Chris Schmidt's Journal

Augh, the Blog Echo Chamber is so annoying. "Here's a slightly interesting demo put together in 20 minutes by Some Guy... let's repost it ACROSS THE ENTIRE COMMUNITY!"

(Similarly, Retweets of Retweets of Retweets of Retweets are annoying. Just don't.)

No, those 10 lines of code are really *not* that interesting. Look! A Map! Oh hooray, who gives a crap.

Also, I want a copy of the internet in my server room so that I can do cool things with it. Someone work on that for me, would you?

On a more life-related note, Kristan sort of moved in this weekend, and Mick is visiting for a week before heading off to start his PhD in Chicago. So our house is slightly more crowded than usual.

I recently passed my second anniversary with Jess. It sadly passed quite uneventfully; lack of $$ ruled out grand gestures, and lack of energy ruled out more vigorous searching for things to do on the cheap.

WTB One Money Tree, Cheap.

I lied, there is one other thing on my mind. This morning, on my way to dropping off the kids, I heard that the UN is planning to 'punish' North Korea for their recent nuclear tests and so on. On hearing this, all I could really think of was the Onion video: "Ambassador Stages Coup at UN, Issues List of Non-Binding Resolutions".

There's always the chance that Mtambi might abandon his post... if he finds a more powerful position like being the mayor of a small town, or being the coach of a little league team.

Looking at the actual state of affairs, this doesn't seem too far from the truth:

Now, council members are preparing to draw up yet another resolution, but divisions in the council could prevent swift action. ... As the US, China, Russia have equal veto power in the council, agreement on the details of a resolution, such as whether or not to include more sanctions, could take some time.

What is the UN good for again? I've lost track...

You know, I'm not one to generally complain about the weather. And certainly I can recognize the benefits of the rain for keeping the pollen down, which is making my allergy problem of yesterday significantly less important. I love a good thunderstorm, and blizzards too.

No matter how much I try though, I can't like when it's pissing down rain, and cold. Warm and pissing down rain is fine, but 50 degrees and spitting rain in May just sucks.

I thought the *April* showers were supposed to bring the May flowers? (And what do May flowers bring? Pilgrims!)

High levels of weather variability are also somewhat suck.

That's my thoughts for the day. (Yeah, I'm pretty braindead.)

(The response, from GargantuanCoho? "Zombies attack! They're attacking from everywhere! You only get one weapon! What do you chose?" I think the right answer to that is "The Automatic Shotgun", right? Unless there's a holy-water spray bottle, in which case I might have to go that route.)

Please FOAD.

Something that made me laugh this morning:

From Wikipedia, through pne:

There once was an X from place B,
That satisfied predicate P,
    He or she did thing A,
    In an adjective way,
Resulting in circumstance C.

What made you laugh this morning? Or cry? Or simply smile?

I realized this morning, upon entering Target, that I can't remember the last time I was inside one. I *think* it might have been around July of 2006 (I can't math. Not 2007, brain, 2006.); at the time, I was helping Schuyler pick out a trash can to replace the broken one in his apartment. (It's possible I have been in one more recently, but I certainly can't remember buying anything in one since then...)

It's weird to me how I still have this mentality that I'm not allowed to buy anything in stores. Grocery stores, department stores, etc. Granted, part of this is due to low free cash funds, but a lot of it is also the fact that I just still live in a mindset where all purchases are controlled by my parents.

(Also, whoa, my music thingy is all last.fm-ified. That's weird.)

I want to ride a roller coaster.

I haven't been writing much recently, but the primary reason for that is that most of the time when I think about writing things, I realize that my life as a whole is pretty stable. I take the girls to school, I go to work, I come home, I chill out, I get on the computer for a couple hours, and I go to sleep.

I suppose that there's a lot of other stuff going on that is important and I just don't really think to write about. My birthday party last weekend was pretty cool, and I didn't talk about that at all, for example. But on the whole, my life simply isn't changing as much as it used to, which is why you don't see me writing much anymore.

I did pick up World of Warcraft about a month ago. I'm still not sure if it's going to be an utterly life-destroying time suck like I know it can be. It's very pretty, and it's a nice way to spend a little bit of time when my brain is dead, but I've seen it mess up a lot of stuff for people due to its addictive nature. I've encouraged a *lot* of people I know not to play, for exactly this reason.

I think that a lot of this is the fact that most of my friends are, to some level or another, geeks. I tend to find that the same qualities that make someone a geek tend to lead to very obsessive behaviors. The problem with World of Warcraft is that obsessing over doing *everything* is very unhealthy because everything is ... well, huge. The physical size of WoW may be something along the size of Delaware -- but its' Delaware as if every subdivision had 10-20 tasks you had to do, some of them repeating daily, some of them taking an hour on their own. Some of the more 'completion'-oriented tasks require you to do literally thousands of quests -- where each quest ranges from a minute to an hour, with probably 10-15 being the 'norm'. 500 hours of playtime to do that, which is a hell of a lot. When you add in the fact that there are different play types for both different character classes -- a priest and a warrior are going to play very different games -- and the 'good'/'evil' sides ('Alliance' vs. 'Horde') there is a *lot* of time you can invest and not feel 'done'.

As a mapping geek, the "How big is the world" comments are actually somewhat interesting as well -- some of the comments go into "What determines how big a world is?" I can say that I definitely find that WoW *feels* big, regardless of how big it is -- and a blog comment suggests that this is similar to how traveling through Europe can seem much larger than traveling through North America despite absolute sizes, because there is more *stuff* in Europe. The concept that the physical size of something is far less important than the actual amount of stuff as far as a mental model of stuff is kinda cool.

Anyway, this probably isn't news to anyone, but I'm still trying to work out whether WoW will be absolutely terrible for me. I'd like to think the answer is no, but having watched it screw up so many other people's lives, I don't know if I can believe that.

Hey! I'm 25 now.

Strangely, my birthday this year isn't that big of a deal; I actually forgot about it entirely until a week ago. This is strange since I've always been such a big birthday person in the past.

But anyway. Happy Birthday to me, hooray. 25 is a big round number. I like it.

So, Julie is hanging around, and Jess mentions that Google "Fixed itself" from its "The whole internet is malware" problem. Julie asks what was wrong, and Jess explains that Google thought that the whole internet was broken.

Julie's response is "Oh, I see, Google got confused. Silly Google. It's just like me!" After a moment, she clarified "Except, I'm not a search engine."

We've rearranged our living room temporarily as a side effect of finishing painting it, and I'm really liking the end result that I have for seating right now. I have a really cushy spot on the futon, with a nice visibility out of both windows, and I'm right now all curled up with blankets and pillows.

The birds are chirping, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, and I'd love to just sit here and never move again.

Edit: Augh! Unexpected solar reflection in my eyes! heeeellllp!

For folks in Boston, the OpenStreetMap project is having a Mapping Party, hosted in Somerville, MA on February 14th and 15th.

From the OpenStreetMap website: "OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you. OpenStreetMap allows you to view, edit and use geographical data in a collaborative way from anywhere on Earth." In Boston, it includes roads, buildings, and more: you can see the map for an example.

If you're interested in learning more about OpenStreetMap, and getting involved in helping to keep a free map of the world available, starting with your neighborhood, join us at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Somerville on Feb 14th and 15th. More information is available on the OpenStreetMap Boston wiki page.

It sounds like LJ laid some people off yesterday. (Hey, it happens to the best companies. Really.)

I expect that -- like when it was bought by Sup, and during most of the changes in the long-while since 6A bought it -- I will see absolutely no difference in any aspect of using the site.

That said, I'm sure that some really good people got laid off, and I'm sorry for that: the 'no severance part of it is really especially terrible. My best wishes to all involved. If I can help anyone in getting a hookup in the Boston area, let me know... though I expect that I don't have anyone who friends me and was laid off, or is even that close anymore. (Things fall apart; the center can not hold -- though I'm not quite sure if the blood-dimmed tide is loosed.)

I like living near Boston/NY. I buy things that ship from there, and end up getting delivered overnight, despite only paying for (or not paying for) ground shipping. In this case, it's a new 50mm f/1.8 Lens (this), and a 430 EX II flash (this one).

Welcome to 2009, everyone.

A lot of people are expecting different things from 2009, but I don't think I am really. Life isn't really sufficiently in flux that I expect the year over year delta to be large this year; 2008 had a lot of suck, and some good times, and I expect 2009 will be about the same.

I'm trying to decide what I should do about my photography: One problem I'm having with it at the moment is that I may actually be approaching a point where what I can do with my current tools is running a bit low, but I don't have a lot of cash on hand to buy better tools. I suppose the answer to that is to find more cash, but I feel like that's a never ending pit of futility, to be honest. Saving money for myself just isn't something that I can do.

I'm going to be speaking on GeoDjango, the GIS extension to GeoDjango, on Thursday, at the Django User's Group meeting at Betahouse, in Cambridge. More info forthcoming at the meetup page.

Things I want to do in the next couple months:

• Decide something about photography. Either make the investment in better equipment, or stop feeling bad about not taking good pictures.
• Go Skiing
• Look into rock climbing, and figure out if it's worth the cost.

I'm not doing any real resolutions this year; I don't usually end up keeping them anyway. My internal resolutions are the same as always: Make your life, and the lives of those around you, as happy as you can.

I hope everyone has a lovely New Year's celebation, and a Happy 2009.

So, I'm crazy today. And when I say that, I mean utterly twitchy can't concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds completely convinced the world is about to come crashing down about my ears crazy. It's quite terrible, to be honest, but since there's not much to be done about it, I just try to cope.

Anyway, since I couldn't concentrate on anything I was supposed to be concentrating on, I put work down and hacked on something. That something ended up being a tool to sync photos from flickr to facebook -- which I'd attempted at one point before, but abandoned when I convinced myself there must be a better way to do it.

Well, in the end, I convinced myself there really *wasn't* a better way to do it, and I just needed to go ahead and take the leap. So I did. I learned SQLAlchemy (which I find somewhat ugh compared to Django's ORM, but hey, such is life), and put together a script that would sync the Flickr metadata locally. Then I put together another set of functions to sync it all back up to Facebook, and wrote a map of tags from flickr to Facebook user IDs.

Other than one small Facebook functionality which was poorly understood by me -- album sizes are limited to 60 pictures, wtf is up with that -- and one minor bug -- when 'chris' and 'crschmidt' were both listed as tags, a person got tagged twice... and the Facebook UI copes with that not at all well -- I was able to write a script in a single day which synced all my photos over, and which I'll be able to run periodically to keep things up to date from here forward.

The end result is that:
0. All of my public flickr photos are now also shared on Facebook.
1. I have 129 pictures of me listed on my profile, including 25 of me with Jess
2. I probably spammed the shit out of a ton of people, since they got listed as being in photos I was 'uploading'. "Oops"?

Unfortunately, unlike usual, this project hasn't been cathartic; I haven't been able to sleep, it's now 3am, and I have no idea what i'm going to do tomorrow.

Sigh. I want a new brain. But at least the current one is accomplishing *something*, even if it's not at all related to what it should be doing. How I wish taht i could get paid just to hack on whatever my brain feels like doing...

Merry Christmas, everybody.

With the girls gone, Jess and I exchanged gifts last night. Nothing particularly extravagant, just a couple dvds and a book for her, and similar for me, though she also got me a Goillapod, which should be nice.

We're sans kids for the next couple days (til Sunday), so it's just a nice relaxing day; I think I'm going to count Friday as a vacation day and make it a 4 day weekend. I've been working at home the past week anyway, but not feeling the need to get any work done does make a difference.

I'm still in bed, and I think I plan on staying a prone position for a while longer.

I wonder if this is something htat people without kids get to do sometimes... just lie in bed and rest? Weird...

So, we made about 3x as much food as we needed for the 6 of us eating dinner.

And when I say 'we', I mean, mostly, 'me': I worked on prep from 9pm -> 1am and cooked from 9am -> 3:30pm.

We ended up with something like 6 quarts of mashed potatoes due to a screwup of mine.

All in all, it was a lot of good frickin food -- Jess buying groceries and picking the recipes worked quite well -- but I've chopped more in the past 24 hours than I have in the past 3 years combined. 8 onions, 10 apples, 2 bags of potatoes, rosemary, thyme, chives, oregano, parsley... and not once did I slice my finger!

This is the first time I've ever had 4 pots on the stove, two pans in the oven, and two thing already done and waiting to be served. (Potatoes, Green beans + shallots, cranberry + orange relish, two pans of stuffing, cornbread and turkey, respectively.) I felt like a cooking machine.

Menu:

• Turkey, rubbed with herb (parsley, rosemary, sage & thyme) butter and roasted.
• Apple and sage bread stuffing with chestnuts.
• Cranberry-orange relish.
• Garlic mashed potatoes with chives and parmesan cheese.
• Green beans with shallots and almonds.
• Cornbread. (from a TJ's box)

I made everything there except for the actual cooking of the herb butter, which Jess did while I was making the cornbread. (I did all the turkey rubbing as well... mmm, rubbing down naked turkey skin with slippery substances...)

Turkey cooked about 1.5 hours quicker than we expected, but ended up *really* tasty -- thank goodness for thermometers, since it did *not* look browned at all when we pulled it out, but the thermometer told the real story of it being at ~160. (I think the thing got slightly warmer than it should have been, but cooking in a roasting pan kept in the moisture and made it really tasty.)

This is the first time I've ever cooked a big meal like this, and I'm pretty pleased with how everything came out.

Finally finished uploading my photos from Japan. See them on Flickr.

Why yes, Virginia, there is a 3am.

Been on a shitty sleep schedule since I got back from Japan, falling asleep around 9 and waking up at ass-o-clock. In theory, I should just go back to sleep, but since Jess tends to be up and typing at 3am, it is somewhat hard to do so.

After a couple weeks hard work, shortly before I left for Japan, I finally got the new MetaCarta Developers Site up and running. It's not perfect yet, but pages like this one about OnDemand make my heart sing, since they actually document shit that in the past, people would have come to me for documentation of.

I'm still uploading pictures from my trip to Japan, but only have one more day to get through. In general, for trips to foreign countries, I'm a bit too unselective about what I upload, but I figure that since I'm not going to be returning, having a full set of the things I care about uploaded is nice.

I am a dull person.

I'm currently in Tokyo airport, flying home in about an hour. I leave Tokyo at 11:15, and arrive in Chicago at 7:50AM. I then leave Chicago at 9:26 and arrive in Logan at 12:44PM.

Japan has been an amazing trip. I've eaten octopus and squid, had a bunch of sushi, ridden the Shinkanzen train, seen a collection of 200+ goth-costumed Japanese chicks crowding a live band, been to Osaka Castle, seen a Giant Buddha statue in Nara, presented to > 80 different people about OpenLayers and its history, present, and future, given two workshops to ~ 10 people on how to get started with OpenLayers, and more.

Maybe I'll write a real trip report at some point, but if *a* picture is worth a thousand words, then I think 452 pictures is worth a bit more. (And I still have 500 to sort through! I probably should cull a few of those though, since they're not all up to my usual standards.)

Looking forward to getting home.

In Osaka now. Tokyo was great, Japan in general has been great, but at the moment I'm really just tired and looking forward to coming home.

Touring Tokyo today -- leaving in about 20 minutes.

Currently 11 episodes into Dead Like Me. Glad that I grabbed it before I left.

Uploaded pictures from the conference yesterday.

jennifer: Saw a couple people in pretty serious GothLoli yesterday inside Tokyo Station, and thought of you. (Though I'm sure I'm messing up the use of the term. :))

(When is LJ going to stop with the Undead Journal thing? Halloween's over, man.)

Sleep Schedule Thursday Evening: Stay up until 11:30 packing. Pass out. Get up at 3am, start packing again.

Get on plane to Chicago, 8am Boson Time. Probably sleep about 1.5 hours out of 2.5 on Boston -> Chicago flight.

Get on plane to Tokyo, 11am Boston time. Fail to realize beforehand that flying from Chicago to Tokyo means there *is* no night time, despite landing a day ahead. Despite flying for 12 hours, I never even see a slightly darker sky.

However, I get an entire set of three seats to myself for the first hour of the flight, which seems good for my chances of decent sleep.

Then, I am entirely too nice when a Japanese woman asks to take the seat next to me -- I figure that it's no big deal if I only get 1.5 like everyone else instead of 3.

Then realize that she intends to bring the person she was with *with* her, meaning I don't have 1.5, I have 1 -- and the person I was sitting next to isn't that compact either, so it's less than 1. So much for sleep.

So I end up with not enough space, and the woman to the right of me keeps cracking her window open to take pictures of the mountains in Alaska, shining bright sunlight in my eyes.

Once we were over ocean next to Russia, that stopped, and I was able to get about 2.5 hours of fitful sleep on the rest of the flight. Arrival in Tokyo at 1am Boston Time. (2pm local time.) Get out of the airport around 3pm local time.

Next is getting to the hotel. 1 hour train ride -- no sleep, but some work on my presentation that I gave this morning. Then a 1 hour-ish walk through the maze that is the subway station, and to my hotel, arriving around 4:30PM.

Get online, check email, body says "hahaha, joke is on you, it's 4am according to me! And you've been up since 3am!" Pass out. At 11ish PM local time, wake up (10am Boston time), and only sleep fitfully/dozingly for the rest of the morning. Get some food from a mini-mart at 2:30 AM. Finish presentation and workshop materials while watching Dead Like Me.

Come to conference at 8:30am. (7:30PM Boston time.)

So, let's clarify. I woke up at 3am Boston time on Friday. It is currently 12:45AM Boston time on Sunday -- just 2 hours short of 48. I believe that I have likely slept approximately 11 hours in that time.

That is far too little. I don't have enough adrenaline for this shit. I want a damn nap.

So not ready for Japan. And I thought I was underprepared for the Cape Town trip!

Still taking photos. Now participating in photowump: a 'photo class' like thing that a friend is doing as a favor to a few of us who have cameras but don't use them enough. :) Looking today, I've taken 3500 photos in the last month -- 4000 in the last 5 weeks. I think that means I've taken more pictures in the last 5 weeks than I have in the previous 3 years...

Picked my first 'pic of the day' that I don't really like technically yesterday -- I got a portion of the cart in the bottom right corner of the pic that kinda ruins it for me. Still, overall, I like the colors and the lines in it, so I'm sticking to it.

I leave for Tokyo Friday morning. I'm going to miss Halloween, which I'm sad about. :( Hopefully all goes well for the family in the week I'm gone: I'm sure that Jess would love for people to hang out and spend time with her here to help out with stuff, if you're free sometime next week.

Wow. Japan. Still kinda going 'wow' over that. :)

Everything else in life is just a rush to get things in line at work so I can leave at the moment, so I apologize if I'm somewhat boring.

Borrowing some gear from a coworker for the rest of the week -- including a 100mm macro lens, which I'm having fun playing with. (Most of my pictures from yesterday were taken with that one.)

I've also got a Speedlite 550ex which I'm going to try and do some playing with -- I don't think I'm at the point yet where flash is what I want most, but it's something.

With that in mind, yesterday's photo ended up being a macro shot of the back of the flash that I took while I was playing around with stuff... This could become a dangerous hobby if I end up keeping it up...

9 days until I leave for Japan.

(Also, since I missed it: Monday's image, which I wasn't as happy with, but is not that bad.)

Ali is sick. She brought it home from school, and definitely gave it to Jess, and possibly gave it to Lynne as well (since she was over on Monday). Other than that, life on the home front is much the same... Though I do need to let my parents know I'm going to Japan... oops... (You'd think I'd have learned after my last mistake.)

Got started on a new/interesting Python/JS project with a friend in my copious spare time. It's nice to have a project which isn't 90% done: the limitations that places on you are so annoying. Doing the last 20% always sucks. I'm much better (and way more efficient) at the first 80%. Wish that I could actually find a job that was about the first 80% -- OCTO was supposed to be that way, but it never really did work out like that.

What should I be writing about here? You all think I'm dull as rocks, I think. Anyone got an interest in helping me improve that?

I'm totally failing at getting going this morning: So far, I have accomplished zero work. So, how better to improve that than posting to LJ?

Went to the Head of the Charles Regatta yesterday. Made my first attempts at sport photography -- some of the photos came out okay, but it's definitely not my strong suit at this point. (I did feel the limitations of my telephoto lens as well: 200mm just isn't enough when you want 'close ups' on people in the middle of the river.) Saw lots of cool looking camera equipment. Photos are up on Flickr. Had my first successful use of GPSPhotoLinker -- works better once I realized that my phone exports to GPX in the local timezone (contrary to the spec), which has been throwing off all my timestamps -- which means my map of the photos I took is actually somewhat more interesting than usual (where I'll just take big hunks of photos and plop them down somewhere nearby).

I'm sleepy. I think I need a personal health day sometime soon.

Picture of the day from yesterday is this cute little kid, who came out to the Regatta. I really like the way the lights came out in this picture.

In order to improve my photo skills, I'm currently working on taking part in a 'one photo a day' project.

The concept behind these projects is pretty simple: Taking a single photo a day lets you improve your photography. By continuing to take photos -- even when you can't see anything that seems to fit as a 'photo' you want to take -- you're pushing your boundaries, encouraging yourself to find new and interesting things to turn into a photo. Project 365 is one of these: I'm not participating directly in any project 365 stuff because I don't know how long it will go on for, but the concept is the same regardless.

Rather than one photo a day, I'm actually pushing myself to take one *great* photo a day -- which means that at the moment, I'm taking more like 30. I'm not looking forward to when winter comes along and takes away all my great material that I have at the moment :)

I'm maintaining the photos that I'm taking in a separate set on Flickr (The "One a Day" set) as well as posting them to the One A Day group.

So far, I've been relatively pleased with the results: as I found during the conference, taking lots of pictures is the fastest way to improve your photography. Currently, I'm shooting almost everything with my 50mm prime lens. The only exception is the leaf that I took yesterday: that one was done with the zoom, because there was no way to focus close enough with the 50mm.

One A Day http://www.flickr.com/photos/crschmidt/sets/72157608074529910/ Trying to take one good picture a day for as long as I can, to keep my photo chops up and improve them.

I'm having fun exploring things other than portrait photography: I feel like I actually got pretty good at that during FOSS4G.

Anyway, if you want to follow along, there's an RSS feed of my One a Day set, and I'd love to have comments/suggestions as to what it would be nice to have photos of. I expect to try to vary my photos as much as I can: mixing in portraits and other stuff like that as I get time with people who don't mind having their pictures taken. :) Right now, the season is making photos of fall an ideal thing to work with -- I'm also keeping a Fall 2008 set with the photos from that.

Regardless of what anyone else thinks, I'm enjoying this project so far, and looking forward to keeping it up -- and would love to be encouraged to do so. I hope to start including these 'one a day' shots with my LJ entries as I post them -- and maybe it will even encourage me to post more, so that people can see my pictures. :)

(If my photography stuff is boring you, or the inclusion of photos is straining your connection or causing problems for your friends page, feel free to let me know, and I can consider making a filter for it.)

Recently I've been using Flickr more, and finding myself frustrated by the lack of decent 'flow' views of my contacts photos. I've put together something that I like a fair amount in this regard, though I'm still not sure it's where I'll end up in the end.

For people who have Flickr accounts, and contacts listed in them, Flickr Contact's Photo Browser is a webpage that will let you see the photos uploaded by your contacts in the last 1, 3, 5, 7, or 14 days. Each contact is displayed with their most recent upload, and you can then click 'more' to see their other photos within that time period (or 'load all' to load all images).

Limit is 50 contacts: If you have more than that for a given time period, I suggest you get yourself fewer friends :)

I don't know if anyone else even has contacts listed on Flickr, but it was a neat toy to put together, and an interesting technical experiment (doing the entire thing in HTML/JS means that the code could be put on anybody's website who wants it, even if they have no server side scripting support).

Anyway, if you think it's cool, let me know.

I'm going to Japan the first week in November. Specifically, I'll be leaving Oct 31st, arriving in Tokyo on Nov 1st. I'll be speaking at FOSS4G 2008: Tokyo on Nov 1st, staying in Tokyo until ~Nov 5th, then going to Osaka; from Osaka, I'll be speaking at FOSS4G 2008: Osaka, and then I'll be flying back to the states on Nov 10th. I'll be acting as a keynote speaker on OpenLayers, and may also be helping to lead a hands-on session/workshop.

I'm doing this thanks in large part to the support of Orkney (in conjunction with OSGeo Japan) and MetaCarta.

(I wonder if I can get people together for a "Chris wasn't eaten by a Japanese Octopus" party...)

Time to go back to work today. Luckily, I think that 3 days is about the right amount of recovery time for this kind of trip: I actually feel relatively rested (thank goodness for small favors). So, back to the office I go.

Luckily, it seems like not much fell apart during my absence. Also, that word looks totally wrong.

This is the email I just sent to my family: If you haven't been paying any attention to my life for the past 3 weeks, this should somewhat catch you up.

Hello! I am returned from South Africa, where I saw lions, but was not eaten by one.

For those of you not in the know, I recently attended a conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Cape Town is a lovely city -- which reminded me a lot of San Francisco, in fact. The city is in large part dominated by a mountain in the middle of the city: Table Mountain, part of Table Mountain National Park (which extends to include much of the cape, down to Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope).

I arrived in South Africa on Sept 27th, and climbed Table Mountain with a small group of friends on Sept 28th. You can see pictures from that trip by clicking on the mountain.

We took the cable car from Table Mountain down, so you can see some lovely shots of Cape Town on the way down. An interesting point about the cable car is that the whole thing actually rotates as you go down, so you get an almost 360 degree selection of views on the way down the mountain.


That week was the conference: FOSS4G is a week long mapping conference, and it was a really great conference. You can read a post-conference summary of my thoughts in my blog, and see pictures of the conference on Flickr.

A short summary is that the conference was very educational in a lot of ways, and I think we got an Open Source message out to a lot of new participants in the Open Source geo scene. We discussed our successes and failures, and the conference really succeeded as a 'meeting of the tribes' that FOSS4G is somewhat well known for.

One night during the conference was the "Gala Dinner", held at Moyo, in Stellenbosch. (pics).

Moyo is an outdoor African restaurant, which includes traditional african foods in a buffet-like style, with African drums and dancing. This was where I had my first taste of Ostrich meat (tasty, but a bit
chewy) and got to eat dinner inside giant tents that held up to 400 people.

Moyo is also in one of South Africa's main wine producing regions (Stellenbosch), and the wine here was supposedly very good.

After the conference, I took a trip with 9 other people down the cape, stopping in Fish Hoek, then going to Cape Point itself, and heading back up for a night in Haut Bay. (pics)

Some highlights:

• me standing at the Cape Point lighthouse, with the Southernmost point on the cape in the background.
• A shot looking down towards the Cape of Good Hope -- someplace that I learned about in School, but never had an expectation that I would actually have the opportunity to visit.

After our trip down to the cape, I flew across the country to Kruger National Park -- a 200 mile by 50 mile national park. At Kruger, I spent 2.5 days driving myself around in a Hyundai Atos (my first time driving a right hand drive car), taking pictures of wildlife of all shapes and sizes. I saw everything you can imagine, from Jackals to Elephants, Lions to Rhinos, baboons, monkeys, and a cheetah eating an impala for dinner. (Note to self: Never buy an impala if you want to outrun a cheetah!)

Having been no more than 6 feet from a lion, I can definitely say that they are beautiful animals, and that having a cheetah look you in the eye is a scary scary thing.

Overall, I can't explain how enjoyable the trip was: I saw so many things the cape has to offer, and I'm looking forward even more now to the oppourtunity to go to the FOSS4G 2009 conference in Sydney, Australia next year!

Hope this message finds you well,
Chris

Made it back from Africa Saturday morning. Had a great gathering Saturday night (with a little bit too much booze, but cool enough people that it mostly didn't matter). Relaxed and finished off Battlestar Galactica yesterday while alternatively sorting pictures and dozing off.

Really looking forward to one more day of recovery before I have to go back to work tomorrow, and still trying to decide what to do about the fact that there is no good way of linking Facebook + Flickr photos that I can tell.

Pics from Kruger are slowly being uploaded. I've gotten through the "best" of the first half of the trip, now working through the other 450. Really loving being interested in photography again.

I am returned from Kruger. I was not eaten by a lion, and I will be posting pictures once I'm back to real internet.

I did see Giraffes, Zebras, and (of course) Lions, despite not being in Kenya. However, I am pretty sure there are actually no Tigers in Africa, so the claim that you can see Tigers in Kenya is simply wrong.

I fly back from Cape Town to JFK tomorrow; the day tomorrow is my touristy time, but I honestly don't feel like there's anything I want to spend 3-4 hours on, so I may just bum around the hotel and wait to go to the airport. (I'd feel pretty stupid if I wandered down the wrong alleyway tomorrow and got my ass robbed.) Pretty sleepy now, in any case -- I guess it is 1am, after all -- so I'll be off to bed, and up for breakfast tomorrow.

Just wanted you to know I was alive. More thorough Kruger trip report later, after I upload pictures.

The difference between the Cape area and the eastern part of South Africa is incredible, and immediately obvious in a way I wouldn't have typically expected. I'm currently in a tourist center in HazyView (gmaps), which is a place where I've got free wifi for the first time in the past 36 hours or so. Since I think this will be my last internet access before next Thursday, I'm taking advantage of it.

Watching busloads (literally) of school kids walk alongside a road with aspeed limit of 80 km/h is the biggest thing that I noticed, but the sheer spread out nature of housing around here is simply something that you never see in the US. Even in Europe, I never saw it; everything in the parts of Europe I saw was simply pushed so close together that it didn't have this wide acres upon acres of housing over it. I'm sure that I'm showing what a stupid American I am, but I can't really help it, I suppose.

I'm about to head to Paul Kruger gate, after which I'll be going to Skukuza, then to Satara, then to Lower Sabie, and out Crocodile Gate on Thursday morning. I'll then be flying back to Cape Town for a day, and flying home Friday night/Saturday morning.

I miss the States, but I'm overjoyed to be experiencing this probably once in a lifetime opportunity. When you're a kid, you hear all these things in school about the Cape of Good Hope -- but there's never really an idea in your mind that you might someday be there. But yesterday, that's exactly where I was: standing down on the Cape of Good Hope. And that's just damn cool.

Conference essnetially ended today: still have to do the code sprint, but the sessions and workshops are now all done. The adrenaline of the past couple days is now wearing off, and I'm realizing that really, 11 hours of sleep in 4 days is not neary enough to be anything other than complete and total self-abuse.

That said, I had a great conference. I had a couple great nights, went to a Casino for the first time, stayed up late drinking mini-fridge Amarula and watching Palin v. Biden, went to a techno dance club for the first time since I was 17 or so, helped more than 100 people work through workshops on OpenLayers and GeoServer (put together by the OpenGeo folks, which I'm looking forward to nabbing as getting started), co-led a workshop of my own, and took over 1000 pictures, moe than 400 of which came out. (There's still a number on my camera, and a number I haven't gotten a chance to upload yet.)

I've gotten to see a great city, climbed a great mountain, played roulette and blackjack.

I've gotten to meet dozens of people, re-meet dozens more, and actually recognized at least 3.

I've regained al ove in photography -- and with it, some level of skill.

I've Videotaped a lightning talk that ha gotten almost 200 vies. I've taken pictures that have gotten me dozens of compliments. I've seen African dancing, and eaten ostrich meat.

That said, all I want to do now is sleep for the next 4 days or so. :)

Met some very cool dudes from Tanzania and Zambia tonight at The Dubliner in Cape Town. It's amazing what can happen when you get yourself away from the overly-touristed bars and into the bas along Long Street in Cape Town; the crowd is much more interesting.

I was also propositioned by a Botswanan woman (who, it has been suggested, may have been a prostitute of some sort, but based on her behavior, she was either very drunk or very good at pretending to be drunk, the former of which seems to an argument against prostitution). Then again, I can see the arguments either way.

Cape Town has treated me lovely-ly so far. Sadly, I can't say the same for one of our drinking partners last night who turned down a cab, and is now less all the money that was in his wallet on the walk home as a result. (No physical abuse, just theft/mugging.)

Penguins!

opening session good. many beers + screwdrivers better. met chick from semester at sea (different from sea semester: theyr'e on acruise ship) with initials crschmidt. though she is actually crpschmimdt. but whatever. Semester at Sea is in Capetown until Thursday; essentially, anyone with an american accent can be assumed to be at foss4g or semester at sea this week.

pictures to upload in the morning when i can see straight.

Today, I climbed a mountain.

No pictures yet, but we climbed up Table Mountain earlier today. It was a great hike -- steep, but well maintained with rock steps cut out most of the way up, and beautiful views. I also have a number of shots from the top.

It was a good time. Also took the cable car back down, so that was fun too.

Maybe naptime now.

For the record, my weblog and journal are likely to overlap somewhat in covering the social content of my life, since the people I'm socializing with are almost entirely geeks at the moment. If that matters to you, crschmidt_tech might be of interest for the next week or so. Arrival at FOSS4G is the first in that vein.

So, I mentioned that Schuyler bought me a new lens, and I got my first chance to use it last night. I'm already in love.

Over the past year, I'd noticed a steady decline in my photo taking, which I felt was mostly tied to the fact that I hadn't really been taking a lot of pictures that I was happy with. It seemed like everything was coming out fuzzy or blurry, and I figured I'd just lost the knack for taking pictures. Getting a new lens has made me realize that this isn't really true: In fact, the problem here is (at least in part) the result of my choice of tool.

When I first got my camera, it had the standard kit lens on it: 18-55mm f/3.5->f/5.6. Not a great low-light lens, but it was a Canon, so it was a pretty decent quality lens. Right before I was leaving for our honeymoon last August, I realized it had broken, and rushed out to get a new lens with less than 24 hours before our trip. This meant my options were limited; I was essentially tied to the local Wolf Camera, and had a low budget. As a result, I bought what was available in my price range, which ended up being a Quantaray 18-125mm lens.

Googling this lens, one of the first hits has a succinct review attached: "It's a soccer mom lens. Not only that, it's about the the cheapest thing you could put on your camera. Don't put cheap crappy lenses on your nice DSLR - you'll end up with worse pictures than if you had bought a $300 digicam."

Still, I figured that at the point where I noticed the lens getting in my way, I'd get a new one, and at least I'd have something for my trip. I'm not typically one to blame my tools: I hadn't put any serious effort towards my photography for quite a while, so I was largely convinced the problem was simply me. Until I tried looking at the photos that I took at the same time as gandalfgreyhame at Jess's birthday party... and realized that I was framing, and taking, the same shots, and getting nothing out of it. When I asked David, he mentioned that he just realized that he couldn't really shoot anything good with the lens all the way open, because the photos just *ended up blurry*.

Thinking back on it more, I realized that my lack of photo taking was almost directly tied to around the time I got married -- around the time I'd killed my Canon lens. With that in mind -- and a less than $100 lens available to me -- I decided that it was possible that my tools really were getting in the way.

In recent photos taken, I've been getting about 1 good shot in 10. With the new lens attached to my camera, yesterday I took 56 good shots out of 103.

So, essentially overnight, I've gone from what I consider a 10% success rate with photos to a 50% success rate with photos. Some of that is certainly likely to be not directly related to the tools, but at least some portion of it is, and given the feedback I'm seeing on the cheap-o lens I have, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Still, this change has made photography fun again.

Heading up Table Mountain today, and looking forward to getting some pretty pictures. When I do, I'll add them to my FOSS4G 2008 set.

Made it to South Africa safely. My bag of clothes didn't -- it's stuck in NYC and will be here at 4pm Monday afternoon.

Hotel is great. Has a decent view of part of Table Mountain and I just got a good view of the sunset against the rocks.

Dinner at 7pm in the hotel with OSGeo people; gonna spend at least part of tomorrow wandering the city.

I think I'm coming through satellite for things to the US (high latency) but the net is reasonably fast here.

Conference starts Monday.

Flights to/from South Africa.

Friday, September 26
Flight: Delta 6795 Operated by Comair
Departs: 10:40 am from BOS
Arrives: 11:54 am at JFK
Seats: 2C

Flight: Delta 128
Departs: 3:55 pm from JFK
Arrives: 3:55 pm at CPT
Seats: 24C

Returning:

Friday, October 10
Flight: Delta 129
Departs: 6:00 pm from CPT
Arrives: 6:30 am at JFK
Seats: 22F

Saturday, October 11
Flight: Delta 6790 Operated by Comair
Departs: 8:40 am from JFK
Arrives: 10:14 am at BOS
Seats: 3C

Have packed:

Camera equipment. GPS.

Laptops: Macbook, Thinkpad, eeepc.

Novels (6): Half of the foundation series, and a couple others in the same class of novels.
Business cards (hundreds).
Clothing, range 10C-30C: Underwear, Socks, Pants, Shirts, Sweaters, Jackets, and Swimming trunks/towel. 3 types shoes: Hiking Boots, Sneakers, Sandals.
Toiletries: Razor, toothpaste/toothbrush, soap, shampoo.

Passport. Itinerary. Hotel reservation printout.

Can't check in for my flight electronically. Called T-Mobile and confirmed international calling. Couldn't find SA plugs in local hardware store.

What am I missing?

Last day of work before South Africa trip. Have a lovely lens, borrowed from Geoff, which I'll be taking with me out to Kruger, and Schuyler picked up the 50mm f/1.8 lens I was talking about yesterday on my behalf.

I'm staying in the Fountains Hotel during the conference, doing a small trip around the Cape on Saturday and Sunday, and then heading out to Kruger National Park Monday->Thursday, back in Cape Town on Thursday night, and flying out of Cape Town back to New York, then Boston, on Friday night/Saturday morning.

Pondering whether to bring camping gear with, in case I want to just camp in Kruger -- camping there is cheap -- but other than that, mostly mentally prepared for my trip.

Whee, South Africa!

After having a couple conversations with David and Dan, I think I've come to the conclusion that a part of my lack of technical chops for my photography is actually because of the camera and lens, rather than entirely tied to my lack of skill, as I had previously assumed. I'm thinking of buying a new lens on David's recommendation to solve this problem. Specifically, there is a 50mm 1.8 lens which he recommended, and I'm liking the idea of it.

For one thing, a non zoom lens (fixed focal length) would force me to frame my shots a lot more carefully. Also, a major factor in most of my photography is low light: something which would help account for that would be nice to have as well. Lastly, it's less than $100, which is in the range where i'm not utterly distraught if it doesn't help that much, and also not going to suffer too much if it fails to work out well.

Maybe I can even have Schuyler pick one up for me at B&H before my trip to South Africa. ETA: Yay, he's going to stop there this afternoon.

For those of you who don't actively follow my flickr account (probably most of you), I've been uploading some of the stuff I have, both in the current set and also from years back, moving over my old self hosted galleries to flickr. Also, if you have access to Jess's photo pool, I uploaded a few more pictures to that as well.

Anyway. That's today's drive: time to get back to work.

Yesterday, we celebrated Jess's birthday with a slightly impromptu birthday celebration. ETA: Some pictures are up.

Sunday night, we established that we would go to Full Moon with Lynne for dinner. Full Moon is a lovely restaurant that I've written about before, and ideal for bribing a foodie to babysit for us. After a dinner there, we came back home and left Lynne to the vagaries of parenting Alicia through her homework.

Next stop was Finale, Cambridge. Upon arriving, we met lulabellafp at the door. Due to two different networking events taking place, we tok a tabe outside on the patio.

For the next 20 minutes, people streamed in a couple at a time: Abby and Dan, who neither Jess nor I had met before in person, were first to join us, followed by nostrademons, gandalfgreyhame, Aaron (a coworker of mine from work), and later on, elements and camieal.

We had lovely deserts at Finale, and then moved onto drinks at Casa B's, a great bar off Brattle Street. They made me a lovely orangey thing in a martini glass, while Jon enjoyed a Shirley Temple and the other guys at the table drank scotch and tequila. At this point, it was about 11:30, so the people who had things to do in the morning said their goodbyes and dropped off the path with us.

With Aaron, Aerin, Jon, and Jess and I remaining, we moved onto Daedalus, which would have been much nicer had our waiter actually given a shit about us. Here I had a tasty Weissbeer of some sort, though I don't remember the name. (It was from Munich, though, the source of All Good Beer, as we know.)

Next, the plan was to finish out our evening at People's Republik, dropping down to the dive bar level. Sadly, People's Republik has last call at 1am on Monday nights, apparently (Boo!) so we were unable to drink there. Rather than seek out another bar, we went someplace we *knew* there would be alcohol: Home. (Also, the fact that our house no longer has a name kinda sucks. It used to be The Commune, but with that name gone, we need something else.)

Lynne -- still being at the house -- joined us for more booze and watching of Blues Brothers. Aaron and Aerin traded swigs of Banana flavored Tortuga Rum -- still left from the Caymans -- while I mixed myself a strong Fuzzy Navel. Andrew rescued Aerin's car, and took her home after about 45 minutes -- though to be honest, I have relatively little memory of time passing at this point.

The people who showed up were great. Some of them I haven't seen -- for any length of time, at least -- in months, years, or ever. The crowd was a great mix of tech and non-tech, and there were interesting conversations the whole night. A big thank you to all the people who made it out -- especially people like David, who made it all the way from Nashua. (I think he was the farthest, anyway...) It was great to meet new people. Also, our liquor bottles from the basement (we keep the majority of our party liquor down there, since we don't drink much on our own) literally had a thick coat of dust on them, which means one thing and one thing only. We need to get back to having parties.

I'm hoping everyone with us had as much fun as I did, and Jess seemed to. A great way to say Happy Birthday.

It's a birthday! Happy Birthday to jpallan, the love of my life. and the person I hope to spend the rest of my life with. I hope that her birthday is as lovely to her as every minute I get to spend with her is to me.

Infusing tequila is something we do around here.

Specifically, what we do is:

• Take Jose Cuervo Silver Tequila
• Put it in a mason jar.
• Put a bag of frozen fruit in it: one of Strawberry, Raspberry, Blackberry, Blueberry
• Leave in, out of sunlight, for 3-6 months
• Once a week or so, shake the jar vigorously
• At end of 3-6 month period, strain the tequila through cheesecloth
• Drink liberally

The end result is something which I think is about 50% less potent than tequila -- volumewise, that's what it turns out as (I'm sure Jess will qualify this in comments when she's more sober) but is 100% more tasty: to some extent, you end up with something that ends up tasting like kool-aid.

It's great! Said the man who is 6 of these things in. So probably like 4 shots of tequila into my evening. Or morning. As it happens.

When I was in Boy Scouts growing up (for those who aren't aware, I'm an Eagle Scout), one of the things that we did on most every camping trip was make "Johnson's Brew".

Johnson's Brew was a tropical fruit drink. It was typically prepared by heating it in a big stock pot over a stove; later in my scouting career we started preparing it cold as well, by adding ice instead.

You'd start with a base of apple juice; typically, you want apple juice to be your largest quantity, about 2 parts apple juice to one part other juice. The reason for this is that the apple juice is pretty weak flavored: other things that you add in later are much stronger and can overpower if you overdo them.

You'd start by cutting up a couple limes and a couple lemons into slices, and tossing them in. You'd add in after that a couple oranges (sliced, again): All of these are with the peels.

You'd mix in some tropical juice: Guava, pineapple, etc. At this point, you're going to start mixing to taste: that means that you pour stuff in, stir it up, and taste it, and see if it's still overpoweringly apple flavored or not.

Other juices that can be used include pineapple, mango, peach, and other similar flavors. As you go on, you can add more fruit chunks as well: canned peaches and pears do well, and pineapple can do okay too. You're best to pour the entire can in, with the juicey sauce 'intact'; it adds to the flavor.

Serving is just dipping a ladle in, and scooping it out: You end up with a cup full of juice, with a couple of fruit bits in it. Typically, it's best eaten in the dark around a campfire: It allows you to play the "is this an orange or a lemon" game, or demonstrate your stuff by showing that you can eat a lime directly.

It's an extremely nice close to a day on a chilly evening, though I have no idea how it scales to non-40 people sized crowds. I also don't really remember if I'm remember if I'm missing something important, but I'm going to see if I can talk to people who might remember and find out.

The name of the drink is after our troop's founder, Mr. Johnson, who created the brew originally.

so, I'm supposed to:

Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair — just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with the picture.

And then you're supposed to do it too. This one was last night.

And this one this morning:

Driving time.

Sleepy. Been getting sleepy around 11 lately, suppose that's not exactly suprising given 6.30 am wakeups with the girls back in school.

Was kind of hoping for a fun storm this weekend, but didn't get what i was hoping for; the 495/95 loops looked like weather barriers on the radar, with a clear bubble effect around boston.

Have recently been amazed by julie's continued ability to read anything she wants, from the text on sides of the comcast usual, to the menus on computer screen drop downs. She is now able to read long books by herself, quickly, and has almost no cases where she ever gets stuck. Compare this to last year at this time, where she could barely read the alphabet.

Not having a shoulder to cry on when I need it at the moment sucks. With Jess exhausted from school and falling asleep around 8.30, i've been having a couple hours a night where i'm alone with myself and my thoughts, which is somewhat ... Unfortunate with my current state of mind.

Such is life in the fast lane.