Category: obscure pursuits

topography

the topography of where I live

I went cycling the other day, out for 10 miles and came home having done 20 , including a hill I had thus far postponed. I was looking around for information on how steep it really is, other than vertical as it feels when you’re climbing it, and came across this site, provided by the City of Seattle.

It seems to be about a 200+foot climb in less than half a mile, taking me to between 275 and 300 feet above sea level, and I then have to crest one more hill at 350 feet before I’m home (I live at around 250 feet). I know REI provides this kind of thing as well, so I may have to get one there next visit.

visuals to remember

Went to Discovery Park this afternoon, and walked along the shore, inspecting the driftwood. I was struck by how similar to bones the driftwood is, with its organic shapes and curves, the bleached and figured whiteness, even the sockets and mortises, both man-made and natural.

It seemed like a boneyard for some fantastically large and ungainly species, the deeply textured bones and disassembled joints, ropes and kelp strands for sinews and ligaments.

if there was ever a device was meant to be wireless

Driver Labo./Newton/WaveLAN

An 802.11b driver for the Newton has been completed and seems to work with a number of cards. Might be time to blow the dust off it and see how this works. Much as I love the thing, it’s hard to integrate something into you life when it needs to be wired up. If only Steve didn’t see the Newton as a reminder of John Sculley (or was there another reason for getting rid of it?), imagine where the technology could be now?

After some email correspondence with the driver’s author, it looks like the WaveLAN (Agere chipset) cards are the way to go: not enough people have provided feedback for Noguchi to flesh out any kind of matrix. If you use the driver and haven’t told him how it works for you, do it now.
Continue reading “if there was ever a device was meant to be wireless”

saving the family farm

Rate Information

Some facts you might find useful:

* A ccf is100 cubic feet of water. There are 748 gallons in a ccf.
* Typical water usage for a household is 7 ccf per month
* Typical sewer usage for a household is 6 ccf per month

The City of Seattle claims I used 300 gallons a day for the most recent period, or 26 ccf (almost 4 times their cited typical usage). The treasurer has been mumbling about profligate water use in the agricultural efforts here, but this news is much worse than I had suspected.

Of course, the city doesn’t actually *read* the meter, instead relying on estimates and SWAGs1. So I took the liberty of making a note of the number this afternoon and will see how much it actually moves. 300 gallons a day seems excessive to me, but if it’s true, perhaps I need a well.

1 SWAG: scientific wild-ass guess

CNN.rss exists, just not at CNN.com

Index of /~jacoby/XML

It turns out someone is generating RSS feeds for various sections of CNN.com content, as well as a host of other sites. Now, on the one hand, the folks at CNN don’t have to host or manage this stuff, but I would think they would want to know how popular or useful a feature like this is, and they can’t know that unless they run it themselves.

<update> Feeds are in development: take a look at this page.

tidying up old cruft

In the process of hosting the Oblique Strategies stuff, I found that the randomizer wasn’t very random. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff you find on the Internet is out of date: this is an example. This code dates from 1996, an eternity ago.

From the srand page at www.perldoc.com:

Note that you need something much more random than the default seed for cryptographic purposes. Checksumming the compressed output of one or more rapidly changing operating system status programs is the usual method. For example:

srand (time ^ $$ ^ unpack “%L*”, `ps axww | gzip`);

Seems to work much better now.