First Bike Ride of Spring

On Saturday, while the kids were napping, I went for my first bike ride of the spring. I tried to do some geocaching at the College Park Airport, but I could not find the geocache.

Since time was short (and the kids were probably going to wake up), I tried to cut through Riverdale. Unfortunately, there was a train stopped on the tracks.

Not knowing how long this would last -- there have been a couple of human-train collisions in the area recently -- I headed through Hyattsville. When I got to the train bridge underpass over the Northeast Branch, I saw the train moving at about 10 mph. So it probably would have been faster to wait. And my legs would have thanked me. But this was a nice ride, and a good workout (about 10.5 miles).

First Ride of Spring at EveryTrail

Because I didn't have a blog in 1991...

20 years ago today,

The donut sale that we were supposed to have today got cancelled because the student government told us the wrong day & the Korean Christian Fellowship was actually the group scheduled for today. For a while, we were stuck with 360 donuts, but the marching band, which is having a sale elsewhere today, bought most of them & the student government bought the rest since they messed up & we don't have any money.

 I believe the "we" is the Undergraduate Math Club.

The "Stay at Home Bowl": Dubious Achievement Update

In 2003, I gave a list of all of the teams to defeat both Super Bowl participants. Teams that can sit at home and say, "We can beat either of these guys." At the time, I was rooting for a Patriots-Seahawks Super Bowl, since the (5-11) Redskins had beaten both teams and would have tied the 1981 Browns for the worst team to have this "dubious achievement" had the Seahawks not exited the playoffs before the Big Game. I was reminded of this post recently when I heard Bob Ryan on Tony Kornheiser's radio show talk about how great the 2010 Patriots were because they had beaten both Super Bowl entrants. So which teams in the past 8 years get added to the list?

• 2010 New England Patriots (14-2)
• 2008 Philadelphia Eagles (9-6-1)
• 2008 New York Giants (12-4)
• 2005 Jacksonville Jaguars (12-4)
• 2004 Pittsburgh Steelers (15-1) 

The Patriots are second only to the 2004 Steelers for the team with the best record to hold this distinction. Let's ask the following question, though.  Of the 15 previous winners of the "Stay at Home Bowl", how did each team fare the following season?

• Won Super Bowl: 2005 Steelers
• Lost Super Bowl: 1979 Rams
• Lost in Conference Championship: 1980 Chargers*, 1981 Chargers, 2008 Eagles
• Lost in Divisional Round: 1994 Dolphins
• Lost in Wild Card Round: 1982 Browns, 1987 Seahawks
• Missed Playoffs: 1986 Dolphins, 1997 Cowboys, 2001 Titans, 2001 Redskins, 2006 Jaguars, 2009 Giants

So these teams have a 60% success rate making the playoffs next year, well above the normal rate (which has been between 35 and 43 percent, except for the 1982 strike year). Perhaps more impressive, these teams have a 33% rate of making the conference championship game, well above the 12-15% rate when you consider all teams.

Book Review: Voices

Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Voices is the second book in Le Guin's Tales of the Western Shore trilogy. I read it because the third book, Powers, won the 2008 Nebula. I'm also reading it because Le Guin is a fantastic writer. If I counted correctly, Le Guin has won the most Nebulas for Best Novel with 4 -- nobody else has won more than 2. Even more impressively, her wins were in four different decades. I wouldn't put it past her to add a 5th in the coming years. She's also won a National Book Award and a Newberry Medal.

I had been avoiding reading fiction recently, except on travel, because, you know, babies. But I find it important to read a little before bed to unwind. I figure that since I can renew books twice, nine weeks is more than enough time to finish a novel. What I didn't count on is the compelling nature of Le Guin's writing. I planned on reading a chapter at a time, but sometimes I got so absorbed that I went through 2 or 3 chapters, robbing me of precious sleep. (Of course, sometimes my eyes drooped after a few pages, and I couldn't get through the chapter.)

Voices is less of a sequel to Gifts than a companion, set about twenty years later in the same general setting. The two main characters from Gifts appear in important, but not leading, roles. It tells the tale of a young woman in land under foreign occupation. She is from a prominent family, but a branch of it who have ended up as servants. Nobody in this land is doing particularly well due to the occupation (she is in fact the daughter of a soldier who raped her now-deceased mother). The book chronicles the awakening of her somewhat-vague magical powers and the struggle of her people to free themselves.

It was interesting reading this book while, in the real world, protests shook the Egyptian dictatorship. I don't want to be too glib in drawing parallels -- in particular, Egypt is not under foreign occupation. But there was a certain resonance that made Voices more exciting to read in this context.

My county library continues their practice of shelving much science fiction in the "young adult" section. It used to bother me more to have to go there to retrieve what I consider quite-sophisticated fiction. Perhaps parenthood has softened my perspective, though -- if it means that well-written books with mature themes are more accessible to kids, maybe it isn't so bad.

In the end, I gave Voices 4/5 stars rather than 5/5 because I found it compelling, but not gripping. Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but while it was very enjoyable and thought-provoking at the time of reading, I don't see this as a book I'll be mulling over in the months or years to come.



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Geocoin Update: Free State Generic #3

I haven't had the chance to find any geocaches since the two in November (winter is always a slow season, even when you don't have twins to juggle).  But the geocoin I dropped off then has been getting some updates.

Three days after I dropped it off, someone picked it up.  They dropped it off New Year's Eve in a cache in Delaware.    Yesterday, someone picked it up with the note that it was their "first geocoin". That makes me a little nervous, since it seems more likely that they won't know what to do with it or that they will give up geocaching shortly.  Then again, I've been holding on to a trackable for two-and-a-half months, so I'm one to talk.

Sadly, since my last update, the other geocoins have been MIA.  I marked them as such, and have pretty much written them off.

Foursquare, reconsidered

A year ago today, I wrote a post about this new site called "Foursquare" I had started using. At the time, none of my friends were using it, so that dampened my enthusiasm.  Well, a year later, I'm still using and enjoying it.  Here are my reflections after a year:

• Being mayor is cool, but a majority of places I'm mayor of, I have a very tenuous hold on -- someone visiting two days in a row could knock me out.  
• I like saying I'm the mayor of a park or a good restaurant, but less so a grocery store or a gas station.  As the parent of twin infants, I find my opportunity to visit places frequently to be fairly diminished.  That should pick up again as they get more mobile.
• Nobody cares about Foursquare points.  They need to revamp them or get rid of them.
• By April, five of my friends had started using Foursquare, and when Christina started in May, it became a lot more interesting.  Sometimes, seeing where people check in interests me more than a Facebook status update.
• I still haven't used it for a spontaneous meeting with a friend.  I think it promises a lot of, "Hey, so-and-so is at the bar down the street, let's meet up," but at my age and place in life that isn't going to happen.  As I said last year, "I could see this being pretty neat 15 years ago in grad school."
• The badges are awesome.  I think they're my favorite part -- I especially enjoy generating badge envy.  Some badges I'm envious of: Just Desserts, Historian, and for some reason most of all, I'm on a Boat!
• They've addressed the cheating pretty well, especially with the recent requirement to use a location-aware phone for check-in.  It would have prevented me from getting any mayorships and badges from last January to April on my old Palm Treo, but I guess the world moves on.
• It would really help if the game got more developed.  For now, as long as they release more badges, I'll be pretty happy, but the whole real world meets digital gaming nexus probably needs more dimensions to take off.

Nebula Update: A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg

A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book won the 1971 Nebula award for Best Novel, so I read it as part of my project to read all such award winners. I vaguely recalled starting to read it before and never being able to make it through.

Well, I got to the end, and then remembered reading the whole thing. Can't remember when -- 5 years ago or 20?

The middle is very nice -- pure Silverberg world-building in the style of Lord Valentine's Castle (aside: this book won the Nebula, and none of the Majipoor books was nominated??!). The beginning and end are weaker, dealing with two peculiarities of the work -- the world's insistence that individuals hide their individuality (the word "I" is considered an obscenity), and the narrator's attempt to overcome that through the use of drugs.

At times, these themes seem very dated -- rooted in the 1960s/1970s. Silverberg handles them well, though, showing the downfall of the narrator in fairly subtle terms. On the one hand, since he's fighting for individuality, we're inclined to root for him. On the other hand, his insistence that he's got this wonderful drug with no side effects (despite all evidence to the contrary) seems a little familiar and turns him into a pathetic figure.

I'm now up to having read 31 of 45 Nebula winners. This one was harder to find, so I bought it used off Amazon. That worked pretty well, since I was under no pressure to return in to the library. I could read it a few chapters at a time, as parenting permitted. As it turned out, I finished the second half on a fairly empty flight back from New Orleans, as we were able to spread out and both kids slept most of the flight.



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The Decline and Fall of the Android's Dungeon

Here's a graph of the number of posts to this blog by year.  As I commented in one of my (rare) posts last year, over time, there's been more non-blog outlets for my random thoughts.  21 is pretty low, though, even given the significant life disruptions of 2010.  I'll try to do better this year, even if it means including goofy, "meta" posts like this one.

Thanks to the Department of Education for helping me create this graph.  Your tax dollars at work!

World Heritage: 2010 in Review

Last year, I said

"I don't anticipate a big haul next year, but one conference near an iconic World Heritage Site (on the level of Stonehenge) intrigues me. Stay tuned..."

Well, the conference originally was supposed to be near the Pyramids, then got moved thousands of miles away. To top it off, it didn't look interesting enough to go, and it was too close to the boys' birth for me to travel.

So the lack of a big haul was prescient. My two trips out of the country, to Montreal and Singapore, were not sufficiently close to the locations of any World Heritage Site. So I didn't visit any new sites this year.

But that doesn't leave me empty handed. On further review, the inscription of Jeju Volcanic Island and Lava Tubes in 2007 appears more interesting. It consists of three sites: Geomunoreum, Seongsan and Mount Halla. Digging through my photos from my first trip to Jeju, in 2001, turns up one labeled, "Me, on top of Sunrise Peak". A little searching leads me to the discovery that "Sunrise Peak" is the English name for Seongsan.

With the new sites inscribed this past summer (none of which I've visited), my total is now 47 out of 911, or 5.2%. It's a rounding error away from last year's percentage (which should have included Jeju, but didn't).

What does 2011 hold? The most promising item is a return trip to Korea, where two World Heritage sites look to be within public transportation of the conference site.  There's also the possibility of picking up one in Hungary, if a conference there turns out to be worth the trip.

Where's Jon? Singapore Edition

It's time for the slightly less exciting version of "Where's Waldo?" in which I try to find myself in pictures that people have posted of conferences I've attended. (I've labeled similar posts so you can view all of them here.)  The clearest shot (reproduced above) is here.  I'm also on the right in this picture from the rump session.

I have no idea who any of these other people are.  Also, I don't like fisheye lenses because they make people (in particular me) look like they have hunchbacks.

Maybe There's a Third of a Century Club I Could Aim for?

In 2003, I posted about the Traveler's Century Club (and updated in 2006).  Basically, it's an organization of people who have visited at least 100 countries (and have a pretty loose definition of what constitutes a country).  Since 2006, I have visited 8 more:

1. Bahamas
2. Estonia
3. Japan 
4. Netherlands
5. Sarawak
6. Singapore
7. Spain
8. Turkey in Europe (Istanbul)

Also,  Jeju Island (South Korea) was added to the list this year, so I have a total of 31.

My pace of two a year was helped by the fact that I attend two particular conferences every year, one of which rotates around Europe and the other around Asia. Each, however, rotates entirely among countries I've already visited for the next two years. This year, though I missed the European one, it repeated also, so I visited no new countries this year for the first time since 1999. I might go to one in Hungary next year, so there's always the chance to add to the total through other conferences.

930 Places Left to See

 In 2004, I posted a list of the 49 places from the book 1000 Places to See Before you Die that I had seen.

Here are the places I've seen since then:

• Blenheim Palace, which we visited in 2005.
• Vienna, which I visited in 2007.
• Paris, which we visited in 2005.
• Place Stanislas, which I visited in 2008.
• The Rhine Valley, which I first visited in 2006.
• Cologne's Cathedral Quarter, which I visited on the same trip.
• La Sagrada Familia, which I visited in 2007.
• Museu Picasso, which I visited on the same trip to Barcelona and found a bit disappointing.
• The Hermitage, which I visited in 2006.
• The Park Hyatt Tokyo, which I walked by last year.
• Tsukiji Fish Market, which I ate at last year.
• Hagia Sophia, which I visited in 2008.
• Topkapi Palace, which I visited on the same trip.
• Headhunter's Trail, which I visited in 2007
• Raffles Hotel, which I visited earlier this week.
• Singapore's Street Food, which I also sampled this week.
• The Great Ocean Road, which we drove in 2008.
• Hotel Del Coronado, which we first visited in 2008.
• Museum Mile, which I visited in 2008.
• Graceland, which we visited in 2005.
• Old San Juan, which we visited in 2005.

That's 21 more, for a total of 70.

What prompted me to revisit the list?  I wrote a review of this book for the site Goodreads.  Goodreads offered to let me post the review to my blog.  In order to have the content in a more open place (and to provide more content for this blog), I've decided to start doing that with some of the reviews.  (I'm also posting some to Amazon.)

1000 Places to See Before you Die by Patricia Schultz

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


It's an intriguing concept, and kinda fun to page through, but way too heavy on $300/night hotels, spas, etc. Let's say I'm going to Dublin (to open to a section at random). She recommends a festival, the Book of Kells and the pubs (possibly in conjunction with St. Patrick's Day). All good. But she also recommends a $65/plate restaurant and a $300/night hotel. I could forgive the restaurant if there was less of that kind of stuff.

I prefer to use the almost-1000-long World Heritage List. Maybe it's just as arbitrary in its own way, but at least it's the product of a consensus, and it's heavier on cultural and natural must-sees.



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Pictures from Singapore

Perhaps you can view this as a sequel to this post and this one from 2007.  Then I had two layovers comprising about 30 hours in Singapore.  This time Singapore was my actual destination, and I had about 80 hours total.  Of course, this time much of that was taken up by the conference, so I feel like I didn't do as much, oddly enough.

I did throw back a Singapore Sling at the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel, visit the National Museum of Singapore, and enjoy some chili crab at a place called Gluttons Bay.  Pictures of these and more are shown in the album below.

Singapore 2010

Two More Geocaches

I've found two more geocaches this month, bringing my total for the year to 3.  Not too impressive, but it matches my total from 2009.  (Of course, last year, I did them in three consecutive days in two countries, which was a bit cooler.)

On Veterans Day, I took a bike ride around my usual 8.5-mile loop of the immediate area.  There are at least 4 geocaches on that loop, one of which was the first of my 2009 finds.  With the aid of a USB charger that takes AA batteries, I powered my phone for the drive and took off after one of these caches.  It was a nice combination of having my Garmin GPS receiver loaded with the coordinates and being able to use the Android phone app to get details once I got to the cache.  As much as I'd like an "all-in-one" solution, this method works pretty darn well.

Spoiler alert: the cache was located just off the trail in the tree stump pictured.  I dropped off Free State Generic #3, my latest geocoin and picked up Montana Plata, a similarly state-themed trackable.


Yesterday, while on my way to pick up our Thanksgiving Turkey from a Frederick County farm, I had a rare opportunity to add a new Maryland county to my list.  There is a virtual geocache in Mount Airy, based around the town 9/11 memorial.  Below is a picture of the memorial plaque, cropped to remove the information needed to log the cache. 

Mount Airy is in Carroll County, which gives me my 9th Maryland county, as shown on the map below.  In July 2008, I noted that I had 122 virtuals (and similar) within 70 miles of home left to find.  Mainly due to the addition of earthcaches, that number is now up to 137.  I may have to reconsider my goal, given my reduced time for traveling up to 70 miles and the news that virtual geocaches may be reintroduced in some form.

Slicing and Dicing the Geocaching Numbers

Well, now that I'm back geocaching, I wanted to return to one of my favorite secondary activities -- slicing and dicing the statistics about the geocaches I've found.  I had previously sung the praises of the "It's Not About the Numbers" web site.  Here's a county-by-county map of Maryland I generated in June 2008 using that site.

Unfortunately, INATN shut down in June of 2010.  So with my renewed interest in geocaching, I had to find a new way of getting my map/stats fix.

After reading the geocaching forums, my best option seemed to be downloading the GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) program.  Someone even posted the approximate INATN color scheme, which I plugged in to get a similar map.

I don't think the map looks as nice (and I'm irritated by the labeling of St. Mary's County as "Mary's"), but it'll have to do. I'll probably pay to register the program, since I was willing to contribute a few bucks to keep INATN alive a few years ago.

The difference in the two maps from a content perspective is the second cache I found in Frederick County in July 2008.

I have to amend my praise for the geocaching Android application a little bit since the last post. While on a break during a conference in North Carolina last weekend, I attempted to find a cache that would allow me to color in NC on the national map. The GPS receiver on the phone wasn't all that accurate, and it killed my battery. The one I found it Maryland was great because looking at the satellite view in Google Maps was good enough. For future use, though, I think I'll carry my Garmin receiver in addition to the phone, so I can punch in the coordinates for more accuracy (and battery life).

Return to Geocaching

My last post inspired me to get ready to do some more geocaching, so I could release more geocoins into the world.  I found the time to activate the Free State Generic #3 coin.  (#4 and #5 are sitting right next to it, but I haven't gotten good pictures of them yet.)

I decided to see what was new in the world of geocaching. First of all, there is now a geocaching app for Android phones. Awesome. Previously there was a lot of prep work to do in deciding what caches to look for, downloading them to my GPS receiver, and downloading descriptions to my smart phone.  The descriptions could get out of date, and didn't have the full logs of others who had found the cache.

With the Android application, as long as I have mobile service or access to WiFi, I can get cache information -- which I can download for offline use, if necessary.  I get to see photos people have posted, and I can plot the cache location on Google Maps.  Definitely worth the $9.99 if I'm planning to do some caching.

Christina and I took the boys on a walk to get some dinner (for us), and on the way back, I got to test it out.  I found my first cache in almost a year and a half.  Granted, it was hidden in a lamppost, which is generally regarded as the lamest type of cache.  Also, it was too small for me to put a geocoin in.  But, still  -- I'm back in the game!

Another Geocoin Update

After April's update, I did in fact send e-mails to the last known possessor of all of my geocoins (except Free State Generic #1, pictured above, which was moving along at a healthy clip).  Not only did I not hear back from anyone (either via e-mail or by having them loosen their grip on the coins), Free State Generic #1, after being placed in Alabama and picked up, also went off the grid.

Until last Sunday.  At that point, someone retroactively recorded that they had dropped it off on July 22...0.85 miles from its previous location.  Ah, well.  At least it's still "alive".

This just makes me want to dig out the ones I have upstairs and launch some new coins.  Now that the weather has cooled down, I know a nice place where there's a cache near a bike trail.  As soon as the kids give us a moment of rest, maybe I'll try to find the time to get them set up and dropped off.

Biking into DC

I had taken this approximate route as far as Peirce Mill in Rock Creek Park before. This time, I decided to keep going and hop on the Metro when I was done. I took the path as far as the Potomac, and I was prepared to finish at the Foggy Bottom Metro. But, hey, I was in DC by the monuments, why not ride around? So I headed up Constitution, past everybody who had gotten into town early for Rolling Thunder, and then to the Archives/Navy Memorial Station. That allowed more sight-seeing, a delicious frozen mango treat, and a straight shot home on the Green Line. A version of this trip is also available at Everytrail.

Bike to Work Day

Yesterday was Bike to Work Day, and I achieved a goal I've had for the past year of actually biking to work.  I ended up biking 20 miles in about 2.5 hours.  If you don't count the stops, I averaged 9.5 mph, which is pretty good.

(Note: a version of this post with cooler maps is available at the Everytrail site.  I am, however, trying to make sure that I have versions of things I carry about on my blog, since Blogger makes it easy for me to download a backup of my entire blog.  With other sites (I'm looking at you, Facebook), I feel like my history is out of my control.)


I left home around 7:30 and swung by the College Park Bike to Work pit stop.  I got my free t-shirt, and I won some arm warmers in a raffle.  Well, I won a choice of items, and I already had the other items.  I think there's a reason I didn't already have arm warmers -- it's called a long-sleeved shirt.  I munched on a free bagel, and then I had the guy from REI check out my bike (it was fine) while I digested the bagel.

I cut back to the Trolley Trail to Paint Branch Parkway, which became Good Luck Road.  I was on Good Luck Road for a large portion of the total trip.  I passed a bunch of NASA test facilities, which I think finally revealed to me the origins of the name of the road.  I didn't have too much trouble finding my way on the part of the trip that I hadn't done before, but I got in a little bit of trouble trying to find a shortcut from Old Town Bowie to 197...I ended up by some very nice horse farms with a "No Tresspassing" sign that seemed to block my way to the WB&A Trail.  The total distance for the detour wasn't too bad, but the hill was.

After a couple of miles on 197, I was on the mean streets of Bowie, which provided a very pleasant ride on suburban residential streets.  It was exhilarating knowing how close I was to my goal.  Finally, I pulled up to work, loaded my bike on my pre-positioned car, then went into my office, grabbed the clothes I had left there, showered, and did some work.  Can't wait 'til next year!

Nebula Update

The Nebula awards were announced last night.  I actually had taken it upon myself to start reading the best novel nominees.  Life is somewhat hectic these days, but I managed to get through 3 of the 6.  They were

• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi 
• Flesh and Fire, Laura Anne Gilman  
• The City & The City, China Miéville 

Of the three, I preferred that The Windup Girl win.  Flesh and Fire was a good book, but it was pretty much standard fantasy fare, with the unique characteristic that spells were cast using wine.  A nice theme, but not spectacular enough to win the genre's top award.  The City & The City was a very interesting book, but it was barely science fiction.  Kudos to Miéville for creating something that defies categorization, but I feel like the award should be for a book more clearly in the genre.  The Windup Girl was not entirely to my tastes -- I found some of the dystopian aspects of it weird and unrealistic -- but I felt like it contained enough good writing and interesting ideas to beat out the other two.

I'm pleased to say that The Windup Girl won.  Partially because it means I don't have to read the other three. 

I haven't read any of the older ones since my last update, so I've now read 30 out of 45.  I have not yet read last year's winner.  Since I like to read all of the preceding books in the series, I now have a trilogy on my hands.  Since it's Ursula K. LeGuin, I'm looking forward to it.  First I have to finish Connie Willis' Blackout, which I suspect will be one of the 2010 nominees.

Once I get to the LeGuin book, I'll have read all of the winners 1992-2009, so I can start working my way back again.  (Or forward, if I don't have enough time to get to that trilogy in the next year...)