Hilarious flickr group of homeless dudes with great signs. I like this better than the classic “Why lie? I need beer.” sign.
Halloween!
Halloween was super fun this year (see what Amy has to say)! Tru was a tiger and Asher was a clown. It couldn’t have happened without Grammy’s help, though… Check out these guys!
The Dyson phenomenon
We got a Dyson vacuum about a month ago. Got it off Craigslist, brand new, for about $100 off of retail. I love it. Amy’s okay with it, though I think she’s more convinced about it than she was when I was jonesing for it.
Matt just visited Brandon and says they’ve got a Dyson, too. And it sounds like a similar situation. Husband has gadget lust and wife is skeptical. I wonder how much of Dyson’s sales are generated from husband gadget lust?
More mapping fun
UPDATE: I found my Mac solution! Here’s the resultant Google Earth file of the hike (kmz). It has everything embedded in one file: images with titles and comments, GPS track and topo overlay. Very cool. I think this is the final tech piece I needed for the blog post. Tomorrow I’ll make a track around town, or on campus, and take pictures, then do this again and post it to Slacker Manager.
I ran into loc.alize.us a while ago, but didn’t really understand it. Now that I’ve been messing around with geotagging photos, it makes a lot more sense. Here’s the recent King’s Mountain hike.
I’m trying to find the easiest way, with both a Mac and a Windows machine, to geotag photos and embed them into Google Earth KMZ files. There’s a PC app called Robogeo that does exactly what I’m looking for. But it’s a PC app. I’ll be trying it out, but I also want to find a similar app for a Mac. No luck so far.
I’m trying to find this stuff out because I think there’s a really good Slacker Manager post in there. Imagine you were traveling and you wanted to let your colleagues know about the good restaurant/pub/hotel/museum/whatever that you found in a given city. You’ve got your GPS recording your track and you take pictures of the places you like. You combine the lat/long from the GPS track with your images and you throw it all into a Google Earth file that you’re able to email around or stick on a webserver somewhere. That’s pretty cool, and pretty useful.
New look
Should be pretty self-evident, but I migrated the blog from WordPress 1.2 to version 2.0.4. Messing around with themes tonight, and I like this one. Think I’ll leave it for a while.
King’s Mountain hike
UPDATE: Forgot to mention the pictures I took. Look for the “map” link to see exactly where on the mountain the picture was taken.
Took the day off of work today (legitimate vacation day, not the sneaky “personal day” with sick leave) and hiked King’s Mountain with Frodo. I’d been up once before and I remember it being painful. This time was the same. It’s about 2.19 miles from trailhead to summit. The trailhead starts at like 600 feet and the summit is at 3200 feet. Very steep. The last half mile is the absolute worst.
Frodo did really well. This was kind of a test for him to see if he could do something this steep. Now I think I can take him on almost anything I’d go on. He has a nice mellow pace. Or maybe he was just humoring me.
I took my GPSr and camera and figured I’d try geotagging pictures. Still working out the kinks with that, though the eight pics I took are up on Flickr now and they’re geotagged and mapped. I used the “tracks” feature on the GPSr and that’s really cool. It’s basically digital breadcrumbs. If you’ve got Google Earth, you can grab this file and it’ll show you the climb we did. There’s an option in there for a USGS altitude map overlay, which you can turn off. Pretty cool. If you don’t have Google Earth, well…why not? You might notice that at the top of the mountain it looks like I’m stumbling around in a couple of places. There was a geocache (members only cache, I think) near the summit that I grabbed–that’s the reason for the tracks over on the right side.
I did all this because I rolled 39 earlier this month, and I’m pretty much in the worst shape I’ve ever been in. So I’ve resolved to, at least, be in better shape when I roll 40 than when I rolled 39. This hiking thing is just one part of my strategy. I’m going to do at least one hike a month–that is, I’ll plan one serious hike but may end up doing other easier ones if the family is into it. The other part of my strategy hasn’t been working out so well, but I’m figuring out how to make it work. I’m going to run sprints, do plyometrics and hit the gym. I’ve got a whole workout planned, based on a book I read. Now I just gotta find the right time–I want to set up a routine, so I don’t get distracted. Mornings are best, but the gym isn’t open early enough. So it looks like evenings are where it’s at. We’ll see. Definitely doing the hikes, though. 🙂
On the Amish
I’ve got to say that since I’ve become a dad, my heart has gotten a whole lot softer. Especially towards parents and their love for their children. The recent news of the murders of Amish schoolgirls in Pennsylvania has made my eyes well up on more than one occasion. I am utterly humbled by the Amish response toward the family of their attacker. As a group, they sure seem to come about as close to living as Jesus would have us live as might be possible.
Ben Witherington has a good post that reflects on the nature of forgiveness.
Since the Amish carry no insurance, the expenses for the surviving injured girls will be steep. You can help by contributing here.
Geocaching with Tru
Man, it’s been a while, huh? I’ve been kinda focused on writing on Slacker Manager. I’ve had lots of posts rolling through my head for the bren : blog, but just haven’t done ’em. Until now.
I bought a GPS unit with some blog proceeds. Figured geocaching might be fun, plus it’d be cool just to learn about the whole mapping and GPS scene. I’ve really been digging using the unit to check out stats while I’m driving (16 miles to work; average speed is 32 mph; etc…).
Anyway, today Truman and I tried our hand at geocaching. Actually, I tried earlier today since there is a cache on the Newberg campus. Couldn’t find it though, even though it seemed like I was standing right on it. I’ll try again later. Tru and I did this one which is down by a Willamettte River boatramp in town. Just a couple of minutes away from our house. It was a microcache, which means it was just in a 35mm film canister, rather than something larger like an ammo box, or rubbermaid container. We had no trouble finding it. We took a nickle and left a Korean coin. Tru was pretty stoked (okay, we both were). We’ll go again tomorrow after work.
Not even cats
Tru’s 5th birthday has come and gone (no pics yet…coming soon, though you can check out what Pappy posted). He had a Robin Hood themed party with a cake that looked like a dragon. Huge props to the mom and two grandma’s who really made the party come together. Pretty cool.
Tru’s kinda hot for the projectile-type toys these days, so he was pleased with the soft slingshot someone gave him. Still shoots pretty good, but the balls are large and squishy. The directions on the box are very clear that you should not “shoot at people or animals. Not even cats.” Not sure why the extra qualifier, but it made me laugh. Maybe cats jump after the balls or something. I’m curious to know what kind of cat injuries were incurred that made this extra message neccessary.
Another clip
Tru and I went down to the park this afternoon. Kinda crowded so Tru got a little frustrated, but was a good sport. I got a couple of nice shots of him rolling in a larger section. Much, much shorter than the last clip. Enjoy.