needcaffeine's posterous

World Travelers & Open Eyes/Minds

I loved to watch  Dinner For Five, which was a down to earth open discussion over dinner with 4 people plus Jon Favreau. I loved the show mostly, because it gave insight into the person versus the characters we perceive them to be. Episode 4.6 was specifically memorable, & I can replay it nearly in my head. The most outwardly bizarre person is Rob Zombie, yet in this setting he comes off rather normal.

And so what does this have to do with travel & open eyes/minds, well I believe travel does that for small percentage of us. I've been traveling the world for as long as I can remember, & well before then. Every school holiday was spent going somewhere. My mother traveled every holiday during her school years, & my father's family spent a lot of time visiting remote locations (mining).  Thus you can obviously see where my wanderlust came from. We never took tours, nor stayed in chain/tourist hotels. The plan was immersion & education, sitting by a pool was definitely out. (I remember sitting in a college art history course, & seeing slides of all the art I'd already seen; & yet disturbed by how the representation in the course conflicted with the museum.)  As I read, watch & converse with fellow travelers; I can see the clear disconnect between world thinkers & those who exist within their safety vest.

And so I wonder why so many people do not accept change when they travel? Obviously there's a certain sense of insecurity for anyone as they travel to a new place, but why are so many unwilling to accept new as possibly equal/better? [Though it would be blind to say that everything new is good; plenty can be far worse.]

Why does it seem so few Americans travel abroad? [I'm a firm believer in the 'Gap Year' concept employed by much of Europe (though I did not partake).] Or maybe I should ask why so do so few American's travel to locations frequented by everyone else? [Dubai, Thailand, Maylasia, Australia, China, Africa]

 

For my Dinner for Five of Travel, I'd have: Anthony Bourdain, A.A. Gill, Erin Burnett, & Ian Wright. Yes, quite an ecletic group, but all great world travelers.

  • Anthony Bourdain - French & NJ lineage, Chef, Traveler/Adventurist, Sharp Witted
  • A.A. Gill - Scottish & English, Writer, Traveler/Adventurist, Sharp Witted
  • Erin Burnett - American, CNBC Presenter, Traveler/Adventurist, Financial Guru
  • Ian Wright - English, Host of GlobeTrekker, Traveler/Adventurist, Immersionist

Hard Disk Insecurity & Old Data Review

Due to my knowledge of computer security/insecurity, I have never (till recently) thrown out any personal hard drive.  Yes that does sound crazy, but having been asked to do digital snooping(data recovery) for my past company, I am very well aware of how readily available "deleted/formatted" data is.

Most of my hard drives were from computers pre-Pentium3, thus their data size & breakout was quite unusual(in today's world). The largest drive was less than 20GBs. They were all multi partitioned, some with 2+ OS' on them. I've always seperated my core data from the apps/OS, so for the most part finding the data was simple. To insure I got all relevent data I also pulled all my brower caches, primarily because I used to use Netscape Communictor as primary e-mail client on Windows & PolarBar on OS/2.

Primarily due to lack of time/laziness, I never bothered to take data from these old drives & properly wipe them. I suggest DoD style wiping or better [7x Random; takes hours/days, but worth it]. Darik's Boot & Nuke was our preferred tool in the office. Apple OSX does provide this option in Disk Utility, be very careful when choosing discs. I have tried to recover data from nuked hard drives, & though I may get a few file names, all data was corrupt.

So over the next few days I'll be reviewing some old data & posting some hopefully interesting writeups on my happenings on the Internet pre-2000. {And if I can get my 8086s firing, I'll speak on the internet in the day of Gopher://}