First Dogwash of the year

Drying the dog
After a brilliant morning walk that ended with coffee and a cinnamon roll, Michelle and I decided to give Barley the first outdoors bath of the year. Its unbelievably nice out lately and dogface was seriously ready for a bath. (no, its not his first bath of the year, just the first outside)

In order to make it fun, we got out his kiddy pool and used the sprayer to taunt him around the yard. He’s a bit of a freak when he gets wet. And its further evidence that he might be part greyhound if you ignore the horrid joint issues.

Finally the fun came to an end and we had to dry the dog off. Its easily everyone’s least favorite part of the job. Barley loathes getting toweled, and used to growl before finally submitting to fate. Besides a load of water, a mess of hair came off with the drying. Despite all the hair we left outside, there will probably be small colonies of it on the floor again by tomorrow.

Anyway, here’s a shot of poor Barley getting toweled off on the deck.

To Kyoto or not to Kyoto

The Kyoto Protocol goes into effect today, and although the US has refused to sign the international treaty, there’s still something we can do about it. Like the folks at Cascadia Scorecard, you can ratify the protocol yourself.

I’m a little uncertain as how to calculate it since I’m not living with my parents anymore, but I’ll make my best efforts to reduce my emission of CO2 to sub 1990 levels. Here’s an easy way:

1 gallon of gas when burned releases 17lbs of CO2. That’s roughly 20 miles given the average US fuel economy for new cars in 2001.

A normal breath of air is roughly 1 liter in volume. When you exhale, 4% of that is CO2. A liter of air weighs roughly 1.2 grams, so you exhale ~.05 grams of CO2 with each breath. So you produce 17lbs of CO2 with 160,647 breaths. On average, we take 12 breaths per minute. So lets say when you ride a bike you’re averaging 20 breaths per minute. That means you can ride for 8032 minutes before you expel 17 pounds of CO2. If you average 10mph on a bike, that takes you 1330 miles. Hmmm…

I’m to lazy to show or check my work. Tommy or Scott will be interested and probably corroborate or disprove the evidence for me. Oh, and I don’t remember my sources. The Internet will show the way.

Michelle’s first race

I forgot to mention – Michelle completed her first race this weekend in Eugene. She ran in the Truffle Shuffle 4 mile event. She finished with her fastest time ever on a 4 mile and would have done even better if she hadn’t started all the way in the back. She was also glowing when she finished. I guess its a runner thing. She’s inspired me to ride more though.

Barley and I aren’t runners so we hung out in the park and watched. It was an amazingly nice day with sun and ducks and prettier gulls than we have in Portland.

Query the possibilities

Here’s an example of some of the work I’m doing on my GIS project. Start with all the tax lots in Portland, query all lots zoned “single family residence”, then query those with a total value (property and building) of $175,000 to $225,000, then query those results for homes built before 1950, then query those results for lot size greater than 4400 sq. ft., then query those results for building square footage for those greater than 1500 sq. ft. Here’s what you get:

All Portland Taxlots After the fall

Kind of startling, huh? I wasn’t going to put streets in it originally, but there’s no way to tell where the second image is otherwise.

Hail to the…

Michelle has a fancy coffee mug with the gilded (not really) logo of the United States Supreme Court on it. She doesn’t use it often, and I usually give it to her on special occasions like passing the bar, or her first race. But it’s such a fancy mug that it needs a processional, and hail to the chief, while seeming appropriate, just isn’t. The two very different branches are separate. Hopefully.

However, I’m not aware of a Supreme Court Anthem, so the first theme that came to mind was the Scorpions’ Rock me like a Hurricane. I have a nasty habit of waking up with bad songs stuck in my head. While it doesn’t necessarily seem like a perfect fit at first, it kind of grows into the part. Think of the justices filling to the room to it. Powerful.

Still… it doesn’t seem quite right. There must be something better. But I can’t quite shake the image of them filing into the court with it playing. Justice Scalia with both hands raised, rockin’ the session to a start.

Altering Science

The LA Times is reporting on a survey from the union of concerned scientists that says U.S. Scientists Say They Are Told to Alter Findings. The results of the survey suggest that many researchers with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife have seen conclusions reversed to weaken species protection and favor business interests.

It’s one thing to take scientific research and choose to ingore it; it’s a completely different thing to fake the science. It’s called lying. And as fond of calling the Bush administration Fascist, this really is a perfect example. But take it a step further; the Nazi party was famous for cooking “science” to champion its message. I don’t like Nazis.

Fat Tuesday

Last night we joined in our first fat tuesday party at a friends place in SE Portland. Besides the grand food, decor, and Hurricanes, the sponsor also put on a mini parade, which lasted for 1 block and consisted of 1 grand marshall (Derek), 1 float (Jim driving, April throwing beads), and one rear marshall (me, though rear marshall sounds dirty). Despite the briefness of the parade, we managed to piss off someone who evidently wanted to get home.

Fat Tuesday!

It was a fun time and my friends in the know helped me enough to dress in a way that while embarrassing me anywhere else, didn’t embarrass me at the party. Plus, the next morning, there was some king cake at work. Word on the street is the person who found the baby-jesus and didn’t fess up will have some serious ‘splainin’ to do.

MacMansions and Northwest Romantic Modernism

I can’t retrace the steps exactly, but I happened upon Robert Harrison Architects Northwest Romantic Modernims today and was quite pleased by it. We’re sort of relegated to purchasing a craftsman style bungalow, but I share the sentiments expressed. And I don’t see any reason why an old house cannot evolve. That’s part of the fun, right?

Google Maps – time to reconsider cartography

Google Maps

Google has announced their Google Maps Beta. Given the cool factor of their other tools I knew this was going to be big. So I tried it out. The sample queries they provide alone make the service much cooler than any of the competition. But I wanted to see what where I live looks via Google Maps. The results: Better start studying something besides cartography.

To start with – the maps are gorgeous. Drop shadows from the location callout, which also has options for setting this as a starting or ending point on a future query. The thumbtack isn’t that intrusive. The vectors are gorgeous – the weighting of the street volumes with colors, the labeling, the chocolate brown borders and the half-circle endpoints. And when you zoom out, the labels disappear cleanly. How am I supposed to compete with that?

The data that google uses appears to come from the same source as yahoo/mapquest (which I don’t like), and it displays it much more attractively. I had always had a preference for MapBlast who was then bought by Microsoft and turned into MapPoint, which I used up until this morning.

Oh – Google maps – since they get their data from the same place, also got the dead ends on my street wrong. Those aren’t through streets. Which is obvious just from the number of delivery-type vehicles that have to back up once they realize it too.