Shewbox.org

Snow

Administrator — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:38:24 +0000

I got tired of seeing the previous post messing up my frontpage in Chrome. Looked fine in Firefox and even IE, wonder why Chrome was messing it up.

So here it is, a brand new post for December right after the first snow of the year. I could lose the cold weather but I still love the snow.

How to Print a Giant Google Map

Administrator — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 19:46:31 +0000

I love maps, especially really huge maps that you see in public places like a metro station or museum. I wanted one for my place and after some work, printed out a giant map of Tokyo that covers the entirety of one of my walls. Luckily I have access to the laser printers at IU (and a large enough print quota to print this with plenty left over) since this was 17 pages wide and 10 1/2 pages tall. This is the view of the entire wall:

It didn’t work out exactly as I wanted. Tokyo proper is actually on the bottom 1/3 of the wall, where I wanted it to be center in my planning. But after printing, cutting and taping the first 2/3 on the wall I figured I’d just live with it vs. starting all over. My method was a bit of a pain to piece together and there very well may be a much better way to do it (if you know, let me know please!). So how did I do it?

First, what area did I want to print? I thought of a few major metropolitan areas like NYC, but as my wife is from the Tokyo area and I’ve been there several times it seemed the most fun. Then I had to decide between a street map or a satellite image. I actually had an even bigger satellite map of Saitama when I was living in Miami and found that having the more traditional map was more fun to look at. You could always do a hybrid if you wanted the best of both worlds as we’ll see in a minute.

Now I needed a way to view a really large portion of a Google map at a time. I suppose you could take a screen grab of tiny little squares and piece those together in Photoshop (after all, I had to chop the big image up into smaller ones in the end anyways) but there is an easy way to view a REALLY large chunk of Google maps at a time. I went to Google maps, went to Tokyo, then clicked on the Link option on the top right corner of the map. Inside here is some Embed code for directly embedding the Google map into any website.

Next I opened up notepad and created an html file with the embed code in it. Since it reads the information directly from Google I didn’t have to put it up on my website, although I certainly could have. I just loaded it from my hard drive and it worked. When you first do this, the map is still very small, and that is because within the embed code there are settings for how big the window into Google maps is. It’s at the very beginning of the code and it’s very self explanatory: width=”425” height=”350”. This allows you to tell Google how big of a window, in pixels, you want to display of Google maps on your site. I wanted about an 8ft x 10ft image so I went into Photoshop and, at least according to Photoshop, I wanted a frame 6912 pixels tall and 8640 pixels wide. So my new HTML file looked like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=tokyo+japan&sll=42.044143,-87.686904&sspn=0.007872,0.019805&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=T%C5%8Dky%C5%8D+Metropolis,+Japan&ll=35.689488,139.691706&spn=0.017219,0.039611&z=15&output=embed">
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=embed&hl=en&geocode=&q=tokyo+japan&sll=42.044143,-87.686904&sspn=0.007872,0.019805&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=T%C5%8Dky%C5%8D+Metropolis,+Japan&ll=35.689488,139.691706&spn=0.017219,0.039611&z=15" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map

At this point if you don’t have a decently fast computer and especially one with plenty of memory, things are going to get really really slow or crash. Google will happily comply and send you the image data for all the tiles you are requesting and your browser will then display all of those on screen so if your computer is low on memory you can probably forget about it. Things slowed down on my computer but they didn’t crash, so next I had to adjust the zoom and placement of the image, which works just like the smaller version of Google maps, except that it has to refresh the ENTIRE page if you move the screen even one pixel. Once I decided on what looked like a good placement and zoom I wanted to save the entire thing. You can save the entire page if you go to File –> Save Page, but it will save an HTML file with all the little image tiles Google sent your way. You could, if you were wanting to print hundreds and hundreds of pages, print all these little tiles, cut out the little squares, and piece everything together on your wall. I wanted full page images both to save paper and my sanity and so I turned to a Firefox addon:

There very well may be other screengrab plugins, but my googling found this one first and it worked fine for me. Once I had the entire image where I wanted it and the screengrab plugin was installed I clicked on the Screengrab icon on the lower right corner of Firefox and selected to Save the entire frame as an image. Once again, if you are short on memory at this step, Firefox will crash. The ram usage for Firefox while the plugin was saving the entire frame as an image shot up to well over a gigabyte. The bigger the image you want, the more ram it requires.

At this point I went searching for programs that would auto splice and print this giant file. I first thought I had a match with a program called the Rasterbator. But it doesn’t allow really fine detail like my map had. It is better for taking a smaller image and blowing it up the size of your wall, where you don’t need really fine details. I found another program called Posterizer, but it crashed every time I tried to use it. So I had to use Photoshop to splice it into all the little pieces. Luckily Photoshop, being the powerful program it is, has a way to automate this using the Slice Select Tool (btw, I have to add I love that IU has a volume license agreement with Adobe and I get the entire CS4 creative suite free).

Finally I had 200 separate images (I created an image bigger than I thought I would need, just in case), each sized to fit my paper nicely. I headed over to campus and printed out all 200 pages and then spent another 30 minutes at the paper cutter slicing the extra borders off the images.

The final step was to put the giant puzzle together and paste it on the wall. This was the longest step and actually harder than I thought. It was surprisingly difficult to make sure everything lined up correctly as I taped all the pieces together. Get a little off in one direction and then the next layer down you might find that the bottom of the one doesn’t match the top of the next. I tried taping together larger sections on the floor and then taping those to the wall to be a bit easier although I was still off in a few places.

Overall, though, I’m really happy with it. I just wish Tokyo proper was centered like I wanted. Shibuya is down by my wall socket

Tokyo station and the Imperial palace is also near the bottom of the wall

Oh well. Next time I’ll get it just right

But you know what I really want? I want the entire wall to display a live version of Google maps. One that I can grab and zoom in/out, drag around, switch from satellite to map to street view. A giant wall sized multi-touch screen in other words. Now THAT would be really cool.

No More TV for Me

Administrator — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 17:29:12 +0000

My wife and I decided to get rid of our cable. Actually it was more of my wife’s decision than mine. Looking for ways to spend less money every month, our $35 we were giving to Comcast for a bucket of programming we almost never watched seemed a good candidate for the ax. I haven’t watched regular tv in ages and the few shows that interest me (like Mythbusters, Nova, Family Guy) I either download or watch online. When I started downloading her programs like Project Runway and she even watched less and less on the actual television, she said go ahead, cancel it.

Comcast technicians cut the television signal yesterday and I removed the tv from the living room this morning. I love it. I wish we would have done this sooner. On the rare occasions I sat in front of the tv it seemed I would either be flipping through dozens of channels not finding anything of value or watching commercials waiting for something halfway decent to appear. Shows downloaded or even on Hulu or so much better as you watch on your time and avoid (at least on downloaded versions) commercials which saves you time. And money in this case since we no longer pay for cable. Even with digital cable and “on-demand”, it was terrible compared to what I can already get on my computer and the internet. In fact, Comcast’s on-demand was all in all worthless. There was always a small smattering of free movies or shows (although always older releases and usually not worth watching) and their premium movies were crazy expensive. We already pay for a Netflix subscription and their Watch-It-Now selection is far superior to Comcast and if there is a premium movie we want it goes in the queue and comes to our door in a few days. And since we don’t watch live sports, there really isn’t anything cable offers us that we can’t already get from our Netflix and Internet subscriptions.

Dream 9/30/09

Administrator — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:40:25 +0000

From what I remember:

Wife and I are on a vacation to Mexico. We meet another couple we know. We say hello, pleasantries and all that, then go different ways. The city we are in has a very carnival atmosphere, only a Mexican carnival (whatever that means). We meet the same couple again, decide to hang out together. It starts getting late we try to find a hotel. We find a place, but when we ask for rooms, we are told there is only one big room with lots of beds. The manager shows us around. All the beds are king sized beds, put next to each other, but separated by curtains. He pulls back all the curtains one by one to introduce us to the people staying in the beds. Somehow this seems important to him. But we decide to go elsewhere.

Fast forward. We find some person’s house to stay. We spend the night. But the next morning the owner of the house comes and says that one of us tried to hit on his teenage daughter and so he will punish us. Flash forward and wife and I and the other couple are tied to a giant slingshot, where the crazy man is going to shoot us far into the sky to kill us.

The Beatles Hey Jude starts playing. I wake up, realizing that wife is really playing the song downstairs while eating breakfast. Hey Jude keeps going through my head all morning.

You Know You Job Sucks When. .

Administrator — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:11:07 +0000

If you clock out early, and by early I mean anywhere from 45 to 2 seconds early, and your boss not only cares but sends you an email and gives you a "personal development issue", then you know your job sucks. Observe:

Hi Ben,

It looks like you clocked out early (but within the last minute of shift) 3 times in the last pay period. Please be sure to use the PIE time as reference when clocking out, and be sure it has clicked over to the top of the hour before doing so. The professional development issue below has been entered into your performance record as a friendly reminder. Just let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks,
Ms. Manager

Ben checked out of three shifts early this past pay period. All of these checkouts were in the last minute of shift and he was never pointed for an early checkout. This is a friendly reminder that consultants are expected to observe PIE time and check out after their shift has ended. The shifts were:

· 12:00-16:00 on 9\8 in Ashton; checked out at 15:59:14

· 12:00-16:00 on 9\15 in Ashton; checked out at 15:59:58

· 12:00-16:00 on 9\19 in IC2; checked out at 15:59:58

Yes, that’s right ladies and gentlemen. My manager decided it was prudent to spend the time emailing me and assigning me a "personal development issue" for clocking out 2 seconds early twice and 46 seconds another time. 2 seconds early. Good grief.

You Get it 10 Minutes Too Late

Administrator — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:40:26 +0000

Had a linear algebra exam this morning. I was doing well up to the last problem when I got stuck. You’ve had that happen haven’t you? Something gets stuck in the cogs in your brain and higher order thinking grinds to a halt. You see the page, you are aware of the problem and you know, somewhere in the recesses of your mind, is the answer you seek, if only the gears would start turning. Time ran out on me this morning and not more than 10 minutes after turning in my test the wheels, as if freed from their obstruction, start spinning rapidly and I see, oh so clearly, the answer I needed 10 minutes earlier. All I had to do was swap rows 1 and 3, then I could get the whole mess of a matrix down to reduced row echelon form and find the correct inverse. D’oh!

Random Things I’ve Been up to Lately

Administrator — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:58:15 +0000

Learning how to invert Matrices and having fun with reduced echelon form.

Expanding my classical music collection and attempting to correctly tag all the files. I’m now re ripping my CDs to FLAC. Hard drive space is cheap and expansive, why not have a bit for bit copy of the CD?

Still driving my little 49cc Honda Metropolitan around town. I think I have around 3800 miles or so now. Bought it with 400 miles on it, so that means that if I traveled at an average speed of 25 mph, I’ve spent 136 hours riding that little thing. That’s a lot of trips back and forth to school and work. And at an average of 100mpg, that’s only 34 gallons of gas.

Working of course. Still at the Afghan restaurant and typing this as I work in the 2nd floor library computer center.

Just finished reading a Murakami book, Kafka on the Shore. I enjoyed it, even if I don’t think I quite understood everything.

Jogging most mornings. Don’t usually go too long now that school has started back. I think my usual run is about 3.5 miles or so or around 30 minutes.

Read two very good books about running. One was also by Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and also the very good Born to Run by Christopher Mcdougall. Both worth a read even if you aren’t a runner.

Read the first Manga I’d ever read in my life, the last few chapters of Kenshin to be precise. Much better than the end of the Anime, although I have to admit that the Samurai X prequel was awesome. Or I should say the first 4 OVA was good. Don’t think I’ll even watch the last 2 as it looks too sad an ending compared to the Manga.

Watching a lot of cool videos with Neil Degrasse Tyson. Like this one.

Hmmm.. is this all? It’s all the springs to mind at the moment. Oh well, it wasted a good bit of time and now I can clock out, go home, change, and head off to job no.2 for the day. I can go home, chill out, grab a nice beer in another 6 – 7 hours.

An Email from Xander, Monday, February 11, 2002 9:36:20 PM

Administrator — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:04:56 +0000

Why is the tummy a yummy bo bummy? B/c I’m a yummy MO MUMMY!!! MRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAR!

done is my man who forgets how to slam! when he will find its to stick and to kind? and blow me out of my mind? for hot is saucey for the tomaterz!
I am sooooo bakedified
if I forget how to dream
and never figure out what they mean
before I grow old
I’ll kill my heart’s beat so my toes will be tagged and cold
because I want my dream to stream through the sky like behind a plane, my thoughts my mind a little jet with streaming dreams behind it
and dying won’t be a prize before my eyes or a consolation realize … I will just taste the darkness with integrity, to have died for a dream, or lack therof.
to have died for hope

to have died
for love

no wait
please
I said I love you
I want to cup your face in my hands
kiss your forehead
and feel your soul
purring beneath your skin
listening
listening for your heart’s vibration
I want to tune myself in
and take a dip
in that beautiful stream
just to kiss and get a sip
of the sweet liquid
poured out of your dreams
this milk that nourishes your friends
the milk that makes it all worth it

I love you
come into the moment
the now
and realize it is not a lie
realize how true it rings

No, We are Not Open

Administrator — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:28:32 +0000

Image you go downtown to a restaurant. It is 4:30. When you get to the restaurant, their open sign sign off. You ignore that and see if the door is open. It is, so you go in. But when you walk inside you notice the lights are turned off and nobody is in the restaurant. The only light coming into the dining room is from the front windows and a tiny light from the back of the place, perhaps the kitchen. Do you:

A) Assume that since the open sign is not on, there is nobod around, and the dining room is completely dark, that the place is probably closed and you might want to try back later.

B) Walk in through the completely dark dining room, glance around the back of the restaurant and notice there is nobody there either, then proceed to walk into the kitchen and find somebody in nicer waiter clothes who is helping to prepare salad, walk up to him and ask if the restaurant is open.

Seriously, why are some people so stupid? This was yesterday as I was just starting prep work for the evening. True, the owner needs to put the restaurant hours on the door somehwere (they used to be there but got taken down for some reason), but why on earth would you walk into the kitchen and ask if we’re open? I really, really wanted to scream something like “Does it @#&*$#@ look like we’re open?!” But I calmly said “No sir, we do not open for another 30 minutes”. Then he asks if he and his wife can sit in the dining room in the meantime. The completely dark dining room in which nothing is yet set up for dinner. “No sir,” I have to reply again. “We are not ready for customers yet. I will be glad to seat you when we’re ready”. I knew I should have made sure the front door was locked. I swear, people think that showing up at a restaurant means they have a right to be served food right that instant in the exact manner they chose. Yes, we’re a restaurant and our business is to serve you how you like. But it doesn’t mean you can show up whenever you want and demand service. Same thing goes at the other end of the evening. We close at 9pm. You show up at 8:59. This isn’t like catching a train. You don’t make it ‘just in time’. So if I tell you we’re closed, please don’t act all indignant as if I’ve personally wronged you. Most days I haven’t seen my wife since 7:30am. I’m tired, cranky, and ready to go home, I don’t want to sit around for at least an extra hour so you can yap to your friends and tip me 10%.

Embarassing Moment #4,129

Administrator — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 17:38:03 +0000

At work in the computer lab for the last 5 1/2 hours, I am reading Malcom Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers on the comptuter (as a pdf). I’m completely immersed in the book, my mind pondering the ideas he presents. One of the student supervisors comes into the lab to check on it (well, check on me really, make sure I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing). There have been people walking in and out of the room all day and I’m so focused on reading that I don’t notice her walk right next to me.

She says ‘Hi, I’m Ashley”.

My body moves in her general direction but my brain, even though my eyes have left the page, hasn’t switched gears. I’m in a total mental daze. I’m glad I can’t see the look on my face as she looks at me, expecting a response along the lines of ‘Hi, I’m ben’. I’m not responding, staring out into space, dazed.

“And you are”, she prompts.

A few more seconds pass.

“Oh, ” I finally force myself to respond, trying to shake my daze and focus so I stop looking like a socially inept moron. “I’m Ben. Sorry”, I retort, “I was reading something and was lost in thought”. I think I try to smile, but I’m still halfway in zombie land so it probably came off as a bemused smirk.

“Nice to meet you Ben”, she replies slowly, giving me a quizzical glance. “How are things up here today”?

“Not bad”, I reply. “Things were slow this morning but they’re picking up a bit”. Finally social brain is coming back onilne. Which means I’m starting to realize I’ve a bad first impression.

“Okay, well, I’m just going to take a look around and see how things are”. She gives me one more half amused smile and walks off to inspect the lab.

D’oh.