Pacific Northwest

I just got back from a two week trip to Seattle and Vancouver. I was in Seattle on business and couldn't turn down the chance to pop up to Vancouver and catch up with some friends.

I managed to fit in a great deal of sushi, which is ridiculously cheap and good in Vancouver, and phở, which I have yet to find at all in Cape Town. Sarah flew into Vancouver for the weekend, Jocelyn had just returned from Australia, and Tarrin was en route from Alaska back to SA, so it worked out incredibly well.

North America's cellphone networks are a complete joke. Roaming gave me no end of hassles and the people at T-Mobile were less than useless. After poorly faking an American accent just to get past their support voice-prompt system (much to my colleague's amusement), I couldn't get them to understand that I was a foreigner roaming inside their country. "No, I'm from South Africa, not in South Africa" was clearly not in their script, so they just looped back to asking me what my mobile number was and getting confused when it started with +27.

I also discovered why Delta's New York-Dakar-Cape Town flight is so cheap: it's 20 hours of hell in what must be the oldest plane in their fleet.

Elasticfox and ssh

I've been working on the Elasticfox Firefox extension, which was recently open sourced. It's a GUI for Amazon's EC2 webservice and is great way to use the service without having to worry about WSDLs and XML.

One improvement I'm pleased with is the support for opening ssh connections to instances. Elasticfox now tries to make good choices for the terminal and ssh programs to run, with the result that it works (almost) out of the box on Mac and *NIX, and (almost-almost) Windows.

For Mac OS X and *NIX, you just need to set the location of your instance ssh keypairs and Elasticfox will launch Terminal and gnome-terminal, respectively. For Windows, you also need to install PuTTY, which Elasticfox expects to find in c:\Program Files\Putty\putty.exe. The error handling when ssh fails has also been improved, which should make getting it to work using your own solution simpler.

Another small improvement is that you can now ssh into many instances in one go, just by selecting more than one in the instance list. This is a real crowd-pleaser when you launch ten instances and, in a few minutes, have logged into all ten, with only a few mouse clicks.

You can install an interim build with these changes if you like to be cutting edge.

If you're new to the extension, take a read through the tutorial that was posted on the EC2 forums.

You might also be interested in the standalone Elasticfox executable for Windows that AideRSS put together. Their description is for an older version of Elasticfox, but the principle is sound. It's particularly useful if the latency between you and EC2 is high enough (because, say, you're at the tip of Africa) that the synchronous API calls hang Firefox.

For the record, the build also includes these updates:

• FIX: sf.net bug 1898177: Adding ICMP firewall rules requires filling in TCP fields.
  
• FIX: sf.net bug 1894182: Choosing security group while launching AMI instance UI bug
  
• opens in a new tab by default
  
• ssh to multiple instances at once
  
• choose platform-dependent defaults for ssh
  
• FIX: redraw lists when sort order has changed
  
• first steps towards branding as Elasticfox
  

Reverse culture shock

I haven't blogged in over a year and recently decided to make a concerted effort to redress the lack of posts.

I've been back in South Africa for 18 months, now; it's been a bumpy ride. I was warned about the reverse culture shock that many people experience when returning to their home country after living away for a long while, but actually experiencing it first hand was (and is) another matter.

For the first few months I was continually frustrated with South Africa. Nothing worked quite as smoothly as in Canada, people seemed rude and had no respect for their fellow man, I struggled to find familiar foods in shops, and perhaps most strikingly, we drive everywhere, and badly at that.

Resuming old friendships was difficult. I changed hugely in Canada, was exposed to new ideas, places and people. My local friends grew too, but in different, more subtle ways. They seemed almost a little parochial, now. It didn't help that every second sentence I uttered began with "In Canada...". When everything you've done for the last three years was in a different country, how do you relate stories without starting them like that? The only other option is to keep quiet and come across as aloof and bored.

"Forward" culture shock takes about six months to overcome. My favourite memory of it is catching the bus to UBC for an early morning class and arriving to realise I had made the whole trip while still half asleep. I hadn't thought about what I was doing since getting up, I had internalised it completely. For a friend in London, it was the agent at the corner cafe getting her favourite brand of cigarettes without her having to ask.

Asking around, I've found that reverse culture shock typically takes twice as long to overcome. It's taken me 1.5 years of living in my home country to feel at home again. I've gradually settled back into the South African way of doing things and remembered that being just a little fucked up is all part of SA's charm. It keeps the politics interesting and the populace on its toes. Moving to Cape Town helped: the driving is just as bad, but at least everyone's chilled out about it. And I can bike to work without too many people looking at my like I'm crazy.

I'm hoping that in 2008 I'll feel even more settled, and maybe even find that sense of contentment that I found in the mountains of BC, but somehow seemed to have lost on the trip home.

Trips and travels

After almost seven months of traveling, adventuring, relaxing and in-transit living, I now have a home again and am about to become a productive member of society when I start my job in a week or so. Below is a summary of my travels and some photos are up on Flickr.

August and September were spent seeing places on the east coast of Canada and in the US. I began with a few days' camping and canoeing on Georgian Bay in Ontario with two friends where, after my tent was blown over a cliff, we proved the diminutive Tarn 3 tent really is a three-man and can stand gale force winds. I then moved east for some solo backpacking around western Newfoundland, alas no whales or icebergs. I can attest, however, that the fabled Newfoundlander friendliness is alive and well, despite having my wallet stolen for the second time in four months. (British Columbian kindness should be mentioned too, since after the first incident my wallet and all its contents [and my pants, but the less said about that the better] were returned shortly after being lost during a weekend in the Okanagan.)

I then met up with another friend in her home province of Prince Edward Island, also off the east coast of mainland Canada. Having gone from a large island to a more modestly sized one, I decided I needed to see the far end of the isolation-and-size spectrum and went with this friend and her family to her father's home, the Magdalene Islands. These are a five hour ferry ride from PEI and are barely more than a few windswept humps of mid-ocean rock connected by tenuous fingers of dune. They are incredibly picturesque, the houses painted in vibrant colour combinations, no two the same. To add to the setting, we were housed in an isolated two-story tower of about 25 square metres on the tip of one of the islands. My remark at how improbable a place this was to live was met with indignation. Apparently this was hypocritical from someone from the southern end of the Dark Continent. That I'm not black was also a source of great amusement, or so I was informed third hand (my neglected high school French was given a severe workout in the Maggies, which are a part of Quebec). I was thrilled to finally experience true Quebecois poutine, and to discover a fantastic French bakery on the island.

After returning to PEI, I joined up with another CS friend and his wife for a car trip through Nova Scotia, packing in as much as we could in two days. We did well, covering the Cabot Trail, the Alexander Graham Bell museum (you mean you didn't know he settled in rural Nova Scotia?), the Bay of Fundy with the largest tidal variance in the world, and Halifax.

From there I began the US leg of the trip with four days in New York City with my brother. Being there over 11 September and visiting "ground zero" for the memorial service was interesting and quite moving. Even coming from the largest city in southern Africa, I was amazed at just how hectic NYC is. Fascinating, for sure, but after four days I longed for just a smidgen of privacy and a glimpse of a horizon. Alone again, I caught a bus down to Washington, DC and, after forgetting just how big the country is, totally mistimed the trip and arrived well into the night. Having been warned about crime in DC, I was amused when my taxi driver asked if Johannesburg really is as dangerous as everyone says. DC has some interesting museums but I found it to be mainly a city-sized exercise in American egoising, and was happy to move on.

My next-to-last stop was Chicago to visit some South African friends, where the bulk of the weekend was spent catching up and eating really good food. Finally I landed back on the west coast, Seattle, where I bade farewell to some folks I met years ago in the heyday of online text-based interactive games (think a text version of Second Life, just way geekier) and returned to Vancouver.

I then boxed up all my worldly possessions and headed back to South Africa. Shortly after arriving I was joined by three good friends from Canada (they of the canoeing and PEI adventures). It was now my turn to reciprocate and show them around my part of the world.

We did whirlwind tours of Johannesburg and its satellite (ex)townships, popped down to Cape Town for a few days, then joined four SA friends for a two week trip up the coast of Mozambique. Sun, beaches, mosquitoes, mind-bending malaria drugs, upset stomachs, bartering in pidgin Portuguese, smelly markets, dolphins, azure seas, island dhow trips... how exactly do you mime that you'd like the most *unripe* melon available? Mozambique was until recently the poorest country in the world. It is slowly moving on from that position, and one is now offered cellphone accessories and airtime on the side of the road, along with the mangoes, (horrible) green bananas and bottles of stupendously hot homemade chilli sauce.

The three Canucks and I topped it off with a week in the Kruger Park, where the foreigners went from being enraptured by the tiniest geckos to being entirely blasé about buffalo and baby elephants. Not to mention the six foot snakes, leopards, cheetah and rhinos. We spotted the big five in the first two days. I don't think they realised just how many visitors to the park see nothing but impala for weeks on end.

I then spent Christmas and the start of the year enjoying being in one place, seeing friends and family, and recovering from all the "relaxing" travel.

Back in SA

I returned to South Africa in mid October and, after ten days, set off again to show three Canadian friends the sights, then on to Mozambique where we joined up with four other friends for a tour of what was once the world's poorest country. The original four finished off with five days in Kruger National Park.

Photos are going up as I get time:

• Mozambique
  

A brief respite

I'm back from my five week trip through Eastern Canada and the Maritimes, and New York, Washington and Chicago. I'm in the process of posting photos:

• Canoeing in Ontario
  
• Newfoundland
  
• Prince Edward Island and the Magdalene Islands
  

Mt Brew

Thomas, Bram, Ellen and I went up to Mt Brew overnight recently. Hot and sweaty below the treeline, cool and snowy above it. Some photos are up. We lost the trail on the way down and had to hitch back to Squamish because we missed our bus. Thank god for the Brew Pub!