Quark.net : Andrew Dul

This year we took advantage of scheduled events to stretch our vacation.  In early October, I was at my usual fall conferences, this time in Montreal.  Tessa, meanwhile, decided to head to southern Italy with some other Seattle folks for a retreat in Positano.  I was scheduled to head to Europe in mid-November for the European Internet operator conference (RIPE) in Bucharest, Romania.  With those bookends, and the ability to take a pause in some work projects, it just made sense to spend the time in-between in Europe rather than flying back and forth twice.  So I headed to meet Tessa in Rome after my conference. All the plans we really had, at that point, was that we needed to be in Bucharest 6 weeks later.  We had thought a little bit about our plan…mostly to head north from Rome and visit a number of the major sights that we’ve never visited.  Despite all our travels over the years neither one of us had really explored Italy at all.

Our first 5 days, we spent in Rome.  We had a cool little apartment not far from the Vatican, and near the subway line.  We wandered a lot through the city and along the way picked up quite a few of the major sights.  We visited the Roman Forums, Coliseum, the many monuments and squares and of course the Vatican.  On my first day, remarkably awake for not really sleeping on the flight over, we went to St. Peter’s square to see Pope Francis give his weekly Sunday address.  From there we found a small pizza place for lunch before I ran out of energy for the day.  We had pre-booked tickets for the Borghese Museum and the Vatican Museum, and those dictated our plan for the next couple of days.  The Vatican Museum was just packed with people.  It was sort of like leaving a sporting event in a huge herd, but with priceless pieces of art and history on both sides as you wandered through the various rooms of the museum on the Vatican grounds.  The floor of the Sistine chapel was packed with people, as that was the last stop on the museum tour.  While it was supposed to be a quiet place with no photos, our viewing of Michelangelo’s paintings were punctuated by flashes of people trying to take pictures and the minders telling people to stop taking pictures.  (If you don’t want people to take pictures these days, you pretty much have to send everyone through a metal detector and take away all their phones.)  St. Peter’s cathedral itself was much more enjoyable.  It was easy to get lost in the huge expanse of space despite lots of people still wandering through the church.  The Borghese Museum, on the other hand, with its time & people limited ticketing system made it an enjoyable experience to see the art and sculptures.  The small nature of the museum also led to just enjoying what was there and not worrying about if you were missing something in some other part of the museum.  The rooms were still packed from floor to ceiling with art and sculpture.

From Rome…no surprise, we headed north, just about an hour by train to the town of Orvieto.  The Umbrian town sits on a hill just off the main north-south train line.  You ride a small funicular from the valley to the edge of the old walled town.  The town has a beautiful old church and side streets to explore.  Our first lunch there was really great as we had a charcuterie and cheese plate which was just fantastic.  On the subsequent days, we explored the other small museums, just wandered around, and enjoyed the life in this small town.  There were tourists, but most seemed to be day trippers and the town was really enjoyable to explore in the evening.

After a little debate back and forth our next stop was Siena.  We found a little apartment not far from the main square and spent the next two days exploring around the town.  We enjoyed a couple of drinks and snacks on the campo in the late afternoon and visited the cathedral which sits atop the hill of the town.  Looking ahead, we booked museum visits in Florence (skip the line) for the next few days.

We rose early to take the train to Florence in time for our reservations to see Michelangelo’s statue of David.  After David and the rest of the Academia gallery, we spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the main town area down by the river including the Ponte Vechio.  That evening in search of something a little different, we ended up at a middle-eastern café which had some amazingly tasty food and great mango juice.  Our second day in Florence, we went to the Uffizi gallery to see the historical renaissance art.  Later in the afternoon, Tessa found a leather jacket at one of the shops not far from our hotel and I enjoyed a really great pork medallion entrée that night which was smothered in mushrooms & truffles.

In search of something beyond the city, our next stop took us out to the western coast and the Cinque Terra.  After going back and forth and confusing ourselves on which of the five towns to stay in, we ended up choosing the town of Monterosso al mar.  We had a great little room in the old town area.  We enjoyed the seafood and pesto dishes while along the Italian coast.  The next day, we walked south along the coastal trail to Vernazza and then onward to Corniglia.  The rest of the lower trail was still closed, so we ended up exploring the other towns on later days by boat and train.

After a lazy day just being in town some laundry and lounging on the beach, the next day we headed all the way across the country to Venice.  Our train took us to Milan where we made a quick change before heading to Venice.  As we walked out of the train station and over the grand canal toward our hotel, Tessa remarked “This is place is real.”  We came to think of Venice not necessarily as the most beautiful city, but maybe a very audacious city.  Building and maintaining a city in the middle of a lagoon so many years ago, that took some real commitment to develop a sustainable city despite all the odds against such an endeavor.  We spent the next couple of days walking all over the town, taking a gondola ride, finding the gondola repair shop, and seeing Saint Mark’s square and basilica.  We were fortunate to enter Saint Mark’s with the lights on, brightly illuminating the ceilings and walls.  The church reminded both of us of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul which we visited a couple of years ago.  While the Hagia Sophia was later converted to a mosque it started its life as an orthodox church just like St. Mark’s.  After seeing St. Mark’s it was much easier to imagine places we saw in Turkey as the original orthodox churches.  Later when they turned the lights off we remarked that the church wouldn’t have been nearly as impressive if we were only able to see it “in the dark.”  We rode the vaporetto around one day over to the island of Merano where we explored some of the glass making shops.  One night, we found a restaurant not far from our hotel where we enjoyed a huge fish & seafood platter simply grilled which was absolutely delicious.  Our English speaking waiter probably made the night even more enjoyable as we found someone who was able to share their town with us in a way we could appreciate more fully.

From Venice, we headed north toward the Austrian border to the spa town of Merano/Meran.  This was is the German speaking park of Italy and so I had to brush off my German language skills.  We enjoyed the change in food and promptly ended up ordering some great Austrian treats including pork knuckle, spatzel, and goulash.  We were quite lazy and spent most of our time just wandering about the town and the countryside.  We also spent one afternoon enjoying the thermal baths and spa.

Innsbruck in Austria became our next stop.  We hadn’t planned on spending 3 nights there, but we enjoyed the hotel we found with its sauna and pool.  Innsbruck also made a good stop along the way before we took the train into Romania.  We also spent some time planning our remaining time in Romania.  Innsbruck also allowed us to feed our ethnic food cravings and we had Nepalese, Greek, and Thai food while we were there.  The only sad thing about visiting Innsbruck was that all of the gondolas were closed for their annual maintenance before the ski season so we weren’t able to head up for a view overlooking the city.

From Innsbruck, we took the hyperloop to Romania.  Not really, we took the fast train to Vienna where we changed trains to the night train via Budapest to Romania.  The train to Vienna hit 230km per hour for a portion of the journey.  Despite being speedy, the train was running about 15 minutes late.  The scheduled transfer time in Vienna was only about 25 minutes and we were starting to stress about running across the station in Vienna only to watch our train leave and then having to wait another 24 hours before the next train would depart.  We got up from our seats early for the Vienna station.  We had our backpacks on and ready at the door for when the train stopped to run across the station…only to find, as the train stopped, that our next train was directly across the platform from where we arrived, and our car was directly across the platform too!  Our transfer took just 10 seconds!  We settled into our sleeping compartment for the evening.  We had a double compartment with two bunks, a sink and places to store our luggage off the floor.  It was quite an enjoyable way to spend the night.  We boarded at 7:45pm, had some dinner, played cards for a while, and then watched a bit of a movie on the iPad before heading to sleep. We arrived in Sibiu, Romania the next morning around 11am.

We had picked Sibiu as our stop based on the fact that was the first large town along the train route where the train didn’t stop at 4 in the morning.  While in Innsbruck, we were working to find a guide for a few days to explore Romania beyond the big cities.  As we expected, it would be hard to fully explore beyond the cities without having a car.  Finding a guide had a few ups and downs as we almost combined trips with another couple but they backed out at the end and we had to reconfigure the plan with guide that we found.

The first two days in Romania we explored Sibiu on our own.  The coolest thing was probably the old steam engines and other railway equipment that were parked down by the rail lines.   It was officially a museum of sorts, but I don’t think they get a lot of visitors.  We were directed into the office to I assume buy our ticket.  We tried our really bad Romanian to ask for two tickets.  The man in the office I think after seeing that we didn’t speak any Romanian decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to do the paper work and collect the few Leu.  He put away his book and motioned for us to head outside; so we did.  (If there was a donation box I probably would have left a few Leu too, but we couldn’t find one.) There were a number of old engines and pieces of equipment including a steam powered rotary snow plow.  Sibiu was largely founded by the German-Saxons who came to the region at the end of the middle ages.  The town had some old historical buildings including a huge Lutheran Church.  The church organist just happened to be practicing while we visited which made the cold church seem much warmer and lively.  The place we ended up staying in Sibiu ironically was run by a couple who lived in Kirkland, Washington for over 10 years.  They recently decided to move back to their native Romania to raise their young son.  It was nice to have a shared experience to have a discussion with them about their life in Romania.

We met our guide, Daniel, our third day in Romania.  We had arranged for him to be with us for the next four days.  From Sibiu, we headed back west for a bit to visit Corvin Castle.  This castle was constructed as a fortress by the German-Saxons and today is an impressive castle sitting a town that is a mining and industrial area.  The pictures of the castle were better than the visit itself, but it was interesting to watch the film crew who was working in the castle to setup up for a movie production.  From there, we headed to the north of Romania to the small village of Breb.  It was a long drive and the weather didn’t cooperate, there was thick fog during the last two hours of the drive through the mountains.  I suspect it would have been a spectacular drive in the sun, but it was a little bit unnerving as the road was recently paved and didn’t have striping or reflectors, the fog was dense, and it was a quite dark night.  Driving by GPS took on a whole new meaning as our guide and driver used his GPS to help him know which way turns were coming up.  He was a really safe driver and we’re very grateful for that and arriving safely in Breb at the guest house.

Breb is a small village in the Maramures region of Romania.  The landscape and region is still dominated by traditional grazing and agriculture.   Our host was a wonderful Romanian woman who made the best food.  I would head back to her B&B just for the wonderful soups she served at dinner.  We spent the next day exploring the region driving up near the Ukrainian border to visit a cemetery with specially decorated grave makers which described the life of the deceased.  We also visited one of the 15th century wooden churches which punctuate the landscape.  Along the way we saw many of the traditional hand built hay mounds and sheep and goats roaming about the pastures.  We also visited a family just off the road who was producing the local fruit brandy.  It was interesting to see the old waterwheels powering various equipment.  At another home nearby a women made woolen slippers and her house was decorated with colorful cooking pots which she traded with gypsy community.

Our next day, we started south and ended the day in the town of Sighisoara, which again was a fortified town built by the German-Saxon community.  We stayed in a room overlooking the town square and explored around the town before having an enjoyable dinner at the hotel.

On our last day with Daniel our guide and we headed toward Brasov.  We stopped along the way at a fortified church and the Bran Castle.  It was interesting to think about how much of the “old” infrastructure was built by the German-Saxon population which lived in the country from the 15th century until the fall of communism.  Once the iron curtain fell many of the German origin people fled the country.  The German-Saxons, as a people group, have made a lasting impact on the infrastructure and Romanian history.

Tessa and I explored Brasov, the next day, before heading to Bucharest for a few days before my conference began.  We took the cable car up the hill overlooking the town and saw the Brasov (Hollywood style) sign up close.  We also visited the black & white Lutheran church and enjoyed sitting on the square having lunch and people watching.

While in Bucharest, we explored the old town and some of the parks in Bucharest.  I was “museum’ed” by this time so we found a few other things to do, like discovering one of the few self laundromats in the city.  Tessa was able to visit the village museum one day while I was at the conference and also spent an overnight with her a friend in Bulgaria who she met while on a trip there in college.  After the conference was over, we took the train out to Constanta on the Black Sea as one of my colleagues at the meeting wanted to see it.  We arrived late in the day as the sun was setting and found the town mostly deserted as all the beach hotels were closed for the season.  We stopped at the beach and took a few pictures in the dark before going back to the old town area for a quick walk and a bite to eat before heading back on the train to Bucharest and our flight home early the next morning.

As many of you know, I’ve been working with ARIN (American Registry for Internet Numbers) for the past decade working on public policy associated with Internet number identifiers.

Earlier this week, we reached a major milestone as ARIN officially ran out of available addresses in the original Internet numbers pool, IPv4.  A new schema, called IPv6, has been defined and is starting to gain traction in a number of countries and with broadband and mobile providers in the US.  The transition, however, will take many years as IPv4 is extremely embedded in almost every aspect of the Internet, and IPv6 has not, until recently, provided significant up-side to deployment by businesses.

For those of you who are looking for more details, you can check out my other blog here:

ARIN IPv4 free pool empty

Earlier this month, Tessa and I made the long trip from Seattle to Dominica (not the Dominican Republic) in the eastern Caribbean.  I was asked to speak at an ARIN outreach event on the island and so we both made the trip and included a few extra days to see the island.  It was a long 19 hour set of 5 flights from Seattle to Dominica via Newark, Puerto Rico, Antigua, and Guadeloupe before we reached the small airport on Dominica in the northeastern corner of the island.  We arrived just after dark and off we went via taxi to find the location of the guest house that we’d made a reservation for our first couple of nights.  After about 20 minutes of winding around the narrow roads we found the place, but there wasn’t anyone there.  We tried calling the phone number for the manager, but it rang disconnected.  We found a brochure at the outside reception desk and another number but it also rang disconnected.  We asked our driver to take us to the little town that was just a few minutes away as I knew there were other places that I’d researched that we could stay.  The other place I had thought of staying was also closed.  Apparently ‘low-season’ is really ‘closed season’ on this part of the island this year.  I also knew that Portsmouth was the 2nd largest town on the island and had a few larger places to stay so we asked our driver to take us there.  We drove in the pitch dark through the center of the island, which had a great cool tropical evening smell.  Another half-hour later, we arrived right on the beach with an open reception and rooms available for the night!  Plus as a bonus the restaurant on the beach was open and dinner was still being served.

After a good sleep, we were able to see the island for the first time in the day light.  We spent most of the first day just being lazy on the beach and exploring around the town where there is a medical school with mostly imported students from the US and Canada.  We had planned to spend the next part of our time at a guest house up away from the coast and the following morning we headed south.  The Cocoa cottages was our home for the next couple of nights.  It was a beautiful location and we had great hosts as well.  They also operate a canyoning adventure and Tessa and I had a great time rappelling, swimming, climbing, and jumping down a slot canyon.  The surrounding jungle was really exciting to be out in and exploring.  We finished that day with a “walk” up to Trafalgar falls.  While the walk was up the road, the roads on the island are steep with some being marked at 25% gradient!  The falls have a “cool” side and a “warm” side.  One creek and pools is warmed by the underground geothermal energy. You can get enjoy going back and forth between the hot and cool pools to help relax your tired muscles.

Dominica is also known for its diving and snorkeling.  We made our way down the southern coast toward champagne reef and were able to snorkel there and see some cool fluorescent squid who congregate there due to the warm water which again is warmed by the underground geothermal nature of the island.  For our last adventure on the island we drove around the southern half of the island.  While the island is only about 25 miles long by 15 miles wide, it is extremely mountainous.  The flattest part of the island is likely the airport runway, and it even that slopes downhill to the sea.  We took most of a whole day to make our way around the bottom half of the island stopping along the way.  We also took a side tour to hike/scramble down to a black sand beach, Cirque Ravine, which has a waterfall flowing on to it from the cliffs above.

The outreach event was held in the capital of Roseau which is small but bustling during the day.  Mini-vans are the buses of the island and during the evening commute the all line up getting ready to take all the people who work in town home for the evening in the communities surrounding the capital.  We were able to explore the botanical gardens, enjoy a tasty lunch at a french cafe, and also just spent the last day enjoying the pool overlooking the Caribbean Sea.  The outreach event went well, we had more that 15 participants from the island and they had some great questions during the day’s presentations.

Tessa and I headed up to Whistler last weekend despite the general lack of snow this year.  While there was no snow in the valley, and the ski-out tracks were like going to 7-eleven to get a slushy, the top of the mountain was lots of fun.  While we didn’t get any fresh snow, there was enough for fun and enjoy the mountains.

To those of you who occasionally check here for updates, sorry for the lack of postings.  I just haven’t had lots of interesting things that I felt like I wanted to post in the past couple of months.   We had a busy holiday season celebrating with family and friends, before I dove into a new work project that has consumed me for all of January and February.

After the LACNIC 22 meeting in Santiago, Chile, Tessa and I were able to spend a few extra days exploring Valparaiso and up the Chilean coast to La Serena.

Tessa & I hardly ever go to visit Mount Rainier despite it being in our “backyard.”  Well this year we did a little day trip up to the northeast, sunrise, side of the mountain.  We got started late in the day so we didn’t do as much exploring as we probably would have liked to, but we did a walk up to the Mount Thompson fire lookout.   Along the way we saw a bear.  Well, we were just really standing at this trail intersection next to a little lake when a number of the other people said, “hey look there is a bear.”  We turned around and there was a female and two cubs just having a snack on the ground cover probably about 100 feet from us.  It didn’t feel scary since I’m sure the bear knew all these noisy people were nearby and we were amongst quite a group of people too!

Tessa and I recently returned from a little road trip through Oregon which included our annual family trip down to Ashland and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  My favorite play this year from the festival was Water by the Spoonful which took a unique look at how we interact via social media and how people deal with change when things don’t go the way they had hoped.  Our time in Ashland was fun and we did a few new things to do including a drive up to Mount Ashland one afternoon.  The view wasn’t the greatest as smoke from the wildfires down in California was obscuring the views.  Before heading to Ashland we spent 5 nights over in Redmond & Bend, Oregon.   We stayed at a lovely little cabin on one of the golf courses.  We did a lot of lounging by the pool and by the golf course.  We also spent one afternoon exploring the town of Sisters and another day hiking through Smith Rock State Park.  We were also in town during one of the wineries annual grape stomp and had some fun squishing some grapes.  Enjoy a few pictures from the trip.

Yes, it is already June…where did the first half of 2014 go?

At the end of February, I stole Tessa away for a long weekend away from work to head up to Whistler for some skiing and snowboarding.  It was a great long weekend, the snow was great and the weather cooperated as well.  I clocked 22 runs mostly on the Blackcomb side of the mountain my first day there, certainly a record for me.

My role on the ARIN advisory council took me to Chicago earlier this year and also I spent most of last week in Bellevue for the NANOG meeting.  With the North American region quickly running down the last of the available IPv4 addresses more changes are close on the horizon.  You can see my other blog for info on that aspect of my work.

Tessa & I were also able to take a long weekend trip over to Chelan just after tax season for some warm Washington spring sun and relaxing.  We did some wine tasting and just a whole lot of relaxing, it was a great way to take a break after a busy tax season.

Earlier this month Tessa & I went down to Napa for Tessa to run a 10k in Sonoma and we also were able to take a quick trip over to UC Davis to see our old college grounds.  Not too much has changed since we were there last a few years ago and the food at Dos Coyotes is still really tasty.

This past weekend, I was able to attend the 2014 RedWinged Leadership Awards at SeattleU.  It was great to see some of my former classmates and be a part of a continuing tradition of not only learning about leadership, but finding and honoring great leaders in the Seattle community.