As a quick little getaway I headed up to Montreal to catch the tail end of the 2009 Montreal Jazz Festival.  If you like music, I suggest you take the opportunity to check out this event.  The festival basically takes over a major part of the city for about two weeks.  The festival isn’t just about Jazz, though that is obviously a major focus.  They have tons of other types of concerts, performers, art venues and general festival goodness throughout.

As you may have saw in a previous post I stayed at the W, Montreal.  What a great hotel.  It was right in the heart of downtown.  It was a very easy walk to the main festival grounds, Old Montreal, St. Catherine Street and basically everywhere else you want to visit.  (more…)

It has been about a month since I posted a cipher puzzle after reading an article about the Kryptos exhibit at the CIA headquarters.  The solution is posted below, looking back at the answer the puzzle was actually quite difficult to anyone except people who study cryptology.  The major hints in the post was the reference to the Kryptos exhibit and the accompanying Wikipedia page.  This page talked about the basic ciphers and translations used on the panels which have been solved already.  I used two of the basic ciphers. (more…)

I recently flipped through a recent edition of Wired magazine which had a focus of puzzles and riddles.  The sidebars and filler pages had special sudokus, magic tricks and other word puzzles.  I am sure the main article with JJ Abrams had something to do with it.  It’s too bad I didn’t pick up any hints or clues about the Season 5 Finale of Lost, it was an interesting article but that’s another story.

There was another article that I also found very interesting, it talked about the Kryptos artwork installation at the Central Intelligence Agency.  As a quick background, the CIA commissioned an outdoor artwork installation for the New Headquarters Building (NHB).  The Kryptos, as it was named, was dedicated on November 3, 1990.  The two part sculpture is located at the main entrance to the NHB.  The main structure has four panels of ciphered text.

The mystery of the Kryptos puzzles is very fascinating.  The artist, James Sanborn, has stated that he thought all four panels of text would be solved within 7 years.  It has now been almost 20 years and only three out of the four panels have been solved.  To further complicate the mystery, the piece actually contains a riddle within a riddle.  Only after the fourth panel is deciphered can people then attempt to solve the main riddle using the plaintext of the four panels.

In the spirit of these ciphers and puzzles, I created one of my own.  Below is the name and address of a place I am going this summer for vacation.  Good luck, let me know if you figure it out.

E887p OhyRg bnEgv rNd80 NeA
ZJbgR y9Fhe IpbvZ aenDr rUM

The four panels of the Kryptos art installation

Finally, after almost a week of collecting, sorting, pruning and editing I have finally posted our main photo gallery for the vacation. 

I tried to pick out images that captured the country we were visiting, from the tourist destinations to people in their everyday lives.  For most of these images I did very basic edits:  crops, straighten, adjust levels.  I also made use of the Lightroom presets in the Develop module along with some presets I downloaded from Camera Dojo.  I used the free Lightroom Essentials, though they also have additional presets you can purchase.

Now that I have these up, I flagged a bunch of images that I want to revisist and spend some more time with processing them.  I will post some of these to my flickr stream.

Without further ado, please head over to the gallery and check out the pictures.  Please post your comments about the pictures or the trip.

It has been almost a week since we arrived back from China.  In short, I had an awesome time.  I learned so much on the trip, I enjoyed seeing all the sites and people.  It was great. When I get some time in the coming days I will write a two part series about the trip.  Part 1 will consist of the travel to China and our stay in Beijing.  Part 2 will consist of our tours in Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai and our travel back to the states.

I think I am now just getting back to my normal routine.  Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were crazy at work with trying to catch up for a missed week and a half.  I was able to go through most of my emails on my blackberry on the busride back from JFK to Albany so that helped a little.

This past week I was suffering from sleep bulimia.  I don’t know if that is a real term or not, but that’s how I am describing it.  My sleep schedule from the jet lag is all messed up.  The first night back I stayed up until 1:00am.  I woke up at 5:00am ready to go.  The following night I went to bed around normal time, but I slept until 10:00am.  On Friday night I was exhausted from work and working out at the gym.  I was falling asleep on the couch around 10:30.  I slept until 11:15am Saturday morning.  Finally on Saturday night I went to bed at a normal time, and woke up Sunday morning ready to roll at 5:00am.  I will say that was one of my most productive Sunday mornings in a long time.  I had accomplished a lot of stuff before 11:00.  (more…)

I know this is my first mention of this trip on my blog, but way back in November I signed up for a vacation to China.  Yeah I know, pretty big trip for my first “real” international excursion.  The trip is organized through a tour group that leads tours all over China.  The trip was organized through the Albany Colonie Chamber of Commerce.  The first China trip took place in the middle of November.  They then planned a second trip for the middle of March, 2009.

After hearing first hand from the people who went on the November trip, I decided it was too good to pass up.  The price was right, everything was planned out, local English speaking tour guides and more.  All I had to do was put down the deposit and get a visa.

Fast forward three months and now we are one week away from departure.  This week is all about preparing at work for my seven day absence.  I expect to be out of cell phone and email contact for most of the trip so I want to make sure everything is in order before i go.  I can tell though I have a busy week ahead of me as there are several projects I need to complete in addition to packing and getting the last minute arrangements done for the trip.

Here is our rough itinerary, I’ll try to do one more post before I leave with a more detailed breakdown.

Day 1: Albany/JFK/Beijing (bus down to JFK and direct flight from JFK to Beijing)
Day 2: Beijing
Day 3: Beijing
Day 4: Beijing
Day 5: Beijing/Shanghai/Suzhou
Day 6: Suzhou/Hangzhou
Day 7: Hangzhou/Shanghai
Day 8: Shanghai
Day 9: Shanghai/Beijing/JFK/Albany (flight from Shanghai to Beijing, Beijing to JFK, bus back to Albany).