• The Wheat From The Chaff

    Posted on by Don

    I’m not sure if this is going to rise to the level of “new GIS project,” but I have been playing around a lot lately with the local transportation authority’s GTFS feed — where GTFS stands for “General Transit Feed Specification,” a standard for publishing public transit information on the Internet.

    These feeds are like a cross between spreadsheets and database tables, and by a judicious massaging of the data you can extract bus stop and route information. Unfortunately, that massaging is a real necessity: the specification is built to convey a lot of information, and to cover a lot of different transit situations, so there’s no simple route-and-stop information — it’s buried in cross-references and spread across multiple tables. All this extraction and data crunching is fairly straightforward though, and there are even tools to automate the process (I use a QGIS plugin).

    Or the process would be straightforward, if we were not dealing with LANTA. These feeds are updated periodically, and about a year ago the new LANTA feeds sort of devolved into chaos, with extra routes showing up that had no real world connection, odd use of abbreviations for bus stop names (abbreviations are sort of frowned upon, for what ought to be obvious reasons), and their cross-referencing system becoming unnecessarily complex. It was hard to figure out what was going on — I thought at first that it was my analysis software mangling the data, but no it was them.

    Well, they’ve been working through a huge revamp of their entire bus route network, so maybe that was the source of some of the bogus data. The new routes and schedules went into effect on June 21, and an updated feed followed soon after; I downloaded the new one and crunched the data — and the garbage was all still there! But, I noticed that in among the old chaos was a new and much cleaner set of data, valid starting on the 21st, showing the new bus routes and the correctly-named bus stops. So now I do a double extraction, first massaging the feed into a useful form, then extracting from that the new, valid and cleaned-up route data. Voilá!

    I have some vague plan to add these bus routes to OpenStreetMap, but that’s a big undertaking, and I would prefer to rely on eyewitness ground-truthing (ie riding the bus) than a data set — which means even more work. For now I’m content with just having got the damn data.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk 📎and tagged

  • Brood X

    Posted on by Don

    I finally got to see the cicadas this week. I’d been on several rides recently looking for them (including one ride up to Blue Ponds in Jim Thorpe — strangely early even for the mountain laurel), but no dice. Then on Wednesday I did a road ride in the hills south of town, and they were everywhere. They were loud enough while I was riding that you’d have to shout to be heard over them, and I stopped once or twice just to watch them fly around.

    Anne and I did another hill ride yesterday with a few friends in the same general area. Again, they were everywhere and maybe more numerous than the other day, even landing on us when we stopped for ice cream.

    So that’s one thing off this summer’s bucket list, though I do expect to check them out a few more times before they are gone.


    📂This entry was posted in nature journal the sporting life

  • COVID Memories II

    Posted on by Don

    Some more things:

    • It was early March, just as things were starting to look bad, and my mom needed a procedure done, so I thought I’d go down to help out for a few days. My dad and I hung out in the hospital waiting room, half-watching whatever 24-hour news station they had on, which seemed like updates from Armageddon.
    • Masking wasn’t a big thing early on, but hand sanitizing sure was. There was no longer any sanitizer to be found in the stores of course, but my mom had already scored some for all of us.
    • The Great Toilet Paper Shortage: we usually buy in bulk, and purely by coincidence we had a pretty good supply on hand when things went crazy. That was the weirdest panic…
    • For about a week or so before the lock-down, people were basically on their own in terms of guidance for business closures, going to work, etc, and there seemed to be a great deal of confusion and anxiety about it until the lock-down made the rules easy — easy to know at least.
    • In the very last days before the lock-down, we went down to Philly for a socially-distant visit with Ben and Candace. We brought bikes, and rode things like Kelly Drive and MLK Boulevard, and out through Manayunk, which was hopping. That was my first hint that not everyone was going to take the pandemic seriously.
    • When masking became a thing, there were not a lot of N95 masks to go around at first, and crafters and sewers came up with a lot of DIY mask projects to fill the gap. Anne made a ton of these for family and friends.


    📂This entry was posted in looking back

  • Moving Forward

    Posted on by Don

    We’re late this year, but I’ve been doing some planting in the garden the past few days. I got in some radishes, beets and various lettuce-like things (mustard, arugula) yesterday, and also planted several cuttings from a currant bush a friend gave us.This morning I put in a bunch of potatoes. I expect to be planting a few more things this week, and some warmer-weather stuff like tomatoes and peppers soon. Meantime, our new tree out front continues to thrive. I planted pansies around the base, and I water the lot of them, tree and flowers, every day.

    This afternoon I got back onto Project Creaky Bike: I removed the crank, then removed the bottom bracket bearing housings (they were in fact loose), cleaned and lubed everything and confirmed that the bearings themselves were OK, then put it all back together, nice and snug. I’ll find out soon enough if that solved my creak — hopefully success won’t conjure up a new one…

    I won’t be going riding tomorrow though, because we’re expecting the appliance service guy some time during the day — oven is on the fritz and probably needs a new thermostat or something. Since Tuesday is now also “cello duets day” with my friend Donna H, we’ll probably be playing here tomorrow instead of in her garden, so I can stay close to home. The expected rain held off today, but tomorrow and Wednesday are supposed to be wet. Maybe a ride Thursday?


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Got A Screw Loose

    Posted on by Don

    My friend Greg maintains that if your bike has a creak, it’s best to leave it alone, because if you do manage to exorcise that one, another creak will come take its place. Nonetheless, I decided yesterday to deal with a persistent creak down near my bottom bracket on the Santa Cruz.

    This creak started (true to form), just after I’d dealt with a bit of play that had developed in one of my shock mount bushings. That was an easy enough fix, once I got the parts from the bike store, but as soon as I solved that — finally, and after more than a month of annoyance — up popped the new creak.

    I’ve had this creak before, and if it’s the same one it just means cleaning and tightening the bottom bracket and crank threads. I girded my loins with some YouTube how-to’s (I can never remember what type of crank I have on which bike, or how to extract it), went out to start the process, and — the bolt holding the crank on is loose, like loose loose. I tightened it back up, thinking that might be all that was really wrong. Bullet dodged!

    I did a towpath ride this morning to Northampton, and the creak, if anything, was worse.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk

  • Vaccinatus

    Posted on by Don

    I don’t remember the whole story — I was young, and it was a long time ago — but I remember as a kid being told that people (like me) who’d had eczema could never get the smallpox vaccine, because instead of developing an immunity they would get smallpox from it. Therefore, since proof of smallpox vaccination was needed to travel internationally, I could not leave the USA. I didn’t really have international travel on my radar as a second grader — people weren’t telling me this to keep me from trying to leave the country or anything, it was just another piece of allergy folklore, passed like “whisper down the alley” from my allergist to my parents to me, and dumbed down for childhood consumption. But here in the present, fifty or more years later, I was wondering just how much of this I understood and remembered correctly…

    According to Google, I pretty much had the story right: thanks to vaccinations, smallpox was eradicated in the USA and Europe before I was born. So even though I couldn’t get the vaccine — vaccinatus eczema was and is a real syndrome — I was pretty safe. To prevent its reintroduction and international spread generally, people crossing borders had to prove they were vaccinated against smallpox (as well as other diseases, like yellow fever). There was a huge push starting in the late 1960’s to finally wipe out smallpox, and it was declared eradicated worldwide by 1980, and as of January 1, 1982, smallpox was removed from the list of required vaccinations, which was about eight years before my first trip outside the USA.

    This whole saga is why vaccine resistance rankles sometimes: Herd immunity is what protected me back then, even though I couldn’t be immune myself, and now people people come up with bogus reasons they “can’t” (won’t) be vaccinated, for things like measles, etc, as well as COVID, compromising the general immunity and putting those people who can’t be individually protected at risk — and the truth is none of us are wholly protected even by a vaccine: herd immunity, starving the pandemic to death, is the only way to really be safe.

    All of which us to say, I got my second jab of the Phizer vaccine on Friday. I felt a bit headachey, tired and out-of-sorts Friday and Saturday, but I’m not sure if it was the vaccine or just seasonal allergies. I’m feeling pretty spry now though, and just waiting for my superpowers to kick in.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day looking back

  • Milestones

    Posted on by Don

    So, eight years ago yesterday I wrote this, and I said it out loud in front of a judge:

    Anne,

    You brought things into my life I didn’t know were missing, and you’ve made me happier than I realized I could be. I love you with all my heart, and I’ll love you until the day I die.

    In my memory, our love has grown through a series of moments where, with some choice or decision, we were given the chance to deepen our relationship, and with some trepidation we took the chance, and each time it was like walking through a doorway into a better place. Now we’ve come to the next door, the next decision, a commitment that I think we’re both ready to make, and I want to take this next step and continue moving forward with you for the rest of our lives.

    I could say a thousand things here: how I love talking with you, and laughing with you, and how I love just hanging out, holding you and looking in your eyes, but I can sum it up by saying “I love you Anne.”

    Now let’s do this!

    We didn’t actually do much yesterday: Anne had some bike education work at CAT, and I went for an afternoon towpath spin. In the evening we got word that our neighbor got her PhD, so we walked across the street and offered our congratulations and a toast, along with John & Donna and a few other neighbors.

    Meantime, I’ve managed to keep my focus/patience long enough to read a book: The Regional Office Is Under Attack! by Manuel Gonzales. Pretty decent, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s mostly action — so far, but I’m only about halfway through…

    Today, for the first time in months, I’ll be playing outdoor duets with Donna H. I expect we’ll be a bit rusty, but the time has definitely come.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day looking back

  • COVID Memories

    Posted on by Don

    Just a few things from early last year, documented — probably, but not necessarily, in chronological order — for posterity:

    • The news about the new disease in Wuhan, China started coming out in late December 2019, and I remember it being obvious even then that this would be bad.
    • Even so, it wasn’t all that obvious right away that it was already here. I remember going to a doctor’s appointment, and she asked me if I’d managed to avoid that “nasty cold going around.” Only much later did this start to seem like foreshadowing.
    • I managed to avoid that “nasty cold,” but Anne did not — she had something in early February that was like the flu from Hell. It lasted for a bit more than a week, and there were a few times in there where I though we’d need to go to the ER. We did not make the connection to the pandemic until “loss of sense of smell” became more well known…
    • There were a number of people we knew, parents/grandparents of friends etc, who died in this time period, of things like pneumonia or “flu.” Nobody thought to test at the time.

    I’ll probably write more as time and memory permits. By the way, this is what I wrote fifteen years ago.


    📂This entry was posted in looking back

  • Contact!

    Posted on by Don

    I get email through my contact form, not much of it but a few arrive every week, and almost all of it is spam. I have things in place to block spammy comment form submissions, based on phrases that spammers (but hopefully not legitimate form users), might use, phrases like “Oakley Sunglasses,” “internet marketing,” and variations on “nude” — I got a whole cluster of these nudie offers a few months ago, and was a bit surprised that I hadn’t already blocked them, and actually hadn’t had a need to, until that point…

    Anyway, I still get a few spam emails through the contact form, but at this point they’re really vague, with innocuous wording, and enhancing the blocking efforts to catch them has become a diminishing returns / choose-your-battles kind of thing so I let them slide. Every so often I get a doozy though, and here’s one I had to share:

    From: [SOME FAKE NAME]
    Subject: Delivery of your email messages.

    Message Body:
    Hi! donkelly.net

    Did you know that it is possible to send message fully legal?
    We sell a new legal way of sending message through feedback forms. Such forms are located on many sites.
    When such commercial offers are sent, no personal data is used, and messages are sent to forms specifically designed to receive messages and appeals.
    Also, messages sent through communication Forms do not get into spam because such messages are considered important.
    We offer you to test our service for free. We will send up to 50,000 messages for you.
    The cost of sending one million messages is 49 USD.

    This message is created automatically. Please use the contact details below to contact us.

    [CONTACT INFO DELETED]

    You’re spamming me, through my contact form, to offer me your awesome contact-form-spam service? Gotta lotta damn gall I tell ya, and your phrasing… It seemed almost too provocative, as if they were fishing for someone to reply with a piece of their mind, and thus hand over their legitimate email address. Oh well, I (mostly) didn’t rise to the bait, and for this form submission I made an exception: I found a way to block similar messages.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day