Category Archives: Trips

Philadelphia!

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My photo journal has gotten an update to bring it current. Not too much has happened in the past month, except for a trip!

Greg and I went to Philadelphia on the Amtrak last weekend. It was an excellent trip and we saw both the old city and historic sites, as well as the Western part of the city with parks and the university. Philadelphia is a rather beautiful city, and is very walkable too, which is nice.

We took the Amtrak last Thursday starting early in the morning, and it was uneventful. It’s funny how “reasonable” the Amtrak cafe car prices are to me now… $7.25 for a wrap is actually not an unfair price to pay. Maybe it means I’m used to eating better food, or am less concerned about food expenditures in general, now?

We spent the first full day in Philly (Friday) visiting the historic sites with the assumption that Saturday would be busier due to being a weekend. But apparently some schools were in town Friday for a trip (I guess Veteran’s Day weekend is a good time for those?), so everything ended up being super busy anyway, and it was fortunate that we got Independence Hall tour tickets before 9:30. (Literally right after we got ours, a huge swarm of students and teachers descended upon the ticket counter.)

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to take the city hall tour, because they sold out of tickets by the time we got there, so we instead wandered around and had cheesesteak for dinner. Apparently there are two “competing” places for cheesesteak in the city: Pat’s and Geno’s. Pat’s is the “original” cheesesteak, while Geno’s advertises itself as the “best”.


But, really, there was no competition. Geno’s meat tasted fatty and greasy while Pat’s was nice and meaty and flavorful. Pat’s fries were deliciously crisp and potato-y, while Geno’s tasted like eating crispy bits of nothing. Even the peppers were significantly better at Pat’s… their peppers were nice and flavorful and gave just right when you bit into them, while Geno’s seemed under-ripe and under-marinated. Geno’s wins barely for their bread, which doesn’t get as soggy with the meat juices, but it wasn’t enough to really matter. I didn’t dislike the bread at Pat’s anyway.


Still, at $9.50/sandwich and $4.50 for fries, it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll be back to either place, even if I visit Philly again. Pat’s had a good sandwich, sure, but not $14 good.
Afterward, we got to do some nice night photography of the Eastern river.

On Saturday we wandered West from our hotel and explored the museum district and library and park and the river and UPenn. The library (at least the central branch) gives library tours as well as tours of its rare books section, and both are worth going to.

The leaves were also changing color, so it was an excellent time to wander the park and museum district.

The train back was on Sunday, and that was mostly uneventful as well (minus some signal trouble that took 40 minutes to resolve). We went to the Reading Terminal Market in the morning for breakfast (which was at a nice, but kind of overpriced, diner in the building), and I also had the unfortunate experience of wanting to buy food from a vendor, being offered a free sample from them, and deciding to walk away instead. Seriously, how do you manage to make such flavorless jambalaya? I was really looking forward to it too. :\

More photos are here.

In other things, work has been full of super stress lately. I guess in a lot of ways I’m the most senior person on the team now, and so a lot of stuff falls to me, and I kind of wish we had a more experienced or senior person directing everything. I don’t know. I’m kind of a terrible leader. :\ Bah.

I guess I’m doing reasonably at my job from a technical and productivity aspect, but I wish I was better at big picture and organizational things.

(I also wish people would stop filing us huge bugs and issues the week of feature freeze when we’re already scrambling to finish up everything for the release, but that’s not something I have control over.)

Also, as far as followup for CrashPlan seeding goes, it ended in great success. I sent back the drive, they received it and uploaded the data, I left my computer to sync up with the servers overnight, and voilà. My 1 TB of data is now online and able to be restored at my leisure. I’ve been syncing my photos and general updates since then every evening (since my personal laptop is not usually connected to the internet), and it seems to be working fine. Yay for online backups!

Strict Königs-Pittsburgh walk success

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We hadn’t been on a long walk yet this year, so yesterday a bunch of us decided to do a modified version of last year’s Königs-Pittsburgh walk… that is, to cross every pedestrian-navigable trans-three-river bridge in Pittsburgh with both endpoints in Pittsburgh exactly once and end back where we started.
Actually, the problem as stated is now impossible thanks to the recently-reopened 31st street bridge (and since the 9th street bridge is open to pedestrians even though it’s closed to traffic), so we added in the 40th and it works out.

The trip itself was a relatively easy 27 miles, so about 12-14 miles shorter than our usual walks. As such, it meant we were able to start at a reasonable time while the sun was up, and finish up before dinner.

Overall, I didn’t have any foot or leg problems (probably because it was shorter) and ended up with no blisters (thanks to the awesome cloth tape), but I did start having back problems toward the end. I guess my back isn’t used to me being upright anymore.

Anyway, we started at 8:42 AM at the Giant Eagle in Shadyside. A few people were supposed to come, but it ended up being only me, Greg, and Keith.

We took a long walk all the way down to the Glenwood bridge, which technically counts due to the small bit of Pittsburgh on the other side of the Monongahela River, crossing it around 10:34 AM.

Next up was a walk along the riverfront trail to the Hot Metal bridge, crossing around 11:53 AM.

After a break for lunch at Panera’s in Oakland until 12:55 PM, we crossed the Birmingham bridge around 1:11 PM.

Next was the 10th Street bridge at 1:34 PM

followed by the Liberty bridge at 2:20 PM.

It started raining around this point, and rained off and on throughout the day. I guess we can’t have a bridge walk without rain. :\
Next was the Smithfield bridge around 2:40 PM.

We met up with Owen at Market Square and then crossed the Fort Pitt bridge around 3:08 PM, finishing up Monongahela river bridges.

After a walk down Carson street, we crossed our only Ohio river bridge, West End, around 3:30 PM.

We met William along the riverside trail on the north side and watched people smashing pumpkins at the Carnegie Science Center. Then we crossed the Fort Duquesne bridge, the first on the Allegheny river at 4:07 PM.

Then it was a quick trek over to the three matching bridges: Roberto Clemente (formerly the 6th Street bridge) around 4:20 PM

Andy Warhol (formerly the 7th street bridge) around 4:25 PM

and Rachel Carson (formerly the 9th street bridge) around 4:34 PM.

Over along the north shore trail to the David McCullough bridge (formerly the 16th street bridge) a bit before 5 PM.

Then through the strip district to the reopened 31st street bridge at 5:25 PM.

At this point, we’d technically crossed every bridge with both endpoints in Pittsburgh, but we were on the north side, so we headed to the 40th street bridge to cross back, hitting it around 6:08 PM.

Made it close to home (detoured to dinner instead) around 6:56 PM. There are more walk photos here.

Overall it was an excellent trip. Greg is kind of disappointed that this will be his first year in Pittsburgh without a 30+ mile walk, but at least he’s still managed to do a 25+ mile walk every year. Which is still impressive.

Duck!!!, Renaissance wedding, games, race, Tartan, People Wars, and macarons (phew)

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Life has been full of lots of awesome things recently.

In probably the biggest (ha ha) thing, a giant rubber duck is in Pittsburgh! It is super cute.

Greg, Eric, and I went to see it on the night it arrived, at which time they were throwing a huge bridge party for the duck.

Yay duck! I was actually expecting it to be much bigger (not having read anything about it beforehand), but apparently it’s only 30 by 40 feet. It’s still extremely awesome.


I think downtown is enjoying the attention the duck is bringing. Here’s Noodles & Co at Market Square that evening. It’s significantly more packed than usual. (The soda machine was constantly out of ice as well as many kinds of soda. And it’s one of those newer ones that has hundreds of varieties of soda and that makes its own ice.)

So yeah. Greg’s undergrad friends Eric and Dan were in town for the wedding celebration of Vicki and Brett. It was held at the Pittsburgh renaissance fair, which was an interesting venue.


Besides the usual wedding food and things, we had access to the fair with things like jousting (which turned into an “attack the good guy and force a ‘joust to the death’ tournament” thing), strength testing, hatchet throwing, arrow shooting, and fire manipulating.




Naturally, there were also board games.

In other recent board game funness, I acquired the Leaders, Cities, and Wonders pack expansions for the game 7 wonders. I also printed the official Catan board, the “official” Cupertino board, the official Stevie and Esteban and Louis leaders, and some boards from the fan-made Empires expansion. The result is an awesomely complex, awesomely large, awesomely 23-wonder-ful game that I am really enjoying.
(More photos of this, and other board gaming adventures in September, can be found here.)

This morning was also the Pittsburgh Great Race. Eric, Dan, and I went to watch Greg run.

The best outfit was a guy running in full Penguins ice hockey gear. Yes, including ice skates. (Word on the internet is that this is actually Tom7, who I actually know [but only in the ‘I have met him once or twice’ sense], so that’s awesome.)

There were also people with awesome signs cheering on the runners. (My favorites were “Worst parade ever” and “Why do all the cute ones run away?”.) They also cheered on the ambulance, police car, and bus at the end of the long line of runners, which was awesome.

There was also Tartan production today. The situation there is rapidly improving, which is awesome. Swathi is doing a good job as the new layout manager and leading a good group of layout staffers. The section editors have started getting their shit together (well, mostly). Papers are slowly (and sometimes painfully) becoming longer than 8 pages. Let’s keep going like that.

But in fun Tartan things, there was also a Kate tree constructed, which rapidly turned into a Tartan ed staff tree. It’s pretty awesome. (More photos of it, as well as general Tartan stuff from September, can be found here.)


I’ve finally started working on the next People Wars expansion, Flashback. It’s themed around PPA students (and general effects that look at the discard pile or add traits), and should be fairly interesting… but what’s getting me in making it is how amazingly young everyone looks.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised given I’ve been tracking this stuff on my photo stats page for years, but it’s still kind of weird whenever I actually go back and start looking through high school photos. Baby friends! ZMONGS!

Speaking of photos, June 28, 2014 will be the date when I’ll have been taking (digital) photos for exactly half my life. It’s kind of awesome that, in about 9 months, I will have over half my life documented in photos. I plan to keep up with my photo journal, so it should be an interesting adventure.

Last, but not least, a nice new French bakery opened in Squirrel Hill by Greg’s work. I stopped by and couldn’t resist getting some macarons. They’re a bit pricey at $2.25 each, but so very worth it. Their French bread is also very, very good.

Yay awesomeness.

Connecticut trip, photo stats and graphs

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life has gotten an update to both the photo journal and the stats section. People haven’t changed that much this time around. I guess we’re all getting older and more boring.
Patrick makes his first appearance in almost 5 years thanks to his wedding, 8 drops off for the first time since I moved back to Pittsburgh (since he moved to the bay area recently), and Emily and Justin return after more than a year of not seeing them.
Yay for people.

This past weekend, a bunch of us traveled to Connecticut to see Tim and Kayleigh’s new house, their new dog Scotch, and Mars and Dan’s new dog Panda. It was interesting cramming 11 of us into a 2-bedroom house, but it was a good time and full of fun board games, crazy miniature golf, tasty food, awesome friends, and cute puppies.





More photos are at my photos page.

Photoshop organizer now reports that I have tagged 336,971 photos. (The number of photos taken is quite a bit higher given that I actually edit down my photos instead of keeping them all now.) It might be time to update some stats.

Here’s the dates on which I took each 25,000th photo:

25,000 50,000 75,000 100,000 125,000 150,000 175,000
January 12, 2004 October 20, 2004 April 10, 2006 April 20, 2007 December 4, 2007 February 7, 2009 July 4, 2009
282 days 537 days 375 days 228 days 431 days 147 days
175,000 200,000 225,000 250,000 275,000 300,000 325,000
July 4, 2009 April 14, 2010 September 4, 2010 June 23, 2011 December 23, 2011 August 24, 2012 June 2, 2013
284 days 143 days 292 days 183 days 245 days 282 days

You may remember the camera stats I posted a while back. Here’s updated stats for the two cameras that still exist:

Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 – August 16, 2013 1481 days; 4.05 years 20,033 photos $70 13.5 photos per day 0.35¢ per photo
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – September 3, 2013 1285 days; 3.52 years 135,774 photos $780 105.7 photos per day 0.57¢ per photo

Also here’s some updated graphs (first posted here).

Photos taken by month (log scale):

Photos taken by month (linear scale):

Photos over time:

Life, walks, travel, and games

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I suppose it’s time for another update.

Today we went on a 12.5 mile walk to Riverview Park north of the city. It would have been longer except it started raining by the time we hit downtown on the way back. After taking the T from the north shore, the rain really started picking up, so it made more sense to bus home. It was a nice walk though.






I recently went on a trip to San Francisco for work followed by a trip to the Northwest to visit Ben in Seattle and to attend Patrick’s wedding on the Oregon coast. Photos of the adventures can be found on my photo site.




Also, as followup to the edit on my last post, Southwest never sent me a voucher as promised for the baggage issues. At this point, I’m mostly apathetic (and I certainly won’t stop flying with them because they still do a better job than pretty much any other domestic airline), but it’s still a rather unhappy end to a terrible flying experience.

My Kickstarted game Pixel Lincoln finally arrived (almost 7 months after its initial delivery estimate). The shipping experience was a huge mess, and has pretty much convinced me never to back another Game Salute game again, no matter how interesting it may be. The games sat in their warehouse for two weeks before they event sent out information on paying for shipping. It then took another week after payment before the games started shipping, and it took three days after receiving tracking info for them to actually get the game to Fedex to ship. Overall, it was over a month from the time the game arrived at their warehouse to when it got to me… which wouldn’t be as terrible if it wasn’t for the absolute lack of explanation from them.
Combined with the already-sketchy expansion Kickstarters they ran before we got the game, it has really been a bad experience.
All of this would be less terrible if the game itself was awesome, but I can’t help feel like I got ripped off terribly. After $49, I got fewer cards than a basic Dominion set and a game that somehow feels not as fun as I was expecting it to be. It seems that there isn’t enough variety in cards (despite me getting a couple expansions offered during the initial Kickstarter) to make interesting enough levels (especially since you need to make two). The characters, mini-boss, and boss cards have no flavor (and no abilities that differentiate them from any other character, mini-boss, or boss card). The rulebook is terribly written and editted, and several important things (like using cards for symbol abilities) are not explained at all. The game itself therefore plays rather clunkily.
Meh. Lesson learned, I suppose. At least I only lost $49 on it.

KoL has been going rather well. The BIG! challenge path that was recently released has made getting the full sea outfits much easier (yay for immediate level 16 aftercore), and I’ve also managed to get down to 3 day ascensions reliably. My last run was a 702 turn run as a Sauceror, which I feel good about (especially given that I do 100% familiar runs).

I’ve been watching quite a few Smosh videos lately and as Zeke says, “Alan’s Law: Anything he spends over 30 hours consuming, he shall make into a card game.”
I’ve hammered out some basic rules and general cards for the game, which is turning out to be a customizable shared-deck game (so a card game where everyone draws from a single deck, but where that single deck can be customized as desired). The rules are drawing from Bohnanza and Investigations, where the goal is to collect cards to complete episodes by trading with other players. Hopefully the player-interaction and fixed deck aspects of it will make it more readily playtestable with my usual Thursday gaming group.
We’ll see if this project actually manages to get anywhere, or whether it’ll fall prey to my laziness like the RPG Get! revamps and the Investigations CCG.

Yay life and things.