Barley’s Mental Map

Every morning Barley runs down the front steps and takes a right. He’s gotten so predictable that I decided to let him lead the entire walk and see what kind of map formed. What made Barley’s mental map of the neighborhood? Was it the markings of other dogs? People?

Well, we never found out because we only made it to the end of the block before Barley had satisfied himself with the latest marking before looking to me to decide on directions. Not much of a map. The rest of the walk I tried to let him pick which way to go (except up people’s walkways) and it seemed his default was to go straight or look to me for some small cue about direction. I was a longer walk than normal and he never gave me the sad eyes when he realized we were turning back towards the house. Still, not quite what I was hoping for. No GIS project.

Bam!

A loud smash woke Michelle and I at 2:10 a.m. this morning. My brian quickly though a circuit had blown but all the power was still on in the right places. Gas explosion? No, the furnace was still working fine. A tour of the basement revealed nothing out of the ordinary – nothing had fallen, and no one had broken in. We were both a little concerned at not being able to find the cause. Barley was still camped out in bed. Then I thought to check the front porch. The Sunday edition of the Oregonian was laying propped against the wall. The wall our heads are against in the bedroom. Oh.

Who delivers papers at 2 a.m.?

Gato returns

Tigger at home
After a lengthy stay with the vet, Tigger has finally returned home. He’s in good health and feeling no pain (Dr. added valium to the IV, it’s a powerful appetite stimulator in cats… munchies. ). He’s responding to being home, is eating and seems back to his old life with the exception of going outside. That’s not going to happen until we’re sure he’s back to normal. His final blood work should come in on Monday.

We’re both somewhat relieved. We were both sure that the old man wasn’t going to pull through this, but he has so far. And he’s made new friends at the vet’s. Still, he’s a bag of bones right now and could really use some of that muscle back. It’s weird to feel his hips and spine when he lays in your lap. Not exactly the cat that was feared in his old ‘hood. Barley is OK with it all because decreased appetite means more cream for him. We’re starting to think maybe the pressure of keeping up with Barley’s lean and model-like figure is what led to Tigger’s dramatic weight loss. Oh the pressure we put on our pets.

Yahoo Maps Beta

movement in yahoo maps
I stumbled upon Yahoo’s maps beta while reading fark today and wanted to see what made it unique. I love google maps, so Yahoo has some impressing to do if they want to woo map geeks.

My First impression is that the interface is kind of busy but not in a work stopping kind of way. The tool uses Flash which is kind of choppy on my 3.8GHz work machine. There’s a live zoom tool and panning which is one of the greatest features of goggle maps. It makes for improved discovery to be able to pan around and see the area around your point of interest and judge scale and location.

A big improvement is the multi-stop destinations. For a sample I did a map of my westward migration since birth (right) which yahoo attached some driving instructions for. This will be a lot of fun and quite useful because no matter how much you’d like to stop by some place on your trip from A to B, most web mapping services don’t allow it.

There’s also a Live traffic tool which I remember hearing about last year at the WebVisions conference. There’s also support for yahoo’s local directory which like google’s is of only limited usefulness.

It’s still in beta, but it looks pretty good.

Portland Traffic

Yesterday’s Colloquium was presented by Robert Bertini of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. It focused on transportation and how it has shaped the development and land use in Portland. The gist of the talk was that transportation was key in locating Portland as a major city and that each new mode of transportation tends to follow routes created by previous modes.

The slide show that accompanied the talk had some great historical photographs and maps from the last century. One of the slides was a map of streetcar routes from the early 1900s which included an Alberta line. Most of these older routes were buried under the street network as cars became more popular.

There was brief discussion about the future of transportation especially as it relates to traffic jams in Portland and the looming sense that we can’t build ourselves out of the congestion we’re seeing today, which is why Portland has focused on other modes of transportation and other alternatives for coping with growth.

I was tempted to ask about the Segway because I remember people saying that it would change the way cities were built and such. While I do agree it’s a brilliant piece of technology (controlled falling … like walking) it just hasn’t caught on. In fact, it appears that bicycle ridership has instead boomed. And why not? The cost of a bicycle is much less and the I’ve only seen one “Segway” rider and it was a kid riding a knock-off that had four wheels getting passed by droves of cyclists in the bike lane on Vancouver Ave.

I’m really curious about transportation. Right now I’m contributing to the jam on most days and I’d like to do something about that.

Ill Gato

After coming home Monday to somewhat improved health, Tigger is back at the vet. He spent the night there last night because his bloodwork suggested his immune system was attacking his red blood cells.

We’re waiting to hear how the night went. He’s on an IV with fluids and steroids to see if the immune system would shape up.

El Gato

This morning I took Tigger to the vet for some greater insight into why he isn’t eating or drinking. Michelle had to take him in to the emergency vet on Sunday because he was looking very bad. His eyes were vacant and he smelled. The emergency vets did a geriatric panel (every thing’s good) but his bladder was empty and he was quite dehydrated. He was given subcutaneous fluids but he still hasn’t drank of his own will. At near 17 years of age, and down to 7.8 lbs, he’s going to have a hard time bouncing back from whatever it turns out is ailing him. Good luck you surly cat.

another RTFM day

On most days my annoyance by people’s lack of initiative to solve their own problems is fairly low. Yesterday however was a bold-font red-letter RTFM day. It was like all easy to use and searchable documentation had been obliterated and reading had gone out of style. On top of that, no one was willing to try even the most trivial of tasks out.

Show cancelled

Michelle and I were going to go see David Gray with one of her co-workers last night until Ticketmaster called to tell us that the show had been cancelled. This was probably the first show in a long time that Michelle had picked to go to and while I’m not much of a fan, I decided I would just be quiet and enjoy the show without any of Andy’s ™ snide remarks. But it was cancelled. So we had dinner at the Blue Nile. Nothing like gorging yourself on Ethiopian food.