saturday we drove from Pendleton into Los Angeles, and met my cousin Rene at the Yard House for lunch. After lunch we went to the California Science Center, hung out at a Barnes and Noble for awhile, then in the evening we went to a club in Hollwood with a couple of Matt's former roommates.

Sunday was depressing for both Matt and I, in that it marked our return to our respective deserts; we drove back to 29 Palms, and I headed on from there to Tucson. The trip was going well, but a couple hours outside of Phoenix, I started to see two large storms in the distance, one on either side of the road I was on. As I approached, I was feeling pretty good about my chances of avoiding them -- they didn't seem to be moving very fast, and I was still headed between them. Unfortunately, as I entered Aguila, a tiny town along the route, the highway slightly to the south, and I was staring right at the larger of the two storm clouds. I kept going, and the storm wasn't really all that bad -- there was a little bit of hail, and a lot of wind and rain. The worst part was not knowing how long the storm would last, or when it would stop getting worse. At one point my visibility was bad enough that I had to pull over on to the shoulder and wait for a couple of minutes, but other than that I crept down the road on my scooter and did my best to ignore the sogginess of every square inch of my clothing. Anyhow, I got through the storm, and kept going until I reached Surprise, AZ, where I stopped for gas. To my absolute horror, I couldn't find my wallet. After scouring the scooter and all of my pockets several times, I realized that just before the storm, I'd stopped to put on my jacket, and had taken my phone and iPod out of my pockets and put them inside the "trunk" on the back of the bike. Although I patted my pockets to make sure my wallet was there, it must have been jogged just loose enough to fall out in the storm, so I was stranded there with no money, no credit cards, and not enough gas to get anywhere. Fortunately I was able to get a hold of a friend in Scottsdale (about 50 miles away) who came out, let me crash at his house, and lent me enough money to get home the next morning. I'm still waiting for my replacement driver's license to arrive, along with my various bank cards, but fortunately I'd left at home my debit card for Missy's bank account, so I've been stealing her money for the last week.

Well, it's been just over an hour now, and the smell of garlic and oregano is starting to become distracting, so I'm going to call it quits for now and go eat. Chow! err, Ciao!

My Week In Review

Okay, so I know it's a little cheeky to post nothing to my blog for the better part of two months, then casually imply that I post at least weekly, but regardless, here goes. As a matter of fact, the title comes from two different trains of thought which ended up colliding with each other and leaving a mess of wrecked railway cars all over the place inside my already disorganized mind. The first was that I've had a pretty interesting week, and have been coming up with all sorts of things to write about if only I had the time. Initially I was jotting these things down, but then my computer crashed on me, and that kind of turned out to be a wasted effort. The second thought was ... drumroll ... that I don't write enough on my blog, and I should try to do something at least once a week. Once a week, granted, isn't much. It's certainly not ambitious in any way, but it's better than nothing, and it's better than the perhaps once a month (if that) that I've been writing up to now. So, the mishmash or unrelated ideas and the vague goal of once-a-week blogging coalesced* in my aforementioned clutter of a brain into the trainwreck that is to be My Week In Review. And if I actually write at least three each month, I'll consider it somewhat of a success.

* unrelated: coalesce is approximately the word I want here, but the nuance is completely wrong. Is there a word for that? It's technically more of a synonym than an antonym, but still, it's got to be an anti- something...

A Very Long Day (for an old man)

Monday was a long day; it started around 7 AM, in Tucson (thus MST), like most days do for me during summertime, but it didn't end until about 7:30 AM, in Boston (thus EDT). Since you know that

• It was a long day
• 7:30AM EDT is actually earlier than 7 AM MST, and
• Time travel will be released about the same time as DNF

it's safe to assume that my waking Monday lasted somewhere about in the low-20-hours range. Which would actually be fine if I were still my my low-20's, but I'm not.

The Geek Conference

Anyhow, I went to work, then came home and headed to the airport for a trip to Boston, where I attended the RedHat Linux summit, an event put on by none other than RedHat, along with Intel, IBM, and a host of lesser linux-bandwagon companies. The conference was great; I went to technical sessions on a host of topics, many of which I felt completely bewildered by (ATA over Ethernet, SELinux policies and domains, realtime debugging). The presenters, almost all of whom were RedHat/Fedora/Linux developers, were often less than eloquent when presenting but usually came into their own in the Q&A sessions that followed pretty much every presentation; this didn't come as a suprise to me; geeks, after all, tend to be awkward turtles in front of crowds, but give us a specific technical problem to work on and we come alive.

Design Patterns

Of course, the people they were talking to were sysadmins and developers, predominately -- in other words, gurus -- except that there, in front of these uber-gurus, we were users of the operating systems, tools, and technologies that were being presented. And so, as true users, we managed to ask an awful lot of absolutely stupid questions. To their credit, the gurus managed to do a superb job of keeping a straight face when asked completely ridiculous questions, but I started to see patterns emerge in their answers. It's as if some agile development people got together with marketing and PR people and wrote up a list of design patterns for deflecting idiots. Fortunately, I was there to translate (quietly to myself, mostly):

"That would be an interesting feature..." -- You are insane
"I don't know why you would do that, but..." -- You are an idiot
"That's an exaggeration, actually..." -- Our marketing bunnies lied to you
"That wouldn't be difficult at all..." -- So do it yourself

And my favorite:

"What I think you meant to ask was ... " -- That was such a blindingly stupid question that I'm going to give an unrelated answer in hopes that you'll have some time to realize your mistake and not embarrass yourself with an attempt at a "clarifying" followup

Speeches Galore

Prior to the technical sessions each day, we were subjected treated to several hours of keynotes. The conflicted choice of verbs in the previous sentence was intentional -- the quality varied greatly between the various sessions. The best, in my opinion, was Joel Cohen, who is a comedy writer, most prominently for The Simpsons. His talk was less focused on the general theme of the conference than many of the others, though he did have a few talking points that he dutifully brought up. Mostly, though, he cracked jokes about his work, The Simpsons, Fox, and pretty much everything else. Sadly, that talk turned out to be one of the few that was not posted on RedHat's website for public consumption. One of the other highlights, though, was a talk from the Dean of Technology at Harvard Medical School, who spoke about using open standards to increase interoperability in the medical information community; trust me when I say it was interesting, because it was way better than it sounds on paper.

Sports

Ahh, yes, I was in Boston when the Celtics won the world series. Err, something like that. It actually was confusing on Friday night, because the Red Sox apparently hosted the Celtics at Fenway Park; even though I'd only had a kahlua and coffee earlier, it made me think maybe it was time to catch up on my sleep. There was also a big parade on Thursday, which went right past the conference center, but unfortunately I almost entirely missed it because I was trying desperately to find a reliable wifi signal, because I'd almost completely broken my laptop earlier that morning.

Doh!

So, since I was going to a linux conference, I figured I'd want a linux machine to play around with. My laptop, however, is running XP, and I like it that way. Since I definitely didn't want to take two systems, I figured I'd just set up a linux virtual machine and use that as a sandbox for the week. Unfortunately, the place I was staying didn't have reliable wireless access, and though I brought a Fedora 9 DVD, I din't bring VMware. So I thought "what the heck, I'll just dual boot it" and set up Fedora in some empty space on my hard drive. That part, actually, worked out fine. But dual booting wasn't really what I had in mind, and for some reason Fedora made my wireless issues even worse, so once I got settled in at the conference center, I downloaded VMware, and went about trying to get Fedora running inside it. Using the disk partition that I'd set up earlier to run on it's own. Before you scoff -- I've done this before.

It works. I. Have. Done. It. Before. And I thought it was pretty straightforward.

Apparently not.

Somehow I managed to disappear my partition table. Completely. Fortunately I figured this out before rebooting, so I downloaded and burned an XP CD as a precaution (thinking how foolish it was that I'd taken mine out of my bag before my trip), and went about trying to fix them problem, but before too long I confused my hard drive just a little too much and windows bluescreened. Sighing about the various minor bits of data I'd lost, I put the XP CD in and started rebuilding my system...but the CD didn't quite burn right. I was able to install something that looked like Windows, but it wasn't. I couldn't get any drivers to load, and software to install, or do much of anything, really, other than play freecell. Then I remembered my Fedora CD. So, I installed Fedora, managed to get it on a wireless network, and downloaded yet another copy of XP. This time it worked; after two more failed downloads, I should say. Finally I was able to get a working system again, but the whole process took the better part of one keynote, three technical sessions, and of course, the Celtics' parade.

Culture

Boston wasn't all geekery and reinstalling operating systems more geekery; I got to experience some culture as well. My personal views on the world of culture can pretty much be summed up in two words: sushi and books. Actually, naturally caffeinated beverages rank pretty high as well. Anyhow, I didn't even realize it until midway through the week, but every time I tallied up the places I'd been, I'd gone to about as many bookstores or libraries as all other places combined. Tuesday afternoon before the conference started I went to Cambridge, and my itinerary was roughly:

• Grab coffee and a scone outside Harvard
• Stop in at used bookstore outside Harvard
• Wander into Map/Travel bookstore outside Harvard
• Hurry wistfully past a Borders outside Harvard, consider getting latte and browsing their books
  
• Browse the selection at a children's bookstore outside Harvard
• Pick up a pocket map of Boston at Staples
• Find my way back to Harvard Station and head back into Boston

Of course, when anyone asked me what I did, I simply said "Oh, I went to Harvard and did some sightseeing". On Wednesday, I asked one of my hosts where to get good sushi in town, and was directed to a little basement restaurant on Newberry Street. Newberry Street is apparently Boston's equivalent to Fifth Avenue in New York or Rodeo Drive in...California. Somewhere. Anyway, it was clearly the fashion district. Despite that, the sushi was impressively good -- especially considering that they used brown rice, which so far hadn't ever worked out for me at U.S. sushi places -- and quite reasonably priced. After dinner, I went to a Borders (hey, it was on the way to the subway).

The conference ended early Friday afternoon, so I had some time to spend. I was somewhat tired, and had planned to sightsee on Saturday, so I cast around for something laid back to do. I was staying about a block from the Boston Symphony Hall, so I decided to see if there was a performance scheduled. To my delight, there was, and I got tickets to hear the Boston Pops and Angela Palmer perform. It was a little bit of an odd matchup -- I'd never heard of Palmer, but apparently she's a famous Boston indie artist; the programme descripbed her as one of the leading performers of "punk-cabaret" so I really had no idea what to expect. It was an odd performance. The Pops were great, as was Palmer, but they were very different, and trying to make them work together didn't work out very well. To my great amusement, however, I was seated at a small table with a couple of older ladies who were visiting from Milwaukie. If you've ever heard Julie Mitzel tell a story that had any lines spoken by an old lady, well, then you know exactly what they sounded like when they spoke. Anyhow, they were very excited to be there, and their enthusiam wasn't dampened at all by the fact that the "amazing deal" their concierge had gotten them for their tickets turned out to be significantly more than the box office price. It was dampened somewhat by the punk/goth/emo/whatever people surrounding them in the audience -- one turned to me after a few minutes of frenzied exclamations to her sister over a guy with about a footlong spiked mowhawk and said "we're veeery conservative in Milwaukie". They were very nice company though; they seemed to have a great time, and it was a testament to Palmer's performance that midway through it -- after coming onstage in a corset and tails, and dropping an F-bomb that garned gasps from more of the audience than just my tablemates -- one of the ladies turned to the other and said "oh, isn't she CUTE?", though I don't think that "cute" was exactly what she was going for.

Oh yeah, and between buying my Pops tickets and actually going to the show, I had a few hours still to spend, so I went to see a matinee of Get Smart. As a huge fan of Steve Carrell, I highly recommend it.

M.I.T.

Saturday I actually did some sightseeing -- I went to Boston Commons, back to the Sushi place, pretty much all over downtown, then I went back out to Cambridge and wandered around M.I.T. This time I was looking for the library, but couldn't find the one I wanted -- you know, the one with the computer books, of course -- as there were about a dozen, and none of them actually seemed to be related to computer science. So I headed for the most promising one, and discovered that the little cluster of core buildings in M.I.T. -- where the library was supposed to be -- leaves a lot to be desired on the usability front. Typical engineers. Anyhow, I decided that if I couldn't find the freaking computer book library on campus, it's probably a good thing that I didn't get accepted there back in 2002.

Big Sigh. I'll get over it. Someday.

Maybe.

Falling back to plan B, I went to the campus bookstore.

Home

Saturday afternoon rolled around, and I headed to the airport to come home. My flight from Logan to Las Vegas was delayed, which was ominous since the last time I had a delayed flight into Vegas, I missed the Tucson connection and had to stay overnight, but fortunately I made my flight with a few minutes to spare, and managed to get home at about 2 AM, MST. Miraculously, Ben's fish were still alive, Missy's tomato plant hadn't died, and my scooter was right where I'd left it, in the middle of the living room. Since it was late and I hadn't turned the light on, I ran into it with one birkenstock-clad foot, and nearly took a toenail off.

But I was home. And it felt great.

Next week: Jailbreak!

Stained-glass CPI

I'm a bit of a sucker for interesting data visualizations, be they useful or otherwise. Over the weekend, the NYTimes posted a very intuitive view of the U.S. Consumer Price Index, a measure of how and where we spend our money:

An Average Consumer's Spending

Personally, I feel that rectangles (particularly squarified treemaps) tend to do a much better job of displaying the relativity of this type of data, but I have to admit that the semi-random bubbles on this particular graph were very, very pretty. The heat-map representation of rate of change is also pretty cool; unsurprisingly, oil-related spending was the big gainer. The only thing I don't quite get is the exact nature of the relationship between "rent" and "owner equivalent rent", but I suspect a few moments of CPI research would clear that up.

In Tech We Trust

The article got off to a bad start. In writing about a pretty cool new DARPA project, IEEE Spectrum referenced a military incident involving Israel and Syria in which Syria's radars apparently failed to function as intended, then brought up the spectre of chip-level hardware sabotage. Their basis for this theory, over, say, the fact that Israel has some pretty good fighters and special forces units? Military analysts, perhaps, or off-the-record conversations with chip makers? No, it was entirely based on "military and technology bloggers," of course.

Many of my professors refuse to allow Wikipedia as a source when writing a research paper. While this is sometimes an annoyance, I can see their point -- Wikipedia strives to always be a secondary source for information, which means that either the information in it has a reference to an authoritative source, or it's potentially unfounded. Apparently journalists need a similar restriction on using blogs in their work -- either put in the effort to track down a legitimate source (many bloggers are highly respected experts; many orders of magnitude more are not) or just don't write it.

Anyhow, once I got past my initial irritation with the author -- and my amusement at the mistaken assertion that "the universe has existed for about 4 × 1017 seconds" or just over an hour -- the article was quite interesting. The basic premise is that we in the information age tend to put blind trust in the building blocks of our technology to work the way they claim to; the Department of Defense, realizing that this might be an okay for an iPod, but not for a stealth bomber, is sponsoring Trust in Integrated Circuits, a research program looking for ways to verify the functionality of the microscopic electronics that make up the brains of virtually any modern gadget.

Personally, I'm nowhere near smart enough to participate in this type of exercise; like most geeks, I have a general understanding of how chips are supposed to work, but wouldn't know where to begin looking when they don't, except to sniff around for a faint smell of ozone. However, it appears that Raytheon, one of the two or three top employers of (smart) graduates from my department, is among the most likely contenders for the research dollars that come with this program. I'm always amused when I ask my friends that have started working there what they do -- every single one of them has responded with "Oh, I'm writing (or debugging) code for radar systems." I'm convinced that during orientation, they've been told to use this instead of the more traditional line "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you". After all, while I realize that "it takes a lot of people to write radar code" (the response I got from one person when I pointed this out) people at every other company I've talked to -- GD, Google, IBM, Lockheed, Microsoft -- tend to give varied answers, but apparently Raytheon is REALLY into radars.

Anyhow, here's to hoping they can use some of that radar code to sniff out bad chips, because let me tell you, if one day my iPod gets shut down remotely, the terrorists will have won. Big time.

Partie Deux

I'm proud of my kids.

Suppose, for a moment, that I'd led into that with a brief intro; I had intended to do exactly that, but it didn't quite work out. The irony here is that the mailing list story had nothing to do with my original reason for wanting to write this, really; a couple of birthday parties did, however.

Ben started kindergarten this year, and is in a class that is a combined K-2 class; for the uninitiated, that means that Ben will (conceivably) be in that class through second grade; it also means that he's in a slightly bigger than normal class. In the past couple of months, we've had quite a few birthday parties to attend (or throw -- Ben's birthday was in February) for current or former classmates, and as the excitement was building for a recent party -- this process takes several days; if it was allowed to continue much longer than that I think our kids would literally explode with unfulfilled anticipation -- Ben stopped gushing about the wonders of the upcoming party, looked at me with a serious face, and asked "Is Maya going to come with us?"

My usual response to this type of question is to assure him that no, Maya will be perfectly fine alone at home for a few hours; in fact, we're thinking of going out of town for a few weeks and leaving her to enjoy some peace and quiet. It's fun to watch Ben's response to this type of answer; first, depending on whether he was hoping for a "yes" or "no",there'll be a moment of elation or disappointment, then concern as he realizes that my answer is out of sync with what he knows about the world, and finally amusement when it occurs to him that once again, Daddy is Joking. An accusatory scowl usually follows as he explains the folly of my ways. Anyhow -- off track once again -- this time, because the party was indeed of great importance to his little world, and I didn't want to trample his expectations too roughly, rather than suggesting that we'd leave Maya home, I asked him whether he was hoping for her to come. I really wasn't sure what the answer would be; Maya and Ben love to torment each other, and the "love" and the "torment" seem to be inseparable. I really wasn't sure if I'd talking to this Ben:



or this one:



As it turns out, Ben without hesitation replied that he did want Maya to come with us, and he brightened visibly when I told him that was part of the plan. He also very gallantly announced that Maya was quite welcome at his birthday party back in February, and more recently, he invited her along last week on a Benjamin-and-Daddy outing to a few nearby play areas (the mall, Himmel Park, and of course Jamba Juice). I know that it might be a long shot for me to hope that this kind of accord between the two of them will continue ("kepe out" signage notwithstanding -- that policy has been completely unenforced in the weeks since it was posted) but even so, I do hope that they'll continue to love tormenting each other for a very long time, maybe even forever.

Mailing Lists I'm Proud of My Offspring, Part 1

I've been on a handful of U of A mailing lists since I started working/studying here; mostly technical lists for IT people. As with any online community, the long-running discussions that come up through these emails tend to imbue the authors' email addresses with a personality that may or may not jibe with the authors' real life personas. And although I'm sure some people actually glean useful info from these lists, I'm still subscribed more for the entertainment factor than anything else -- I generally ignore 95% of the chatter and tune in only when I'm specifically asked to, or when I see a juicy topic pass by that's just too good to pass up. This hands-off policy has gotten me a bit of a reputation for commenting rarely, and only to either add genuinely useful data to the conversation, or to steer it wildly (and deliberately) off-course; there's usually no middle ground for me.

I further reinforced this the other day when I started catching up on a too-long-running discussion about energy-saving measures we could take at the university, and whether more harm would be done than good by, for example, turning off computers at night (my favorite suggestion: we turn off servers on evenings and weekends; no more after-hours support duty!) Anyhow, it was a pretty typical discussion, until one of the admins, a self-described "confirmed auntie", suggested that really, if we were serious about minimizing our carbon footprints, we should all stop having kids. Or at least stop having so many.

Now, I don't know about you, but I've never really thought of IT as the "baby factory" demographic that it seems to be in this woman's mind, but apparently I and others in our happy little geek family are having way too many kids for her. I certainly don't care if she or anyone else decides not to have any children; it's great decision for some people, and it's one that I'm sure just about every parent has thought longingly about at 3:00 a.m. while scrubbing poop of their elbows. But it's none of her business how many kids I have, and more importantly she was doing it wrong. I mean seriously, how hard is it to derail a serious yet mundane email thread!? She tried, and failed.

My reply was that although Confirmed Auntie had gotten us off to an okay start, if we were really serious about environmental impact, we'd not merely remove ourselves from the gene pool, but from the CO2 emission pool as well...just stop breathing for a while, and see where that takes you, so to speak. Talk about becoming part of the solution, rather than part of the problem!

This had the desired effect -- while the thread continued for a while, I don't think I saw a single email after my that actually had anything to do with IT or rational, measured strategies to mitigate power use on campus (of course, the latter had died out long before I came along.)

Anyhow, I really didn't mean to get into all of that; I actually started typing with the intent of saying how proud I am of my two kids. The above was supposed to be a brief intro, a segue; not an entire blog post of it's own. But I'm already reaching my internal limit on this post (also, I'm hungry) so I'll continue later.

Time well spent

A couple of weeks ago, my mom sent me a link to a ten minute video of Randy Pausch giving a speech on Oprah. A Carnegie-Mellon professor of Computer Science diagnosed with terminal cancer, Dr. Pausch was delivering a shortened version of a now famous speech he delivered at CMU as part of their "Last Lectures" series, answering the question "If you had one final opportunity to speak to your students, what would you say?" After watching and being impressed by his speech, I went ahead and took the time to watch the full thing on YouTube; it was well worth it. Anyhow, an article in yesterday's Times reminded me that I'd meant to share the video and hadn't gotten around to it. So, if you have some time:

The NYT article
The short version
The full speech

Japan: The beginning of the end of an era

One of the things about Japanese culture that always amazed me was their reliance on vending machines for a massive array of retail products. As in the U.S., you can buy basic food and drinks, but in Japan, beer, smokes, pizza, sex toys, and articles of clothing (sometimes worn). To be fair, as far as I can tell, the latter two are mostly found in love motels (yet another oddity of Japanese culture, but one that makes a fair bit of sense when understood), but even so, the Japanese are way ahead of us when it comes to vending machines; the closest thing I've seen in the U.S. was a vending machine in a major airport selling iPods, which didn't make a lot of sense to me -- how are you going to get music on an iPod in an Airport!?

Anyhow, the great thing about the alcohol and tobacco dispensers in Japan is that they never asked for I.D. -- if you had correct change, you got your vice fix. However, in an apparent response to abuse of this "feature" (who knew?) the Japanese tobacco association is introducing the "Tobacco Passport", or, in true Japanese style, the "Taspo," an RFID card that can only be obtained at the age of twenty. Read more about it on the official site (In Japanese here -- showoff).

What impact this will have on 18 and 19 year old Marines and Airmen, I don't know. I suspect that cigarettes are cheaper on base anyhow, but I know a few guys who had odd fetishes for specific Asian brands of smokes, though I never cared enough to find out where they bought them.