scottyallen.com

So, I’m looking for a new place to live. My current place is ok, other than the fact that I have to wear earplugs in order not to be woken up by the guy upstairs talking on the phone or walking around, due to extremely thin floors.

The process of looking for a new place usually means lots of saved searches on craigslist with are imported as rss feeds into google reader. However, this time around, I thought I’d get fancy, and see what I could with Yahoo Pipes and Google Maps. Here’s the fruit of my labors: Scotty’s Custom Apartment Search
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It involves a couple pipes:

• Housing search with radius which is made up of
• Craigslist housing and
• Distance between two addresses

The last of these uses the new Fetch Page module in Pipes to fetch maps.google.com driving directions, extracting the driving distance. Thus, it’s not actually an “as the crow flies” radius - it’s something even better: it’s a driving distance radius. It would be just as easy to do driving time as well, which would be interesting.

I integrated the pipe with maps using the GeoXml rss overlay api for maps.

Overall, I’m really impressed impressed with Pipes. Above all else, it’s a really fun system to use. My only frustration is that it’s a bit too simple in places. For instance, it only allows simple math, which prevented me from calculating “as the crow flies” distance between two points, due to a lack of trig functions.

I used to keep a journal, for several years. It was something my friend Katie taught me, and I cherised.And then I went travelling abroad. And I still kept a journal, and cherished it even more. It was a way of digesting everything I was going through, and seeing. I didn’t keep it as a record, or as something for anyone else to look at. I kept it for the process of writing, for the ways in which it made me think about my life.

But in the several years since I’ve been back (I was gone for 16 months), I haven’t journaled hardly at all (a few pages worth of entries). I think largely, it was because life at home simly isn’t as exciting as life on the road. Things seemed less worth writing about. And then it just became habit.

I miss it.

Nik and I went rode our bikes today up to Mt. Sanitas, and went bouldering for the afternoon. It was really nice to get out, as I haven’t climbed hardly at all this season, between breaking my shoulder, and travelling, and just being busy with work and school. We had a pretty good time - it was a beautiful day, though both of us were pretty out of climbing shape.

On the way home, we stopped at a lemonade stand, and bought lemonade from a 5 year old girl and her mom, with the little change I had left in my wallet. The girl was very curious about the bouldering pad I had on my back, convinced that it was a bag that must be holding something really cool. When she found out it was for climbing, she proceeded to show us her horizontal clibming skills, walking on all fours up and down the median grass strip her lemonade stand was on.

I gave them one of the cards I got from John at BBC (Boulder Bicycle Commuters), which says:

Dear Merchant,

Your business has been patronized by bicycle today. Thank you for supporting bicycle access, safety and facilities in our community

(Staff: Thanks for sharing this with management)

Since it was her sister’s lemonde stand (paying for dance lessons), I recommended she give it to her sister.

I don’t think the girl totally got it, but the mom did, so hopefully a discussion will ensue later. I’ve handed out two other cards, one to the gas station on Arapahoe and 17th, and one to Cold Stone Icecream. Both times, the employees I gave them to were very receptive, and definitely sounded like they’d show it to their bosses. Very cool stuff.

I shot the following tonight. I was sitting at my desk, about to start on some use case diagrams, when I heard fireworks. Don’t know what they were for, but I went out and stood in the parking lot, and came away with some interesting shots.

Alas, this blog has been relatively dead as of late. I just moved, and started school, and business is busy, so it’s sort of been set aside for a while. Just before I left for Mexico, I purchased a Nikon D70 digital SLR, which I’ve been loving, but haven’t really had a chance to put to good use since I got back from Mexico. But… here’s a shot I took out the living room window of my new apartment. Hopefully I’ll find some more time for new entries soon. I’ve got lots on my mind that I’d like to talk about.

It seems ever since I’ve gone back to school to finish my degree, I get less respect professionally from people. It’s as though people think to themselves, “Oh, he’s just a student, he must not be competent, or must know less. After all, why would he be a student?”.

My goal in going back to school was to become more competent than I already am in my field, and expand my areas of competency. But somehow being back in school makes people have the opposite perception of me. Now all of a sudden I have people quizzing me on my knowledge, double checking simple work, and generally not trusting my abilities - all things I’d never encountered when I was working full time. It’s particularlly frustrating as it seems it often comes from people of lesser or equal technical ability.

In related news, I ended up withdrawing from the software engineering course I was in, and picking up a computer graphics course instead (CSCI4229). It’s not riveting, but it’s keeping me challenged and entertained.

I had a very enlightening conversation with one of my professors, though it was hardly the good sort of enlightenment.

It turns out one of the classes I’m taking this semester, Software Engineering Methods and Tools, is going to largely be a waste of time, and we won’t be learning much I don’t already know. It turns out the first half of the course will be largely an introduction to linux and development in a linux environment (make, cvs, find, grep, standard libraries, etc). And the second half of the course, which gets into testing, performance evalution and debugging, won’t be getting into enough depth to be of use to me.

This is all added to the fact that the funding was cut so severely that they had to drop half (or possibly more) of the lab sessions. So there will only be 6 two hour labs the whole semester. For a course that’s supposed to be largely hands on.

I had hoped to learn extreme programming (pair programming), test driven development, how to develop test harnesses for hard to test systems, and project time and cost estimation. None of which will be covered.

But that isn’t the most annoying part. The most annoying part is that there appears to be no one I could have talked to ahead of time who might have steered me away from this fate. The computer science advisor is useless. The professor for this class said that I’m a rare exception - most students don’t really care what they’re learning, and just want to be told what they need to know to pass the course.

Screw that. I’m here, spending all this time, so I can actually learn something. And not just anything. What I want to learn. But apparently that’s too much to ask.

Yesterday, on my way to lunch with a friend, in the process of flying down Baseline Dr. on my bike, I made the spetacularly stupid move of trying to adjust my lock, which resulted in me and the bike being transferred from a vertical rolling position to a horizontal sliding position. I was goig fast, and slid quite a ways. Thankfully, no one ran me over. That would have sucked. I pulled my bike to the side of the road, talked to two concerned people that stopped to see if I was ok, and then promptly passed out in someone’s front yard. Doh!

I got taken to the hospital by two very nice complete strangers, and got to meet a crazy conservative with an infected beesting (who had four different wounds from failed attempts to give him an IV, which I find more than slightly ironic), and got to have lots of fun with sadistic xray techs who made me do lots of painful things.

Moral of the story is that I chipped the corner off my shoulder, which sucks, but, as far as these things go, is pretty mild compared to what could have been. So, l now have a nice industry velcro contraption to bind my arm to my body (you gotta love industrial velcro), and silly things like putting on shirts and flushing the toilet take on all new meaning. And I anticipate getting to discover all sort of new intracacies about the boulder bus system. w00t!

When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed.

– Marilyn Manson

A fitting quote for our time.

Update: I’ve been corrected. This quote was originally from a fortune cookie, and was only popularized by Manson.