Brian is a Nerd

I'm starting a sub-blog for topics I think are more nerd related that the usual fare on this site. It's a single column design, allowing for larger photos and maps. I'm calling it "Brian is a Nerd" and it can be found at nerd.wheretheheckisbrian.com. There is a permanent link on the left sidebar. The first post is about tracking gas mileage using an iPhone, spreadsheets, and Google Fusion Tables. Check it out!

The Palms

I live at an apartment complex called "The Palms". As part of their shtick, they imported and planted about twenty palm trees throughout the property.

They all died during the drought this summer. 

Undaunted, management brought in NEW trees, just in time for winter. These people have a firm grasp on the reality of climate, and how much the weather cares about their desires, you see. 

Last night we had a pretty impressive thunderstorm: lightning, hail, high winds, rain, the works. Impossible to sleep through. This morning, this is what I saw as I drove to work:

Winter

Winter has finally arrived. It was 32 degrees this morning when I left the apartment, and at 10:45am it's only 37 degrees outside.

The cold front arrived yesterday, and brought a ton of dust with it. Someone snapped this picture while flying into Midland Airport, and put it on Facebook.

Big Bend: Third Time's the Charm

The weather finally cooled off a bit, so I took the opportunity to drive down to Big Bend National Park for my third visit. Packed up the night before, then left straight from work on Friday. Got to the Chisos Basin campground with enough time to set up, eat dinner and relax a little. Last time I was at Chisos Basin, everyone had hammocks. This time I brought my own.

That night I slept for eleven hours.

Saturday I drove around the park and did a bunch of short hikes. The stand-out feature was Santa Elena Canyon:

I spent the afternoon reading in the hammock, surrounded by mountains. Very relaxing.

Sunday I did the Window Trail hike. It's a nice hike down a dry stream bed that cut a "window" into a cliff.

As usual, more pictures here.

Road Trip to Arches

After working a 10-day shift, I took off for a four-day weekend to meet my parents at Arches National Park. They were on the southernmost point of a two week trip, but it still took fourteen hours of driving to get to the rendezvous point. I had never been to Arches before, but I've wanted to go for awhile. The rock formations were worth the drive.

We also saw a big-horned sheep, which apparently is a pretty rare treat:

All told, I drove 1660 miles, getting 38 miles per gallon in my little Honda Civic.

View Arches Road Trip in a larger map

More pictures in my Picasa gallery:

New Kindles!

Amazon has just presented new Kindles!

Most people will be focused on the Kindle Fire - a 7-inch, color touch screen device with an 8-hour battery primarily used for Amazon eBooks, music, movies, TV shows and apps, all for $200. Amazon will sell a lot of these, and it looks great. However, I'm not expecting to buy one, for the same reason I didn't buy an iPad 2: my original iPad still gets the job done just fine. However, if you're looking to by a tablet, this looks like a worthy contender.

I'm far more interested in the new e-Ink Kindles. The new base Kindle (non-touch) is available for just $79, and is available today. At that price, this is going to be a huge seller at Christmas. However, I'd probably get the reduced-price $99 Kindle Keyboard if I was going that route.

The Kindle Touch is the product I'm interested in. Amazon has ditched the old hardware keyboard and is using a system of infrared sensors to enable a touch-screen interface. This is the same system the Barnes and Noble Nook Simple Touch uses, and worked even better than I expected when I test-drove a Nook at the local B&N last night. I'm on the fence as to whether I want the 3G version or not. It's an extra $50, and with a little forethought probably wouldn't be that necessary. But when I'm traveling, having that free, world-wide 3G connection sure is appealing, especially with the experimental web browser built into the Kindle.

A few caveats: the Kindles don't come with covers or chargers, just a USB cable. Not having a cover included is a downer, but who really needs another USB wall wart? Also, the pricing: the advertised prices for the e-Ink Kindles are all for the ad-subsidized versions. If you don't want ads on your sleep screen, it'll cost an extra forty bucks. On the other hand, all the ads to-date have looked pretty attractive. I might be willing to put up with them.

The Kindle Touch (4th gen) and Kindle Keyboard (3rd gen).

All in all, it's a pretty decent upgrade. The screens appear to be the same component used in the previous generation, with the new IR touch sensors embedded in the bezel. I still think the Kindle Keyboard is more attractive, both in color and form. But it may be about time to retire my venerable first-generation Kindle.

The 1st generation Kindle.

Cyborgs

The Unofficial Apple Weblog posted a rumor yesterday speculating on a new voice interface (called "Assistant" in the post) that may be coming with the next iPhone.

We're told that you can speak to the Assistant in your normal tone and speed of voice; it's that accurate. Assistant is also integrated with Wolfram Alpha, so you could also ask your iPhone questions like "Convert 10.2 acres to hectares" or "What's the cube root of 924?" and get an immediate answer.

I have no idea if this is actually coming with the next Apple product, but I'm convinced that something like this is coming in the near future. And it sounds really, really cool. After all, what could be better than asking a question to the air and having your phone spit out the correct answer?

But as cool as this is, it's also worrying. When you don't have to put any effort into learning something, it doesn't stick with you. At the most basic level, this is the same problem as needing a calculator to figure out that 3 x 4 = 12. As human beings, we shouldn't need a technological crutch to navigate through basic aspects of life.

Having said that, you can still bet I'll be all over this feature, if and when it ships.

* * *

One other interesting bit from the article:

One more fascinating feature that is likely to be packed with privacy settings is "Find my Friends." With this feature, you could ask your phone "Where's Erica Sadun?" and (provided she's made her location information available to me) the iPhone would display her location.

Again, there's no way to know if this is real or not, but after the brouhaha about iPhone tracking earlier this year, Apple had better be very careful about how they present a feature like this. I think it would be fantastic to have a service that would let me know when friends are nearby ("enhanced serendipity", if you will) but it would be pretty easy to forget you had this enabled, or to forget who had access to your location. I've been publishing my general location for over a year now, but only a few people have had access to my pinpoint, real-time location. It's not something you would trust to just anyone.

ISS Time-Lapse Video

A very cool time-lapse video from the International Space Station. Seeing lightning storms from space is fascinating. From the YouTube description:

A time-lapse taken from the front of the International Space Station as it orbits our planet at night. This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, El Salvador, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Lake Titicaca, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earth’s ionosphere (thin yellow line), a satellite (55sec) and the stars of our galaxy.

Wildfire Aftermath

Two months after a wildfire swept through...

And people don't believe me when I say I'm not concerned about wildfires anymore, because there's nothing left to burn :-)

Photo Map

So this is how I spend my Friday nights. After playing with Google Fusion Tables for a bit, I got pretty excited about mapping my photos. Fusion Tables is definitely a beta product, but it's fantastic at turning a table or a Google Earth file into a nice map.

View Larger Map

If you click on a pinpoint, the corresponding photo will pop up.

I've been working on my digital photos for quite a while now, categorizing, getting rid of duplicates and bad shots, and geo-tagging my old photos, and making sure to keep up on that kind of thing with all my new photos. Last night I uploaded a bunch of photos from my college and high school years. You can check out the galleries here. I'm still missing my big European summer of 2006. Cleaning up those photos is an on-going project. I started with close to 2000 photos (almost 200 of which were of the Eiffel Tower) taken by six different people. Getting rid of junk photos (I have sooo many blurry photos of stained-glass windows), sorting them chronologically (nobody had the date/time on their cameras set accurately in 2006) and accurately geo-tagging everything has been quite the chore.

My sister has been working on digitally scanning the negatives of my mom's old photos, so hopefully I'll eventually be able to add photos of the vacation to Hawaii and the two-month RV trip around the contiguous United States.

Oh, and just for the heck of it, here's the Photo Map and the Google Latitude Map overlaid on each other:

View Larger Map