Porcupine Alley

I arrived in Cape Town about 5am (dark outside), and stepped carefully back into Africa (stepped/stumbled:  they were unable to locate lights for the path from the plane to the terminal).  There wasn't much of a line for citizens in the passport-checking area, but that didn't stop at least a few people from wandering right to the front of the line, as if to cut, and then just continuing on right past the passport-checkers, who were unable to really notice due to the poor design of the booths they sit in.  Hopefully those guys have no trouble with lack of passport stamps on their next leg, or perhaps it's just a known thing here that there's no need to bother with the hassle of official entrance/exit.  Next up was a quick check on pricing for transportation:  For two people, it was R170 for the shuttle, or $240 for a cab.  The cab people were clearly not pleased with being undercut, but the shuttle was a great choice.  Despite my misdirections, Chris Ho...

  I had a great backpacking trip in the Southern Sierras (near Mt. Whitney in the John Muir Wilderness) a few weeks ago, and finally decided to see about getting some geocoded pics online. Since I've been so spoiled with my eye-fi card, I'm not used to needing to manually geocode my pics.  Still, I had my trusty old GPS with me for the trip, and I figured it shouldn't be too hard.  Here's what I did: Used GPS Babel to quickly export a .gpx of my tracks from the trip Ran the gpsPhoto perl script to geocode my photos:  ./gphoto.pl  --gpsfile hike08.gpx--timeoffset 28800 --maxtimediff 3600 --dir ./hike_photos/ Note:  the time offset (in seconds) is because my camera and I are set to -8 hours from GMT, and the time diff allows my photos to be up to an hour off from the closest gps point.  This is because I sometimes hiked with with the gps off.  Now that the photos were geocoded, I uploaded them to Flickr, and noticed th...

I finally had a chance to get my first flight in at Mussel Rock earlier today -- soaring over the coast was everything I had hoped for.  No need for a vario at this place; lift is everywhere.  So much lift, that when I was ready to land, it took judicious use of big-ears (which is very common to see out here, and clearly helpful to ensure you avoid blow-back ) to get past the incredible buoyancy I was getting.  I have no idea why some folks call it cliff-boring .. soaring is a ton of fun, and it's great to be a little more familiar with this site.

A few weeks ago, I purchased Eye-Fi's fancy geolocating and wireless-uploading SD Card , which I'd seen a demo of at WhereCamp . I love gadgets, perhaps too much, but this thing is indeed a great implementation of a cool idea. And, as yet another harbinger of how almost everything will soon be location aware, it has all kinds of potential. For example, devices like this could be used as the poor man's (no iphone) location updater.  Since they haven't opened up their API (allegedly it's on their to-do list), and because I've been looking for any excuse to play with FireEagle , I just finished up a little python script that queries my flickr photos every few minutes and (if there's a new one that eye-fi has uploaded), it grabs the WOEID and updates my FireEagle profile.  Working with the Fllickr and FireEagle API's was fun. Obviously a bit of a hack, but once they do open their API (so I don't have to pull for data), or otherwise allow us to ...

Ate lunch at Eric's today. Despite their scary restaurant inspection report ( EveryBlock reports are yet another nice feature of San Francisco), it was one of the better meals, and deals, I've had in a while. $6.50 total bill for a huge plate of tasty kung-pao goodness, soups, and tea. I'll be eating lunch here again.

I spent the morning at Mussel Rock Park , kiting and getting back up to speed on some ground handling basics with some good tips, and a great site overview from Jeff of Airtime San Francisco . I've never gone cliff soaring before, and I'm certainly not used to the fog! Starting around noon, there were a few gliders in the air, and I understand the weekends can be packed. If the weather looks good, I'm excited to get some flying time in early next week.

When I first saw walkscore.com I was impressed with their simple but clever approach to creating a walk index. Ranking walkability is an interesting topic for me: I've had the opportunity to work on a few different sprawl and walkability models in the past, but these often tended to be complex. And I don't mean they used tricky or especially unintuitive algorithms (although do believe this type of analysis is often ruined by unintuitive modeling). I mean complex in terms of the data sources. In the world of ranking walkability, many sources (assessor, zoning, sidewalk attributes, etc) that the more academic models tend to rely on are just not comparable from city to city. To me, one of the key features of the new version of walkscore is that it keeps true to it's initial approach by keeping it simple (business listings and census data), and using a straightforward methodology . By focusing on amenities and where people live, can a model like this be use...