Robot Dreams

Right before I left on vacation for Kauai I replaced my phone service. There came a point that I could not receive phone calls while sitting at home, and I've had only a cell phone for years now. To put it mildly Cingular's claims about network coverage doesn't cover the customers that got swallowed up by their ATT wireless purchase. So I switched to T-mobile, for a lower price, more minutes, new international phone, and now I get a full signal at home

Why I came to use my phone for some pictures in this trip is simple... I didn't have time, I'm the kind of person who packs in the last 5 minutes if possible, to test if my SLR camera was working. So I try and use it for the first time in the helicopter tour we took, and it doesn't work. It just decides to rewind every roll of film I put in it. Anyway here are some of the resulting phone pictures from the trip...

• We tried doing a small hike to a pair of waterfalls, we only managed to see one of them after getting lost, and along the way we had some interesting spectators.

• One of the first things we did was to scoped out some of the local beaches and parks. The first one we visited was Ke'e Beach at the end of the road entering the Ha'ena State Park. None of us that went are really beach persons, John and I where more interested in the snorkeling, of which I'll post pictures eventually.

• The town we stayed in, Princeville, was once part of a plantation as much of Kaua'i was. At this point it is mostly resorts and vacation homes. But across the Kuhio highway, an overrated term since it's only the speed limit not the size that seems to change, is a lookout point with a view of the Taro Farms and of the start of the mountain range behind it.

• And stragely, on the last day, we took a stroll down to the beach at the end of the street in Princeville. The Puu Poa Beach is at the bottom of the cliff on which stands the Princeville Hotel. The image in this case is an arrangement of three phone pictures taken from the same spot.
  

I live in a condo in Evanston, and I've lived in condos for much of my life. In current, and the previous also, my windows look out onto a parking lot, as you can see from the satellite image. Evanston in a rather diverse town racially and somewhat economically, as most of the Chicago area is, and because it's the home of Northwestern University it is also well educated. In this case it means that you see a wide variety of cars. Hence I've seen the full range of gas consuming autos, but for the longest time there are two that consistently park in the the lot. At one end a Hummer2 at 325 HP and and optimistic 13 MPG, to a Prius at 67 or 76 HP and an average 55 MPG. So now for more than a year I've been waiting for those two to park right next to each other to capture the dichotomic moment for eternity. So with my camera phone, since my SLR is broken:

Some slight digital manipulation to remove license plates, and to trim the sky.

I made it back from Lake Tahoe in one piece. This was one of the few times that the travel was a real pain. Leaving from Ohare, Chicago, I managed to get delays in both directions. And given the propensity of Chicago weather it was for totally different weather phenomenon. On the way out, I was trapped Sunday night by a thunderstorm and tornado watch. Not that I don't mind the delays most of the time but two aspects of this one made it really painful.

First I was caught in the plane, so I was delayed for 3 hours inside the plane which was in line to take off in the middle of the taxi ways. Second, that delay put me arriving at Reno at 12:30am, and what's so special about that time? That's the exact time the last shuttle bus from Reno to Lake Tahoe was leaving. So I'm in the plane thinking that I'll have to stay overnight in Reno to wait for the first morning bus, yuck. As luck would have it the arrival was at 12:10am, so instead I was jogging through the Reno airport to catch that bus. I made it with 2 minutes to spare

Second on the way back in on Thursday afternoon, the pilots where nice enough to attempt to speed things up and try and get to Ohare before the weather would arrive and cause delays. And what weather would that be, perhaps another thunderstorm, after all it's almost Spring. No such luck for me, instead it was in the form of a snowstorm in the 4 to 6 inch range. So in the span of 3 days the weather goes from Spring to Winter and I catch both transitions.

And now for something completely different... As a form of relaxation I tend to write code in languages I usually don't use for work. This weekend I took up doing a bit of Python to try and get the Boost BuildBot operational again. And what could be so hard about that? After all it should be as easy as downloading and doing the usual configure stuff. Well I'm not the kind of person to be satisfied with the operation of much of the software out there, and hence my gravitation toward the Boost group. So my challenge for the weekend was to figure out how to use BuildBot without installing it.