Who Am I?
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Well, as you can probably tell from this page, someone who's not done
enough studying of HTML, Java and JavaScript technologies, but I do
know enough to be trouble. I have an online resume
for those that are interested. The image at left is courtesy of (shudder)
Microsoft and the Sony Metreon Theater complex in San Francisco where I
spent a week with my brother and his wife doing a little home renovation.
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I've joined yet another Austin startup. Once again, it's not a dot-com
(are there any left?). LifeSize makes a HD video conferencing system. It
works pretty well from what I've seen and the speaker phone makes those
crappy Polycom phones sound like a joke (even if it looks like a glorified
dinner plate).
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I live in the Rainey Neighborhood in Austin, which has become something of an
occasional clusterf*ck (mostly Thursday - Sunday + "Spring Festival Season")
for the residents of the neighborhood due to the never ending noise levels from the
various bars that have moved in. To that end, I've started scraping the City's sound
permit site to keep track of who's got a permit and what
the terms of the permit are. I will attempt to keep this up to date in an effort to
better inform the residents of what's going on. For grins, the
current permit list for the entire city is quite large.
My interests include running, kayaking, cycling, weightlifting, Linux, Lego MindStorms
and Atari vector video games.
Photo Album
I recenty got a digital camera, so I may as well post the pictures on the
web. The photo album
(an experiment) is just getting started so there's
not much there yet. I hope to scan and post all of my conventional photos
once I get the time.
New - Running Log
I recently purchased a Garmin Forerunner 201 GPS watch which is a pretty cool
toy. It automatically tracks distance, time, pace, altitude, speed and location
and you can download this data to your pc. The included software runs only on
Windows (ugh) and doesn't support overlaying a map on the track data, so I wrote
some Linux CGI programs which read the XML file generated by the watch, merge the
data with some maps from TerraServer.com
and plot my runs on the maps along with
an altitude change graph. It's pretty simplistic, but it's only a weekend's worth
of work... You can track my progress and see
where I've been. Amazingly, the curvature of the earth is enough over a couple
mile area that it's not possible to correctly plot really long runs on a flat map
without a much better understanding of the math involved in mapping latitude and
longitude to X,Y coordinates on an aerial photo (it's not even possible to stitch
the terraserver.com maps together accurately as they seem to be playing games with
flattening or unflattening the images - hence you'll see occasional discontinuities
in some roads). For a more interesting version, try
this. This is implemented with the
Google Maps API and is pretty slick. No more
needing to suck down and stitch together the terraserver.com imagery. Of course, you
lose the pace graph and pace coloring of the trails, and the altitude graph is part
of the per mile popups (click on a mile marker to see it), but
you gain the ability to place markers, pan, zoom and do other neat tricks. All of
this is available from the sourceforge open
source project Web 4 Runner. It now supports
running, biking (running really fast) and I'll be adding kayaking soon (if I can figure
out a way to determine that a "run" is mostly on the water....) If anyone has a
Forerunner 301 and would like to send me the xml file, I'll see about adding heart
rate support to the graphs.
You can visit some of the places I once and still do occasionally visit
by clicking here.
