• Boxing Day

    Posted on by Don

    Merry Christmas!

    I’m just sitting here, working on a few chores, bills etc, and watching the chili cook itself in the crock pot. It should be ready tonight, but we’re not going to eat it until Thursday night, when Emmi & Kyle, and Ben, all arrive for our Christmas gathering. I am almost caught up with my Christmas shopping…

    On Friday we went into Philly (by way of REI, where I finally got new boots), for a birthday lunch with Ben and his girlfriend Candace. We went into Port Richmond, a part if the city I’d never seen before, and apparently a heavily Polish neighborhood of long standing. Storefronts in Polish: funeral parlors, travel agents, even a BYO strip club (we joked that they played Polka stripper music), but most important: many Polish restaurants. Candace knew the area, and she knew of a place with “the best Polish food in town,” which is where we had our lunch. Much delicious, heavy food, then we went to the hipster coffee shop up the street before our trip home.

    Saturday was rainy, so that “Christmas Lights” night ride did not happen, but we did get together with Liz H-D for our annual “fancy dress cocktails” at the Hotel Bethlehem. We also ran into Erin and Todd out with some of their friends, so the party went a bit later than expected…

    Christmas Eve morning started a corresponding bit later than expected, but in the afternoon we went to Jeff and Crista’s farm for their annual bonfire, then we went with Anne’s mom to the Christmas pageant/service at the meeting house. That was followed by a rather subdued night out — a lot of places closed early — but we got our annual post-pageant Christmas Eve beer with Will & Martha and Peter and Anna, and Rick with Liz and Joey. Good to see everybody, and on the way home it started to snow.

    Yesterday we laid low, with another late morning and another big breakfast, and an afternoon bike ride along the towpath north of Jim Thorpe. They got a bit more snow, maybe two inches or so, than the dusting we got back home. It was a bit of work in the snow, but the ride and the day were beautiful.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Spanked!

    Posted on by Don

    Another day, another awesome MTB ride… I rode again with Greg H, but we hit Sals this time. I think I did a but better in the rocky stuff than the other day, but even if I think [redacted] is a bit tougher, with more difficult trail challenges sprinkled here and there, Sals is relentless — it never stops being rocky, or uphill, or both…

    Tomorrow is a rest day, going in to Philly to see Ben, and Saturday, if the weather holds, we’ll be doing the “tour of Christmas lights” ride.


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life

  • Rest Day

    Posted on by Don

    I had an awesome ride yesterday, with Greg H at a local place that shall not be named — and if you’re in the know you already know where I mean — where, in contrast to Monday’s slop fest, the ground was snow-free and fairly dry. Chalk it up to good drainage, and maybe hilltop exposure to sun and wind, but conditions there were almost as good as it gets.

    My riding, however, displayed a certain lack of courage…

    On the way up the hill I was in front, and thinking to myself “enjoy it while you can,” because I knew the rough stuff would remove any fitness advantage I might have.  My recent riding follows the same old pattern: my fitness is the first to return (and the last to fade even when I’m slacking), but technical skills, and confidence, atrophy quickly and take forever to return. (I also got skunked by the fact that there were more technical features there that are just above my usual ability; I can clear them sometimes but am frequently knocked off my game. I used to call this my over/under. If things were just a little easier I would have been a lot better/faster/whatever, I swear…)

    Anyway, we had a good time, and I am getting better even if he has to wait for me after the difficult sections. We were supposed to go again today but Greg couldn’t make it, so it’s on for tomorrow.


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life

  • Back Out In The Muck

    Posted on by Don

    Yesterday’s ride along the canal was a slopfest, clothes and bike gray & gritty from the gravel/cinder surface, and I was whooped by a 14 mile ride over soft paths. So today, I’m heading out again — this time with Greg H to some actual trails, which stay dryer and more solid, hopefully. I’m heading out in a few minutes, just after blogging and a little lunch.

    A quick aside on the mapping front: I took a long time dithering about it, but I wrote my own chainage routine, and my own ascent/descent calculation function, both in PL/pgSQL, and both — especially the ascent routine, where there was a lot of room for improvement over my PyQGIS script — worked perfectly. (The ascent routine took about 20 minutes to run everything, as opposed to 4-8 hours for QGIS.) I still have to zero out the data at bridges, but I am now back to where I can wait for outside data (recommended routes, etc) to continue.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk the sporting life

  • Motion

    Posted on by Don

    Getting ready for a towpath ride; I’ll be out on the singlespeed which needed a little bit of work, tires pumped etc before it was ride-worthy, but looks to be in good shape — there are not a lot of moving parts. Not much to say otherwise..


    📂This entry was posted in the sporting life

  • Shoveling Out, On Steroids

    Posted on by Don

    Another dusting last night, an easy shovel job but the neighborhood looks really pretty, especially on my walk this morning. Anne went early to deal with her office’s walkways, then met Debbie for breakfast at the new breakfast place on Main Street (the Flying Egg, go there it’s pretty nice). Anyway — after I got up, and shoveled here — I texted to see if she needed help; she replied that the job was done and I should  come over and join them. Great start to the day, nice to see Debbie, and the point of my story was that it was beautiful out, with early-morning-rosy winter clouds, before it all morphed into a generic “sunny winter day,” which was nice in its own way but that early sky really was cool.

    On the home front, we got our new oven yesterday. It looks pretty nice and stainless-steel modern, the range is a bit more aggressive than our old one and, most important, the oven keeps the correct temperature. Too bad the delivery came while I was trying to sleep in — not too early really, but before 9:00, and I was trying to catch up on my sleep after a rough few days…

    I’ve had a bit of an eczema problem lately, and it really got crazy this week. We super-cleaned the house, I switched to baths instead of showers… and I broke down yesterday, went to my GP and got some prescription strength cortisone cream, as well as a Prednisone prescription. I’ve been warned about euphoria, mania etc as side effects, but nothing: I’ve basically been just putzing around the house today, though my skin is running through a fast-motion miracle cure so there’s that. I have an allergist appointment in the New Year, and I got a referral for a dermatologist from the GP. I’m going up in the attic soon to find the humidifier. Life goes on.

    Meantime, the mapping — rather, the fixing of the mapping scale-up problems — continues. I had problems with getting the elevation changes, and had to eventually abandon a QGIS solution, and build my own PostGIS function to get the “chainages.” The term is apparently a holdover from ancient surveyor days, where they used chains to measure distances; what I needed was a shapefile of points, set every 10 meters along each road in the database, but the new file had to refer back to the road database in a certain way, and the QGIS plugin just wasn’t flexible enough for what I needed. (My solution worked like a charm.) The next step was to use SAGA and my elevation data to give each point an elevation, which since the new chainages were themselves now in the database rather than a standalone file, the process was its own struggle learning experience, but it’s done now. Next up is generating the ascent/descent data, which I might decide to do in PostGIS as well — my current, PyQGIS-based method is run-all-night-check-results-in-the-morning slow. Tomorrow, or this weekend…


    📂This entry was posted in day by day tech talk

  • This Week Today

    Posted on by Don

    Stopping by again…

    Mapping: I had, and still have, a few technical issues to deal with, but the full Lehigh Valley database is now in PostGIS, along with elevation data — bogus elevation data, that’s one of my technical issues — and the demo map can now route with the new database. But it’s got the slows, it’s got the slooowws… With about 3200 road segments in the “toy database,” it could route in about 1-2 seconds, but the full-map version took about 6 seconds per routing task — and there may be multiple routing tasks in each route, from start point, to via point and then through subsequent via points, and finally to the endpoint. Unacceptable!

    I did some searches online, and sure enough there are a lot of people complaining about pgRouting performance and looking to speed it up. The general consensus: there are a few things you can do, including tune your database, but the actual bottlenecks are the pgRouting algorithms. Some suggested using osm2po, another program that converts OpenStreetMap data for databases but can  also do routing: tried it and it’s blindingly fast – d’oh! (Unfortunately, I didn’t see much there in the way of customized, dynamic cost functions, so I can’t see how to turn it into the the answer I’m looking for.) I tried a bunch f the Postgres/PostGIS performance-tuning tips anyway, and they did seem to help a little.

    I eventually came across one potential solution: route only on a subset of the roads in the database, using a bounding box. For each pair of points to route between, I find the smallest rectangle that contains both, then expand it by 2000 meters in every direction (like a buffer zone); this is my bounding box, and the routing search is limited to the roads that touch or fall within that box. This seemed to do the trick: my routing times are back down to about 1-2 seconds.

    Except near — wait for it — those confounded bridges. The valley is broken up by the Lehigh river, with occasional bridges, and if there are no bridges within the bounding box for a route that needs to cross the river, no route will be found. Meanwhile, when routing points are on a diagonal, the bounding boxes are fairly big, but routing points that run mainly east-west or north-south produce long, skinny bounding boxes. I found a few “dead zones” where routes couldn’t be found, especially east-west ones north of Northampton, routes with skinny bounding boxes where the bridges are a little sparser. My original bounding boxes were expanded by a buffer that was only 1000 meters; I went to 2000 meters in an attempt to alleviate the bridge problem. This didn’t solve it entirely, but it did help, and there was no real performance hit going from 1000 to 2000 meters. I’ll probably look at distances between bridges, and revise my buffer zone to be just bigger than say, half that distance.

    Reading: I picked up Don DeLillo’s Underworld again, intending to just read the first part. I love the first chapter but never finished the book because I found the rest boring; now I am engrossed and don’t know what I was thinking back  then.

    Listening: WXPN has been playing “The 70’s, A-Z” this past week, every song they have in their library that was released in the Seventies, played in alphabetical order. We’ve been following along religiously, and it’s been fascinating and fun but they’re only up to “T,” and it gets wearing. Full disclosure: the radio is off right now…

    The only time they weren’t playing the 70’s was for their Friday “Free at Noon” concert at the Word Cafe, which this week featured Russ’s band Cherry. So, we went down to Philly with Ray and Lorraine, where we met Frank and Patricia, and Ben, and Gabby, and we all watched the show and then went out to lunch with Russ at the White Dog Cafe. As always, we spent a few minutes at Penn Books before the ride home. All the talk in Philly, among us and overheard on the street, was about the upcoming snow on Saturday…

    By the way, Saturday was Luminaria Night in Bethlehem, here is a photo of ours:

    candles in bags on sidewalk
    Luminaria Night

    One last thing: here is what I wrote ten years ago.


    📂This entry was posted in cultural ramblings day by day tech talk 📎and tagged

  • Updates on Various Things

    Posted on by Don

    Just kicking back this morning, before going with Anne over to the Bike Co-op for the afternoon…

    Reading: I just finished N.K. Jemisin’s debut novel, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. I took to it well enough at the beginning, but it actually became a chore to read: I put it down for a week, and read the last third in two sittings, closing the book with a sense of relief yesterday. Strange because I really liked her award-winning “Broken Earth” trilogy, and the style and voice were very similar; Anne said that maybe the author worked a few bugs out of her writing between her debut and the trilogy, and that may be so but I didn’t really see it. All I can say is that I really recommend the trilogy, but don’t feel the same about this one. I think it’s also first of two, but it’ll be a while before I read the sequel.

    Two Hours Before The Mast: I did my usual Wednesday volunteering at the Canal Museum yesterday. The canal boat is now in dry-dock for the winter, and Scott E is trying to get as much maintenance done on it (especially things like painting) in the nicer weather as he can, so yesterday I helped prep the deck for staining. Mostly this meant sanding, and the sanding I did was mostly “trim work” with a small vibrating sander, near fixtures and in corners where the bigger unit couldn’t fit — I did this for about two hours until the little sander overheated and turned off.  I thought of it as “swabbing the deck,” but showed remarkable restraint and did not talk like a pirate.

    Mapping: The routing website is now essentially — well, not done done, but the functionality is pretty complete. It routes, with a few glitches (but I added error handling so it doesn’t just choke without apologizing), it modifies routes based on user preferences for hills and visible recommended streets, and it can export the route as GPX; the final steps for website usability are to add printing capabilities for the directions, and add some explanatory content. (Finishing the job means building the real database — and finding a place to put it online.) I’m pretty happy with how this came out so far, it’s actually fun to play with.

    Listening: Not to eMusic, that’s for sure. I’ve used them for years to purchase music, and once they were both a good deal at a flat 49 cents a song (with no DRM: download it and it’s yours), and a good source for whatever I was looking for. Then in about 2010, they bought into some of the more mainstream catalogs, changing their price structure — more popular stuff became more expensive, some songs required you to buy the entire album — to accommodate the new sources. This actually  drove away many of the better and more obscure labels, leaving eMusic no better than any other generic source, at least in terms of selection. Now the major labels are gone again (I think), and the catalogs are mostly things I don’t care about. So every month I pay $15, which gives me $17-$18 in credit to use or lose that month, and I hardly ever even check in anymore to see their new offerings — and whenever I go there to search for something specific, they don’t have it. It’s time to move on.

    On the Home Front: We are busy researching ovens, in preparation for our new purchase.


    📂This entry was posted in cultural ramblings day by day tech talk

  • A Thanksgiving Miracle

    Posted on by Don

    So, flash back to several days ago: Anne was cooking things in the oven, and they were just going …wrong: bread was burning, cakes were coming out uneven, the oven was just acting funny. A quick check with the thermometer and she confirmed that the oven’s thermostat was malfunctioning, and a look inside the oven showed one side wasn’t even firing. Our oven was on the fritz.

    Our oven was on the fritz, that is, three days or so before we hosted Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s just the thermostat, but the last time the repairman came out (to fix the thermostat if I remember correctly), he said we needed a new oven — if we even got a repairman out before the holiday we would probably not be able to get parts,  much less a new oven, in time. A turkey, a ham, many side dishes and pies and cakes, and 17 guests coming — what to do?

    Well, first we panicked, but then Anne did a bit of research and we decided to cook the turkey in the wood-fired outdoor oven — the wonky indoor one, with some supervision, would work well enough for the (pre-cooked) ham as well as those side dishes that couldn’t be repurposed to range-top cooking, and guests would bring plenty of their own food. The only real hit would be the extra work of starting and running the fire.

    This mostly fell to me, and was a two day process. We got up early Wednesday and I got a fire going, and fed it periodically during the day while doing other prep chores. This fire was just a pre-heat to get some temperature into the core thermal ballast; all we cooked on Wednesday was the pizza we had for dinner. A little measurement told us the whole turkey, with a pan big enough to cook it, wouldn’t fit in the oven, so Anne split the bird in half as part of the prep, while I got the fire going again Thursday morning. At around 900 degrees we put the bird in to brown, then we put it back in again when the temperature was down around 500. It cooked in just under two hours, and it came out fabulous. Everything else was awesome too, and the whole day was a fun success.

     


    📂This entry was posted in day by day pioneer arts

  • On The Bridge: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

    Posted on by Don

    Talk about hedonic adaptation! A week or so ago I was sure I was far from ever being able to route on my web map using pgRouting, then a triumphant breakthrough, and now here I am, annoyed that it’s not perfect…

    My first problem is a data issue, and a recurring one in my mapping and routing life: dealing with bridges. Once I got the routing to work, I started to customize it with a separate “get_cost” function, which deals with ascent and descent (other criteria are coming), and that worked fine. Then I noticed that the routes seemed a little off, like they were avoiding what I thought would be the optimal routes, the main one being that it would do a lot to avoid a certain section of Broad Street. That’s when I remembered: there are several bridges on that section, and rather than following the elevation of the bridge’s road surface, my elevation data followed the contours of the ground below it, leading to large ascents and descents along that section.

    To solve the immediate problem, I changed the ascent and descent to be zero for the section containing the bridge — close enough to the truth, for that short a span on a mostly flat road. That made the routes in the vicinity more sensible, but what to do about other bridges?

    I think I have three options: I can either find the actual elevation data for the top of the road surface (using a “digital surface model” rather than “digital elevation model” and probably using LIDAR rather than satellite radar data), or I can assume that the bridge has a mostly constant slope, and calculate the slope from elevations where it attaches to the ground, or I can save myself a lot of work and just say “they’re flat, or flat enough to make no difference,” and make all ascents and descents be zero for bridges. I am still thinking about this…

    The second problem is a little harder to figure out, since it involves the PostGIS routing function I got off the Internet: when the beginning and end points of the route are on the same segment of road (ie there are no intersections between them), the function fails. I don’t know enough about Postgres functions to be able to solve this, so I may have to either live with it for a while, and contact the person who wrote the function for some help.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk 📎and tagged