totient | Entries tagged with road rally

On the way home from today's trip to Arisia storage I stopped at Long Hill Orchards in West Newbury and Rusty Can BBQ in Byfield.

Long Hill was out of cider donuts but had apple tarts with a delicious butter crust and a mixed fruit pie with an amazing filling but an oil crust which was disappointing considering the tarts.

It was my first time at the Rusty Can and the BBQ is the best I've had in Eastern MA since Uncle Pete's closed. Byfield isn't close to anything but it might make a nice destination for a bike ride this summer.

To get from West Newbury to Byfield, Google sent me down Ash St in West Newbury, which I've driven dozens of times before and sent a handful of road rallies down, but not recently -- I don't think I'd been down it in fifteen years or so. This is around the corner from JB Little Rd in Groveland which I declined to put on the first rally I ever ran because the surface, though paved, was too poor. Shortly after that it got washed out, and then for a little while it was in decent shape but unpaved and I did send a rally down it. These days it's a walking trail. So I was a little surprised in specific, and at the same time not at all surprised in general, to find that a quarter mile of Ash St is now unpaved, where it passes through the floodplain of the Beaver Brook.

I'll be adding this to my inventory of unpaved through roads in northeastern Massachusetts. And maybe I'll send another rally down it someday.

Last time the three things meme came up I concluded that my most interesting things are more "three unusual things I have done with people who don't happen to read my LJ" than three things I'd done on my own. But on reflection there are some things I think I can put down which won't be quite as much a function of which social circles read this blog. So...

Three things I've done that I'd be surprised if any of my friends (on LJ or otherwise) had:

Made an astronomical observation with an optical telescope of >5m aperture
~~Gone on a >1000km bike ride~~ Edit: Finished last in a multi-day bike race
Competed in a motorsport by writing a computer program

kirkcudbright mentioned to me that his employer gives a 5-week sabbatical after each 5 years of service. This struck me as wonderful idea, and then I realized I've been doing it myself. On my birthday in 2000 I quit my job at BBN with no plans for a new job and took six weeks playing with stuff *I* wanted to be doing before starting the next job. I wound up starting two companies, one of which continues to make my taxes more complicated to this day. My friend Robert remarked that I was the busiest unemployed person he'd ever met (though I think

tcb puts me to shame in this department). It was a blast.

I had a smaller intentional gap in 1992 after MTDP folded which I used to bicycle to the Worldcon in Orlando (well, really to Richmond VA, because who wants to bike any further south than that in August) and one when I left MIT in 1996 which is how come we could get set up for a housewarming party in the new place in DC so quickly. I used a bunch of vacation time while chairing Arisia 2006 around the time of my 5-year anniversary at Permabit and I suspect a formal sabbatical then would have been eaten up by Arisia, as was the couple of weeks I had between jobs at the end of 2006. I conclude from this that three weeks is not enough time to do more than catch up on the metaphorical laundry.

And so it is my plan to spend August on sabbatical. I will be employed on the 1st and the 31st but not in between. I've already booked some travel into this plan, but I hope to make major progress on some personal projects. Four and a half weeks is not as good as six but hopefully it will do.

I haven't been posting about this here because so many of my coworkers read this journal, but at this point I think just about everyone I can reasonably tell in person has been told...

I'm leaving Permabit on December 8 and starting a new job at ITA Software on January 2. I will be working on the core scheduling application.

When I started at Permabit almost six years ago, I had been working on my Palm Pilot programs but had to put those down mid-bugfix as Permabit was in those days in full-on startup mode. A year later things eased up enough that I could think about other things, and I expected the time lapse to make fixing my half-fixed bug much harder. But in the intervening year I had become enough better of a programmer that rather than being set back, I was more able to understand what the code I was looking at really did and figure out how to fix the bug. Soon I put the program down again, and another year later when I picked it up, I was able not only to quickly chop bugs off my fix list, but also to identify new potential trouble spots and predict where bugs might be rather than waiting until I stumbled across them in competition. Another year or two passed, after which time I decided that my skills and process had progressed so far that the existing code base was no longer appropriate, and so I began to rewrite the apps from scratch. Then Arisia 2006 came along and I put that down for a year. This March I picked my rally app up again and sat down to add a new kind of feature, one I'd thought about in the early days of the rally app but never been able to compose a good architecture for. At the end of the day when my new feature passed its unit tests, I checked it in with a satisfied thought of "I learned something new today". This was immediately followed by "It's been a while since I did that at work. Time for a new job".

The road to the new job has been exciting but circuitous, involving contributing to two open source coding projects (one to put on my resume, and one being the tool I use to maintain the resume itself), a secret flight to San Jose, and the genesis of the so-far second-most-credible attempt to solve a Hilbert problem (link is to the third-best solution; the code for the best solution is not online). ITA itself has been very responsive once I reached the point of being ready to proceed with them. I'm looking forward to working with some of my readers for whom I have the most respect technically, and at the same time will miss many of my current coworkers terribly. And in the meantime I have three weeks that I plan to jam chock full of fun things to do.

Yesterday I drove down to Naugatuck to do the precheck of next Saturday's Connecticut Country Roads trap rally. The rally is well put-together: a good alternation between thinky bits, fun driving bits, and transits where you have a chance to catch your breath. There are a couple of new (or anyway, not frequently used in New England) concepts to give you something to think about at every intersection, but none of the wacky instruction overload or obscure definitions or other brain-hurting stuff you see on National trap rallies -- I think anyone who could figure out what was going on at a TCNE trap rally (this means you guys,

rmd and

clauclauclaudia) should have no problem following the course. At 170 miles it felt like there was enough rally there to justify the 2-hour drive down. The roads were beautiful. And I had a total blast.

It's been too long since I published.

I may have a chance to do so at Permabit, and I have some stuff from working on the rally app that would benefit from being published, and I have other ways to fix this. But the itch is definitely there. Time to work on that.

Frost Heave and Lunacon are on the same weekend.

When driving to a rally in Vermont, having a (rental, in this case) car with New Hampshire plates is extremely useful.
Trust your instincts. At one point along the course there had been a long time since the last hard mileage, and those are what I use to calculate. But it "smelled" early. Looking over my timing logs and the information on the checkpoint slip, it turns out that we were in fact 37 early at that point along the course.

1. I remember throwing snowballs at your window to make you come out and have a snowball fight with the rest of us, freshman year. What's one memory you have of that time that's particularly vivid?

The first one that comes to mind is of half a dozen of us up late at night doing problem sets and writing bad poetry on a Wednesday night in my dorm room, and getting sillier but somehow not any less productive as the night wore on.

2. I don't know much about the road rallying stuff you do. How'd you get into it?

When I moved back to Boston, I lived for a year with Will Turano, who was into various motorsports. He bought me to an autocross, which is a speed event on a short closed course, and then to a road rally, which is much more about math than it is about adrenaline. We did terribly on my first one, and my reaction is my usual problem-solving reaction: write a computer program to automate it. (This is in large part the approach I'm taking to running Arisia, too.) This I did, and itwe did well at the next few rallies -- and oddly, taking home a bunch of $5 plastic trophies seems to have been quite a motivating factor.

3. What brought you back to the Boston area after being away from it?

Uh, it's home? Mostly by that I mean that my friends are all here, but I also love that the city is bikeable and is also full of fascinating people who aren't (yet) my friends. Other contributing factors included that my job in DC, while intellectually stimulating, was rather dubious morally. I like to tell people that I held a Top Secret clearance for three days, with the implication being that I quit after learning something dreadful. Actually I had already given notice when the clearance came through, and never officially handled any TS material, though I inferred a few nasty things during that time that I'm sure are classified at that level.

4. Our friendly secretive organization have offered you the chance to fix one problem you see in your town. What problem do you fix, and why?

Wow, can I fix how tremendously and underlyingly racist Boston is? We can start by providing transit that actually connects black and white neighborhoods without two changes.

5. Why did you choose the job you have now?

When I interviewed at Permabit, Sam didn't give me a non-disclosure agreement, explaining that in his opinion they're not worth the paper they're printed on. Instead he picked up a pen and recited, "I wave the +3 wand of non-disclosure at you". I thought this was an organization that would have the agility I was looking for, and ultimately I was right, though it later turned out that Sam wasn't really part of the solution on that one.

You know how the meme works: comment here to get questions from me.

Wow, is it a relief now that the Arisia panic of the last two weeks is over.
Maybe too much of a relief: there are lots of other things I was deferring until the end of that panic, and none of them are registering in the top ten things I'm psyched to do today.
I love that first hour between getting up and eating breakfast. It's one of my most productive hours of the day, or if I'm not using it for being productive it at least launches me quickly into whatever I'm doing.
This does not make me a morning person. I'm still in that first hour, and it's well after noon.
But the hour is nearly over, and it's time to make pancakes.
Which means it's time to go get milk.
Haven't I made an LJ post like this before?
I'll just have to read my entire LJ history looking for it.
(hours later) Man, modern Palm apps sure need a whole lot of different icons. I'm getting to know Photoshop awfully well given that my primary mode of geekery isn't visual.
That's funny, given that I'm awfully visual in general.
(yet more hours later) Is there a 14th-inning stretch for games that go that long? The 7th inning was a long, long time ago by the time tonight's 18-inning Astros-Braves game was over.
So far the better team has won each of the Division Series.
I don't usually like watching TV. But I'm psyched about the Lost DVDs that miss_chance and I are going through. I don't think the difference is the lack of commercials (though that's nice). I think the difference is the lack of a laugh track.
Why do I charge money for my Palm software? It's not like it's a significant amount of money. Maybe I'm looking for validation: someone likes my program enough to pay $20 for it. Or, I suspect, they like the program I give away for free enough that they want to give me $20 and buying the non-free one is the way to do that. Maybe I should go to a shareware model for that one. I do like having free software out there, though; it makes me feel better about using free software from other people. Hmm.
I'm definitely looking for validation when I write LJ entries. Which is probably why I agonize over them, which in turn is why I post so seldom.
Fresh, hot cinnamon bread! I love living with housemates for a million reasons, but right now the easiest way to my heart is the old standby.
Long weekends are a good thing, but they're not infinite.
Laundry is, however, infinite.
I was going to clean off my desk today, and instead I played with projects on my computer. That was all well and good, but my computer projects are starting to bump up against my desk not being clean.
It's not even that my desk is all that messy right now. But horizontal surfaces accumulate things until they are full. Maybe a smaller desk would be better.

This meme is supposed to conclude with me tagging some people and telling them what to do. No, thanks: the meme should be obvious, and you can do with it what you will.

Today was the running of the DARPA Grand Challenge. This event, if you haven't heard of it, combines two ideas near to my heart: AI and road rally. Teams are handed a set of instructions shortly before the start, and their vehicle has to make it to the end of a challenging course within a time limit. The catch: It has to do this all by itself, without human intervention. This is the first year that anyone has actually made it. A team from Stanford has the best time, with two CMU teams close behind. As I write this, two more teams (out of about 30) are still on the course, though both of them have already taken more time than the Stanford team. One of those still has a chance of finishing inside the 10-hour limit, if they can avoid driving off a cliff. I'm rooting for them, partly because they're the only hybrid on the course, and partly because they're from New Orleans.

Also today was the failed launch of Cryosat, an Earth ice coverage mapper. This is geeky because the failure was presaged by the failed launch of the Planetary Society's solar sail experiment; both used the same Russian IUS, which failed to ignite. The first failure was half-assedly covered up by the Russians, who tried instead to blame it on the experimental use of a sub-launched first stage. I guess that coverup isn't going to work any more; the good news out of this is we might see more sub-to-orbit launchings.

One of the rules in rallying is ( * ) that suffixes and prefixes don't count towards the name of a road. So if you're told to turn onto Smith, and the first Smith you encounter is N Smith Ave, and you later encounter E Smith St, they're the same street.

Which makes it all the more amusing, as I clean up Arisia's databases, to encounter addresses on streets like "E Street".

I'm not in Franconia today.

candle_light and I were planning to head up for the Big Lap rally. We'd have had to be there by 8 and it's a 2.5 hours drive, so I reserved a hotel room for last night. And since I thought it would be silly to make such a long drive in two cars, I planned to meet up with her at a party in Wilmington in the evening.

miss_chance would be stopping by Wilmington and could retrieve the car, so I could drive there and she could drive home.

candle_light and family have an outing in southern NH today, and she was planning to go directly there. No problem; there's plenty of public transport from various points along the way, so I spent a bit of time compiling different ways to get back into town depending on the exact timing of our return from the far northern reaches. The most likely answer was a $15 bus ride from Concord, NH, as that added the least amount of driving to the weekend. But the fact that I was contemplating ways to cut five minutes of driving out of the weekend made me think that maybe driving to Franconia for a road rally was just too much driving at the expense of all the other things I'd also like to be doing this weekend.

Meanwhile there was ongoing doubt over whether

candle_light and I wanted to drive up the night before or just go up in the morning from her place, but that's just background babble for this story.

Then around 10 got a call from

miss_chance. From Vermont. She wasn't going to be stopping in Wilmington, and could I get the car back to Somerville so she could drive it to work in the morning? By the time I could get back to the party,

candle_light would be at her house packing up for the drive north. Or I could get the car to someplace else that

miss_chance could find, or find someone else to drive it back, or... and at this point I realized that the logistical knot had reached Gordian proportions and did the appropriate thing.

So today, I get to put my bike back together, which I've been wanting to do for a long time. I can't wait.

Confirm last changes to NRIs and generals with prechecker.
Write pickup points document
Write large-format control crew scoring form document.
Write mail merge version of entrant envelope document.
Write trophy label document.
Finish writing control crew instructions, including checkpoint equipment utilization analysis.

Print out and collate competitor RIs.
Print out and collate worker RIs.
Print out and collate generals.
Print out and photocopy generic police letter, pickup points, flyers for other rallies, control scoring forms, control crew instruction.
Assemble entrant packets.
EDIT: Print out control-specific police letters.
Assemble control crew packets.
EDIT: add maps to control crew packets
EDIT: recheck control crew instructions for typos

Print out control sign stickers.
Print out start signage.
Print out landmark sticker for NRI 134.
Print out emergency signs.

punt: build control clock extension cables.

Pick up trophies.
Cut new trophy pillar material to length.
delegate at end location: Reassemble trophies.
delegate at end location: Label trophies.
EDIT: burn TSD Lite CDs for class winners

EDIT: Reconfirm end location.

Essex Ramble is in just over a week.

The route is set and prechecked. I've chosen which control locations I'm actually going to use. I need to insert a bit of extra time in a few places, but that should be done tonight. The overall length is a bit longer than I had in mind, but I think it'll be OK. I could shorten it slightly in two places, but then I'd need to redo the precheck, which I don't want to do.

The trophies are ready; I have to pick them up, and then make some modifications.

The postmark deadline for entries was yesterday, and so far that's going at least as well as it's ever gone in the past. I'll have a better idea there by Monday.

I have three of my four control crews lined up.

I need to make about 20 checkpoint signs to attach to telephone poles along the route. This is in addition to the freestanding signs we usually use, which will be placed where there aren't telephone poles. I can get 24 signs out of a sheet of MDF, so it's off to Boulter Plywood in the morning. Maybe I can get a jump on the packet assembly this weekend, too.

Anyone want to spend a day driving around Essex County? I'd like to do a pre-run of Essex Ramble with someone who hasn't rallied (or hasn't rallied much) before driving and me reading (but not interpreting) the instructions, to see where they're too confusing. I'm free for Saturday or Sunday of this weekend or next, though this coming Sunday is probably easiest. I can provide a car with a manual transmission, or we can use yours if you prefer automatic.

I spent about two hours tonight putting together a route for Essex Ramble. It's about 5 miles too long, but I think I'll be able to trim some off once I've confirmed the lunch location. I also spent three hours on fieldwork since I last wrote in this journal; maybe by the time I'm done I'll have some idea how long these things really take to put on.

Have I mentioned how good a fit the Monte Carlo format is for Essex Ramble? It really should have been one all along.

Anyone been to the Cracker Barrel in Tewksbury? What's it like? The end location I'd been thinking of for Essex is booked and I'm thinking of moving it there. Scott Beliveau's South of the Border rally ended there, but as there were only 4 cars and we all pretty much got there at once we did the finish in the parking lot instead of going inside to eat.

Six hours of fieldwork for Essex Ramble V today. The start/end locations I have in mind will work OK, and there are lots and lots of backup locations nearby. Found some really good roads I hadn't used before, and pulled some folks in an SUV out of a snowbank. They seemed grateful, and I was happy to have an excuse to use the tow strap that wasn't me being stuck in a snowbank. No new unpaved, but the Cutler Road bridge is done so I can (and will) use that.

All these years, Essex was just screaming to be a Monte and I never noticed. It will be so much better this way.

I've also put in several hours of what might be computer work for Essex, except that I'd have done it anyway. Version 3.4 of the Topo! browser is so much nicer than version 2.7 that it's not even funny. Too bad the data sets are incompatible.

Inspired somewhat by

frotz, I want to put on an endurance rally in the late spring of 2006 or 2007. Start is in Gloucester, finish is in Provincetown, and the route goes through all six New England states. Run time is two days, with an overnight in the Berkshires. Hotel rooms, meals, and return to the start by chartered ferry are included in the registration fee. The rally will incorporate features of other New England rallies, so for example it will traverse the longest covered bridge in the US.

Tonight I sketched out a possible rough route for the rally. The original idea was that the route would be 500 miles long, but it's been obvious for a while that I can't pull that off. But looking at the roads, I think I can probably keep the total distance down to 600 miles or so, and not need a third day.

phi

Entries tagged with road rally

Navigation

a fun surprise

three things meme

sabbatical

new job

connecticut country roads

(no subject)

when schedules collide

rally lessons

questions from saxikath

twenty things

a geeky day

nameless

!rally

rally to-do list

Rally prep

a drive in the country

the power of positive procrastination

cracker barrel

(no subject)

six hundred miles

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