What a first day in India! As it’s 12:17 as I put fingers onto tablet keyboard, it is now almost exactly 24 hours since I arrived into the country and it’s been pretty wild. The morning started off slow, quite literally, as the omelette breakfast that was advertised on the menu as taking 15 minutes took almost an hour. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised; Christine already has been warning me that “Arab Time” and “Indian Time” share a lot more similarities to each other compared with “Western Time”. The food was quite tasty too – white buttered toast, a spicy omelette with onions, peppers, and cilantro in it, and a creamy coffee. The hotel staff told me (correctly) that a rickshaw to the Andheri train station would cost about 50 rupees (the driver took my sixty and didn’t offer my change but I was feeling generous and let him keep the equivalent of a dollar), but my first heart pounding moment was that I couldn’t find the danged ticket booth. I walked up and down the platforms twice, over the arching bridge connecting them, and even interrogated a bookish-looking young guy (I operated on the assumption that they would speak English several times today, and haven’t been wrong yet) as to whether we just provided the 5 rupee fare on the train. Nope – there was a ticket booth, I just had to find it, which I finally did, buried around a corner behind some billboards for popcorn and snacks. Half of the time during this search, I had been dogged by a sad-looking girl, who had to be between 5-7 who was holding a baby in her arms. She would tug on my arm as I was walking, and if I stopped to puzzle over the ticket kiosk’s hidden location, she immediately fell to my feet and started touching them, then touching her forehead. For the first few minutes I gently and sadly told her in English “no money, no change, I’m sorry” (and I really didn’t; all I had was 1000 rupee bills left in my pocket from the ATM).

With ticket in hand and a few small change bills in my pocket, I walked triumphantly back to the platform, and happened to see the same girl standing with a woman that I assumed was her equally poor mother. I proudly handed a 20 rupee bill (the equivalent of 4 train tickets halfway across the city or a couple good meals) to the woman, and walked onto the train. Suddenly a swarm of children surrounded me, chorusing “money mister money mister money mister” over and over again in some sort of eerie high-pitched drone. I thought I’d be safe on the train, but they followed me onto the train and proceeded to continue to touching my feet. The gruff looking Indian men around me, young and old, looked rather embarrassed and they tried to shoo the children off me. “Mister,” they said, gesturing to the children, then to me, and then pantomimed a “tsk tsk” motion. “They go then.” I saw the little girl with the baby, and gave her a 10 rupee bill, and the girl next to her a 5 rupee coin, then showed them my empty change pocket. The littler one pouted at the 5 rupee coin, and pointed at the 10 bill in her hand. “Wasn’t that your mother back there?” I asked in exasperation. “No mother mister, no mother” was the response. But the train was leaving, and the kids melted away, the men shaking their heads in irritation in the direction of the beggars and flicking their newspapers open. And beside a few stares from new people getting onto the train, I was mostly ignored for the slow, clanking ride to Mahim station.

The doors were never shut, people were literally hanging out of the door like the enjoyed the natural “air conditioning” it provided (headless to the huge signs in English and Sanskrit warning of the fact that this was an electric train that used 25,000 volts to run) and a massive rush of humanity shoved silently to get on and off the train at every stop. A group of young students in uniforms came on the train about 15 minutes into the ride, a couple of them produced some little cymbals and bells, and they all begin singing a rhythmic upbeat song in either Hindi or Marati (the local state language – I can’t tell the difference of course). They sounded pretty good too. I was watching carefully to see how early people got up from their seats (if they were the 30% like me who had gotten on at the end of the line and gotten seats; most people were standing and crushing into the aisles and doors) and was able to leap out at Mahim, just as the train started moving.

At Mahim, I met up with my new tour guides and tour group – Nilesh, our young guide, a couple of Australian women named Steph and Anita, and a Hollander named Bart. The rain had been drizzling nonstop all morning, and we splashed over the uneven cracked pavement a bit north of Mahim towards the Dhavari Slum. Nilesh worked for a group called Reality Tours, the only Dhavari touring group that was a registered NGO and gives back 80% of all tour income to the slums to run schools for children, job-education centers for adults, and nutrition/sexual health schools for expecting mothers. Nilesh was a small fellow with shaggy black hair, a trim little goatee, and twinkling eyes. He seemed to enjoy his work quite a bit as he led us first through the commercial section where they recycled the garbage that Mumbaites leave in heaping piles all over the city, stitched together garments for factories, and make bread for both personal sale and for restaurants. The recycling part was particularly interesting – Nilesh told us that the slum was one by technical name only – the 1km clump of land was government owned, but for a hundred years squatters had been throwing up first metal, then concrete shanties and houses and starting small businesses in them. But the Indians are resourceful people – although many of their devices look ramshackle by Western standards, they are masters of working with what they’ve got. We got to see the rooms were bales of crushed lawn chairs, CRT monitor bases (I knew the plastic from the screens we actually pay to get rid of at the University were getting reused somehow!) were stored, and the rooms were large metal machines ground them into pellet form and where those pellets were stored so that Samsung and LG could buy them from the slum laborers and reuse them into making smartphone bodies. Just think – the next time you hoist your plastic-bodied phone, remember that it was likely touched by an industrious team of Indian workers in Mumbai. Their pay is measly though – 8 rupees per kilogram of plastic, and 5 for the same weight of paper. I compared that to Jordan in my head – when I was there, a laborer could make 20-30 gersh (50 cents or so) for a kilo of paper. That’s over triple the price. We even saw the rooms where the grinding machines were being welded, put together, and painted, and smaller rooms where smelters were making their gears. Now that’s local business.

Then we crossed the street into the residential area of the slum, which is defined as “not having any toxic manufacturing processes happening in it” My poor sandals, already in beat up shape from Thailand and Malaysia, probably won’t survive this trip between the constantly pouring rain and the trudging through industrial waste water. Children ran around us now, cheering hello over and over again. Nilesh patted one on the head and told us “these kids won’t beg from you, they see that I’m with you, they see the tour guide logo on my shirt, and they know that your visit is improving their life here.” And he was right – not a single person begged money from us in all of Dhavari. Nilesh had told us that these were a proud hardworking people who didn’t want to feel exploited, and in fact they wanted to share their hardworking lives with western tourists. Photography was understandably forbidden in the entire slum while travelling with the Reality Tours group – ever since the area was used as the background for the massively successful Slumdog Millionaire movie, the residents were irritated with tourists tramping through and photographing their poverty, and Reality certainly wasn’t going to contribute to that.
Continue reading this post…

I’ve thankfully arrived fully intact at my hotel (hostel?) the Anjali Inn, and will be going down in a few minutes to attempt to order breakfast off of a card menu they handed me last night. My two flights, first from Chicago to London, then from London here to Mumbai were of course uneventful, but I had a wonderful chatty and talkative seatmate for the first leg of the flight – a Montessori school teacher from Slovakia named Danka who had just finished her first-ever trip to the USA for an international school conference. She had only found out that her school was sending her to the USA 2 days before she left, and then she only was able to spend 3 days in the country! She told me that her “Esta” form, the E.U. version of a visa to the USA, was good for 3 years though, and had only cost 10 pounds. I ruefully wished that such an amazing feat of paperwork existed for my Arab friends to allow them to come to the USA so easily.

My second seatmate was an Indian-American, a quiet guy named Maheer who taught me a few Hindi words – he was on his way back to Mumbai to visit his family but he was quick and proud to point out that he was an American first and foremost. I slept for most of that flight; chatting seemed to be far from our minds.

Upon arriving at the Indira Gandhi airport, getting my ride to the Anjali couldn’t have been easier – the customs official barely glanced at my hard-earned $150 visa, and after making a withdrawl of several thousand rupees of local currency (the exchange rate currently being almost 61 to a single dollar) I made my way outside to the massive throng of people – young, old, and taxi drivers who seemed ageless in how they immediately hounded me like horseflies – where Patel, a man with a printed sign bearing my name, was waiting for me. As we waited for his car to circle around the airport to pick us up, a trim man in a polo shirt and jeans said something to him, pointing at me. I wondered if he was another driver, asking whether Patel was actually going to take me somewhere or just sit there, my money not being properly used. Patel showed him his card and the Anjali Inn papers, and then man walked off. The man was a plainclothes cop, he told me, making sure I wasn’t trying tPuri Bhaji or Ussal Pavo hussle you off somewhere.

Our driver found us a few minutes later, and bundled my two small bags into the back, and me next to them. My eyes were immediately drawn to the jeweled cross necklace wrapped around the rearview mirror. “Is one of you a Christian?” I asked. They both laughed. The driver replied that he was Muslim, and Patel said that he was Hindu. “But this car, for both of us, so we pick something not bothering either.”

The room they gave me was small but clean, although a slight scent of mildew pervades most things unfortunately. This being the rainy monsoon season probably doesn’t help. But the A/C works and so does the internet and it’s only for a couple days, so I don’t mind. I took a brief walk around outside near the hotel a few minutes ago, to see the area in the light – it definitely seems like a poorer neighborhood, judging by the open stormwater drains in the sidewalks, the piles of rotting fruit cores (also on the sidewalks) and then heavy, pervasive smell of exhaust that already seems to be cloying the back of my throat.

Time to wash that out with some Puri Bhaji or Ussal Pav! And then get myself down to the Mahim train station (somehow) by 10am for my first guided tour meet-up.

I’ll only be taking the Android tablet with me this time (this is why I bought one with a keyboard; the Asus Transformer Infinity); it will be my first time traveling with a non-Windows powered computer. The last time I tried this Android app was back when I was still using an iPod touch, I think, in 2010. How times have changed.

So far, Christine and I have narrowed plans down to my solo flight to Mumbai, meeting up with her in Trivandrum, then Amma’s ashram, Kochi, and a flight to Jodhpur. Hopefully that will be followed by a desert safari somewhere in that area (probably Bikaner) and then a train ride (probably; if we can figure out how to get these ridiculous Indian websites to work) to Agra, where we’ll be staying at a nice hotel with a view of the Taj Mahal. Then up to Delhi for the Hindu New Year (that’s when she tells me it is at least!) and a flight back to New York to hang out with her cousins for a couple days!

Should be a fun three weeks. The advantage to you guys, my readers, is that my posts should hopefully be more timely (instead of two weeks after I get back with edited timestamps) and also a wee bit shorter…closer to how my Britain trip posts were back in 2007.

I just returned from a great weekend of biking and camping, and I didn’t need to leave the state this time to do it! My friend and colleague Caitlin recently purchased a new bicycle, a cyclecross type, and she was eager to put some more long haul miles on it. She and her boyfriend Branden extended a cycling and camping trip invitation to me and some other friends of theirs; a 30 mile ride from Madison down to the New Glarus State Park. Despite living in Brodhead for almost a decade while growing up, a town literally connected to New Glarus by the Sugar River bike trail, I’d never actually been in the town before for any reason, and I was excited to hit the trail, the camp, and a town that’s known for the most famous beer in Wisconsin, Spotted Cow.

I started from work, taking a half day off on Friday afternoon, and met Caitlin on the Madison trail with serendipitously perfect timing coming from her house, and once again with perfect timing we met Branden coming out of his office building as well. We were all a little nervous about the dreary overcast sky, and the fact that Wisconsin weather has been deluging for the past month. However, as we hit the Capitol City Trail heading southwest out of the city, the cool breeze and shady sky was actually quite a blessing, both for temperature reasons and the fact that we had the trail almost entirely to ourselves. We were all wearing biking clothes, and thankfully we had friends in cars carrying our camping stuff down to New Glarus for us, otherwise it would have been a much more difficult and encumbered ride!

We stopped for lunch in Belleville, where we flipped a coin and picked one of the two restaurants listed on the Chamber of Commerce website for the town – we had just turned right off of the bike trail and down main street in the city, when Branden happened to look back behind us at the traffic – he shaded his eyes a bit and said “no way…” – it was their friends and our fellow campers Kate and Patxi, her Spanish boyfriend. What serendipitous timing, Branden exulted – what were the chances that we would detour through Belleville, and happen to meet them on the street mere moments before we would have gone into a bar and grill and missed them? The bar, J&M’s (no relation to Brodhead’s M&J’s, I think), served us some amazing swissburgers (lightly charred and crispy on the outside and tender on the inside), and the bartender, Barb, got out her book of “best Wisconsin small pubs” and showed us a few of her favorites since she heard we were heading to the brewery tour.

Conveniently enough, the clouds opened up and started pouring rain only a few minutes after we went inside, and stopped again right as we were finishing up our second or third pints. Across the street from our pub, a large group of older cyclists, fit men and women in polka-dotted outfits, were getting gear out of a van – our groups recognized each other as fellow spandex-wearers, and they hailed us from across the street and asked the best way to get back on the trail toward Madison – it turned out they were all from Des Moines and were doing a “capitol to capitol” bike ride. Something for us to aspire to, perhaps…

After another half hour of biking, we came to the New Glarus Tunnel – a massive train tunnel built in 1888 that was surrounded by blasted-out cliffsides that over the past century had become overgrown with beautiful moss, lichen, and low hanging trees. No fewer than two or three springs seemed to be bubbling out of the cliffside; I assume they were springs as they seemed to start in the middle of the rock, and weren’t coming down from the top of the cliff like a creek or stream might. Inside the tunnel, which stretches for almost 1,300 feet, it was pitch black and there were puddles of rainwater as deep as half a foot. Caitlin, on her small new bike, seemed a bit concerned by this, but Branden told us not to worry – just cycle as fast as possible to keep your forward momentum in the water and we should be able to keep our feet dry and the bikes from toppling over. With headlamps and bikelights glowing dimly and with water drips echoing around us, we went forward as fast as we dared – it took us about 2-3 minutes to get through. My bike had fenders – however, theirs did not, and I was the only one who made it to the campsite with an unsullied back.

Our site had three tents, the other had two. We jokingly referred to ourselves as “base camp zero” – the other was “site B”

The folks with cars (Danno, Dan, and Kate/Paxti) had already arrived, and it was nice to flop down in my chair (after I had unloaded it from Danno’s car) and relax in front of the fire that they had already started. There was a bit of bad news though – our last couple bikers, leaving a few hours after us on sleek road/racing bikes, had some rough luck on the muddy trails and one of them had gotten a flat. Thankfully, one person’s car had a rack on the back and and Hobbes and Jude were only a few miles away from the end, just after the tunnel. The car sped out there, rescued them, and we were all reunited. Continue reading this post…

Yesterday, my academic association hosted the UW-Madison’s chief of police at the end-of-the-year luncheon, and she gave an excellent speech on the current state of gun control bills/laws and her feelings on it. Riseling has been on the force here at the UW for 23 years, so I would definitely say she’s more qualified to voice valuable opinions than the average Senator or House representative. She had a quick wit and a blunt way of speaking (the latter is probably a stereotype that’s true of police officers) and made some great points.

Obviously, the biggest point of contention was the gun control bill that failed to pass a couple weeks ago. Riseling pointed out that opponents of “any” gun control – because, after all, the right to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed” right – are forgetting that most amendments are regulated – or infringed, if you want to phrase it differently – all the time. The freedom of speech and religion, for example, two of the most famous examples of ‘Merica’s greatness, are regulated to prohibit threats and libel, or polygamy, or sacrificing virgins. Riseling pointed out that these have been accepted for decades, and that the 2nd Amendment even claims that the militia that the purpose of bearing/keeping arms was originally intended for (I’d personally like to mandate that all gun owners join militias, since they love the scream about the 2nd amendment so much) is supposed to be well-regulated, not unregulated.

Then Riseling pointed out – if we completely unregulated our “right” to keep and bear arms, then should a billionaire be able to purchase military grade helicopters with heat-seeking missiles on them, whenever they want, if cost is no option? It’s his right, isn’t it? What about a functioning tank? And then she did point out the ridiculousness of the current law at the Madison capitol prohibits more than 4 people to organize together to sing/protest, but yet people can buy .50 caliber weaponry and rocket propelled grenade launchers. Where do we draw the line? If you don’t believe that a casino mogul shouldn’t be able to own an F-16, then you’re infringing his rights – so let’s draw that line a little farther down.

Riseling emphasized that what she’d really like to see is a shared list of attempts by felons to acquire weaponry. It’s supposed to be illegal anyway – has been for years. But right now, only gun stores are supposed to check these things against a quick database – gun shows and private sellers don’t have to, of course. And then the gun store destroys the result of that check within 24 hours. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a centralized database of felons attempting to acquire weaponry, or attempting to acquire them from multiple places? Police, said Sue, are overwhelmingly in favor of this.

All and all, a smart lecture from a smart woman. The UW Police and the Madison Police (the latter’s silly ticketing of bicycles like they were deadly motorized vehicles aside) are pretty good, in my opinion. The capitol police, led by our thuggish corporate crony Governor Walker, is another story, but hopefully we can clean out that lot when we get rid of Walker in another couple years.

Swipe that yellow bar to the left and you might see a password request

2018 Note: These instructions are from 2013 – so unless you find a 2013 era Kindle Fire that has not had its software updated, the below instructions might not do you much good. I don’t know, as I don’t own a Kindle Fire personally.

I recently came across a Kindle Fire nearby where I work at the university. A colleague and I assumed it must have been owned by a student or teacher who worked in our building, so she posted signs up around the building stating that a lost Kindle Fire (original, not HD) had been found and that the owner could pick it up in her office. Months went by, and I was tormented by the sight of it in her office, sitting unreclaimed on a stack of paperwork.

She tried contacting Amazon, asking if they could help us locate the owner if we gave identifying numerical information about the device. They (perhaps wisely) refused to do so, but tempted to coax the information out of us anyway so that they could remotely brick the device and render it useless “for security reasons.” I assume then they’d ship us a postage-paid box that we could return the dead device in, and they’d take care of contacting the owner themselves.

Hah, I thought to myself. What a roundabout journey this poor Kindle will have to take, when all we need is just to reset/delete a lockscreen password. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work. It ended up being a lot more involved than I had thought it would, thanks to some variations between how Amazon has modified Android from Google’s original designs. The purpose of my blog post here is not to introduce new information or research (I’m a repair and maintenance guy, not a programmer) but instead to merely tie together a myriad of information that I had to use on my journey of discovery.

1. First order of business was researching where Gingerbread (Android 2.3, or what came as stock on the original Kindle Fires) stores the database for lockscreen passwords. XDA-Developers reveals it here; to summarize:
   data/data/com.android.providers.settings/databases/settings.db
2. It’s an SQLite database, so you will of course need the application sqlite3 to edit it. The problem is that while stock Android comes with this executable, the Kindle Fire does not. If you try to edit this file, even on a rooted Kindle Fire, it will merely tell you – I don’t know what to do with this file.
3. I didn’t have any rooted Gingerbread-era phones lying around to rip the binary executable off of, so I downloaded and installed the Android developer SDK on my computer. If you have one, you can use that, and skip this extra time-consuming step. This site here has instructions for installing the SDK, and adding Gingerbread as an installed operating system/environment.
4. Once you have Gingerbread open in a cute little window on your computer, you can use these instructions to find where the SQLite3 executable is found, and how to yank it off of the emulated Gingerbread virtual machine and onto your computer.
5. Now, you know where the .db file is (theoretically) and you have a sqlite application ready to be put on your locked Kindle Fire. But of course, in order access your own Kindle Fire’s /data/data folder you will need to root it. But people should be rooting their own devices anyway, and it’s not like you can’t undo it, so I didn’t feel bad about rooting this lost Kindle Fire in order to find the owner. Plug the Kindle Fire in, and follow these instructions here for the original Kindle Fire Utility to root it – the interesting thing is that for all of the Kindle Fire’s weird eccentricities, like not including SQLite3, they still leave debug mode enabled by default, which is kind of key for this to work if you can’t get to the home screen and settings.
6. Now that you’re rooted, you can use these instructions to get ADB (android debug mode) going in a terminal window on your computer. Use push to get that sqlite binary onto the Kindle Fire in the /data/data folder. I rebooted the Kindle after doing that, then opened up ADB in a terminal window again.
7. Success! Now, going way back up to that first instruction website from step #1, you can get into the settings.db file and delete the lock screen password with the following commands:
   sqlite> update secure set value=0 where name=’lockscreen.password_salt’;
   sqlite> update secure set value=0 where name=’lockscreen.password_type’;
   sqlite> update secure set value=0 where name=’lockscreen.lockoutattemptdeadline’;
   sqlite> update secure set value=0 where name=’lock_pattern_visible_pattern’;
   sqlite> update system set value=0 where name=’lockscreen.lockexchange.enable’;

I rebooted one last time, and this time, instead of the lock screen, the system rebooted right to the user’s home screen. I went to the “About Kindle” page on the device and found the user’s full name, looked him up on the Wisc database, and sent an email off of to him letting him know that we had recovered his device. I even dropped it off for him; he seemed surprised that I had taken the time and effort to track him down, but pleased to have it back. He was clutching an iPad when I came to his office, so something tells me that the temporary loss of a $199 device wasn’t devastating to him.

Anyway, I hope that this amalgamation of instructions can prove helpful to someone who’s in a similar situation.