Beige Alert!

Death of Rats

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:52:27 GMT

aunty_marion made a Death of Rats for me! It arrived today intact, even though the letter carrier really crammed it into the mailbox.

Here we see him sitting on the couch, watching the telly:

His eye:

Here's a closeup of the itty-bitty button on his cloak:

It's teensy-weensy!

New shoes, same as the old shoes

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:46:57 GMT

I bought some new shoes. I'm fairly sure this is the first time in my life I've replaced shoes with exact duplicates. Normally you can't still get the same model by the time the old ones wear out. These fit fine, and so I now have exactly the same, only clean and not worn out.

I will derive

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:07:53 GMT

Via Ezra Klein, math nerd music video I Will Derive!

Also, YouTube is just amazing. Check out that "related videos" selection for yet more mathematical music videos.

Today's winner

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 22:19:42 GMT

Today's winner in the unwieldy category of "Languages are Confusing: Best name of a country ever (depending on which languages you speak)" is "Island."

(A few of you might have already guessed what I'm getting at.)

There is this volcanic island in the north Atlantic, just slightly south of the arctic circle. This place is the country known in English as Iceland. The name is fairly descriptive, given the weather that far north.

In German, it is called "Island." If, like me, you mostly speak English, I suppose that's pretty descriptive, too. (The German word for island is Insel. In Icelandic Iceland is Ísland or Lýðveldið Ísland.)

You see, I was reading over this list of countries, in German. Some are pretty obvious (Kanada), some I already knew (Frankreich is France), and Island, um, well, it's the sort of thing that jars the brain. Though my guess, after a bit of thought, did turn out to be correct.

teh cute

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 13:59:10 GMT

Do I have cute photos from DucKon?

Ur rite

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:31:53 GMT

More joy from I Can Has Cheezburger

more cat pictures

Alcohol

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:24:05 GMT

A television show consisting of video of police arresting drunken troublemakers, with snarky narration provided by a not-really-celebrity panel? Sure, you think, it's supposed to be funny, but isn't it so dumb that no one with a functioning brain could stand to watch? Normally, yes, but I was drinking whiskey while watching, so it was hilarious. If you are going to watch drunk people, you need to be drunk.

And, really, I've tried drinking to excess, and it surely reduced my mental capabilities, but, wow, how much did these people drink? Because I've sure never had enough to behave like that.

One also has to admire the dedication to following proper procedures exhibited by police officers who know that they are being videotaped, doggedly attempting to run the sobriety tests on people who really don't need formal testing to be determined to be drunk.

Deutsch

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 03:01:55 GMT

One thing I've noticed is that any time I use even a few words of German in a Livejournal post, I get a bunch of comments, particularly from my German friends. What does this mean? I'm not certain, but if real life is like livejournal—and clearly LJ is just like real life, right?—then when I visit Germany, if I speak any German, I'll end up surrounded by charming and lovely German women. Who will tell me that I used the wrong article and the words are all in the wrong order and my accent is very ~~strange~~ cute.

We'll see in the fall :)

Eichhörnchengefahr

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:52:32 GMT

If you are menaced by squirrels, don't miss this at Nothing For Ungood.

No matter how much these things look like they want to cuddle up with you, keep away, as they are wild killing machines.

And on the subject of squirrels, Germans will always try to make you say their word for squirrel. Don’t do it, they are just going to laugh at you.

For more on the topic of trying to say Eichhörnchen, see Germans make fun of you when you try to say stuff:

Germans know their language is filled with sounds foreigners can’t make, so they try to get you to say certain words so that they can mock you. Such words include:

Eichhörnchen - This is the classic trap Germans set for us.

Oachkatzlschwoaf - This is the Bavarian cousin of the aforementioned.

Streichholzschächtelchen - This is the ultimate impossible German word to say.

(One of my many readers who actually speaks German will have to let me know if "Eichhörnchengefahr" actually makes sense or if I'm just messing up. And many thanks to legoline for making me aware of Nothing for Ungood.)

Duckon

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:40:19 GMT

Do I have photos? Yes. How much does a gigabyte cost these days? Not much. So, no, I haven't sorted through all thirteen gigabytes of them and put all the good ones up. I do, however, have these two that show two different wonderful, skillful, and, most of all highly dignified musicians performing:

Cities At Night

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:36:58 GMT

Via Kevin Kelly, check out NASA's Cities At Night gallery. "But taking pictures in the dark is difficult at best, made even more difficult by the fact that the International Space Station moves more than 7 kilometers per second (15,659 miles per hour) relative to Earth’s surface." So they rigged up a tracker out of stuff they found floating around in the space station, and have taken many lovely photos. They have a 127 megabyte video that's worth seeing. The narration sometimes sounds more robot than human, but it's quite interesting.

Water

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 13:56:32 GMT

There has been a certain amount of rain recently in this part of the world. Specifically, a large amount. There are small lakes in all sorts of places that are normally dry. Strangely, there are also some lakes that managed to find a way to bust out of confinement and flow away downstream, leaving big muddy areas where water used to be.

Right in Milwaukee, though, it's not so bad. Nearly all the roads anywhere near me un-flooded shortly after the rain stopped, and I'm fine. I did get some interesting photos, though:

running

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 00:31:54 GMT

The modern standard length for a marathon is 42.195km. The longest distance I've run is 10 km, and my best time is 57 minutes, for an average of 10.5 km/hr. If I could maintain that pace for 4.22 times as long, which I couldn't, that would be approximately a 4 hour marathon, which I gather is something of a marathon beginner's idea of a halfway decent time. Men's record times are around 2:05, for an average of just over 20 km/hr. Women's records are around 2:19-ish, a speed of a bit over 18 km/hr. So... What's that sort of pace like? Well, I can manage 20 km/hr. In a 100 meter sprint. Pretty darn amazing to think of someone running that pace for two hours.

Similarly, I see the Tour de France guys do fairly long time trials at an average speed that I can manage momentarily, but only if I'm going down a sufficiently steep hill.

There are amazing people out there.

Kite festival

Tue, 27 May 2008 02:08:42 GMT

There was a kite festival this weekend in Milwaukee. I have a large quantity of photos, but here are a few showing the strange affinity sea creatures have for the sky:

Getting a route onto a Garmin Forerunner 305

Sat, 24 May 2008 19:44:41 GMT

(This is another technical tutorial intended less for the friends list and more for the confused users out there googling for help)

The Forerunner is more ultra-fancy pedometer than navigation system, but since it runs by GPS, it can perform amazing feats of navigation too, limited by a UI intended more for athletic training than navigation and, of course, the tiny screen needed to fit on the wrist.

It is possible to define a route and upload it to the Forerunner, and let it tell you which way to go and when a turn is coming up using the Navigation/Route mode.

You can define a path in Google Earth, using Add Path and clicking out a series of waypoints. Once done, right-click on the path in the "places" list and select "save place as" and save it in kml form. Now the trick is converting that into something the Forerunner will accept as a route.


gpsbabel -i kml -f YourRoute.kml -x transform,rte=trk,del -r  -o garmin -F usb:

This will transform the trackpoints into routepoints and upload them as a route. You do seem to lose the name of the route in the process. It does, at least, seem to work.

GPS Geekery update

Sat, 24 May 2008 04:21:50 GMT

The Garmin Forerunner 305 will log detailed track data. Obviously, the included CD-ROM of software won't do Linux users any good, but GPSBabel can download the data through the USB interface and convert to all manner of file formats, notably the Google Earth kml format. You can then open the file up in GE and see tracks and go through the datapoints in excruciating detail. For example, at 07:58:35 this morning I was cycling at 23.7 km/hr on a heading of 127 degrees, with a heart rate of 170, at lon/lat of -88.031338 43.059832. I mean, you never know when this information may be of use! The nice display of your track on the map/image might be handy, though.

Besides the commute (which, no, really doesn't need to be logged in such detail, but we have the technology!), I've done one run with the Forerunner so far. Nothing was every stopping me from just randomly running for a half hour with no idea exactly how fast or far I was going, but I always want to be able to keep track of my pace, and track my improvement. With this thing, I can just head out and go wherever I choose, making up a route as I go along, and still always know my speed and distance. No need to stick to going back and forth and back and forth on a pre-measured route. In fact, the route I was planning on taking was blocked by flooding part way through, so the random re-route was quite handy.

Linux help: Make sure the garmin_gps module is not loaded. See the Linux Hotplug page for instructions on disabling autoloading of garmin_gps and getting permissions for normal users on the device. I get a nice kml file using something like this:


gpsbabel -t -w -i garmin -f usb:0 -x track,title="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M"  -o kml,units=m -F filenamehere.kml

-t to download "track" data, -w for waypoints, the -x options to label the different tracks by date and time instead of just numbering them, and units=m for metric. The default is American units, which you can specify with units=s.

Excessive Technology

Wed, 21 May 2008 15:49:56 GMT

I have a new toy, a Garmin Forerunner 305. This is a device in the huge-wristwatch form-factor that combines heart rate monitor with GPS receiver for speed and distance measurements. Now that the more compact and even fancier 405 is out, the 305 can be had for a much more reasonable price, down actually in the range of the fancier plain heart rate monitors.

I got the thing yesterday, and set out on a walk through the local park, grinning the big grin of someone using extremely complex technology for a ridiculously silly purpose. Why not use a constellation of orbiting atomic clocks to keep track of...walking? Sure, you can question whether applying technology to the task of turning a simple walk in the park into some sort of athletic competition with heart rate monitoring and GPS-measured speed and distance is really improving my life. But why spoil the fun with such thoughts? This thing offers data. You can reconfigure all the displays. Speed, distance, heart rate. Current, maxima, averages. Altitude. It can calculate sunrise and sunset times, given how it knows exactly where you are. Time of day? Oh, it knows about time. Finally something with a clock you never need to worry about setting.

My intent is to use it mostly for running, to be able to keep track of speed and distance without having to stick to running back and forth on the same pre-measured routes. Also I'll be able to send my other heart rate monitor in for battery replacement without being left bereft of my precious data.

We live in wonderful times

Thu, 15 May 2008 02:43:57 GMT

What kind of amazing products can you buy? You can get organic vegan donut holes! Vegan junk food! (These are quite yummy, by the way.)

Bestest friends, whole wide world

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:08:17 GMT

I found chocolate (and a cute card) in my mailbox when I got home today, sent all the way from Germany by kinder1of5, Michael, and Brita. That will brighten the day :)

Danke sehr!

In Soviet Russia...

Fri, 02 May 2008 14:46:27 GMT

Best lol evar:

see more crazy cat pics

Graham

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:25:21 GMT

The houseconcert in Illinois on Saturday with musicmutt was tons of fun. Great to see him again, along with the whole gang, chirosinger, chasophonic, Bonnie. Andrea Dale came all the way over, too. Fun circle afterward, too.

Fast and hard

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:42:43 GMT

The National Geographic TV channel is showing a program called "America's Port" about the port of Los Angeles. Most recently, we got to see the Coast Guard trying to find a mysterious boater. "Yo! I'm coming in fast and hard!" he transmitted on the radio. Cut to shot of befuddled Coast Guard guys looking at each other. "Fast and hard?" They call back. "What is your location, sir? Where are you coming into fast and hard, sir?" The good news is, he did not respond with something involving a woman's body. They spend some time looking for him, getting various unhelpful responses from him by radio. They kept showing the "Yo! I'm coming in fast and hard!" clip over and over. I kept thinking that surely every woman dreams of hearing something like that from some guy, right? Probably not. Anyway, eventually, they find him, and—surprise!—he's drunk. They tow him back to shore where the port police arrest him for drunken boating. He's apparently had this experience before. He wasn't happy about it, either. The thing is, the coast guard would never have even known he was out there if he hadn't picked up his radio transmitter and started transmitting drunken gibberish. That's pretty much asking for it, really. Sure, I've tried drunkenness myself, and evidently my judgment was impaired—for example, I apparently kept thinking I ought to drink more alcohol—but I didn't get the urge to call up the police and tell them I was drunk and stupid.

Anyway, I keep saying "Yo!" and giggling. You've got to imagine a drunken sort of voice saying it. Someone ought to cut out the sound clips and put them over a heavy drum beat, make a techno remix. Yo! YoYoYoYofastandhard thumpthumpthumpthumpitythump

Scud running?

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:32:10 GMT

While on the subject of the Pipedreams radio show, in this show we hear the hymn "Lo! he comes with clouds descending." My first thought when I heard (not read, but heard, mind you) the title was "he's scud running!"

"Fugue based on Mary Had A Little Lamb"

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:57:02 GMT

Things you don't expect to hear department: "A mischievous blending of tunes from here and there, including 'This Old Man,' 'Grandfather's Clock,' a fugue based on 'Mary Had A Little Lamb,' and a love theme from the film score by Nelson Riddle for 'The Great Gatsby,' all brought together by the incendiary wizardry of the young American virtuoso Cameron Carpenter." This description by Michael Barone (not to be confused with the conservative pundit by the same name) on Pipedreams, of an improvisation played on the show in September 2007. Program notes and link to on-line audio here. It was the last thing played, at about 73 minutes into the show if you want to listen to it in particular.

Starbucked

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:28:06 GMT

I'm not really a critic of Starbucks. They serve perfectly tolerable sugar-milk-coffee beverages, and wherever you go, they probably have several locations conveniently nearby. Indeed, I just noticed one opened recently at Mayfair mall, here on the west-ish side of Milwaukee. The surprising thing about that is that the mall already has Starbucks, in the middle on the second floor, as well as the shop serving Starbucks-brand product in the Barnes and Noble bookstore. Now, thankfully, no one will have to walk more than one-quarter of the way through the mall to get to the nearest Starbucks coffee product. On the one hand, I guess we have to suppose that there is a lot of demand for coffee in the mall, and it's just wonderful that we are being serviced so efficiently. On the other hand, what the hell? Three??? In one building?