On Anonymous Pranks

I'm fortunate enough to be a member of several communities which enjoy pranks, shenanigans, gags, and other mischievous hijinks. Many of these activities are carried out anonymously, and I'm sometimes asked if I am involved or know who is. However, I believe that discovering who is behind an anonymous shenanigan does not enhance the fun.

Thus, my policy is to neither confirm nor deny involvement in any given anonymously-perpetrated shenanigan, nor share any knowledge I might have of the the perpetrators' identity, regardless of my own actual involvement or knowledge and regardless of the evidence which the asker has otherwise obtained (correct or not).

And yes, I may or may not have some things cooking. :)

Apple Picking

Went apple picking today with friends Andrew & Emily and their son, in West Boylston.

Fireworks

Went to scope out the fireworks at Powderhorn Park last night, with the lovely wife as well as David P., Pete, Dr. Andy, and Bethany. I took along the photo gear; some very nice results, I think for a first-timer.





These are all ISO 200, f/8, 2-3 seconds exposure, on the 2 second timer because I don't have a remote shutter release. I think if I did it again, I'd just do a bulb exposure on f/9.5 (and thus a remote shutter would be essential).

St. Louis trip

For Thanksgiving, Erin and I drove a long 11 hours down to St. Louis to visit Joanna and Steve and their new baby Anya.

Anya being cute.

Walking in Forest Park. Joanna lost her phone, but a woman picked it up and Steve recovered it a couple of days later.

St. Louis has the City Museum, which is a jungle gym for adults plus about a zillion other things, including...

... a school bus 10 stories up where you go in and look around ...

... a 7-story slide ...

... and a Gothic watchtower, plus two airplanes you can climb in, an artificial cave with an organ in it, a giant white whale, a human hamster wheel, giant ball pits, smores, etc.... the list is basically endless. I have no idea what fraction of it we saw.

Anya being cute.

Joanna and Anya.

Trip Leader Checklist

One of the things I enjoy doing is leading backpacking trips and other adventures. Along those lines, I created a checklist of the steps needed to prepare for such a trip. Turns our there are a lot. Perhaps this list is useful for you, too. Feedback welcome.

State Fair

The lovely wife and I made the annual pilgrimage to the State Fair today.

Foods consumed:

• French fries
• One (1) corn dog, by me
• Potato skins
  
• Ice cream
  

Foods not consumed:

• Cheese curds (shocking, I know)
• Giant pickle on a stick
• Deep-fried candy bar
• Pretzel from a stand with a cop car in front
• .... over 300 other possibilities, including 78 on a stick.

There were a lot of people at the fair, including a dude on a cell phone near a no parking sign.

One of these massive blue ribbons is Erin's. Sadly none of the bottles were labeled, so we don't know which one was Erin's (or really whether hers was there at all, because there were 20 categories and only 10 blue ribbons), but just look at the size of that thing!

The literature table in the Eco Experience building had Cyclopath postcards. Sweet!

Do not drive your car into this building, especially before 9am or after 9pm.

If you're nominated for Princess Kay of the Milky Way (yes, there's a Wikipedia page), you get a creepy likeness of yourself carved in a giant block of butter - which you then have to get to take home.

The biggest hog is quite large (~1,300 lbs), and generally very sleepy.

And the piglets are very cute. They also dislike being held upside down while having a rectal temperature taken and having an ear chewed on by another piglet (not pictured).

Eve of Destruction

Saturday night, some friends and I went to Eve of Destruction at Elko Speedway.

Eve of Destruction is several hours of motorized ridiculousness.

For example, guys who do backflips on motorcycles. I'm not sure how one practices this stuff without getting killed.


Also, "Figure 8" racing, which is exactly what it sounds like. It may be shocking, but these two guys did not crash into each other.


Also, spectator events, when you can bring your own car in off the street and race it.


2nd to last was the "Dukes of Hazzard" jump, where you can bring your own car and drive it off a jump. Winner is whoever jumps the farthest.


But what's better than jumping a 1970's wood panel station wagon, a Suburban, and a minivan? How about a SCHOOL BUS!??!?!?!


Last but not least is School Bus Racing, which again is exactly what it sounds like. It's much slower than the regular car racing and absolutely hilarious, especially when they go figure-8.


Sadly, this time the school bus racing didn't last too long because a guy tipped over and apparently there wasn't time to right him and continue. I wonder if their permit to operate only goes to 11:00.

Bread, with Eyes and Mold

This bread was brought to a GroupLens potluck several months ago and not finished... it made its way through a few desks until it went into Katie Panciera's, where it remained until she found it on July 16.

It was a little stinky and I didn't have an immediate use for it, so I threw it out.

How to Make Reid's Day

Send him this:

Subject: you should know

Every time I'm tempted to quit Facebook (a pretty regular occurrence), I think of all your fascinating status updates -- the slug counts, the 100-update marathons, the unbridled criticisms -- and I'm compelled to stay a little longer. Just to see what you do next.

PedalPub

Yes, this is a people-powered mobile bar.

Puzzle Game

Last weekend, Erin and I and Katie did a puzzle game, with running around downtown Minneapolis and solving puzzles to get the next destination.

One of the stops was Deja Vu strip club. Katie went inside. Embarrassing photos were taken (see Facebook for details).

In this town, we have not one but two unnecessary and wasteful stadiums going up.

John as Agent Smith.

825-TUBS

I think 825-TUBS is an excellent phone number for a dumpster company. However, I think it would be better for a weight-loss agency or personal trainer.

Pasta-Off

For my birthday, we had a "pasta-off". People brought various home-made pasta sauces (6 in all!) and we made a giant loop of home-made pasta, something like 30 feet in circumference. The above photo is cutting the wide strip into noodles.

I didn't capture a holistic image, but my friend "mannatunkle" captured several.

It was a hit. Erin threw me a wonderful birthday party. (Oh yeah, I turned 30 on the 1st.)

Project 100, #50.

New Digital Camera... Really This Time!

A little while ago, I blogged about a new digital camera, a Canon SX-10 "bridge camera". Well, I sent it back, deciding that it really was the worst of both worlds rather than the best, and I replaced it with a Pentax K200d, which arrived today -- an entry-level DSLR and one of only two DSLRs on the market that take AA batteries (the other is also a Pentax). It also turns out that I could get an 18-250mm lens (field of view equal to 27-375mm on 35mm) and that I can use Erin's old-school manual focus lenses that were hand-me-downs from her dad (and plus, the image stabilization is in the body, not in the lenses as Canon and Nikon do, so the old lenses are stabilized too). Even though it's a beast at 1.2kg with the 18-250 zoom, I think it's a fit. Yay!

Here's a picture of Jess. 1/8 second, f/1.4, ISO 1600, hand-held with a Takumar SMC 50mm, one of the aforementioned old-school lenses. Given that this was taken in very poor lighting (available light at 11pm) and I'm pretty green at manual focusing, yet it's among the best pics of Jess I've ever seen, I'm pretty pleased.

Choosing a Topographic Map

Outdoor adventures such as hiking, backpacking, and canoeing require topographic maps ("topos" or "topo maps"). It used to be that the only source was paper maps published by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), a government agency. Now, many different vendors republish USGS data. But how do you know which vendors' maps are any good? It is hard to get honest samples from vendors.

Hence, I publish visual reviews of topo maps, so you can decide what works for you.

If you have maps that I haven't reviewed, I would love to include them. E-mail me.

If I Were Rich, I Would Buy Books

I read a lot. This year it will be 77 or 78 books, depending on whether I finish my current book before the new year; I read the complete Discworld series this year.

I also measure the books that I read with a caliper, so I know how much shelf space they consume. This year it'll be at least 107% percent of my height (6 feet even); last year it was 75 books and 110% of my height.

I put a list of everything I read online: http://reidster.net/logs/book.html. (No RSS on that; sorry.)

Currently, I get nearly everything I read from the library. But if I were rich, I would just buy the books, because I'm a pack rat, I love books, and libraries have limited collections, so frequently there's a lot of messing around to get certain books.

So, I looked up the prices of all the books I've read this year on Amazon, to see what the damage would be. I chose new and hardcover, when possible. The total? $1,313.93, not including shipping.

I would buy them from a local bookstore, not Amazon. So maybe it would be $2000. Still, that's less than I thought. Hmmm.

New Digital Camera?

I got a new toy in the mail today, a Canon SX-10 IS. I'm not entirely convinced it's right for me... it's kind of a bizarre bastard child occupying the space between point-and-shoots and full DSLRs. It's three times bigger than my old camera, but 1.5-2 times smaller than a DSLR. It has an extraordinarily versatile lens, 28-560mm (which is fairly wide to huge zoom), and zero-centimeter macro capability (i.e., the subject can touch the glass)... for a DSLR that'd be 3-4 lenses, and at least $2000 and 10 pounds of glass (but higher quality glass, of course).

However, it's way bigger than the P&S that I've been taking on hiking trips so far (36-105mm) and been fairly happy with, and it has the same kind of small, noisy sensor that compact cameras do, and the user interface is rather weird in places. Is the fancy lens worth the extra mass and bulk? I'll contemplate this question over the next few days.

This is a picture of my cat. Believe it or not, it's a 1/2 second exposure, hand-held. Sometimes image-stabilization really kicks ass (click through - it's even reasonably sharp full-size). [Edit 1/5/09 - no, it's actually not very sharp at all.]

Summary

In case you missed the last half-dozen blog posts that I didn't write, here's a summary:

1. I attended the CSCW conference in San Diego, where I presented my paper, "Computational Geowikis: What, Why, and How", which was nominated for Best Paper and earned an honorable mention. My talk was very well received and cited as the "best talk of the conference" by at least one stranger.
2. I demoed Cyclopath to a standing-room-only crowd of ~50 city planners and other governmental types. They liked it.
   
3. I attended an HCI symposium in New York and gave a talk.
4. I gave my oral preliminary exam and passed, making me a Ph.D. Candidate. It will be official when all the paperwork that I was supposed to bring to the event is signed. ("Where's the paperwork?" "What paperwork?")
5. I moved reidster.net to a virtual private server, which is way faster and more reliable. E-mail service will follow soon (not that you'd notice any difference).
   
6. I bought a fancy battery charger with all kinds of buttons and modes. It's great.
   
7. My FW made incredible toffee, and I ate it.
   

496 Obama Buttons

This is what 496 Obama buttons looks like:



I counted them. We'd ordered 500 and had given away 7 before this pic was taken.

Reid on KMSP

I was interviewed about Cyclopath by KMSP ("Fox 9"), one of the local TV channels, for their 10:00 news on 10/14. Here's the video:



Some thoughts, carefully numbered but in no particular order:

1. The news people at KMSP, as a whole, know nothing about bicycling -- pedal misspelled as peddle, intro refers to the map as a way to "get off the streets" (the whole point of the cycling movement is to get accepted as traffic).
2. Talking to the press is fun.
3. Being interviewed by local TV news is extremely cursory. Few follow-up questions; basically it was "Tell your story. Go."
4. If you're interviewed for TV or radio, observe whether the interviewer is miked: if not, then remember that the questions will not be included in the final cut, and adjust your answers accordingly.
   
5. Overall, I thought the story was decent. Good publicity.

I also have a piece coming out in the Minnesota Daily on Tuesday. I'll blog about that too when it's out.