Biking! Statistics!

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Statistics are here.

Elevation Profile

I used my GPS while biking finally, and used it to create a Google Map and record all kinds of information about a ride around the Arlington Triangle. I also used GPS Visualizer to create the nifty profile view.

So I'm clearly not very fast out there; I averaged about 15 mph even disregarding stops for crossings. My friend Chris averaged 18.3 mph while doing the 112 mile bike portion of Ironman Louisville this past weekend. Humbling. Still, extremely neat to have the data - statistics help you quantify just how much fun you're having.

The End of Thinking

Where was this  when I was in school?  It will take derivatives, including showing you all the steps so you can show "your" work.  So much potential, and probably the geekiest way to waste time on the internet short of posting on comic book message boards.  "Who would win in a fight, Spider-man or Boba Fett?"  Maybe Alpha can answer that question...

UPDATE: Seriously, check this thing out.  Watch the overview screencast - it is breathtaking how much data is already in place.

Things To Do

• Get a copy of the new Firefox 3.0 browser. Even better than the previous edition. There is an especially nifty feature where you can tag your bookmarks as well as sorting them into folders, and they can have multiple tags. And you can find all the bookmarks that share a tag just by typing the tag into the address bar - pretty slick.
• Go read katebeaton.com. It is hilarious - I especially like the one about Teddy Roosevelt, "Adventure Time." Teddy Roosevelt was awesome.
• Find something pulpy for summer reading. I recommend skipping the latest bestsellers and sampling a the work of a classic author of thrillers, Eric Ambler. The Care of Time is one of my favorites, and I'm reading Journey Into Fear right now. I've heard The Coffin of Dimitrios is also extremely good.
• If you are in the Baltimore/DC area and are interested in ships, consider heading up to the Charm City to tour the USCGC Bertholf, the first new major cutter in decades. She's scheduled to be open for tours the weekend of the 27th.
• Find something decent to watch on tv now that Battlestar is off the air until sometime in 2009. At least the mid-season finale was awesome.

Commentary

I use Google Reader a lot. I scan the NY Times and the Washington Post sites each morning, but mostly I subscribe to various RSS feeds, then filter them for what interests me. For a while, Reader has allowed you to email items of interest. Recently, the added the Share feature, which allows other RSS subscribers to sign up for items you flag. Now, they've added a feature where you can add notes to the items you share. My shared items are up on the right, or you can go here and see items I share plus any notes. I haven't made any good notations yet - not much value added. But I think it is extremely slick, and a great way to archive news, posts, and articles.

Reader

I'm a big fan of many of the free services Google offers online. The two I use the most are probably GMail and Google Reader. I route all of my mail, except for my work account, through GMail. It is just so convenient and functional; it even has one of the best spam filters I've ever used.

But while GMail (and the time burglar that is GChat) are extremely helpful, I love Reader. My chief pleasure is learning new things, and Reader is a great way to tap into and aggregate information from as many sources as you like. I use it to keep up with baseball news, astronomy articles, world events, movie and television reviews; I even get updates from a biophysics site (Biocurious - check it out).

I often use the email function in Reader to let my friends know about articles or entries they might find interesting. However, it now has a nifty function that allows you to tag those entries you want to share, and collect them on a unique shared items site. I've had trouble using the embedding function, but I've placed a link over on the right as well, if you want to have a look.

This is all fine and good, but I hope anyone else out there who uses Reader will start sharing as well, so I can latch on and learn about the interesting things my friends and family are reading.

Covet House

I love books. And I have a weakness for gadgets and gizmos. So, naturally, things like the Sony Reader interest me a great deal. Today, Amazon unveiled their e-book reader, the Kindle. It looks like it might meet their goal of being "an iPod for books." I do like the name, though; it recalls the quote at the bottom of the page from Plutarch. "The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled."

These products are problematic for me. I love to read, and these things are just so cool. However, I'm also a confessed bibliophile. A lot of people who call themselves "book-lovers" are actually what I would call "readers." They love books for the ideas they contain. I think of myself as a reader, but also as a true bibliophile. The books themselves, the substance of them, is important to me. There are great books, like say Coming into the Country, which would be just as good on these devices as the are in paperback. But I don't see how House of Leaves would be quite the same. A fine hardcover edition of your favorite book can be a prized possession, in a way a Reader or a Kindle never could be.

So my reaction to these devices, and the prospect of their widespread adoption, leaves me somewhat ambivalent. I am sure I will eventually get something like Kindle someday, but I doubt I will ever stop buying books.

Futurama

Two excellent and interesting articles for your consideration today.

First, from the New York Times: Jury trials come to Japan. I, for one, didn't know that Japan had tribunal-style trials. I found the whole thing fascinating, especially the national campaign to educate citizens (well, technically subjects, I think). The article makes it sound like it is not so much a program to teach the students how to be jurors, but how to express their own opinions.

Chris has written in the past about crime in Japan - the 99.8% conviction rate, for instance, boggles the mind. "If they were innocent, why would they be on trial?" Sounds like a scary place to be falsely accused, and the intimation of forced confessions conflicts with my image of modern Japan as a restrained, peaceful nation. But an amazing social experiment is about to take place, on a national scale, and I hope to hear more about it, both in the news and from my friends overseas.

Next, some hard science via the New York Review of Books. One of the great futurists of the age, Freeman Dyson, writes on biotechnology. Dyson has a history of predicting some off-the-wall things (e.g. Dyson Trees), but the man is indisputably a genius. He was one of the great proponents of Project Orion - flying to Mars by riding the explosive blasts of hundreds of atomic bombs. But the article posits a "domestication" of biotechnology. Just as the computer went from the province of governments and huge corporations to individuals, so could genome design move from the lab to the home. It is an interesting parallel, and it raises some great questions that Dyson discusses. Foremost in my thinking is that if there are malicious hackers that create computer viruses, there will be biotech equivalents. Learning from our history, we should prioritize creating open source anti-virus organizations, like the Nortons or Anti-Virs that help contain digital mayhem.

Get Medieval on your ass

I received two late, but fantastic birthday gifts this year. First, from Jane, a model trebuchet kit. With just a utility knife and some glue, it went together in a little over an hour. It is a lot of fun. It doesn't always work really well - many missiles end up firing straight down, stay in the sling, or slip off right at the start. I may have to modify the sling, since that seems to be where the trouble is. But that gives me an interesting project. And it is a great demonstration of physics. Energy is conserved - the potential of the counterweight is almost entirely converted into kinetic energy in the missile. I may use it as a starting point for building my own, larger trebuchet at some point. Though, I confess, I'm more interested in building a Floating Arm Trebuchet, a modern update of the concept that is even more efficient. It combines my interest in physics with my childish love of weaponry. Boom boom boom.

The second gift arrived today all the way from Mike over in the sandbox. I'm almost embarrased by this. It's a beautiful carved stone chess set. I'm no geologist, but I think parts of it are marble. Hell, even if it's just rock pulled out of some dirt farmer's field, it's gorgeous. I feel like I should be studying old Kasparov games to be good enough to play on this board. For the record, I suck at chess. I'll have to visit the library for "The Beginners Guide to Chess: The Horsey Moves Up 3, Over 1."

Many thanks to my two very generous friends.

Party Like It's 1999

Almost 1999, anyway. I had tried to make some CDs to listen to some music in my car, but the old CD player in my trunk doesn't like to read homemade CDs. It has given me trouble in the past. I finally decided to give up and get a portable mp3 player. I know - I must be some kind of Luddite, right? Totally - machines are the work of Lucifer. Now I have to go home and churn butter for 10 hours.

So I found that Apple offers refurbished items at reduced prices at their online store. So I got a 2GB player for almost half-price. I'm also going to get a super-cheesy cassette adapter so I can output to my car stereo easily. I'll be Rockin' like Dokken. Except more so, because Dokken never rocked. So now I've caught up with the latest thing from 4 years ago.

On the home front, I came home the other day to a bit of a surprise. Someone went to town on the bushes and hedges around the house. There was a lilac bush that was quite nice. Now... not so much. It's pretty much gone. I hope it was the property management company, or the landlord. Otherwise, I've got to worry about roving bands of topiary vandals. Chilling.

Commentacular

I've had some folks tell me that they can't leave comments anymore, and I'm here to tell you: "It's not my fault." Well, it kind of is.

I recently upgraded from using the normal Blogger framework to the new Blogger Beta. It made it easy to make some layout changes, adds labels to posts, etc. However, it seems since I now have a Blogger Beta account, I can't leave comments on regular Blogger sites, and folks who use regular Blogger cannot leave comments on mine, unless they too trade up to Beta. Google says that this will be addressed, but nothing has happened yet. The workaround I use is to leave comments as a "Guest" user, and just manually add my name and a link back to here. Technology is a double-edged sword.

I had a very productive weekend. On Saturday, I visited Kirk, Melissa and Kolton in Annapolis. They have a kick-ass apartment right across the street from the Naval Academy where Kirk is teaching. We all went to the Navy vs. UMass football game, which was pretty great. We got a very low flyover from some S-3 Vikings, and watched the Brigade of Midshipmen march on to start the game. And the contest itself was a good one - Navy barely managed to pull it off, 21-20. Many, many turnovers, and some spectacular reversals of fortune. After the game, we went to downtown Annapolis for dinner - one of maybe two places I know where every bar serves a solid Dark and Stormy. I don't go to Annapolis often, so it a nice change of pace; next time I need to remember to take my camera out around town to get some photos of the old buildings, sailboats, etc.

Sunday also went well. I finally got some... stuff... to kill my crabgrass, so that got sprayed down. I got a new mailbox installed, so my letter carrier doesn't destroy all my letters trying to fit them into the matchbox-sized box I used to have. And I refined some details on the replacement duct-tape wallet I made Saturday. Not a day of earth-shattering accomplishment, maybe.

More impressively, Steph competed in the Iron Man Wisconsin race, in and around Madison. I followed her progress online, and she finished in 13:22:10. Apparently in quite punishing conditions, temperatures in the 50's with rain all day. It doesn't sound bad at first, but when's the last time you spent 13 hours continuously running in the rain?

Tweak

A few minor changes today. I've added the new post labels now offered by Blogger, as well as using the hierarchical Archives menu. While I was at it, I tweaked the layout a little bit, which meant I pulled an Orpheus and descended back into HTM-Hell this morning. But I managed to get the random image generator up and working again, which was my real goal. Moving everything else around was pretty simple, actually. I hope to continue modifying the basic template to make it a little more visually interesting.

We've gotten quite a bit of rain over the past few days, but nothing like the Deluge 2006 rain earlier this summer. Enough to keep my lawn from completely dying. And the much cooler air that came with the rain is very welcome. Once it dries out, it will be ideal weather for long bike rides.

In a happy coincidence the rains coincided with the arrival of my new Simpsons - Season 8 and Arrested Development - Season 3 DVDs. If you didn't watch AD while it was being broadcast, put it on your NetFlix queue or give it a chance somehow. It really lends itself to DVD viewing - so much hidden background humor that demands a quick hand on the pause button. Maybe it isn't for everyone, but I think it is brilliant. So the rainy weather gave me a chance to curl up in front of the TV and tear through the whole thing in 3 nights.

New Toy

Just this evening I got a new computer, something I've been considering for a while now. After a few years with a tower, I've switched back to a laptop. However, I also got a wireless router so I don't have to be anchored to my desk. It's pretty sweet, but I'm way behind the curve on that, right? I asked Ian and Jane for advice on wireless and if it was worth the effort, and Ian said "Yeah, the future is five years ago and it's awesome." More than a little sarcastic, but more than a little true.

At any rate, it's a pretty nice little laptop, with an extra-wide screen and the ability to play DVDs without a full boot-up. I will probably take it with me on my trip home next weekend, so I can watch a movie when I'm doing my layovers (drag) at LaGuardia and JFK.

Tomorrow I will be back on track with Half Day Friday. With all the travel and projects lately, I haven't been able to enjoy that particular minor blessing. Walking away from the office for lunch and never coming back is a very good thing. And tomorrow, lunch is Cap City for Cuban Tacos to celebrate Sarah coming back to work. Welcome Back to D.C., Sarah! Tacos!