Randy’s Blog

I've made it to season 6 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Only one more season after this. Over the weekend we watched an episode called Schisms, which deals with members of the crew experiencing missing time. It was creepy and enjoyable. At the beginning, Lieutenant Commander Data (an android, for any non-Trekkies out there) reads some of his poetry to the crew. One of the poems is dedicated to his cat, and it is so excellent that I had to share. It's called "Ode to Spot", and is written in the iambic heptameter mode:

Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,

An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;

Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses

Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,

A singular development of cat communications

That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection

For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.

A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;

You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.

And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,

It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.

O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display

Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.

And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,

I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

I went for a ride yesterday, which was one of the hottest days of the year. It felt like it, too. Hot and humid. I was surprised by how many people were on the trail, despite the weather. Technically, the pictures above were taken 3 weeks ago, when I rode the same section of the Prairie Trail. I didn't feel like stopping to take pictures of the scenery yesterday, I just wanted to keep riding.

Distance 17.3 miles

Riding Time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Season Total: 150.5 miles (only 5 miles away from my all-time season high!)

One of my favorite authors growing up was John Bellairs, who wrote creepy gothic mystery books for children. The stories almost always involved the supernatural: evil wizards, magic spells, terrible curses, and long-forgotten tombs, crypts, and ancient magical artifacts. And also houses. There were often big, old houses in his books. Strange mansions with secret passageways, unusual weather vanes, creaky floors, and large fireplaces.

It turns out that some of those houses were inspired by his hometown. He grew up in Marshall, Michigan which has a large historic district of homes all built in the 1800s. Here's what he had to say:

"In my imagination, I repeatedly walk up and down the streets of the beautiful old Michigan town where I grew up. It is full of Victorian mansions and history, and it would work on the creative mind of any kid."

Last week, to celebrate my birthday, Wendy and I traveled to Marshall to see that house, along with all the other historic homes.

The Cronin House

It was fantastic, and did not disappoint. It is showing signs of deterioration, since no one currently lives there. But it is still a remarkable house. I went back to it each day of our trip to take more pictures. Here are just a few:

The Octagon House

This is another house featured in one of the books, this time in The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn. It's currently being renovated.

Honolulu House

After John Bellairs died in 1991, his estate asked writer and long-time friend Brad Strickland to complete several of John's works in progress, and even to write his own books featuring Bellairs' characters. One of those books was The House Where Nobody Lived, which was based on the Honolulu house. This was the only house on our trip that we got to view from the inside. The house was built in 1860 by a man who spent several years in Hawaii, and wanted to build something to remind him of the islands. The interior of the house is filled with unbelievably intricate painting. It was quite a sight to see.

The Fountain

This isn't a house, but it's a unique feature of Marshall mentioned several times in Bellairs' books. There's a large roundabout on the main street with a fountain in the middle, surrounded by a circle of trees. At night, the fountain is lit up by colored lights. Each night of our trip we sat for a while at the fountain as darkness fell. On the first night, we could see the stars of the Summer Triangle (Vega, Deneb, and Altair) overhead, and a bit later, the full moon rose into view, which also happened to be a blue moon. The colored lights from the fountain, along with the stars and moon made for a great view.

The Historic District

The historic district is packed with unique houses and interesting architecture. There were far too many to take pictures of all of them. And I still managed to take a lot of pictures.

The Rest of the Trip

I could easily keep posting photos, but I'll stop here. During our trip, we also:

• Stayed 3 nights at the National House Inn, a bed and breakfast whose building was constructed in 1835. It was part of the Underground Railroad at one point; and it was also a house of ill repute at another point.
• Ate at the famous Schuler's restaurant, which has been in business at least since the 1920's. The food was delicious, and our waiter looked exactly like the actor Chris Pratt.
• Visited the American Museum of Magic, which is on the main street in Marshall. It was a bit of a disappointment; there wasn't much to it besides lots of authentic posters advertising famous magicians of old.
• Walked all over town, until our feet hurt, our legs were exhausted, and my phone was almost out of batteries from taking so many pictures.
• Visited the Binder Park Zoo in nearby Battle Creek. It too was a bit disappointing. There was a lot of walking and not a lot of animals. It didn't help that the zoo's tram broke down while we were there.
• Ate a delicious nut roll at Louie's Bakery, on the main street in Marshall. One of the guests at the bed and breakfast recommended this to us.
• Walked along a very nice riverwalk that overlooked the Kalamazoo River.
• Saw several black squirrels. I saw a few of these in Oklahoma a long time ago, but never any since.
• Enjoyed the breeze. It was hot and dry during our visit, but fortunately there was a strong breeze that helped keep us cool, and keep the mosquitoes at bay.

The trip was a lot of fun. I'm glad we went. And strangely enough, during our trip, there was an announcement online of a recently-discovered, never-before-published short story by John Bellairs. It's called The Gargoyle in the Dump, and it will be published in September as an ebook. It's very short, only 24 pages, and is apparently about 3 brothers having a very boring summer, until they discover a talking gargoyle in the town's dump. It sounds exactly like something John Bellairs would write. I'm looking forward to it!

Two things I forgot to mention about my new phone:

1.  I love the double-tap to wake feature. Instead of pressing the power button on the side to wake the phone up, you just double-tap anywhere on the screen. If the phone is awake, you can also double-tap the screen to make it go to sleep. That's really useful and cool. Other phones have had this feature for a while; this is the first time I've owned one with it.

2.  As luck would have it, the first picture I got to take with my new phone was of a skunk in our backyard:

We watched it for at least 20 minutes foraging around in the grass looking for food. Then it wandered into the front yard for a while. Eventually it went into the backyard and disappeared into the bushes.

Ours was a very brief encounter with a skunk compared to one of my coworkers. He discovered skunks were living under his front porch, so he hired a wildlife company to trap them. When it was all over, they had caught a mother skunk and 7 babies, 3 of which were extremely rare albino skunks. I never knew such a thing existed.

Phone

I got a new phone recently: an Alcatel Onetouch Idol 3. I'd had my old one for 3 years, and I kept telling myself it was fast enough for the things I used it for, so I didn't need a new one. But it was stuck on the KitKat version of Android, with no hope of getting new versions. I kept looking at Wendy's newer phone, which had the latest version of Android (Lollipop), and feeling envious of the new features she could use. And there were times when my phone ran so much slower than hers. So I caved and bought a new one.

I was quite pleased with my purchase. The top of the line phones these days cost $700, which is an astronomical price to pay for a phone, in my opinion. I kept looking for a solid mid-range phone, and that's what I found with the Idol 3. I was able to pre-order it for only $200, and it has Lollipop, and it is much, much faster than my old phone.

It's also much bigger, which has taken some adjustment. It's a 5.5-inch phone, compared to my old one which was 4.6-inch. It still fits in my pocket, but just barely. I usually take it out when I'm sitting down and set it on the desk/table/whatever's convenient. That means I'm more likely to forget it somewhere, but so far that hasn't happened. (Knock on wood)

Laptop

I also got a new laptop recently, but unlike the phone, I went top of the line. I've been using my old laptop for almost 5 years. The main reason I bought the old one was because it was cheap: it was a Black Friday deal I bought online from Best Buy. It was not all that fast, and the keyboard had an annoying row of buttons to launch default programs (web browser, email, calculator, etc), which meant I kept accidentally hitting those buttons when I meant to hit something else. Then I'd have to wait until the program launched, so I could kill it, and try again to hit the right button. It didn't happen that often, but it was very annoying when it did.

So this time around I decided not to skimp. After reading reviews from Consumer Reports, and talking to a coworker who just got a new laptop, I bought a Dell 17-inch Inspiron 7000 series. It's got an i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, a 1 TB hard drive, and a dedicated graphics card. It also has a touch screen. So far I love the larger screen (my old laptop was a 15-inch), and I absolutely love that it has a backlit keyboard. No more squinting at the keyboard in the dark to make sure I'm hitting the right button. Very nice! And it's also much, much faster than my old laptop! 

This morning I finished all the setup: installing Linux, getting everything configured, and transferring over my data. I'm looking forward to developing software with this machine.

CamelBak

A few months ago I reached my 10-year anniversary at work. As a reward, I got to pick a gift from a (very) small catalog. I was fairly unimpressed with the selection. I had to look through it several times before I could find something I was even mildly interested in. Finally, I decided to get a 100-oz CamelBak. It's one of those backpacks with a water reservoir inside. There's a tube that extends out of the backpack and clips to a shoulder strap, so you can easily drink from the reservoir. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was great choice, because I could use it on bike rides to take along far more water than would fit in a bottle. So even though I was briefly tempted by a soft-serve ice cream maker, I got the CamelBak, to encourage me to exercise rather than to eat ice cream.

I've taken the CamelBak on several bike rides now, and it's great. I drink much more water than I usually do when I just have a bottle, and it's easier to drink while riding. 100 ounces is a lot of water, but it's actually not that heavy. The only downside is that the backpack does make my back get much sweatier, but that's fairly minor (and sweating is part of the point of exercising).

When I'm done riding, I take the reservoir out of the backpack, wash it out, and store it in the freezer until the next ride. Several places, including the CamelBak website, recommend that as a way to prevent bacteria from growing.

So that was a pretty good gift after all. I hope to use it for many bike rides to come.

• Shape-shifting UFO spotted over Bogota: A distinguished journalist reports seeing a shape-shifting UFO over Bogota, Columbia. It's a good report with some intriguing pictures. I just find it disappointing he feels the need to apologize for what he saw.
• Theories about a strange roar over southern Wisconsin: Closer to home, last month a strange roar was heard over parts of southern Wisconsin. It lasted several minutes, and was heard in several counties simultaneously. Planes, thunder, meteorites, and earthquakes were ruled out. We're not that far away from the cities that reported the sound.
• What the Deer are Telling Us: Apparently deer, like humans, are very good at wiping out biodiversity. A biologist claims that deer have eradicated 80 percent of native Wisconsin plant species. Another example:
• "On Anticosti Island, in Quebec, deer feasted so remorselessly on currants, gooseberries, and wild fruits that the native bear population, dependent on the fruits for survival, died out within 50 years of deer introduction. This was astonishing. A prey species, by stealing away plant resources, had extirpated its predator."
• A quest for pain-free fishing: The author discovers that Egoscue exercises allow him to continue fishing in retirement. I don't fish, but I have been doing Egoscue for the past 5 years. It helps to counteract the total lack of movement I get from sitting at the computer. My favorite part of the article: the author writes that his daughter worked with yoga instructors who had chronic pain, and much to their chagrin, yoga didn't help alleviate that pain. But Egoscue exercises did.
• Leonora Carrington's 98th Birthday: This is one of the best Google doodles I've ever seen. Leonora Carrington was a Mexican surrealist painter. The doodle is inspired from her painting "How Doth the Little Crocodile". I looked up that painting, and I discovered it's even better than the Google doodle. Here it is.

Finally, the weather has warmed up! Saturday's high was in the mid-70s, so we took the bikes out for another trail ride. This time we went to the Des Plaines River Trail, which is one of my favorites. Somehow I never rode on it last year, so I made a point of getting to it first thing this season. It's a bit of a drive, about 35 minutes, but it has some of the best scenery of the trails I've been on. 

It starts near the Wisconsin-Illinois border and follows the Des Plaines River for 30 miles south, almost to Chicago. I've only ever ridden along the northern half. A really nice feature of the trail is that even though it crosses several major roads, it has lots of underpasses so you never have to fight traffic to get across. The only downside is that those underpasses are right next to the river, so when we've gotten a lot of rain, they are sometimes closed due to flooding. Fortunately, you can check the status of each underpass online.

We haven't had much rain this spring (which is about to change this week, and was another reason I wanted to ride this trail now), so all the underpasses on our ride were open. The pictures above are pretty good, but don't quite do the trail justice. Once everything has fully bloomed, it's beautiful.

It was a fun 10-mile ride. On our way back we stopped to watch a huge bird, which we later decided was a turkey vulture.

As an encore, today I mowed the lawn for the first time this year. And now I am exhausted.

Distance: 10.03 miles

Riding Time: 1 hour, 6 minutes

Season Total: 20.7 miles

A few days ago I got an email from Google about a new ratings system they're implementing for Android apps. I had to fill out a questionnaire about my app so it could be assigned a rating. I did, and now in North America my app will be rated E for Everyone. I even got a "Rating Certificate" email from the IARC. But who is the IARC, I wondered? I've never heard of them. So I did a quick search for "IARC", and discovered that wow, there are a lot of IARCs! After the first few pages of results, I'd discovered:

• International Agency for Research on Cancer
• International Assisted Reproduction Center
• International Arctic Research Center
• International Aerial Robotics Competition
• International Accreditation and Recognition Council
• Indiana Association of Regional Councils
• Israeli Amateur Radio Club

At this point I gave up. None of them seemed like the one I was looking for. I went back to my "Rating Certificate" email and clicked on links until I discovered that this IARC is the International Age Rating Coalition. Mystery solved.

During my investigation, I came across the Acronym Attic site, which lists over 100 possible definitions of IARC. The two that piqued my interest the most were

• International Acid Rock Conference -- about environmental effects of mining in South America
• Illicit Antiquities Research Centre -- about the theft and traffic of archaeological items

The second one actually sounds really interesting (check out their newsletters here), but sadly the organization closed down in 2007.

After 7 months, 10 days, and 15 hours, I finally got back on the bike trail. Weather was sunny and low 60s. The ride was mostly pleasant, except for the smoke from a nearby controlled burn.

6.81 miles, north on the Prairie Trail

Riding time: 49 minutes

Including a few rides around the neighborhood, my season total is 10.6 miles.

I've always been a big fan of Little Debbie snack cakes, especially Swiss Cake Rolls and Nutty Bars. Some months ago, the vending machine at work started carrying a Nutty-Bar-knockoff called Buddy Bars, which I'd never heard of. Today I came across this link:

http://secondratesnacks.com/buddy-bars-vs-nutty-bars

It's a blog dedicated to comparing snacks with their second-rate versions. I totally agree with their assessment, Nutty Bars are much better than Buddy Bars. For the most part, Buddy Bars aren't bad. They're a lot less sweet and more peanut-buttery, but the second time I tried them, there was a burned taste that was terrible and disgusting and totally turned me off of them. Someone in the comments on that article says "The “burnt” taste comes from recycling damaged and partial parts into the peanut butter filler." I have no idea if that's true. If it weren't for that, Buddy Bars would be a nice change of pace to the sugary Nutty Bars.

The premise of Second Rate Snacks is completely ridiculous, but I love it. It's fun to scan through past posts to see what second rate snacks they taste test. The About page mentions they got the idea for the blog when they noticed a package of "Animal Snackers" in a vending machine.