As GPS-enabled phones become more popular, there have been a lot of geocaches placed by people using phones. Many of these will have serious “adjustments” to their posted coordinates because the person placing it just took a single reading, using whatever their phone was reporting and called it good. Usually these adjustments are anywhere from […]
My first iPhone hide Read More »
The other day I came across Stefan Wehrmeyer‘s very interesting tool, Mapnificent, which estimates how far you can go by public transportation in a specific period of time (defaulting to 15 minutes). There is an option to indicate you have a bicycle available. Obvious uses of the tool are looking at commute times and evaluating
King Neptune, outside Mardis Gras Land A few weeks ago, I spent a week in New Orleans at Supercomputing 2010. (Sometimes my job has perks.) I wrote a really long summary of this for internal use, but thought I’d share some of my notes: Jack Dongarra of Oak Ridge National Labs offered his perspective
Mister Peabody, set the Wayback Machine to three years ago, pick a spot during a really long product release cycle. Partly out of boredom, but mostly to mess with development manager at the time, I had asked one of the developers to swap out the splash screen. The product logo was thus modified: Official Battle-ready!
Today is a good day to PLOT! Read More »
Not that I need another hobby, but… I’ve belatedly taken my friend Tracey’s suggestion to try geocaching, essentially a treasure hunt. When I started reading about it last month, I was impressed with how many of these things there are. Check out the map of geocaches within a few miles of home: The first one
At a previous employer, we had a software utility, wcheckdb, whose purpose was to clean up all of the object database-cruft leftover from day-to-day use of the product. Its output was initially a series of cryptic diagnostics that only the lead engineer could appreciate. We often redirected these to a file. The program had a
Lather, rinse, reboot Read More »
Because I’ve been blessed with good vision, visiting the eye doctor hasn’t been a high priority. However, lately I’ve become more aware that the zone of focus for close objects is now approaching the limits of my arm length. Since I had a little money leftover from the pre-tax medical savings account, and my calendar
My arms aren’t long enough Read More »
This may seem far-fetched, but I got a paper cut from picking up a cardboard box. The box slipped, and when I grabbed it, my finger brushed against the edge, leaving a large gash in my finger. Okay, maybe not “large,” but it hurt a lot and the cut was big enough that it needed