February 2008 Archives

Now that I have had a little more time to play with the data obtained during my hike on Monday, I have found a few tools that will allow me to show interesting things from the tracklogs. One of my favorite things so far is the elevation profile, which shows the change in elevation during the hike. This isn't likely to be something that I generate for every tracklog, since most of them are either flat and boring, or they are on such a tiny scale that every mild incline looks like a mountain (they look like an EKG, which doesn't show a balanced or sensible geographic profile). The thumbnail of my first elevation profile is below. As always on my blog, click the image to see it big.

Somehow someone ended up on my blog after searching Google for "average masturbation per week". The answer wasn't previously posted on my blog, but I became curious myself, so I did a little research. A survey of 10,000 males returned an average of 6.85 times per week for men between the ages of 20 and 35, decreasing by about 1.2 times per week for every 10 years after.

Hiking is a healthy and fun outdoor activity.

King's Pinnacle

I am a bit fatigued at the moment (woke at around 3am and then went for a hike), so I am just going to let the GPS explain everything: [click me]

I have been sitting beside my bookshelf for the past hour while working on various things online, primarily taking care of some course related stuff. The bookshelf sits in this room, usually undisturbed unless I'm pulling something specific from it, usually for research or adding something to it, usually some book I will get to reading eventually.

Directly to my left is the reference section (I own about 3 fiction books, total), which contains numerous books on personal health and fitness. These are books I have been collecting until I can have a plan of attack which includes them and I think I am approaching that point. I don't work out well because I don't have a plan, I become bored because all of the exercises that don't require special equipment are all the same. I am going to change that. First, I think it is time to build a pull-up bar unit outside and it is also a good time to get back into either walking or jogging EVERY night. I have become too stationary again, like so many times before. I work very well when I have a plan and a schedule, so thats what I am going to do. I am going to set goals for myself, based on the United States Marine Corps basic fitness requirements. My longterm goal will be to obtain the highest score possible on these measurable tests. For the short term I intend to use the tests as a guide for where I need to be as far as fitness. Once I have gotten into motion towards the long term goal, I will also add in some other goals, such as working towards my ideal body look. My Polish genetics will be hard to adapt for in this plan, but I am going to do my best. I am fairly short, but almost maximum height for a Pole, so the only thing I can do is work on areas such as my obliques to get my width under control, which shouldn't be a problem. I can deal with the broad shoulders and wide hip bones as long as my obliques give me some definition.

My guides for this goal will be:

-USMC Guide Book of Essential Subjects (0-967-51236-0)
-Anybody's Guide to Total Fitness (0-7872-9878-1)
-Men's Health Hard Body Plan (1-57954-229-8)
-Men's Health Book of Muscle (1-57954-769-9)
-Complete Book of Abs, The (0-375-75143-2)
-USMC Workout (1-57826-158-9 (maybe, if I get up the balls to do it)

and for balance I will seek guidance from:

-The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Male Physical Development (0-8264-0787-0)

I will spend some time this week preparing for this and then I will begin execution of it no later than next Monday.

Over a RDC connection, you have two choices with Google Picasa...

I have had quite a bit of fun reading over the server log files for this blog over the past few days. My most frequent visitor has been GoogleBot. It would appear that the GoogleBot has noticed that the blog has changed and is now attempting to re-index the several hundred (1,077) pages of my blog, one page at a time. It didn't take very long after my change of theme for the blog to get the bot curious.

This is a sample of a tracklog being overlayed on a map, using Google Earth. This shows the best and worst of the GPS system. First of all, it provides a nice clear shape of where you travel. The trouble begins when the device records a bogus point in its log. When you see sporadic lines and lines that look like they should be the same, but aren't, thats what has happened. In this map, the best example of this is at the top of the map where the device was on its return path to the park office parking lot. Those lines should overlap, or at least parallel, but on the reverse trip something went wrong, data bounced off of a cloud or some other interference "bounced" the signal, placing some of the trackpoints in locations where I didn't travel.

Another use for the GPS tracklock is geotagging. GeoTagging uses a digital or encoding film camera's internal clock stamp on images in the EXIF data format and the tracklog from a GPS (automatically using known time information) to match points in the GPS to images. A lot of modern utilities, including Google's Picasa (with Google Earth), can automatically associate the information in the log with the information the camera writes. The end result is an image that looks no different from before, but includes very detailed information in its attached EXIF data that will allow you to know exactly when and where a picture occurred. It may seem trivial to have that information in a picture, but when you think about it, photographs are very vague. A two dimensional rendering of a space doesn't provide for many clues when it has been many years since a picture was taken. Every blade of grass looks like every other blade of grass, and environments change.

I have yet to take any pictures or store any tracklogs of any significance to try this yet, but I will attempt to do so as soon as the proper situation presents itself.

There will be a full lunar eclipse for all parts of the world that experiences night at 0143 GMT (2043 EST and 1943 CST). It will occur Wednesday Evening/Thursday morning February 20/21, 2008. The full event lasts just over 3 hours, but we will experience totality for about 50 minutes. Totality will begin at 0300 GMT and 2200 EST. When entering the umbral shadow the moon will appear to be in retrograde of its cycle (it will be less full as the eclipse progresses) and then at totality we should see a bright red moon resembling an enlarged Mars (this is due to the refracting of light from the upper atmosphere, same phenomenon that causes red sunrises). During the late winter/early spring is the best time to see an eclipse, since the atmosphere tends to be clearer.

If this is the type of thing that interests you, I encourage you to try to enjoy it, as there will not be another total lunar eclipse until 2010.

For more information, see this Wiki article.

This entry is the 400th published entry in this blog. To celebrate this joyous, but not completely unexpected occasion, I have changed the theme of my blog. To complete this change it was required that the blog be completely rebuilt, some of the rebuild went well, other parts didn't. Over the next few days I will clobber out the stuff that doesn't and get it rebuilt AGAIN.

The new theme and templates will utilize some of the features that have been added to MovableType since I began using the old theme over 3 years ago. The most notable of which will be the use of "tags".

It will take a bit of time for me to get used to this new theme, as well as the new templates, so there will likely be several more small modifications in the next few months.

Having no other immediate plans for the evening I began work on LiveCurt.net immediately after my last blog post, but in doing so, I have stumbled on some problems. I have to question what my target audience for my website is. Is it for the 3 or 4 individuals who check in on me occasionally through the blog, or is it for a new target? I feel like I have so many skeletons in my closet that I openly reveal on my blog that maybe having my website's purpose imitate it might not be a good then, but what if the problem is the opposite? Maybe I am too reserved on the blog and the new site should take on a life of its own that is more about who I really am and what I like.

I have gone over several concepts in my head and can't seem to find one that truly fits into place. I thought about the original "SiteEngine Implementation Plan" for curtis.kularski.net, but that no longer seems right, that just seems annoying and cumbersome. Then another idea popped into my head, several sections utilizing different things to combine data. How unoriginal! I would like to syndicate my blog to the new site, thats a certainty, but I can't grasp on to whether that should happen as a rolling list of titles, or if I should bring parts of recently blog entries to the page. Additionally, I have considered a news-based role for the main page, something where everything each new blog entry and other items are "announced". One of the major things I have wanted to do with this is announce new shoes I add to my collection and things like my new tech toys. I want to also get back into writing technical articles like I used to do (killing curtis.pcfire.net will be a must, since its dead already). With this type of thing I run into a few boundaries that I must continue to operate with. My sneaker fetish is something I have gotten used to being pretty much common knowledge among people I interact with, but even though most people I know are very open minded, there is a TMI border I must uphold, after all, there are other sites I have constructed for that type of thing.

My primary goal with this project is to have a refresh of my personal web presence. The main problem is that for the last 3 years, this blog has been my web presence as I have let all of my other sites fall away during my time at university. The people I know now are not always the same people I knew three years ago, there have been some additions and quite a few subtractions. It would seem that my web presence currently is almost without purpose.

Current topics of interest for my new web presence: blog entries, news items, technical articles, creative writing, art, Doom (ZDaemon), garden info, my media library, fitness routines (public jock log), weekly summaries (end of week journal), a few of my favorite things.

This is what I know currently, I suppose now I should take it all and run with it and see where it gets me.

Question of the day:
What is the life expectancy of a blog?

LiveCurt.net has been running for several months now, but I have done no development to it. I have considered numerous times copying my content from curtis.kularski.net to this domain, but I know what will happen if I do that. The copy would made and no further changes would occur. I am planning to play with a variety of designs sometime this month and get around to finally making the website come to life. Maybe I will try to do it in the next 15 days and have it ready for my 23rd birthday ;-).

The most useful feature of my new GPS unit is the ability to record and transfer tracklogs. Tracklogs are a GPS-friendly way of making a note of each piece of data they create when reading their latitude, longitude, altitude and time. There are several ways this information can be recorded. Magellan uses a standard non-friendly tracklog format. In this format a line of the track may look like this: "$PMGNTRK,3517.403,N,08115.616,W,00245,M,064603.68,A,,140208*6C". Not many utilities outside of the Magellan platform will read/use this format. A more "universal" tracklog format is GPX, a format that uses XML to record the information. GPX is a native Garmin format. This format looks a bit like this:

<trkpt lat="35.290050000" lon="-81.260266667">
      <ele>245.00</ele>
      <time>2008-02-14T06:46:04Z</time>
</trkpt>

This format is very easy to read, but not many devices outside of a Garmin will use it by default. Now, once I get the information converted (currently performed by GeoVisu v.4) I can use the format in any number of applications. Most of the applications I have found DO NOT support using a background map, only a plotting of points... well... I have a TI-83Plus or a TI-89 Titanium that will do that... so we move on to the next step... see what Google can do for me. Google Earth is an application I have avoided for years, because I used to hate it. Google Earth now seems to be ok, so im currently using it to interpret my tracklogs (from GPX format). Another utility I have found that is somewhat useful is called TrailGauge. It uses US Geological Survey and TerraServer data to create a map of the points in the tracklog, but it is very slow and produces maps that aren't very useful initially, also it is restricted to using about 30km of data at a time... which sucks for longer trips.

I am currently considering training GITI to perform the Magellan TrackLog to GPX Log conversion and perhaps keep a record of all of my tracklogs, but thats a feature for when I have a stronger understanding of the type of data I am working with. I will likely use Google Maps for now for my vehicular trips and TrailGauge for my hiking trips.

There are also some important questions I would love to have answers to:
1. What the hell is GeoCaching?
2. What do sane people do with tracklog data?
3. Are there any good maps availible of state parks that I can use?

To make a change to your life, the first step is to decide to change.

Isn't it nice when instructors are responsible?

Often times during an academic semester students and instructors get burned out and need a break from this, but usually it isn't a month into the semester. I am having such a problem with my creative writing instructor this semester. He seems to never do anything. If assignments are supposed to be due on a Sunday, then it is nice to get the instructions for the assignment before Friday night. Presently I am waiting for an assignment for the first poem of the semester, but it doesn't seem to be happening. This issue has been occurring since the 2nd week of the semester. He claims to always be "behind" and "busy", but no real explanation as to why. He teaches 2 live Expository Writing courses, an online Argument Based Research course, and then online sections of Creative Writing 1 and Creative Writing 2. I would believe that an English instructor would be able to keep up with that load.

In addition to the slackassness in Creative Writing, my astronomy instructor is not keeping the online assignments up to date with the lectures, which is disturbing when I leave a lecture and would really like to use the website to evaluate my understanding of the material.

With Drawing II, we seem to have stalled on Chinese calligraphy. I like to be as internationally informed as anyone else, but spending 2 weeks on Chinese calligraphy doesn't seem to be getting us anywhere. The course has been running longer than any of the others, but I feel like the least accomplished has been in this course. I want to move on and do bigger things. The instructor seems to be running the combined sections of drawing 1 and drawing 2 as just as drawing 1 course, which irritates me slightly since I registered for drawing 2 to be able to move on to more advanced materials and techniques, not stagnate on line formation for 4 weeks.

During my first semester of Creative Writing, I felt a great energy behind my writing, one which doesn't seem to exist right now. Maybe it is the absence of the literary high I got from reading the techniques of Robert Olen Butler, as he showed how to obtain the power to extract with great accuracy the contents of the sub-conscious (the white-hot core) and place them on the page. I don't remember enough of the sensation of diving deep in the core to be able to recreate it, especially not for the type of writing exercises that I am having to perform this semester. Starting the semester with fiction is like dropping me on my head, I don't know which way is up anymore. Poetry has always been my forte, and something that I found myself to be good at. I can integrate my thoughts into those of others and expand their worlds of fantasy, but I can't seem to create my own world. I have had many ideas for this first chapter of a novel project which I am currently struggling with, but too many of them seem cliche (some might say "Classic"). I want to be original, but there doesn't seem to be a world I am interested enough in to bring creativity to it. When I finally lock on to an idea, I find something wrong with it, something I don't like and I move my creativity into searching for other ideas. Three years ago, I redefined what I am. I defied everything that I had set up for myself and everything that everyone thought I was. I was not an externally creative individual. I functioned more like an I.T. borg drone. Without end-users to support, this didn't go very far, although, the technical is still where most of my energy and creativity lies. With my visual arts I can combine interests, I can put line into vessels, and I can put vessels into line, but somehow, writing about ceramics doesn't seem to bring me to very much interest. Writing code and writing fiction are very similar, they are both creative works that are mostly theoretical, and almost never work on the first try, even though that first failed try is required before you can ever begin to hope to see a working final product. If I have my own fantasy world, it is likely digital in nature, and probably has a Matrix like quality, but that has been done before, and no one seemed to like it. Perhaps I could enter that fantasy world and bring something new and interesting to it. Currently I am working on a "safe" novel idea, which I don't think will go very far, but should at least be a nice enough exercise to get me going.

On a related note, I am a bit puzzled by the way I feel toward GITI's Document Manager functionality currently. I have been told by another person that the module seems lacking and doesn't seem as though it would be good for the creative process. It presently looks like this: http://images.livecurt.net/blog/Doc.PNG. I go between thoughts on this myself. Sometimes I look at it and think it is too cluttered and consider making it more "paper-like" and having it accessible outside of the primary GITI interface, to reduce the level of distraction, but then there are times when it would be nice for it to be more friendly, prettier and not as sterile. The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive, so I could do both, but there are still concerns over changing what is for something that could potentially be better, or worse.