On Wednesday of last week, a full week ago, the geohashing algorithm xkcd comic was posted. It purposes an algorithm for randomly determining latitude and longitude coordinates scattered evenly throughout the world. There is a random location within roughly 85 miles of your present location generated every day. The algorithm works like this:
Meetups are held Saturdays at 4pm, and since the comic was posted last week, this Saturday was the first meetup, so I skipped the zombie walk, earth fest, and Zuneral to attend. The location was in the front yard of suburban house in Hopedale, MA.
Everyone was very good about not disturbing the house or entering the yard. We even actually met up around the corner from the location at first so as to minimize the hubbub directly in front of the house. Someone did actually bring some beer which had be promptly re-hidden in his backpack. There were about 40 people there in total, which Randall thinks is a “triumph.”
I didn’t make use of most of that. What I did do was throw around the frisbee, chat and take lots of pictures. Here are some of the pictures that come with back story.
I managed to both take that picture and catch that frisbee on the left side. I’m proud not, but I did manage to sail one shot directly over this guy’s head and into the lake, but he was good sport and went to get it anyways.
From March 19th through March 24th I was skiing in Utah with my friend from back home, Paul, his dad, his roommate, his roommate’s girlfriend, and his roommate’s girlfriend’s roommate. It was a blast. The second two days were the very best skiing I’ve had in my life, which skiing wise is still rather short mind you; anyways, it was great. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I’m going to tell this story in short form with pictures, be sure to click on them to read the captions.
We spent the first two days at Snow Basin, host to the 2002 Oylmpics Downhill course, and probably others. We however stayed mostly on the green slopes here teaching the girls to ski. I did make it up the gondola at least once the first day, and skiing down from there was really tiring. Much more tiring than anything I did the previous week during my warm-up in New Hampshire. (The warm up post is not forthcoming, its just lost with all the busyness. ) The second day at Snow Basin I got a little more advanced skiing in, and it was not as tiring.
On the third day we switched to Powder Mountain, which is nearby and known (apparently not very widely) for not having crowds ever, even on weekends. I’m pretty sure this view looks into the salt lake basin to the northwest, which is away from the city.
Despite that it snowed only very little, if at all, while we were there Powder Mountain still had untracked powder if you looked in the right place. Of course, learning to ski in Ohio I’ve never skied on such stuff before. It was difficult but I got the hang of it.
On the second day at Powder Mountain (the last day overall) Paul, his dad and I again went in search of some untracked powder. It was harder to find that day and we ended up having to walk up this ridge a bit. In the end we found it too dangerous and skiied down the back side, where it was less steep and had fewer trees. But as we went down we looped around and had some fun darting through the trees.
By the end of the trip my confidence in my skiing abilities was way up. Too bad I didn’t start skiing until the end of the season.
This post is primarily a response to Chris’ comment on my previous post. Last week was the fourth time I’ve been to Las Vegas. Three of those have been in the last year (one before I started the blog, one this summer, and this one) for work. The other one was when I was 13, with my family.
So, what exactly did I do there. Well the work part occurs out in the middle of the desert and involves testing software with the actual hardware its designed for, its super exciting </sarcasm>. We stay in the podunk little town except for the two nights actually in Las Vegas that bookend the trip. There is one restaurant in this town, which sucks, oh and this part isn’t interesting.
When I’m in Vegas I usually hit up the strip, but I tend not to gamble. Gambling is one of the few activities that you can go out and do alone, but like most things it’s not as good as with a friend — to commiserate over your losses with. I can really only let myself play blackjack, given that I understand the odds involved with all the common games, and its so hard to find a $5 table, I have looked for them on occasion. The one time I did gamble (trip 2) I put up $60 for $5 blackjack, played for an hour and half and got up after I’d made it back to $65 and then lost the hand, breaking even. On trip 3 I saw a show instead of gambling.
This time I got in before dinner, so I grabbed a Chipotle burrito, part of my quest to use up those gift cards, and took it to the Bellagio, and ate it watching the fountains. This is a video of them from where I ate. It sounded like it might be the song from the end of Oceans’ 11 so I turned on the camera. I’m yet actually compare it, maybe you all can do that for me.
After I finished my burrito, which cost a whole lot less than they do here in Massachusetts (at least $0.25 less in Nevada), I walked around to the other side of the fountains and watched for a while. Taking this video:
They really are the best free show in town. These aren’t even the best two songs I saw. It’s of course hard to tell before the music starts playing what song it will be, and if that song is any good is even harder. They should announce the song name before it starts playing, to get people’s attention and provide the information. There is one song I’ve seen 3 times (2 of them on the same night on trip 3), Luck be a Lady, and wow that song is sub par. The fountain work is unimpressive, its long, and the lyrics get old fast. I know its the The Chairman of the Board and all, but its not so good. I do hope to one day see the show for Fly Me to the Moon, I think that is the one I would request of the songs they do, if I could.
After that, I just perused the strip and did some people watching, which is fun. It was cloudy and the moon was dimmer (through the clouds) than the light from the Luxor was shining on the clouds. This makes sense if you think about it, but it was neat. I park at the Bellagio because my hotel is about a block off the strip up by the Hilton. The Bellagio’s parking is great because unlike other hotels its not in the very back, its more off to the side, so its quicker to get in and out. On my way back to my car I checked out their conservatory display, which was themed for Chinese new year.
After that I went back to the hotel watched some of The Office. I wasn’t feeling very well on the ending bookend in Vegas, so I pretty much just slept. I think I’ll be going back again this spring if I can get the next version of the software up in time and work out some of the hardware issues I had this trip. So what else should I be doing while I’m there, Chris?
I feel like I haven’t updated the blog in a while. I don’t know, I’m thinking maybe a change in formats/coverage is in the works, but I’m not really sure. Anyways, I was checking out our winter vacation spot in North Carolina on google maps when I found something really surprising. Our cabin was only about 3,400 feet away from the Smokey Mountains National Park.
I wish I’d know that when I was there, it would have been cool to drive all the way up the road to the ridge. The trip was otherwise fun. I won 2/4 poker tournaments, none of which were played for money, much to my dismay, but that was really surprising given the crowd, although I’m sure had money been on the line I would have done worse, cause it changes everyones play style. Lets see, what else, I spent at least half a day playing with my cousins who are finally old enough that I feel like I can relate and play fun games with. We played sardines and sharks and minnows and some other stuff. Oh, we also played the Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader board game, I was on a team with my cousins and we as a collective (total grade level totaling ~30 between the 4 of us) were indeed smarter than a fifth grader.
Oh I got connecting to the internet on my laptop via a usb cable to my cell phone working in about an hour in preparation for the trip. I used it a little bit as it was the only connection available, but I tired not to use it too much because I’m unclear as to what the billing repercussions of doing so are. Although from what I can tell, since only the verizion 1x network was available I didn’t violate my terms of service. You only violate the terms of service when you “tether” to the EvDo network (the faster one)without signing up for overly expensive data plan, which I didn’t do, anyways we’ll see in a few days when I get my bill.
The above image is a badly reconstructed panorama from the front porch of the cabin. It was raining then as it was most of the trip, which was no problem, we just played games inside the whole time. It did clear up enough for a night of casual stargazing and a fire complete with smores, yum.
Previous Map
But what about me? I’m thinking probably not, as much fun as last year was, it would have to cost a lot less than it did last year before I would go. Although I should have a free plane ticket by then, and I do enjoy New Orleans.
Well, I am definitely not going since we have to play LSU. Clearly the BCS is totally flawed, but I mean really, the only reason they jumped that much is because someone doesn’t want to see a clearly better team that didn’t get the chance to play for their conference championship (namely Georgia, but also Kansas) in the title game. They vote in someone who gives the game some kind of legitmacy (LSU) so they can say that the BCS works, when in fact it does not work and they just picked two teams with good reputations to play each other. Not that I don’t think the BCS favors teams like OSU, it does, but it would favor them even more if they just lived within the system and were content with the awful match ups that would fall out of it without undue manipulation of the human component.
Hog Island is a small island in Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island. One of my room mates, Brian’s, extended family owns about half of the island. Its a very unique place with no roads or power running to the island. There used to be a daily ferry out, but that has since stopped. So one can only get there by personal boat. Brian hosted a party there a week ago, which was a blast. Although, I was embarrassingly sore from a ~6 inning whiffle ball game that ended tied 7-7. Below is a map of some of the pictures I took to try out the new camera. Click on the pictures for a bigger view (you’kll want to use the larger map for that), but note that they have been compressed to save on bandwidth, you’re welcome Chris.
Well I went to Las Vegas for work and the to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for vacation with my family and Paul’s family. And well check the my map of the trip.
Huh, it looks like you have to sign in to google maps before it will show you any of the my maps. I guess I never noticed this before, or maybe its new, in any case, if the map doesn’t have lots of blue lines and markers on it, then you should sign in it seems.
Unfortunetly Google could not calculate driving directions between Boston and Alice Springs, NT, Australia. So Josh and I settled on an Outback Steakhouse in Connecticut to settle round 2 of our Red Sox/Yankees bet. The Yankees won both May and June series, although swept neither. That means to Sox are still 1 game up in the head to head record. Anyways this entitled Josh to a free meal. It was a good time, but both the Sox and the Yankees lost their games that day.
Also of note, on the way there (~150 miles) I got an average 47.0 mpg, the highest yet. Feeling that I could make it to 50mpg, the 2007 EPA number if I just drove @65mph on the way back (instead of ~70 as I did on the way there). Alas, I only got up to 48.0 (and just barely) on the way back. In any case thats 3 mpg higher than the 2008 revised EPA numbers. This is the first time I have beaten that number. I drove this same route at ~42.5 mpg two months ago, at similar speeds, so I attribute this higher number to a nice dry summer day — It was raining and ~50 deg. F. on the previous trip.
On Sunday I took my first “road trip” in my new car. That is if you consider 272 mile round trip as a “road trip,” but it was long enough for me to test out some new things. The reason for the trip was to meet up with Josh to settle round one of our bet over the Yankees/Red Sox series this season. For each series or pair of series the loser buys the winner dinner. This dinner was for the first series at NY; we hadn’t started the bet before the first series at Fenway. Anyways it was a nice trip, esp once I got out of the rain in Boston. Below are the things I tested on the trip and the results:
M$ Streets and Trips: Verdict: Crappy
I played around with this once before on the way home from work and had issues with route recalculation not working very well. These issues resurfaced on this trip. All was alright (not good) until I got off the highway due to traffic in New Haven. First the gps lost track, the software’s response to this was to not tell me anything and lock up. Josh had called to tell me I was early, so when the software got done locking up I tired to get it to tell me where Yale is so I could drive though it since I was there and had time. Well it couldn’t tell me, how worthless. Of course, as it turns out, Yale is spread out all over the place there, but I managed to miss all of it.
Tonight came the next problem, the reason why I will never use this software ever again. The program recorded gps trails of exactly where I went, which are pretty high fidelity looking at the map. I want to export these traces and put them up on a my map. Well try as I might all this data remains locked up in a proprietary MS binary file format. All i need are the coordinates in text form, I can do the rest, but no I can’t get anything out the program except the screen shot above. Next time I’ll just have to use Linux to log the raw gps data for me. I know, I should have known better than to expect that I would be able to do what I want with locked down closed source software.
Car (2007 Honda Civic Hybrid) MPG: Verdict: Amazing
I’ve been wanting to go on a long trip with my car to get a good sense as to what its true highway performance is. The primary, trustworthy, MPG displays an average, you can have 2 running averages at one time. I use 1 per tank, and the other has been running since I got the car. Normally the per tank average is lower than my usual to work and back real mpg. I can tell this because the average always ticks up during the week. On the weekend when I only make short in the city trips the average dips. As such I didn’t know my true highway performance until now, with a ~270 mile trip @70mph almost the whole obliterate any low readings pulling down the average. The revised 2008 mpg numbers for the 2007 Civic Hybrid are 40 (city) and 45(highway). Well I got 42.3 on my trip. I bet I could hit that 45 if i drove 60mph. Also this spring my normal millage has increased from ~34 to 38+. I will be confirming just how much plus this week by watching how much the 42.3 average drops. So far in 1 22 mile round trip to work the average is still 42.3, it went up to 42.4 for a bit. The overall average since I got the car is now ~36 up from ~32 in the winter. I’m not sure all of this can be attributed to weather, as I’m probably becoming a more efficient driver. I purposefully did not drive 75 on my trip after I noticed my mileage dropping when I tried it. In any case I am very happy that my numbers are very much in sync with the new revised EPA estimates now. I had previously been unimpressed with my mileage.
Unfortunetly 
