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life pictures

A Sneak Preview

We went to have an ultrasound today to find out whether our next child was going to be a boy or a girl. We got some really good images of a very healthy and active baby. They were easily the most detailed ultrasound images we had ever seen except for the one time we got to have a 3-D ultrasound with Isaac (because the clinic wanted to test their new machine).

Enoch's arm

Aside from very clear images we got a good look at a very active little boy, turning his head, moving his hands and feet – he was almost constantly in motion. Hopefully that means that Enoch will be a very well-matched playmate for Isaac (once he is more than half Isaac’s size that is).

Categories
culture life meta pictures technology

Speed Affects Lifestyle

Preface

I was laying in my bed at 5:00 AM (when most people should be in bed) and my brain started reviewing the images of the roads I commute on. I began to think of how such a complex road system would be entirely unnecessary if we were not able to travel at the average speed of today’s normal commute. Consider this a stream of semi-consciousness about the impact that our speed of movement has on the kind of life that each of us lives.

Then

Let’s place the year 1889 as the baseline of a slower lifestyle. I choose that year because it predates the advent of the car, it is late enough that we had the ability to move faster than horse and wagon with the use of railroads, and it’s 120 years ago – a nice round number.

In 1889 most travel was done by horse or on foot. As I recall traveling 30 miles in a day was generally about as far as a person could expect to go. In the late 1870’s the Transcontinental Express was able to average about 35 miles per hour traveling across the country. That would appear to be the functional limit of traveling speed for that time.

Now

Today people regularly travel 70 miles per hour on their daily commute (outside of rush hour) only because we have created an artificial speed limit of 65 mph on our roads – without that speed limit most vehicles could easily travel at 90 mph.

For the sake of simplification let’s consider the differences that we would see if we were to limit our physical traveling of people to 5 mph (a fast walk) with a limit of 30 miles per day, as compared to today when I can comfortably make a trip of 600 miles in a long day and regularly commute 20 miles each way to work.

Comparison

In our modern situation the only real limitation on where I work (physically) is how much time I am willing to commute – I can choose to live 50 miles or more from my place of employment so long as I am willing to take the time to commute. In the slower lifestyle if we assume that I am willing and able to spend 6 hours of my day commuting in addition to the 8 hours I need to work then I could work as much as 15 miles from home.

From a community standpoint I could not reasonably interact with anyone outside a 7 mile radius on a reagular basis in the slower community whereas in the modern-speed community I could with no more effort interact with people anywhere in a 100 mile radius. If we had an even population density over that whole area that would mean that I have access to 204 times as many people on a daily basis. If we assume that there really is a limit on how many people I can know well then there I can really only know ½ of 1% of the available information about those I can interact with on a daily basis compared to the slower society

Conclusion

I am really not trying to suggest that our society has gone all downhill since some utopian point in our past, but I do like to think about the real results of what we think of as progress. As I was looking around (on the internet – there’s a new kind of speed there) I discovered an entry in Wikipedia on car culture that focuses on cars and addresses this same mindset of “what has really changed with this progress.”

What are your thoughts on the effect of rushing about in our society?

Categories
life pictures technology

What’s in a Name?

Despite the fact that I have had my twitter account for over two years I’m still pretty low on the twitter curve. Let’s put it this way after more than two years of having the account I currently have a total of 47 updates to my credit. Truthfully I ignored twitter after getting the account until recently when I decided that it might be interesting to see what’s happening in the twitterverse. It did not take very long before I noticed that I get lots of tweets directed at me from people I don’t know. I just assumed that this was another example of the dangers of having a common name. I got on twitter early enough that I was not forced to use a name like “whatdoyoucallaguywithnonicknameswhenhisnameistaken” when I created the account. I was lucky enough to get a nice simple “davidmiller.”

I have long known that there are many David Millers around (such as the Mayor of Toronto – yet one more reason I should go visit there) and I assumed that I was getting tweets from people who assumed that “davidmiller” on twitter belonged to a David Miller that they knew. Finally today I noticed that more than half of the tweets directed at me from people who obviously don’t know me contained links from blip.fm – I know nothing about the site except that from the content of the tweets it is obviously oriented around listening to music. I finally got curious and asked the people who recently sent me blip related tweets why they were sending them. The answer I got was:

holyshadow@davidmiller cause they have integrated twitter and blip, and since you have the same nick, you receive the blips on twitter. that answers?

So now I know why I may be the only person on twitter who has blocked more people than he follows (blocking people means that I don’t get informed every time they send a tweet my way) – due the the mashup nature of so many social networking services I am getting random tweets because some other David Miller has the same username on blip.fm as I have on twitter.com – I wonder if I can just block tweets that contain a url from blip?

Categories
life pictures

Finding Our Lost Sheep

Three days ago, on Wednesday evening, our hamster, Moonlight, got away from us. Normally when this happens we know where she is and/or she comes back where we can get her, but this time we could not locate her and she did not show up within a few minutes. We soon came to the conclusion that she must have made her way into the vents so we set out some food and water in a couple of places where she might get to them (such as the cool air return in the top of the downstairs hallway). Unfortunately after 24 hours none of the food or water stores had been touched and we were beginning to get worried. Our only consolation was that we were still occasionally hearing scratching noises from time to time suggesting that she was still alive.

Last night after Laura and I got home from our date Laura called me down as she heard Moonlight at close range in one of the basement walls near another cold air return. I took off the cover but there was no Moonlight. We decided that she must not be in the vents but in the walls themselves. We went into the spare bedroom and cut a hole into the wall where we heard her. She was not in the place where we cut, but we continued to hear her. She would begin climbing the walls every time we called her name. When we were confident about where she was located we finally performed the rescue operation (at 11:00 pm):

After two days of being trapped in the walls we had our Moonlight back. She was happy to see us and very happy to start drinking some water.

Categories
life pictures

Four Wheel Drive

It’s a good thing I bought a vehicle with 4WD – I got stuck driving into my driveway this afternoon coming home from work. I should have got a picture of the Explorer sideways in the driveway or at least a picture of the sideways sliding tire tracks in the driveway. Better yet I should have had Laura take a video of me driving in after clearing away the snow around the tires (I was still sliding).

I had cleared the driveway before I left for the breakfast with Senator Bennett but by the time I got home there was another 8 inches of snow on the driveway. I did think to get  this picture (taken by Savannah) after I had cleared the driveway.

snowpack

It doesn’t show in the picture but that pile of snow is over my head in height. The line in the snow near the height of my knees is the level of the snow from today.

Categories
life Local pictures politics State technology

Voting Record

Voting Record will allow recording of votes cast for display and reference purposes. Elected officials can record and display their votes and citizens can track and display the votes of an elected official they follow.

Latest Version: 2.0 (March 16, 2009)

Display templates are introduced here giving you total flexibility in deciding what to display. There is one set of template settings for recent votes and another for search results. Each template is made up of a header, a footer, and an item template. Template tags are used to display the variables specific to each recorded vote such as the vote cast or the vote description. There is also a setting for what to display when no votes are returned in the recent votes and another setting for when no votes are returned in a search.

Votes are entered on a dashboard widget:

Vote Record Dashboard Widget

A vote management page is available from the posts menu:

Manage Recorded Votes

Recent votes are shown by adding <?php recent_votes(); ?> in your theme templates. You can show a search votes form by using the shortcode [ SEARCH-VOTES ] on a page or post. Options for Voting Record include:

  • The option to specify a primary voter (if most or all of the votes being tracked are from one person).
  • The option to specify header text/code for the recent vote list.
  • How many recent votes to show – limited by number of votes or number of days.
  • What to show before a list of recent votes and what to show before a list of search results.
  • What to display at the end of a list of recent votes and what to display at the end of a list of search results.
  • The format for displaying your recent votes or search results lists, including which pieces of information to show.
  • What to display when no recent votes are returned or when a search comes up empty.

To install it simply unzip the file linked above and save it in your plugins directory under wp-content. In the plugin manager activate the plugin. Settings for the plugin may be altered under the Voting Record page of the Options menu (version 2.3) or Settings menu (version 2.5 or later).

Categories
life meta pictures technology

Kiva

For those who wish to help others but who have limited means to do so Kiva provides an opportunity to give a little (as little as $25) and help people around the world who have business plans to lift themselves up economically. Loans from individuals get pooled as necessary to fund people. I have been very impressed with this system that allows people to help others by using small means to make great things happen.

I was very happy to take the opportunity to take the code written by Connor Boyack and turn it into the Kiva plugin for WordPress so that people can raise the visibility of Kiva by displaying loans in the fundraising stage with a link to donate.

version 1.1 (2/10/2009)
More options over which loans to show

Latest Version 1.2 (2/27/2009)
You can now use a text widget with the shortcode SHOW-KIVA (enclosed in square brackets – []) to display the Kiva plugin in a widgetized sidebar.

Options include:

  • Number of posts to show.
  • Display format for loan list – Image only displays the image for each loan linked to the donation page, Both displays the image and text information, Text only displays name(linked to the donation page), business, country, and fundraising level/goal for the loan.
  • Gender – you can restrict to only show loans for men or loans for women.
  • Region – you can show loans only in one of 7 geographic regions.
  • Sector – you can only show certain types of loans such as retail or agriculture.

To install it simply unzip the file linked above and save it in your plugins directory under wp-content. In the plugin manager activate the plugin. Settings for the plugin may be altered under the Kiva page of the Options menu (version 2.3) or Settings menu (version 2.5 or later). Place the call show_kiva(); anywhere in your page templates or use [ SHOW-KIVA] in a text widget.

Categories
life pictures

My New Car

My team will be moving to a new office in the coming weeks to a location that would add another hour or more each way to my commute if I kept taking the bus. I’ve known this for months so I have been thinking about the need to buy a car.

I hate the idea of a car payment and have been lucky in my previous two cars that I have been able to pay for them without a loan. This time I really worried that I would not be able to find a reasonable car for the amount of cash I figured I could afford to pay. Late last week I noticed a little truck at the side of the road along my bus route that was for sale in the right price range. That got me serious about shopping, especially when combined with the news that we would probably be moving a month earlier than I had previously expected.

After driving a couple of other cars (including the truck I had seen along the bus route) I finally found my new car:

my new explorer

It’s amazing that I could get everything I wanted at the right price. It drives well, has low miles, can hold carseats (the little truck couldn’t do that) or haul larger items, and it even has 4 wheel drive in case we ever need that on our hills. I feel very fortunate today.

Categories
life pictures

Random Injury Report

I must have a knack for this kind of thing because I really doubt that puncturing a fingernail is a common type of injury. I’ve done it twice in my life now. Once when I was young (I touched a power saw that had not stopped spinning). Apparently yesterday was not exciting enough for me. I was attempting a minor repair when the board split as I was trying to screw it in place and the drill punctured my middle fingernail with a screwdriver bit. I’m really curious to see how this will heal.

Categories
life pictures

Congratulations to Carl

I almost have a lawyer for a brother. The Colorado Supreme Court just posted a list of people who passed the Bar Exam and he’s on it.

Now all he needs is to be sworn in. What an accomplishment. CONGRATULATIONS!