Bike Repair Class

 

I realize almost all of my posts lately have been bike maps, but I've been enjoying exploring new bike routes, and I enjoy technology, specifically GPS technology, more than I probably should. I promise to limit my posting to new bike routes, at the least.

Anyway, this morning, I rode down to the bike shop for their bike repair class. I learned how to change a tire, which may come in handy if I get a flat, as well as how to perform other bike maintenance. I am less enamored of learning how to do that, but I appreciate having some idea how my bike works.

I took a slightly different return route, partially due to one-way streets. Total distance was about 3.3 miles, but the GPSr cut off a couple times, so that's not exact.

Ride to Riverdale

 

This evening, after I got home from work, Christina and I rode our bikes down to the Riverdale Park Farmers Market. Instead of riding our usual route, we decided to head through College Park to the Trolley Trail. Unfortunately, at the southern edge of College Park, the paved trail ends. It's supposed to run all the way to Hyattsville eventually, but that hasn't been constructed. So we ended up riding on a path through the woods. As you can see it was a really direct route.

Unfortunately, the farmers market has lost its fruit supplier, so it wasn't as useful a trip as it could have been. Fortunately, we were able to get some ground lamb and...sorbet!

 

The path to the farmers market had a steep downhill, so it wasn't a good candidate for a return path (uphill); instead, we took our usual path up Queensbury. I did suffer two minor injuries (hamstring and ice cream headache), but I am recovering nicely. :-)

New Bike Route

 

I'm taking the day off today. Things to do...and such nice weather. We went out for an exploratory bike ride to find the College Park Trolley Trail. It turned out to be a nice ride, although the hill on Amherst is a little bit of a killer in the return direction. We did about a half an hour round trip (a little less than 4 miles). It would probably require half an hour each way to get to REI or MOM's Organic Market. It's also not that much further from where we were to Lake Artemesia and the airport...definitely a much quicker way to get there than Sunday's ride. On the way back, we stopped at town hall to get $0.25 stickers for our tennis rackets to allow us to use the town tennis courts. Then we looped through the town park and headed back home.

Now...mulch.

Longest Bike Ride Yet

 
Today (Sunday) we took our longest bike ride yet. My GPS receiver counts it as 7.7 miles. It's similar to one we've taken before -- through town, across East-West Highway, then through Hyattsville and Riverdale Park to the Northeast Branch Trail along the Anacostia. This time, however, we pushed past where we usually go...we went around the College Park Airport and made it to Lake Artemesia in Berwyn Heights. Maybe next time we'll make the loop around the lake.
 

Warm-Up

 

Christina and I took the bikes out together for the first time since before my recent trip to Germany. We just did a 15 minute tune-up to get our "bike legs" back. It provided me an opportunity to test out my new GPS receiver mount -- I had snapped the old one. It performed well and helped me produce this map. Hopefully, tomorrow we'll be able to get out for a longer ride.

Game Days

ETI: Estimated Time to Invasion
Originally uploaded by Eric E Haas

Last Saturday, I went to Timonium for a gaming convention. I initially went to exchange games as part of a trade, but since I paid admission, I figured I'd stay for the silent auction, and since I was staying for the silent auction, I might as well play some games. Here you can see me wearing my favorite hat and playing a game called "Estimated Time to Invasion". I was the alien -- the game wasn't that good.

Someone takes pictures at these gaming conventions and posts them at Flickr. Here you can see a picture of me playing Dominion. Probably the highlight of the day was seeing people playtesting unpublished expansions to Dominion. Well, that and getting a copy of Civilization, a game I lost in the 90s to some movers.

Geocaching Stats Update

It's been since last June since I posted a full-fledged geocaching stats update. At the time, I had found 61 caches; now I have found...78. Since last June (after the update), I have only found one physical cache. That was...yesterday. There's one on the bike trail mentioned in a previous post, so I decided to grab it. It wasn't too urban or too woodsy to touch on any of the things that had bothered me about physical geocaches. Today, I did an earthcache here in Cologne, Germany.

Sadly, some of the requirements lead to some pretty stupid pictures. Anyway, that brings my total "cache-to-cache" distance to 86743.95 miles. That means, on average, I've traveled over 1,100 miles between each cache. I'll bring that average down later in this week with a virtual cache a stone's throw from the cathedral. (I misunderstood the instructions today and have to take a new picture).



I'm now up to caches in 9 countries, having added Australia and Germany since last June.

I'm still enjoying waymarking more, but the ability to generate stats in geocaching is way more advanced.

Bike Ride

 

I had a nice bike ride after work today. This route is fairly similar to one Christina and I took on Sunday, but this time I brought my GPS receiver. It was just shy of 6 miles round trip. About three and a half miles were on-road, so I'm looking forward to getting a bike rack for the car, so we can start closer to the trail. We actually ordered one recently that attaches to the spare tire, but we need to get someone to install it.

Waymarking Sunday Drive

Last weekend, when I dropped Cheetah off at the kennel, I took Route 2 back, since I was headed towards Laurel. I noticed a number of historical markers along the road. So today, after I picked her up, we went north on Route 2 and found 5 markers (I also found one on Route 4, before I picked her up). Surprisingly, none of these is among the 259 historical markers already waymarked, so I'll have to write these up later. That'll bring me up to 8 posted in this category, only two short of my 10 in "You Are Here" signs. I'm not quite sure why these are my favorite two categories.

 

 

 

 

4% More German

In honor of (not celebrating) St. Patrick's Day, I decided to take another look at a project that I last seriously pondered about eight years ago -- genealogy, or more specifically trying to figure out my ethnicity.

I have 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents -- well, we all do. So if I can figure out their ancestry, I can figure out how many parts in 256 I am whatever. For example, my great-great-grandfather, William Grantham, came from England. For the sake of simplicity, I'll assume that all 16 of his great-great-grandparents (my great⁶-grandparents) came from England, too. So that contribution alone tells me I'm 16/256=1/16 (6.25%) English. Add in another English great-great-grandparent on my mother's side and I'm 32/256 (12.5%) English.

When I last left things in 2001, I had figured out 140 of these 256 parts. I was hoping with more information on the web these days, I'd be able to make progress with little further effort (ah, the American dream).

I succeeded, but I didn't make it much further. My paternal grandmother (Oma) has the most unresolved lineage, so I was happy to figure out more about her. Her great-grandmother, Elizabeth Keffer, is of German descent. Her great³-grandfather, Peter Putman, was born in Germany.

So that's 10 more parts out of 256. 10/256=5/128=3.90625%. So I'm about 4% more German than I realized. Approximate tallies to date: 24% German, 14% Scottish, 13% English, 6% Welsh, 2% Dutch, 41% Unknown.

None of this is too important, but if I find any Irish ancestry by next St. Patrick's Day, I promise to put on a silly leprechaun hat and celebrate to make up for previous days gone unobserved.

On a more substantive note, if you go to Google Books and search for "Alexander Cairns" and Wisconsin, the first result is for my great-great-grandfather, who is listed as a leading progressive in Grant County, Wisconsin.

Tourney Time

Well, once again, I'm filling out my bracket. I've uploaded a copy of mine from Yahoo! Sports. I'm filling out brackets on 3 different sites. My goal is to pick the same teams on each site (tracking one bracket is a waste of time, let alone three), but in the past, I've messed that up and ended up with slightly different teams on different sites.

Waymarking Category Hunt

Last August, I mentioned "Waymarking Bingo", the goal of getting 20 categories in a row in my "waymarking grid". At the time, I had 4 in a row, now I have...6. You can see them diagonally above from F22 to J27. For what it's worth, they are "Doorways of the World", "Burger King Restaurants", "Municipal Flags", "Newsstands/Newsagencies", "Art Deco - Art Noveau" and "Tennis Facilities."

Overall, I have 202 of 874, for a 23.1% hit rate. This seems like I'm not making any progress, but I see from last August's post that I was at 73 of 752, or 9.7%. Also, I'm missing 672 categories as opposed to August's 679, so I'm even making slight progress on that metric.

Since I'm not going anywhere this month (haven't even left Maryland), I'm trying to post some categories within walking distance of our house. I've done synagogues, Presbyterian churches, Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches and Lutheran churches. These are all easy to find nearby, and I can put them on my "ignore" list when I'm done, since I don't feel the need to see more of these when traveling. (I also found a couple of Civil War memorials last weekend near the farm where I was buying beef.)

Schadenfreude

I read recently that Bank of America stock fell on fears that the government may take over the bank. I would be very happy to see this happen.

When I moved out to California in 1992, I needed a local bank. First, it was hard to do cross-country banking with my credit union. Second, I needed to establish residency, if I was going to spend a second year in school there. I chose Bank of America through a fairly simple process: I walked from my apartment to campus, and chose it because it had a branch along the way. I was very happy with BofA, and was a little bit sad to close my account when I moved to Georgia the following year. But in 1993, there weren't really national banks. So I set off with a rather large cashier's check locked in my glove compartment.

When I got to Georgia, I decided that I was going to put down roots by choosing a bank with some sort of local flavor in its name. The first one I came across, "Southern Heritage", seemed a little too flavorful for my tastes. (In Georgia, the word "heritage" is generally code for the Confederacy or for African-Americans. In this case, I think it was the former.) My next choice was "BankSouth," which seemed more like it.

I had a happy banking relationship with BankSouth, until shortly before I was about to leave Georgia, when they were swallowed up by NationsBank. First of all, this was an anti-competitive merger -- these were the two main choices in much of the South, so combining them didn't help the consumer. Secondly, NationsBank had completely awful customer service. They instituted a program where, when you called in or visited a branch, their computers would determine how profitable you were to them, so they could figure out whether or not to be nice to you. Also, after the merger, people in their branches were completely flummoxed by my attempts to pay my BankSouth car loan -- yet they refused to give me new loan coupons.

When I moved back to Maryland, I happily closed my NationsBank account, refinanced my car with the credit union and have not been a bank customer ever since. In the late 1990s, NationsBank took over Bank of America and appropriated its name. I guess they figured that they could erase their (deserved) reputation for bad customer service by buying the name of a bank with good customer service. If the entity responsible for all this gets wiped out, so much the better.

Inauguration

We delayed our trip to San Diego to give us time to go to the inauguration. It was worth it! Things were packed so tightly that I didn't get any great pictures. Here are some snapshots I took.

Inauguration

Inaugural Concert

I went into DC to catch the Inaugural Opening Ceremonies Concert. Now if asks me if I'm going to a Springsteen or U2 concert, I can say, "Nah, I saw them at the Lincoln Memorial." It was fun, but I have no idea how DC will handle even more people on Tuesday.

Inaugural Concert

TPM Reader JG

Long-term Android's Dungeon readers may recall that in 2003, I was quoted on talkingpointsmemo.com.

Well, here it is in 2009, and I've been quoted again.

Apparently my fields of expertise are imprecise grammar and Puerto Rican politics.

Help Me Identify This Language

 

About a week ago, before we left for Arizona, I went out to waymark a nearby peace pole. When I got home, I was unable to do so, because the category requires a list of the languages on the pole, and I didn't have it.

Today I went back and took some pictures. When I got home, I was able to identify 11 out of the 12 languages on the pole, but one stumps me. If you look at the picture above, on the left, you'll see Arabic, Dutch and one I can't identify. (On the right is Gaelic, Russian and Animal Paw Prints.)

I am appealing to anyone reading this to help me figure out what language this is. It seems to borrow its alphabet from Greek and Hebrew -- possibly others.

Face in the Crowd

 

Pictures from the conference I went to in Australia have just been posted by the conference organizers. I appear in the background of several similar pictures, for example here. I am clearly taking careful notes about the rump session talk, to the point of neglecting my beer.

World Heritage: 2008 in Review

Well, as predicted last year, I broke my streak of visiting 5 world heritage sites per year. Unfortunately, it was in the wrong direction, as I only visited 4.

1. Istanbul in April.
   
2. Nancy, France in October.
   
3. Naracoorte Caves in Australia in November.
   
4. Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne in December.
   

The list is now up to 878. Sadly, none of the sites inscribed in 2008 were ones I could claim retroactively, so my total is now 44 out of 878, or 5.0%.

2009 is not particularly promising. I could hit sites in the US and UK again, perhaps. I have a trip planned to Cologne. Although I've already seen the cathedral, there is a site in the outskirts that I could add. My Asia trip is to Tokyo, but my preliminary scouting indicates no sites right around the city. Of course, I never know what the year will bring...

 

 

 

 

Tiny Penguins

Merry Christmas, and please enjoy these pictures of our last evening in Australia. We drove to Phillip Island, a couple of hours south of Melbourne to see the Penguin Parade. On the way, we stopped for dinner. We were just looking for a quick fish & chips meal, but we ended up at a relatively fancy restaurant with a nice view of the ocean. Too bad we had to eat and run, but the weak Australian dollar made it a reasonably priced experience.

We then headed to the Nobbies Centre, which was closed, despite what they had told me over the phone. The one bright spot was the ability to photograph any stray penguins, which was forbidden at the penguin parade itself.

The penguin parade itself happens at sunset when the tiny penguins come back to the beach to rest for the evening. I am not usually a sucker for cute animals, but there are few things more adorable than a foot-tall penguin waddling up the beach, being bowled over by a foot-and-a-half-tall wave, and struggling to its feet to waddle some more.

 

 

 

Melbourne Aquarium

The conference dinner was at the Melbourne Aquarium. Once again, still pictures did not quite do justice, so I present for you this video:


The aquarium seemed OK, but also seemed to fall into the category of "you've seen one aquarium, you've seen them all."

National Gallery of Victoria Waterfall Window

The National Gallery of Victoria, where we saw the Gursky exhibit, had a neat waterfall window. A picture didn't really do it justice, so I shot this short video.



I didn't notice the anatomically correct statue until later.

Gursky

I was pleased to find out that there was an Andreas Gursky exhibition in Melbourne while we were there. I first encountered Gursky's work in 2000 at the Tate Modern. According to Wikipedia, Gursky is "a German photographer known for his enormous architecture and landscape color photographs, often employing a high point of view." That seems pretty accurate.

One of the neat things about his work is that you can't really appreciate the art without going to the gallery and seeing the "originals". The sheer scope and detail of the work is impressive in a way that can't be reproduced online.

I've now seen around 25 of his works, out of a total of around 100 in his career, so this was a good chance to appreciate the breadth of his career.

 
 

Sunday in Melbourne

We had some free time on Sunday before the opening of my conference, so we walked from our hotel to the Royal Exhibition Building and Carlton Gardens. The Building and Gardens are a world heritage site because they, "as the main extant survivors of a Palace of Industry and its setting, together reflect the global influence of the international exhibition movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries." OK, it's not Stonehenge, but it goes on the list -- I'll be posting my year-end World Heritage review soon. We also visited the Melbourne Museum, which has a nice aboriginal collection (no pictures). They also have Phar Lap -- or at least his skin. The rest of him is in Canberra (heart) and New Zealand (skeleton). We bought tram tickets and headed back to the hotel. The tram proved to be a fairly convenient way of getting around the central area of Melbourne, although it made life challenging when driving.

 
 

Giant Koala

For our drive back from Adelaide to Melbourne, we took the direct, non-coastal route so that we could make it in a day. The trip is much less exciting, but we found a few things of interest. One of these was the Giant Koala, our second and final "big" item of this trip (we found more last time). We don't recommend the hot dogs there, by the way.
 

Ned Kelly

While looking over our pictures, I realized I left out one establishment from my "Dining Out in Adelaide" post. On our last night there, we went to "Ned Kelly's Restaurant" in North Adelaide.

I think that the US and Australia may be more like each other than they are like any other countries. They're both big, new, wild countries -- the main difference is that Australia is emptier and newer. One of the similarities is the propensity to turn outlaws into heroes.

Ned Kelly is a 19th century Australian outlaw, whose most amusing feature is that he prepared for his last stand by donning a set of homemade armor. Thus, "Ned Kelly's Restaurant" is a cheesy testament to Australiana. Think Outback, but based on Australians' idea of Australia, rather than Americans'.

I had the kangaroo, emu and camel. Christina passed on the camel; wise choice. But the kangaroo was tasty. Too bad they were out of wallaby.