Louisville Downtown Exit Coverage Map

Here’s a quickie but oldie. When I started going downtown more often for various reasons, I decided to study the layout a bit. I ended up drawing this map:

I did this by having two google maps open; I would then do a route in one, and drag the endpoint around; as I discovered when things “switched”, I would update the map in the other window. I often had to stop and wait because I ran out of API calls per minute. I’d love to write (or have someone write) an equivalent program, something that colorizes the 2D space of google maps by some function of a route to that spot.

Here’s a readonly link to the map that I made.

It will be fun to re-update this after the bridge work is done to see how things might have changed.

Kosair Charities “Bears On Patrol” Sighting

As I come in to work now, what did I see
Laid out on the side of the road
A mound full of Teddy Bears winking up at me
Laid out on the side of the road

It turns out this is the work of Korsair Bears on Patrol. It’s a stuffed animal drive; collected by, in this case, United Health Care and Optium. (see their names in the first picture on the sign). They started out at 700, then 4000, and this year it snowballed to 13000+. Today was media day, media was arriving at 11:30, so they were trying to set the bears out to make for a better shot.

But it was really windy. The plastic kept getting blown about. They tried water bottles. I raided my parking lot for larger stones of gravel. Turns out, the solution was to dump more bears down on the plastic, like this boss is doing. They said by the time all the bears get out there, they should have all the plastic filled up. I might swing back out around lunch time to see that.

The lady said that they used to be in the first floor over in our building, but now they’re on the third floor, and its much harder than they first thought to move that many bears. Never fear, the call has gone out to the rest of their company, and they’re getting the manpower together to get the job done. She showed me a picture oh her phone of a fishbowl conference room – the kind with one wall being all glass – stuffed floor to ceiling with bears.

The purpose of the bears: The police officers and firemen keep them in their vehicles. If they encounter a family in a distressing situation, with a child who needs comforting, out comes the bear to provide some luvvin’ in ways only a teddy bear can.

I love people, and I love people doing good things.

E-Cycling

I work for igNew.
igNew rents space from Tier Reit.
Tier Reit is a arm of Behringer Harvard.

Somebody at either TR or BH decided it would be a good idea to invite Bluegrass E-Cycle over. I am very glad they did that; we had several servers and monitors and microwaves (yes, microwaves) sitting around that needed to be dealt with.

The news flash is that they are doing the same thing tomorrow, at one of TR’s other properties. Click on map for link to google maps to get directions. I don’t know if the address (200 Bullitt Lane) is correct or not. I’m guessing the timing is similar: 9am to 3pm.

* Bluegrass E-Cycle image cross-linked from their website – hope you guys don’t mind, I’m trying to promote you.

A Visit to Bricks and MiniFigs

I’ve always loved LEGO’s. When I found out that Louisville got a Bricks and MiniFigs (franchise) store, I had to go check it out. (Prices should be visible if you zoom in on the pictures)

Yes, they have Minifigs

Yes, they have New-In-The-Box Sets

Yes, they have Used Sets – some parts may be the wrong colors, accessories might be missing

(The price got cropped. It was $80)

They have Tubs of Loose Bulk Parts that you can buy:

I don’t see myself making any purchases there anytime soon. I have no specific projects in mind; I do have a desire to build some of the sets I’ve seen go by over the years, but it would be more cost effective for me to get an account with Pley than to actually buy the sets, I think.

Then again, for a large set, at $40/month .. suppose I do this for 3 months.. I don’t get to keep any of the sets.. $120.. Hmm. Maybe I’ll revisit that.

Watching TreeHouse Videos Quickly

In November, I signed up to be a mentor for Code Louisville. It’s a program where people use TeamTreeHouse (as made available to anybody living or working in Jefferson County by Louisville Free Public Library) to study up on stuff, and work on projects, and if they need help, they can ask the mentors during their weekly class/lab.

For the first Two Months, I stayed current on all the videos, and quizzes, at TeamTreeHouse. You can see that from my profile on the right.

Unfortunately, I do not have the 10 hours per week necessary to do this properly. (Well, 5 hours for watching videos, and another 5 for working on a personal project).

I still want to keep up (so that I know what the course is teaching the students, so I can help the students when they have questions), so now my mission is to stay up on videos, while not taking the quizzes that come after each video, in the most efficient way possible. (Note: possibly Windows specific, YMMV):

Step 1: Subscribe to the iTunes feed.

Every video lives somewhere like this:

Go up to the “course” level URL instead: , and there you will find the magic button:

The actual link address is something like this:

itpc://teamtreehouse.com/library/javascript-foundations.rss?feed_token=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

Which, if you convert it to http, and get it in a browser, looks like this:

I.E. It’s a plain old RSS feed. However, the itpc:// causes it to open in iTunes as a podcast, where you get this:

Note. At first, you don’t get all the episodes – I had to tell it to “show old episodes”, and I had to click the little cloud icon to download each one .. there’s probably a way to do that easier. I clicked on each one. I was at work, so it downloaded fairly quickly.

Step 2: Watch them with VLC

Then, instead of watching the episodes with iTunes, I find them on disk, and watch them in VLC. I go as far as to create a VLC playlist to get them in order:

Then, while I’m watching them, I can speed them up:

[ , ]	Slower/Faster in 0.10x increments If the speed gets higher than 4x, it cuts audio out
=	Resume normal speed
Shift-Left-Arrow, Shift-Right-Arrow	3 seconds left or right

I find that watching at 8x, I can tell what the subject matter is fairly easily. If I find something interesting, “=” + a couple of Shift-Left-Arrows, and I watch that at normal speed (or sometimes only double-speed).

I just watched 3 hours of video in an hour. And I don’t think I missed any detail. Nice.

In another half hour, I can catch up to where the class(es) would have me be at.

Selling and Buying a Car in Louisville

For the last week I’ve been doing a lot of Car Analyses. Some of it was trying to figure out how to judge one car over another; another was visiting my history of cars, and determining satisfaction, and pinpointing my motives. This is what I’ve figured out; I’ll start with the most useful first:

My Experiences with Places to Sell or Buy a Car in Louisville

CarMax

Will usually buy at the bottom end of KBB trade in value, unless <= 50k, then gives a decent price

Will sell at above KBB Value. *

* = better quality cars than we’ve bought anywhere else.

Cottage Car Sales

Better buy value than CarMax

Sells at below KBB Value usually (but small inventory and some quirks)

Sam Swope Honda World

Best value for the Honda that we sold them

Haven’t bought one from them myself.

Disclaimer: commentary above is based on 1 statistical sample in some cases and may not be significant.

In the end, we got $2000 more for our 2008 Honda Accord Coupe from Sam Swope Honda World than we would have at either Cottage or CarMax. Terry Smith there was very professional, courteous, and prompt; no pressure of any kind; I would definitely do business with him again.

Evaluating the Worth of a Car To Me

When I was in the throes of trying to make a decision between a X and a Y, I needed some way to evaluate the cars. Here are the tools that I found:

UsedAutoGraph.com	Mileage vs Sales Price Active Listings vs Active Auctions Overall value decline How long does the car last Popularity
http://www.edmunds.com/honda/civic/2010/reliability.html	Its somewhat buried in the Edmunds website, and really i should give a link to identifix, however, look at that URL. I could very quickly look up any make/model/year and find years to avoid.
http://autos.jdpower.com/research/Honda/Civic/2010/ratings.htm	Another awesome URL, gave a quick overview of the quality of the car.
Car Max Inventory	Pictures of cars. Mileage. Feature availability.

I also used a formula like this:

Consider a 2010 Honda Civic EX for $16k with 42k Miles on it.
According to UsedAutoGraph, it holds its value well (should not die) till 100k, probably even viable to 200k. Knowing myself, I’ll find a reason to upgrade, so lets say 150k miles instead. Approx end sale price then is $5K.
So I would get 108k miles for approx $11k, yielding around 10 cents a mile from the purchase price.
at MPG of 25/36, I would get about 30mpg out of it, at $3.50/gallon yields 3.50/30 = 11 cents per mile gas price.
So the car would be about 21 cents per mile, for me.

I did this same analysis for the cars we had owned till now. I always thought that the Honda Pilot that we bought was a complete gas hog.. averaging 15 mpg.. however, the sale price vs the buy price made it BETTER than the Ford Focus that we also had. I would not have thought that. (Then again, the Focus had an encounter with a Deer which dropped its resale considerably)

Picking through CarMax Inventories

We pretty much knew we were going to buy the next car through CarMax, or at least use a CarMax car as the baseline to compare against. My general approach was:

Use them for test drives to figure out which car we want (year differences, trim level differences, lie down in the trunk of the car, etc)
Assume that we will NOT be buying the car from the local (Louisville) CarMax
- This freed me from the necessity to make the decision NOW.
Search their inventory for the right mileage, color, options nationwide. We could also look at the CarFax history (for free) and see where the car used to live (avoiding Florida due to Salt damage).
Spend $99-$299 and arrange a transfer of the vehicle to Louisville.
- At this point, the car is locked in as mine. But it might take a day to three weeks to execute.
- This gives me time to reflect and really decide if this is the car for me.
- Good thing, because that Ford Escape that I ordered.. ended up having second thoughts and choosing not to buy it.
- To CarMax’s benefit – I cancelled the order fast enough, they had not loaded it on the truck, so they gave my money back (they didn’t have to). (Well, i was transferring a different car, so they moved it to the second transfer).
The car hasn’t arrived yet; I’m in that reflecting place. So I can’t say what happens next; but it will probably involve test driving, and then buying this car.

Filtering CarMax Inventories

They have a LOT of cars, with a LOT of options. Here’s how I tackled that, in an Excel Spreadsheet:

Initial search: No filter, just the make/model/year range, sorted by price, and or mileage. Pull the first 10 into the spreadsheet. Get a baseline, the corners of the grid. This is the least / most amount of money I would spend on that car type. Chart it. Bubble chart using a function to show age by bubble size.

Successive Searches: I narrow it down by features, getting more and more selective. I pull each of those into the spreadsheet, but as a different series. I layer the series so that the more specific ones drown out the less specific ones.

Result:

Using this approach, I could easily see that if I wanted X set of options, the lowest miles for the price was at Y, but if I added Z option to it, then that drove the price up by Y2. Ie, how much car am I willing to spend on. Note that I inverted circle sizes, so that newer cars were bigger circles.

Note that while filtering in CarMax, I really like how they show numbers next to features. This helps me figure out what are “standard” options and/or are packaged with each other. In this screenshot example, (106) is standard across everything, while the Satellite Radio Ready is a much more selective. I got pretty good at it, being able to choose 3-4 options that narrowed down the car to exactly what I was looking for.

Summary

Its been a crazy week. Its been a fun research process. In the end, I have a car on order that I cannot wait to get my hands on. I even made a picture of it my desktop background.

I hope some of these tools are useful to you in your future. Enjoy!

Code Louisville 2.0, Shelving Various Things, New Tech

Tonight was my first night of mentoring at Code Louisville 2.0. I don’t know if I’d mentioned it before; I volunteered to be a mentor in a program that the city is putting together. The City’s viewpoint is, we need more skilled IT people (there’s a shortage). My viewpoint is, I get to help somebody who wants to learn, to learn something, is good with me.

It went pretty well. The program is using Treehouse for the source of instruction; the Louisville Free Public Library made a deal with Treehouse to make it available to all library patrons. The quality of the instruction is pretty decent, and it takes the stress off me for being a source of instruction. Instead, i just need to share my experience with folks. Some of them are right at the level of the instruction, some are much more advanced. It keeps it interesting.

To keep the mentoring / labs interesting, I’m trying to do a mini version of a standup at the start, and then circulate amongst everybody to keep things personal. I’m trying to keep a live document editable by all going as class notes / links / what did we decide. I hope its a good example for them, of how to use technology to collaborate.

As a result, though, I’ve had to shelve my architecture build. I simply don’t have the 4-6 hours it would take for me to go to LVL1 and print out the 3D parts of my house model. Each part. Times 8 parts. Times 4 levels. Without being a hog.

My current geeky project inventory:

A family project: old 35mm slides converted into slideshow project for delivery at Thanksgiving (where I’ll record everybody’s commentary about what the slides were about)
- I need to find decent screencast recording software that will let me create a DVD later. I think I’ll be trying SnagIt.
- Planning on using Picasa as the presentation vehicle. My wife has already scanned in all the slides from the negatives.
One more birthday song, for my stepson, coming up in December
One last soccer banquet slideshow, as requested by one of the kids I know. He’s a good kid, and yes, I’d be honored. To be delivered probably late November or early December, i don’t know yet.

I’ve also had an infusion of new tech into my life:

A Samsung 700T that I got off a co-worker at about 50% of the list price. This is a Windows 8.1 (thanks Anthony!) tablet device with a keyboard that makes it pass off as a laptop pretty well. I’m writing this blog post on it. However, while in tablet mode, the near field pen thingy works perfectly. It even does the “hover” thing that mice do, that I really miss on the Apple. And I’m getting used to the flexibility of reaching up and touching instead of trying to force the mouse to get to a certain spot on the screen.
A whole house water pressure regulator to cap water pressure at 75 psi. What was happening was spikes up to the 150’s, which caused the pressure relief valve on the tankless water heater to dump scalding hot water onto the concrete basement floor.

Running wise, I (barely) ran my last half marathon of 2013 (time: 2h48m). Due to a calf injury, i could not train much – my longest run the month prior was 5.5 miles – but thanks to Mr. Calvin Spears of Occupational Kinetics, I got put back together. They also used a cool app – it seemed to be called SparkLines, but i can’t find it anywhere – to measure me while I was running, and detect that my form is lop sided when I’m in my right foot. Good stuff to know. They also say they can make me faster.

My running schedule is currently clear of all races. I intend to sign up for the Polar Express series (3k, 4k, 4mi) which runs Dec-Jan-Feb, as a way to have a goal to stay in shape over winter.

The Color Run (Louisville, KY 2013)

It took a while (life) but I finally got the video trimmed and uploaded:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtZyHrOvCrU&w=448&h=252&hd=1]

Ye Ole Caption

Yay! I joined one of.. 4000+ results? Everybody had a video. And I joined late, so all the people searching for it, have already chosen their favorites and moved on. Down, Ego, Down.. Pop original motive: To represent “what I love” about the races I’m running this year. And give an outlet for my video create/organize/edit urge.

For this video, I had one camera on my forehead, and another on a chest strap / reversed / pointing backwards. This had some challenges:

Chest strap was not made to be worn backwards, and so it rubbed up against my front neck/chest area uncomfortably.
Because I could not see where the camera was pointing, and it was at chest level, and the race was mostly populated by women, I got some footage that was, possibly invasive of the person’s space. This mostly happened at the start.. and at the finish when everybody was throwing color in the air. I tried to ensure I cut out anything that would be embarrassing, but I wonder if I missed something. Solution: cut out the backward pointing video as necessary.
Battery life! Hero 3 chews through it like crazy, compared to the Hero 960. Observe when the camera got turned off for a bit (not sure why) in the middle of the video.
Presentation: I went the easy way out; I didn’t try to choose front vs back, I just showed the whole thing. Which actually is accurate – it really is that chaotic there.
Stabilization: Chest moves left/right a lot when I run. However, that’s easily handled by Warp Stabilizer.. at the cost of 1 hour per 5 minutes of video or so. On the flip side, Warp Stabilizer against the head-mounted camera didn’t work, the camera view angle moves around too much.

About the race itself:

Its not a race. It’s a casual walk / jog with a bunch of screaming, yodeling, skipping, and general goofing off.
Go with goofy friends. I was in good company.
Protect your phone!
The color won’t last. Even if you try to save it with vinegar etc. So don’t worry about staining stuff too much. (well, it might give a hint of a shade)
There are multiple waves. I was in Wave 5? Somebody else I met was in Wave 14, I think they said.

About the video edit:

I tried to keep everybody who waved at the camera in the final edit.
Original was 1 hour and 15 minutes of video. Cut down to 8 minutes. Yeah baby.

Good fun. Highly recommend the race to anybody who even considers it .. yes you can walk it!

Kentucky Derby Festival Mini Marathon / CodePaLousa Day #2

“Stop calling it a Mini. There’s nothing “Mini” about 13.1 miles.” — somebody who probably is not a Marathoner.

Well, the second half of the Marathon – making the video of it – Its not “over” because the video isn’t “perfect” and I’m a perfectionist, so I’m admitting defeat and uploading it as it is. Because to succeed would involve more frustration than I pay myself for. Maxim S1: Dial the perfection knob down to 7 unless I’m getting paid for it.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD3T-L5PPzo&w=448&h=252&hd=1]

My wife’s name is Molly but that’s not for her

My hope and intention was to capture some of the “how” it works (for those folks who’ve never been to a bigger running event like this) as well as the “why” its beautiful (the people who run it, the beautiful old people along the road, the general sense of celebration, the life that happens along the way).

I planned poorly – I ran the GoPro at a frame rate (60 fps), shortening the available battery life to 50 minutes, and took too much video at the starting line, so I had to switch to the iPhone for the last bit. I wish I could have included:

The girl who broke her leg, got crutches, and she, and her entire family, are walking the rest of the way to the end. Beautiful family.
The guy who broke his leg, got crutches and a wheelchair, and he, with a buddy following behind him with the wheelchair, are intent on finishing it.

Other little things that are interesting to me:

The lady who ran three halves this year – her shirt said “I can do it.”
If my friend Todd had run 1 second per mile slower, he would not have qualified for Boston.
Running into just about everybody I know who runs, including Nick whom I know from Panera who is 72, race-walks Marathons, and hopes to do 6 M’s in 6 days in the North East this year. And Steve. And Shannon.
I was able to sit with somebody by the side of the road and listen to her. Her knee was locking up on her good leg, and she didn’t know how she could keep on going, and she told her friend not to come back for her but her friend wouldn’t listen, and she was frustrated enough to cry to me, a stranger. Bless you little lady, I hope you did good, whether that was respecting your pain, or finishing your goal. Please don’t injure yourself, its much more important to stay healthy than to finish one race.

Lessons learned:

The most comfortable place for the camera is, in fact, on my head. On my chest, it vies for attention with the heart rate chest strap and its much harder to aim; and there’s no hope for having it “put away” on my belt. If you skip to the end of the video, I don’t look too dorky with it. Although why did I have to dance?
I can probably get a much faster time if I didn’t talk as much, or shoot as much video. Almost everybody I talked with – if you go look up their times via their bib numbers – finished faster than me. Go figure!
Don’t try to mix anything else with a half marathon day. To whit:

CodePaLousa Day #2

No Problem. Car is broken, I’ll just ride my scooter to the half marathon, run 13.1 miles, ride home, let the dogs out, ride back to downtown, and attend the last 3-4 sessions, having only missed a keynote and one session.

Problem Number 1. We parked 1 mile from the start. In the morning, that seemed like a great idea. After the race, not so much. Every sidewalk curb was an oww-portunity.

Problem Number 2. Scooter = Windchill; Windchill against tired fatigued muscles = frozen muscles. When I got off the scooter at home, I was locked in a “Cowboy Stance”. I could hardly get the scooter back on its kickstand. I could not walk up the steps (I had to crawl).

Problem Number 3. Given what my wife calls “Marathon Brain”, I very intelligently put away my scooter lock into the under-seat storage, with my keys still attached. At that point in time, didn’t know where the spare keys were (Separate story, starring the Blinking Red Dot from my unconscious). This makes transport difficult.

However, I did get to wave at two ‘PaLousers (wait that sounds bad) as I jogged past the Seelbach Hotel at the end of the race. And that would be my second day of CodePaLousa.

The good news is, my inability to attend has lead to a grassroots movement – I am dedicating the first weekend in the month to have my own mini-conference – including Pizza, and Board Games, and Microsoft’s Channel 9, and one hour sessions, and a friend or two — to catch up on videos / presentations on various technologies.

Papa John’s 10 Miler Video

I had some footage I took during the PPJ10Miler sitting around, that I’ve meant to do something with.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M5xtcCmlpQ&w=448&h=252&hd=1]

Scenes from the Papa John 10 Miler 2013

Stabilization is hard! especially on iPhone video, where there isn’t a large forgiving field of view like a GoPro. It took an hour to stabilize the 3 minutes of footage I had, on an i7 processor with 12G of RAM.
I scream way too loud for being a camera person.
I still had some moire develop on the 1080p video, so I took it down to 720p at a drastically different frame rate (25p). I ended up doing 4 different renders trying to find something that worked. 60fps helps with the source of this problem, but is a booger on battery power.
I should do some test stuff with the different modes of stabilize some time. Cool blog post about it for me to digest: http://whoismatt.com/bestwarpstabilizersettings/ In my case, I went with “Position only” to preserve frame space, and removed cropping. Yep, more research needed..

Anyhow. 10 miler is a fun race. Its really nice to see the leaders of the pack – usually I only hear about them on websites and stuff like that. And they have nice technical shirts. Definitely recommend.