Travelogue

DEPARTURE

I am on a plane.

It's been well over a decade since I've flown anywhere, almost 20 years since traveling for work. I'd never even heard of early check-in before yesterday (when an app on my phone when got really insistent about doing so). I went ahead and printed the boarding pass since a paper ticket sounded familiar, and then carried it around the airport. I loitered for while near the check-in counters, reading my oddly-homemade ticket and making sure it would get me to my seat.

The security check wasn't too bad. There was that familiar panic of trying to get all my things into the little tub, convinced I was going derail the entire process causing the line to back way up. People would stamp their feed and huff with rage while I trembled and wept. It was fine. I strolled right through in step with everyone else. Again, not too bad.

At the gate, I went all in and plopped my phone down on the scanner and checked in with the QR code on my screen, thus boarding without using my paper ticket. That part was neat.

(Actually, I'm 99% sure that the barcode was an Aztec code, not QR. Not getting out much doesn't make me some kind of savage.)

Upgrading to first class was an indulgence that I considered a reward for being willing to travel. This was a sound decision. They had free booze, but I didn't want any. They had free lots of things that didn't really interest me. The true luxury of first class can be summed up in one word: ELBOWS. I spent four hours in the air and didn't have to think about where to put my fucking elbows. Not even once.

Money well spent.

ARRIVAL

It could very easily be my imagination, but I swear every city has a unique odor. Not in a bad way or anything, but they all smell different. Nevada smells like a hot street near the beach if you subtract the smell of the actual ocean. I don't really expect that to make sense to anyone else.

The first order of business after getting to my room was to turn on the TV. I love watching the local news in a new city. Everyone is so ugly and strange!  Look at those weirdos, talking about things happening in obviously fake locations.

The only thing to really catch me off guard was the hotel mini bar. Rather than retail packaging, candy and pretzels were presented in nice little boxes that all matched. It looks nice and no doubt gives the hotel better margins. I'm sure they were taking an absolute bath selling 1.7 oz packages M&M's for $13.

What I wasn't ready for was the "Intimacy Kit" ($32) at one end of the tray. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to sell. The problem was the contents:

More specifically, the order in which they're listed. I can't find an objective pattern to it (total items, alphabetical order, number of vowels, etc.), so I'm left to assume this is the order in which you're to use them. I worry that I've grown this old and still don't understand how sex works.

Privacy PANIC! (or: Corporate Location Services)

Well, it could become a panic.

Being constantly disappointed by the horrific cost of RTLS (think indoor GPS) combined with a recent edict to better track time and attendance in my department has led to this glorious albatross:

Now anyone can figure out what I'm (maybe) doing and (very generally) where I am while at the office! What's to keep me from tracking everyone doing everything, you ask?

Starting at the top we have:

FOUR separate scheduled tasks so that when my computer is locked (or idle for 5 minutes) my PC STATE can be reported as active or not. That involved way more jacking around than I'd imagined, but it could be the most accurate part of my little system.

EIGHT separate Outlook rules that run when I'm notified by our security system that I've swiped a reader to open a door (one for each door). The best their server can do is let me flag my card as "lost/trace" so it sends email every time I use it. Then Outlook updates a text file on the network.

ONE bad SNMP query. Ah, well. Turns out I didn't find the right OID for the hookstate of my phone and I don't really feel like digging it up (Cisco SPA112 if you've got the secret MIBs). I never use the thing anyway, since it's mostly there to be lovely. Query runs when the page loads.

And finally, a very rough cron job running on the machine that manages our WiFi. It posts/renames all of the http/inform connection files from the APs to the server, then PHP tries to find which one mentions the MAC address of my phone. Every single minute the thing runs. Oy.

That result also feeds a tag to load a little map with my current coverage area. One of FOURTEEN little maps.

Fun? Oh, yes! Not so practical, though. I only made it this far because I didn't have to worry about including any logic. I can't imagine trying to scale this to more than just me and my one device.

More from INDOT

Other things actually led to the Traffic Cam Selfie project. Namely, wanting to pull up traffic cameras (dammit) to peek in on my daily commute before leaving the house. This was born of the knowledge that all of this data was floating around out there, and then wishing there was some way to benefit from it. (again, big thanks to INDOT for making this all open)

First was a simple page that shows traffic cameras between home and work:

Not too bad. Only downside is how quickly the images get stale (>60 seconds). At least I'm living closer to how TV detectives do.

More recently I stumbled across a nice json page that aggregates what's on those big highway message boards for INDOT's web site. That was a pretty cool find, so I fed it to a little LCD display:

My very own DOT message board!

I was deep into scripting an ESP8266 module to fetch/parse the json directly without me having to do anything when it dawned on me: This is the most useless thing I've ever done. Seriously.

Still fun, though.

Ridiculous Gifts: TV Remote

My father-in-law and I have, over the years, exchanged silly gifts. That's really all the lead-in there is. I actually started writing this thinking there'd be more to it than that, but no. Something silly, and if at all possible, entirely ridiculous.

This year for his birthday he'll be getting a new television remote that also doubles as a subtle commentary about his age:

This one's going down as one of my favorite projects to date. Not because of the cerebral Ha ha you're old here's an old-timey remote subtext, but because of how much harder it was to make than I'd imagined.

It took almost two months, during which my family made due with only half a kitchen.

The concept was very simple: rig new buttons to a universal remote, then decorate in a hilarious fashion. Contact-switch remotes, I discovered, do not lend themselves to any sort of rigging. After about a dozen failed attempts to connect leads to the board, I eventually:

• drilled a few dozen holes through the board with a pin vice and a .6mm bit
• inserted breadboard jumpers and potted the back with hot glue to hold them in place
• "soldered" the pins to the traces with silver epoxy

I am satisfied with the result, as both main criteria have been met: silly on the outside, completely ridiculous on the inside.

Traffic Camera Selfie

You won't have to watch too much television before you stumble across some official barking, "Pull up the traffic cameras, dammit! We need to find this guy." Then dozens of people start banging on keyboards until an entire wall is filled with live traffic video from across the city.

Part of what makes it nonsense is the fact that it really doesn't take so many people to dial up a video. You usually just click something. A single person sitting alone and in silence, however, would be horrible television. Much worse than some city's runaway budget after hiring all those people to do what the official could have done with a mouse.

The other part is the nonsense that's more in my lane: taking video from over there and showing it over here. That understanding led to an obsessive itch that flared up a while back:

I wanted to get a picture of myself from an actual traffic camera.

Step One: Find some traffic cameras.
Indiana's DOT has those. When you're zipping along the interstate and you see a CCTV dome, you may wonder if, six months from now, some FBI person will come along and zoom in on you and then exclaim, "Facial-rec confirms it. Let's get that bastard! Dammit!" Nope.

Step Two: Get some pictures.
The "nope" above is due to the fact that video is huge. First you have to move it, then you have to store it. Also, 99.999% of it is guaranteed to be completely uninteresting. INDOT tackles this puzzle by:

• only taking snapshots with the cameras (they snap a picture every few seconds)
• only storing a few minutes worth of snapshots
• aforementioned snapshots are also a bit wee (640x480px)

This, in turn, created a bit of a puzzle for me. I'll only get snapped while I'm on the interstate, and then will only have minutes before it's gone. Also, since the images are lacking in the pixel-depth that storytellers keep selling (zoom in, dammit!), I'll need to find a way to confirm that what I have is what I want.

Step Three: Collect.
Without going into too much depth about just how stupid I'm willing to be, I was able to remotely trigger a dump of the INDOT cache on a machine back in the office while recording GPS/environment data on my phone. And so:

This is me.

And this is my photographer.

Telephone Restoration

Now this was a silly minihobby:

A lovingly restored Kellogg/ITT 500 that I'd say was late 60's or very early 70's. My family made terrible fun of me as I sat and polished the housing over a weekend. I'm glad they'll never know just how long it took to make the dial card.

Pseudowork

I made an art:

I've been working on generating my own metadata for our local (television) programs based on closed captioning content. First round of scraping text from CC resulted in just over 2 million words (after a long, dreadful cleanup). I'm about 1/3 of the way through our programming.

The database won't be ready for a while, so I crammed the raw text into one of those word-cloud generators. Not as neat as searching the archive for "Indy 500" and getting a list of every show to mention it (with links that start video playback 5 seconds before it appears), but still pretty neat.

Globemaking

Maybe the best offline project of my career in nonsense: globes.

Globemaking is not a hobby. It isn't even a real word. I got curious about it not too long ago and decided to give it a go. There's actually very little published about how to make globes, which (of course) made it irresistible.

Globe #1: not shown. This was my introduction to gluing paper onto a ball. Not much to see.

Globe #2: Callisto

Behold! The second-ugliest moon in the solar system:

There is little chance of it being confused with the real thing:

• Dreadful algebra? Check.
• Dreadful geometry? Check.
• Kitchen wrecked? Check.
• Fussiness Index: +321 (that's pretty darn fussy)

As is often the case, I'll set off to see if I can do something at all, then return to see if I can do it well. The Callisto globe is a little over five inches across and took about two weeks to do. That's two weeks spent making something that's entirely unimpressive. Everyone has seen a globe by now.

Globe #3: Europa

A proper stand lends instant credibility.

This globe yielded the most information (which means it has the most problems). It's tough to fast-track a hobby so you can become adept without wasting years to gain actual experience. I've decided to take one more crack at it, then I'm done. Interesting tidbits from this round:

• Sealants with high acetone content mobilize/diffuse yellow and cyan laser printer toner (turning the whole thing green). Xylene and toluene are okay.
• Decoupage glue takes a week or two to completely dry, during which time it (and the paper substrate) continue to shrink. Printing cross-grain and letting everything rest for a week before assembly should minimize gaps.
• My geometry was wrong. Regular sinusoidal gores don't align around the poles. In another week I should be able to produce a transverse Mercator projection. I can just see you shaking your head, bemused that I missed something so obvious.

So globe #4 will appear in a month or two. I'm bored with this, but I don't think I'll be able to let it go until I like the results.