Messing with a few things here…
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And Just Like That…
…winter was half over!
I don’t have much to say about that (winter, that is), it’s been pretty lame as far as winter sports or activities go, mostly snow-free and unseasonably warm. Oh well, we’ll have to plan a trip north I guess, if we want to do any skiing or skating.
Meantime, Groundhog Day has come and gone, and so has the Superbowl, and so has the Superbowl of Chili in Easton. Of course I went, as did John R, Eric, George and Doug & Lori. Good times, we were through the door early and got our chili on, including maybe a little on our clothes. D&L took off after that, and the rest of us went for coffee at Easton Market, followed by drinks at Two Rivers, where George’s girlfriend Jessica met us. We were all stuffed, but she was hungry and got food while we drank, then she gave us all a lift home. Another one in the books!
By the way, here’s what I wrote about it in 2004, and here’s what I wrote in 2005. Lotta chili under those bridges.
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The Iron Bridge
Although it probably won’t rise to the level of my Calypso Island obsession, I’ve been intrigued by a story I ran across, about a nearby railroad bridge and a fire there that smoldered for 20 years…
I ran across this while doing some futzing around with OpenStreetMap, where someone had left notes on the map — “notes” are meant for marking items where corrections need to be made, but these notes were just interesting bits of historic trivia about certain places. (This, by the way, is a pet peeve of mine.) One note described an iron railroad bridge (on Iron Bridge Road) that had been covered by fill. There is a railroad that crosses Jordan Creek, and Iron Bridge Road which runs parallel to the creek, but the road and creek crossed under the railroad via tunnels, and the note in any case was nowhere near this particular spot on the road. Does the note indicate a different RR crossing, now gone?
I did some research, and discovered that there was no other railroad crossing, the existing railroad was indeed the location of the iron bridge. This was part of a rail line build jointly by the Crane and Thomas Iron Companies, from Catasauqa out to local ore fields. It was originally a plank road when local roads proved inadequate for heavy traffic, and was converted into a railroad, complete with huge wooden trestle bridge across Jordan Creek, when the plank road proved inadequate.
As time went on and trains got heavier, the wooden bridge was replaced with an iron trestle bridge, which was an engineering marvel for its time but was, in its turn, also discovered to be inadequate… So about 1916, the railroad build a set of concrete tunnels under the bridge (for the creek and the road to go through), then started dumping slag, “factory ash” and other industrial waste, building up an escarpment around and over the bridge. They dumped about 300,000 tons of fill between 1916 and 1919, and created the hill that’s there now.
So far so good, and a moderately interesting piece of industrial history, but what caught my eye was a newspaper story from about 1942, lamenting the inaccessible iron now buried under the hill, which could have been salvaged for the war effort. Unfortunately (the article continued), the escarpment, which was basically a mountain of industrial waste, caught fire in 1917; it burned underground, melting the buried iron so it sometimes leaked out of the hill, and occasionally catching the railroad ties on fire, for the next twenty years.
Twenty years! I thought that a twenty-year fire, complete with molten iron running from the ground, was just crazy, a story on the order of Centralia that locals would still be talking about, but I found almost nothing about it. Just another part of Pennsylvania’s Mordor-industrial history. OpenStreetmap correctly shows the current conditions on the ground (RR on escarpment, with road and creek passing under in tunnels), so I made no changes and closed the note.
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More Fun with Routing
I’m not sure why I did it, but I installed PHP and Apache on my new computer, then moved a bunch of my “internal website” stuff over from storage. Everything seemed to work pretty well, so I tried the commuter routing program — I got errors, natch.
I looked at the error messages and realized that the pgRouting routines had changed, so my database routing functions were out of date — that led to me discover that even the newer version of PgAdmin3 doesn’t work well with my newer Postgresql version, especially when it comes to functions. So, I installed phpPgAdmin — which was also borked, and in the same way, but I was able to fix the source code. Even working properly it couldn’t do what I needed though, which was to modify my old function. I tried writing a new function through phpPgAdmin, which was extremely laborious, and basically re-wrote the original, broken function, so now I had two useless functions that I couldn’t modify. Ugggh, time for bed.
I woke up this morning and got it done old-school, writing a SQL script to define the function and running that from the command line. Presto, now I have a working function, and a working commuter routing program. Bonus: the new version of pgRouting is much faster (though that could be the new computer), and some routing errors are now fixed. Wish you could see it!
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Fun With Alice And Bob
I moved my SSH and PGP certificates to my new machine, and setting them up meant visiting a few cryptographic sites (to remember how to do it, and also just because). That means I spent a lot of time in that world, where “Alice” and “Bob” (and so on, alphabetically) are the main actors in usage scenarios: Alice sends a message to Bob, but maybe Clara intercepted it, how does Bob know the message is secure? Well, Alice encrypts her message and signs it with… Tedious, tedious, but now it’s done, and I can securely access my online accounts as well as send/receive encrypted email, which is sort of like being the only person with a phone — who can you call? — but still: I once thought it was cool, and now I have it back.
Auld Acquaintance
This past weekend was sort of the end of the holiday season for us: we saw friends we’d missed during the holidays. Friday night we did some bar-hopping with Doug & Lori, then Saturday was a “Festivus party” at Eric & Kris’s place (where we saw D&L again) lots of catching up and the usual merriment, it was a really nice night.
Movie Night
We saw “Uncut Gems” the other night. I don’t recommend it: the acting and the cinematography were all good, but the characters (especially the protagonist) were annoying and unsympathetic, and the plot, as Anne put it, was “a 2-hour panic attack.” Ugh.
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Yuletide Greetings
Merry Christmas! We just ate the biggest breakfast… Now Anne and Ben are out biking to a rare book store, and Emmi & Kyle are on a walk through the neighborhood, and I have a few minutes downtime.
Little Women
We saw this last night. I didn’t want to see this, only decided to go (at the last moment) because everyone else was going, and really expected I’d have to “grin and bear it” through this movie, but I found it compelling, an awesome story well told, and with visually stunning cinematography — it didn’t hurt that lead actress Saiorse Ronan was pretty easy on the eyes, as was everyone else in the movie.
It was also fun to see Laura Dern in another movie so soon after Marriage Story, and in a role so different from her part there.
Photo Catch-Up: UPDATE
I had a bit of a failed experiment here: I’ve been “curating” my photos, meaning I’ve been adding tags etc in my home photo editor and then posting them to Flickr. I also have a plugin here on the blog which supposedly lets me publish Flickr albums here, but I just tried it and it didn’t work. Oh well, if you want to see my newly posted photos you’ll have to check out my Flickr account.
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New To Me
Anne and I had a bit of an “Easton day” yesterday.
There was a lecture at the Canal Museum in the afternoon: the Lafayette College Library’s director of digital studies gave a presentation on “Old Maps and New Technology,” basically about digitizing historic maps and using them with GIS, and it was right up my alley. (I was surprised that Anne wanted to go too, but she also enjoyed it, and we bumped into my friend Kirk there, which was a pleasant surprise too.) We also took a little tour of the current exhibit, which concerned changes to the Lehigh Valley landscape over the past centuries and was heavy on old maps and aerial photography, and had a pleasant conversation with the speaker.
After that we were meeting Kathryn and Beth for dinner at a new place downtown (Aman’s Artisan Indian Cuisine, and very good), but we had some time to kill first so we walked around Center Square — I scoped out some of the new downtown amenities for the maps — and stopped in at Pearly Bakers. We walked over and met them for dinner, then we all went across the street to a place I’d never even seen before, called Oak.
This was a sort of Washington, DC-style, upscale steak house: three stories and an enclosed rooftop bar, exposed brick and wood and architecture — we ended up on the roof, at a table with a small fire in the middle, and continued our dinner conversation for another few minutes. We only stopped in for a drink and a look-see, no idea how the food is (yet) but the place looked awesome.
We were actually home pretty early, like before 9:00, so I spent the evening updating OpenStreetMap.
(I’m also in the middle of working through some photo curating: The other day I moved my photo collection over to the new machine, which was much easier than I thought it would be, then finally finished catching up with adding metadata tags to my old photos. Once I was caught up with that I started importing photos — my backlog goes all the way back to 2015 — and posting them to Flickr. Check them out, yo! And stay tuned for plenty more.)
Tonight I’ll be playing with my cello ensemble. Time to go practice.
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Back To The Old Scene
Morning weigh-in: 179.5, 12% BF
It’s been a while since I posted a weigh-in, and it’s also been a while since I’d weighed this little. But I’ve been under 180 for a few days now and I thought I’d celebrate. I was close earlier this year, hovering around the 180 lbs mark (down from 190+ lbs) before Colorado, but then Colorado happened, and so did Columbus, and also Thanksgiving…
I haven’t been radically diet-conscious lately, but I can say I’ve been a little more careful, and I think we both have been eating better (Anne especially) these last few months. I’m also back on the “100 push-up challenge” for the winter, where I do at least a hundred push-ups a day — not that that in itself will change anything, but that plus other weight routines I do with it, plus the rides (when they happen: it’s been pretty crappy out lately), and the not-really-a-diet have all been chipping away at the inner tube.
Today was a morning cello session with Donna H, getting ready for our Sunday concert at the local nursing home, and in a few minutes we’re going out to take Anne’s mom up to see friends in Jim Thorpe.
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Divorce Story
We saw Marriage Story last night over at SteelStacks. I’d heard a lot of good things about it, and it was really a good movie, but it was not a feel-good story. The basic gist is that it follows one couple through their divorce and custody battle, always a knee-slapper…
Basically a character study (of the couple as individuals, and as a couple), the movie had some really good acting, fueled by serious star power — Scarlet Johannson and Adam Driver, plus Laura Dern, Alan Alda, Ray Liotta and Wallace Shawn (that guy from The Princess Bride). Unfortunately, the movie tended to “showcase” the actors at times, almost as if it were a vehicle for a break-out star, or multiple ones.
The plot itself was a bit boring. Conflict is at least the precursor to drama, or should be, and conflict was baked into the story, but this thing moved like a sporting event you couldn’t care less about: sooner or later it will end, with some final score, and everyone will move on. And that’s what happened — the lawyers even advised their clients that this would be so.
In the end, I’m glad I saw this, but my final take-away is that its makers think it’s better than it really is.
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Not Quite The Borg
One more piece of software I added: Jaspersoft Studios, a program to design and generate reports from various data sources. I use this because — unlike other report programs I have tried — it works well with PostgreSQL, the database I like to use, but it can be a bear to use since it has a lot of moving parts.
There are two ways to use Jasper Reports: one is as a standalone program, and the other is as a plug-in to the Eclipse IDE, which I happen to like using, and which I use nowadays for almost all my coding. I downloaded the standalone program first, but it looked so much like an Eclipse product it reminded me that there was a plug-in — this would be just one more thing that I could run from my single IDE to rule them all. So, I installed the plugin.
What I got, plug-in and standalone package, was version 6.10, and it really looked beautiful. Unfortunately, as soon as I started to use it, I found that it was too broken to use… Jasper Reports is mostly like a graphical page layout program, where text and other elements can be moved and resized on the page, but the elements here wouldn’t move or resize. Which is bad.
It took me a day to find information on the problem. I never did find a solution but I did find a workaround: just use an earlier version. That’s what I did, installing standalone version 6.8; Eclipse will have to wait until I learn how to add older plug-ins.
Anyway, the program works fine now, and still looks beautiful. I used it today to make a table of bike rides from my database, natch.
Reading
I just got the latest Jeff VanDermeer novel, Dead Astronauts. This is set in the same story-universe as his Borne and A Strange Bird, and some of his short stories, but it is supposedly far more complex and experimental. More on this after I get through the first page…