Turn Your Radio On

When you are out here, riding the infrastructure that stitches the nation to the corn and grass fields; when you have a cavalry of horses under your foot, pulling you forward; when you have left your loved one-- and your cat-- and you are flying against the jet stream to your last, true friends; when the job you may not have much longer, with a company that may not be much longer, provides not just the monies but also the modem you use to connect; when the light is falling fast and you are racing the jet liner that touches down at O'Hare; when this is your state among the union and this is your vacation; then there is naught to do but reign in the horses from their pasture and bridle them again beneath your feet to carry you on, into the night.

West Side

How do I plan a trip along a specific route? Google maps should accept such things as "Portland, OR to san francisco, CA via Route 101". If i'm going to drive down the west coast for the first time in my life, i want to take the coastal highway.

What GM does feature, though, is the ability to drag waypoints into a route. With a few strategic alterations, I can get exactly what I wanted, without knowing the details about connecting roads and such.

True Names

Yesterday, as i was driving to a friends house to help him move, a cardinal shot across the front of my car from the trees along the side of the road. I sometimes wonder whether squirrels and birds do this intentionally, thrill-seeking. It happens more than i would expect. Lightning, say, happens quite a lot, but i've never in my life had it strike within twenty feet. Birds, however, often fly in front of my speeding car.

But that aside, what occured to me as this particular bird passed a foot or so in front of the grill, was what i would say if it in fact collided with the car. 'I hit a bird yesterday'? I suppose, if one hits another human, it's enough (at first at least) to say, 'I hit a man the other day'. But later, you'd probably want to know what man i had hit, know his name.

So it passed through my thoughts as i drove on that, were we to afford all species proper respect, i would need to know this cardinal's name. But to have unique names for every bird, and squirrel, and dog would require a fair amount of specification.

In my current job, i'm often having to look up various people in a database. When they tell me their name, i take the more obscure of the first and last, since that will tend to return just their records. I despair a bit when it's a Bill Smith or Elizabeth Jones, because each of those four names will invariably return several pages of records.

So, to be fair, I suppose we already need finer indicators. Bill Smith with Vanguard Publishing, Elizabeth Jones of Thirty-two Terrace, Northwest. Likewise, pets often assume the family surname, though clearly your dog is not of your blood, so that's a bit loose.

But in the moments after this cardinal missed my windshield, i was struck by the idea of home many more names-- beyond the given and the sur-- we would need to name individuals across all species. Seemed like a cumbersome idea at the time.

Intermediate Civics

Here's the results of my research. It's not too encouraging. The motivation is to lower my monthly payments. The idea was based on the two word-of-mouth assumptions, that cars lose a big part of their value the moment they're driven off the lot, and that Honda's don't deprecate quickly after that. Don't pay too much attention to the exact values, they're taken from the NAPA book, rather than Kelly's Blue Book, because that's what the library has. Of note is that the trend is similar for all the models considered. The point is that the trend is linear over the first five or so years, rather than the sharp initial drop and soft flattening out the two assumptions would lead you to suspect. Something like figure 2.

The motivation was that i could sell sabado in, say, three years, recover roughly the cost of the loan on it, and buy a cheaper honda (a prelude, say, or a model without a navigation system), thus reducing my monthly payments. In the big book of caleb's budget, car payments are the second-largest monthly expense (rent is the undisputed winner). This is a class of analysis (if you have a name for it, please volunteer), based on the idea that, of several factors, two or three will be by far the largest contributors. So, in this case, my Netflix subscription is just shy of 1% of my monthly expenses, whereas my rent is a solid 31%. Lots of other things can be looked at in this manner (process time of elements of a piece of software, say, or cooking times of parts of thanksgiving dinner).

I guess i'll be driving sabado for the next five years, at least. Mind you, i love the car. But optimization is my speshee-alitee. This is the life of the engineer.

Civics 101

Here's a bit of autoporn for the interested. It's a car I consider both sensible and sexy: it's one of the top ten cars of 2006 in fuel efficiency (though, in that line-up it is near the bottom), and it looks good. The dash is split, with the speedometer further forward and closer to the field of view than the less-immediate displays (tachometer, odometer). When i got to the dealer, they didn't have the color i had planned on (dark blue), so what i got was a combination of what they had and what i wanted (it wasn't a compromise because i'm quite happy with what i drove away with). In fact, i went with the intention of spending a certain amount on an Accord. The dealer talked me into the civic and as a result, i got a more fuel-efficient car with more features than the Accord for the same price i planned for.

Features this car has include the sun/moonroof-- what defines a moonroof? i thought it was window glass in the roof that doesn't open, but my coworkers think it is glass that opens part-way, to vent air, but doesn't fully retract-- alloy wheels (which i didn't understand until a few days after i got the car. this means there is no hub-cap, what you see is the wheel. now that i know about them, i see them a lot), and a in-dash navigation system. The nav system is very cool, but i will qualify that. It's cool because it's kept me from getting lost several times and because when i'm driving around and see a body of water, a park, or a road diverging and wonder where it leads, i can use the nav system to name the features or show me a map of what's over the hill.

The qualification is the source of the map information. There is a navigation DVD which holds the data. The DVD that my car came with is already a year or two out of date. Update DVDs can be purchased from Honda for about $200. What foolishness. There is a property in my hometown neighborhood that used to be a psychiatric hospital but has been renovated and made into upscale apartments. The nav-system still reports that it is Appalachian Hall Hospital, even though it hasn't borne that name for several years.

The real problem, though, is the DVD, which by nature will become outdated. The car has some way to communicate with the GPS network to get position and elevation data. The navigation information should be downloaded on the fly, like mapquest or google maps, so that it is always current. And while it would require a larger effort, highways and city streets should be color-coded to reflect congestion in real time. Then i could see that I-435 is at a stand-still all the way to Quivira and take an alternate route.

But I like my car all the same. It's pretty responsive (when the AC isn't on) and the handling is good. The stereo system is solid and has an auxiliary eighth-inch stereo input, so i can plug in my mp3 player or whatever else. I like the color, which i choose to call graphite. And now you've met Sabado.

Weigh-in

I have a running joke with myself, concerning my weight. i'm 5'7" and 165 pounds. this gives me a BMI of about 25.8. On a good day, i might be 160 lbs, which would be BMI= 25.05. Now, the CDC defines 'healthy' weight as a BMI of 18 to 25. So i'm just over the line into being 'overweight'.

The joke is, i like to think of myself as being on the Front Lines in the War against Obesity. After a while, though, it occurred to me there's all sorts of elaboration on this. Obviously, someone with a BMI of, say, 20, is Behind the front lines. But all the tubby people you see walking around are In Enemy Territory. Someone who is morbidly obese i consider to be a P.O.W. that just kills me.

I'm not sure where that leaves someone with a BMI of 18, or an anorexic. i haven't gone that far with the analogy, since fat people are mostly what i see. and really skinny people to me are just Painfully Thin. any ideas?