Author Archives: Alan V

Travel, Travel, and Travel

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I have a lot I really should write about (and over 8000 photos I need to edit through and post on photos), but I’ve been having trouble working up the energy to do anything these days other than work and collapse into a mindless blob afterward. So here’s my attempt at writing stuff out before I let life updates lapse again.

Photos will come later. Probably. Maybe. (At least life’s photo journal and stats pages have been updated on time.)

I took a work sabbatical this past summer, and spent the first part of it travelling to Thailand with my mom. There’s a lot I could write about the trip itself, including how much I surprisingly enjoyed the back-to-back-to-back travel within Thailand (because normally I prefer my vacations to be sedimentary), but the biggest thing I want to document was the travel experience itself.

For money reasons (ha!) we flew United first class from Pittsburgh to Chicago, and then ANA international business class from Chicago to Tokyo to Bangkok (and likewise on the way back from Bangkok to Tokyo to Chicago). The domestic first class was mostly “whatever” (definitely wouldn’t be worth paying extra for on its own), but international business class… oh my god. I have never arrived at a destination so *relaxed* and *rested* and *unstressed*.

Going into the flight, I was expecting the best part to be the food, because I love eating (and drinking) and the menu for the flights looked amazing, especially the abundance (and variety) of snack foods available at any time. But the benefits of business class by far was the lie-flat seat and the airport lounge access. The seat meant I could actually, properly, comfortably sleep and wake up without pain in my neck or shoulders or back (which was important for the ~29 hour door-to-door travel). And the lounges meant I had a place to sit (with free food and drink) without having to fight the large crowds in the airport, complete with well-maintained bathrooms and showers (although I didn’t use the latter).

The return Tokyo to Chicago leg also featured ANA’s “new” business class, with a closing “door” and a wider seat where my mom and I could literally sit next to each other.

And oh yeah, all of the food was also delicious. So that part definitely didn’t disappoint either.

The expense wouldn’t be worth it for shorter flights, but for over a day of travel, it felt more than worth the price. Especially given we had booked business in the first place because economy tickets were more than triple (!!) their usual cost and business seats were slightly cheaper than usual, making the price difference between them much smaller than usual.

In any case, after we got back from Thailand, I still had some sabbatical left, and I guess was feeling the itch to make up for the lack of pandemic travel… so we promptly booked a Fourth of July trip to Denver and Colorado Springs, to see some friends along with the rest of my family. It was great to catch up with David again, meet some new online friends for the first time, and generally spend time with my cousin and her husband.

After that, I had the usual summer get-together with my in-laws in late July, and then traveled to San Francisco for work at the beginning of August. The work trip itself wasn’t particularly noteworthy except for the fact that we then flew to Seattle afterward (instead of home), saw some friends there for a few days, and then took a cross-country Amtrak home (via Chicago).

The Amtrak was… an experience. It’s been something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, but now having done it, I’m not sure it’s something I feel the need to do again given the price and (relatively lack of) amenities. The best part of the trip by far was the food (three cooked-to-order meals a day in the dining car, including three-course dinners) followed by the views (especially from the observation car). But the relatively small room (we had a roomette) and repellent shower (which I didn’t use during the trip, meaning I arrived at home three days later feeling disgusting) were less ideal, and the price (around $1000) made the entire experience feel not really worth it.

I learned afterward that the ticket costs only cover something like 65% of the operating costs for the train, which just makes me feel like passenger rail in this country is stupidly behind. I assume operating costs would amortize out much better with more passengers, which would bring the price way down to something more reasonable (and cover a higher percentage of the costs), but it’s the usual catch-22 with public transit: Cut services so no one wants to ride so you have to cut services so even fewer people ride so you have to cut services so…

In any case, our travel for the summer isn’t done yet, but at the moment I’m enjoying being at home for more than two weeks in a stretch since May.

So… yeah. Hooray for things?

We now return to your regularly-scheduled lack of updates.

Photo Stats Time

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It’s the end of a four-month period and we recently passed 500,000 photos, so the photo journal and stats pages have been updated and… it’s time for new stats!

The cameras table also has an update, because since the last stats update, I’ve gotten two new cameras! I got a moto g pure back in 2022 and work also upgraded my iPhone to an iPhone 14.

Intel Pocket PC camera October 6, 2000 – September 18, 2003 1077 days; 2.95 years 15,829 photos $200 14.7 photos per day 1.26¢ per photo
Olympus C3000 Zoom September 28, 2001 – December 5, 2003 798 days; 2.186 years 10,647 photos $450 13.3 photos per day 4.23¢ per photo
Kodak Easyshare DX6490 December 8, 2003 – March 17, 2006 830 days; 2.274 years 49,413 photos $500 59.5 photos per day 1.01¢ per photo
Nikon D50 March 22, 2006 – November 15, 2009 1334 days; 3.655 years 105,067 photos $570 78.8 photos per day 0.54¢ per photo
+$250 repair cost 0.78¢ per photo
106,916 shutter releases $570 80.15 shutter releases per day 0.533¢ per shutter release
+$250 repair cost 0.77¢ per shutter release
Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 – December 1, 2016 2684 days; 7.35 years 21,616 photos $70 8.05 photos per day 0.32¢ per photo
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – August 20, 2022 4558 days; 12.48 years 208,758 photos $780 45.8 photos per day 0.37¢ per photo
290,157 shutter releases 63.65 shutter releases per day 0.27¢ per shutter release
iPhone 5 June 23, 2013 – December 23, 2014 548 days; 1.5 years 130 photos $0
(Provided by work)		 0.24 photos per day 0.00¢ per photo
149 shutter releases 0.27 shutter releases per day 0.00¢ per shutter release
iPhone 6 Plus January 8, 2015 – January 11, 2018 1099 days; 3.01 years 4883 photos $0
(Provided by work)		 4.44 photos per day 0.00¢ per photo
23,352 shutter releases 21.25 shutter releases per day 0.00¢ per shutter release
Nikon D7100
(Current)		 December 2, 2015 – April 18, 2024 3060 days; 8.38 years 49,609 photos $620 16.21 photos per day 1.25¢ per photo
126,462 shutter releases 41.33 shutter releases per day 0.49¢ per shutter release
iPod Touch 6 December 2, 2017 – December 10, 2021 1469 days; 4.02 years 5610 photos $160 3.82 photos per day 2.85¢ per photo
66,398 shutter releases 45.2 shutter releases per day 0.24¢ per shutter release
iPhone 8 Plus March 8, 2018 – March 21, 2021 1109 days; 3.04 years 17,751 photos $0
(Provided by work)		 16.01 photos per day 0.00¢ per photo
252,264 shutter releases 227.47 shutter releases per day 0.00¢ per shutter release
iPhone 12 March 26, 2021 – March 19, 2024 1089 days; 2.98 years 9291 photos $0
(Provided by work)		 8.53 photos per day 0.00¢ per photo
74,656 shutter releases 68.55 shutter releases per day 0.00¢ per shutter release
moto g pure
(Current)		 December 29, 2021 – March 24, 2024 816 days; 2.23 years 1254 photos $199 1.54 photos per day 15.87¢ per photo
6045 shutter releases 7.41 shutter releases per day 3.29¢ per shutter release
iPhone 14
(Current)		 March 21, 2024 – May 4, 2024 44 days; 0.12 years 1050 photos $0
(Provided by work)		 23.86 photos per day 0.00¢ per photo
10,628 shutter releases 241.54 shutter releases per day 0.00¢ per shutter release

Here’s the first iPhone 14 photo:

And the first moto g photo:

And the 500,000th photo (fittingly over Carnival, on a day when I took and kept 887 photos):

Photo count table:

0 25,000 50,000 75,000 100,000 125,000
October 6, 2000 January 12, 2004 October 20, 2004 April 10, 2006 April 20, 2007 December 4, 2007
1193 days 282 days 537 days 375 days 228 days
125,000 150,000 175,000 200,000 225,000 250,000
December 4, 2007 February 7, 2009 July 4, 2009 April 14, 2010 September 4, 2010 June 23, 2011
431 days 147 days 284 days 143 days 292 days
250,000 275,000 300,000 325,000 350,000 375,000
June 23, 2011 December 23, 2011 August 24, 2012 June 2, 2013 February 17, 2014 March 21, 2015
183 days 245 days 282 days 260 days 397 days
375,000 400,000 425,000 450,000 475,000 500,000
March 21, 2015 November 13, 2015 April 29, 2017 December 2, 2018 December 5, 2021 April 13, 2024
237 days 533 days 582 days 1099 days 860 days

And the usual graphs, starting with photos by month over time, log scale y-axis:

And photos by month over time, but with a linear scale y-axis:


Total number of photos taken over time:


And time between 1000 photos:


I Am A Bananupdate

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Is it hypocritical of me to say that I miss when people used to write long-form blog posts when I’ve been really bad at doing so myself?

Probably, but something something do as I say not as I do.

The sporadically (and weirdly) warm weather the past couple weeks seems to have started triggering my spring allergies already, resulting in me waking up at 4 or 5 AM with a running or congested nose, so blame this post on that.

I’ve been reading back through my old journal posts from during and before the pandemic, and I… really miss pre-pandemic life. And it also strikes me that I used to have a much more obvious “life outside of work”, but that mostly disappeared during the pandemic and hasn’t come back since. I don’t think this is the fault of work — my teams and manager and everyone has always been great about work-life balance — but it just feels like something inside me stopped being able to properly destress outside of work (so *all* of my non-work hours are now spent trying to relax) and/or my hobbies now would rely on things I’d consider unacceptably high risk (like going to Origins again and sitting in a convention hall with thousands of people for 4 days).

But it’s striking how much I used to do outside of work, whether it was as simple as “host board games on a weekend” or “go rock climbing once a week” to “dedicate a day every week to doing newspaper things for The Tartan” or “go to things like weddings or group events”. It’s not that I don’t write about them anymore… I don’t do them anymore. It’s probably worth a more serious look at how I can change that.

2024 will probably end up being a year of change (and unexpectedly expected large expenditures of money), in many ways, and not just for myself. It’ll be interesting for me to make a December post and see how many of the currently ongoing pieces of “fun” (both with myself and friends) ended up working out.

Anyway… life goes. There should probably be some photos in this post, but it’s 6:30 AM and I’m not going to boot up my photo computer to satisfy that itch, so wall-of-text it is. (Or was.)

Back To “Normal”

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It’s been over a year since I last posted, and a lot has happened this year, especially in the last 6 (or so) months of it.

The biggest thing is maybe that I’ve flown on not one trip but two trips, and have managed to avoid COVID in doing so. (The last flight there might still be pending, since I just got home today.)

This summer we felt like we really needed to start doing something to get back to normal, since the world was clearly moving on without us, we clearly couldn’t go the rest of our lives without ever flying again, and the pandemic situation was clearly never changing significantly from its current state. So we decided that the safest thing to do was to book an international trip to the UK!

It sounds crazy, but it actually makes sense if you assume (like we did) that the riskiest part of travel is the airports (rather than the planes, which circulate air so rapidly and also filter it) and indoor spaces. London Heathrow is one of a single-digit number of international destinations that the Pittsburgh airport directly services so… London hiking trip it was!

Photos are here, here, and here, and ignoring the indoor breakfasts at small B&Bs (with like… two other groups at most) we had only one meal indoors at a restaurant. We also found that Heathrow immigration into the UK is totally automated and takes literally 30 seconds. From deplaning to heading to the train was less than 30 minutes.

The weirdest part of it (after the initial shock of “I haven’t been in an airport in three-and-a-half years”) was how basically no one wears a mask while flying. Like… COVID is still a huge thing? And airplanes and airports are great places to catch things? Maybe wear a mask just for this part?

The second weirdest (or maybe I just never noticed before) is how inconsiderate people are now when they cough. No covering of the mouth (with a hand or otherwise). No mask for people who are very clearly sick with some respiratory disease. Yeah, get on a plane and cough into the air for your neighbors to breathe thanks that’s a great idea we appreciate it.

In any case, despite all of that, the trip as a whole made me comfortable enough to travel in person to my teams’ release planning this past week, for the first time since summer 2019. And this trip really pushed a lot of my comfort zones.

Starting with… an airport transfer, so it wasn’t just the relative quiet of the Pittsburgh airport and the quick exit through SFO. We also had to deal with DFW (and, unexpectedly, ORD on the way back) which are extremely busy and have nary a mask in sight (although SFO seems to be better at this than anywhere else, which is maybe not surprising). Then also sitting in meeting rooms all day with dozens of other people for most of a week. And eating indoors at team dinners. And attending an (indoor) team event with over a hundred people in attendance.

I’d purchased an N100 mask specifically for the office, and while I’m sure I looked ridiculous in it, it apparently worked because I have successfully returned home without COVID (although we’ll find out about the return flight in a few days, so hopefully it’s not premature to make that statement). Photos from this trip will be on the photos site at some point. If the last set is any indication (Carnival 2023 photos posted in November) it might be next year. We’ll see.

There are so many other things I should probably write about, like how the elevators in Salesforce Tower in SF are the worst and made me literally 20 minutes late to a meeting waiting for them, or how I amusingly tried to meet my coworker Paul in the UK and couldn’t make it happen but ran into him (repeatedly) in SF during planning, or how I’m amazed that my team at work is now over a hundred people and I don’t know half of them and met a bunch of people I work with daily for the first time in person this trip, or how I’ve been playing a lot of roguelike deckbuilding (computer) games recently and really enjoyed Slay The Spire and Roguebook while not really being a fan of Banners of Ruin, or how I’ve started getting (somewhat) back into coding at work now that I can delegate more of my architect duties, or how we’ve watched through almost all of Picard and how I enjoy the series if you think of it as not being part of the Star Trek universe because the characters are just all completely out of character, or about how I was supposed to be home from the SF trip on Saturday except we hit a flock of birds on takeoff causing us to return to SFO and making us miss our connection and therefore continuing the trend of plane issues that has seemed to plague all our friends recently…

I could write a lot more things, but I think this trip has just made me tired and sad at the state of the “pandemic” (which is so clearly over to everyone else) because it’s just a reminder of how much I’m missing by trying to stay safe when the rest of the world refuses to do its part. So I think I’ll just stop here.

Life and Things

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I opened up the wordpress dashboard today to write a post and noticed I had a post pending from June. So, uh… here’s that post so I can get it out of the draft section:

It’s June, so I should probably write something, but it feels like my life has been a whole lot of The Same™ for the past few months (and years), so I’m not sure how much interesting there is to write about.

Well, I guess there are two things.

The first is that we attended a wedding (Lea and David’s) for the first time in something like three years, and it was simultaneously amazing to do something that felt almost normal and terrifying because COVID is still a thing and numbers are going up again at the moment. I guess we’ll know later this week if we got out unscathed.

As far as weddings could have gone though, I think this was the most low-risk it could have been. It was local (so no travel required), they required at-home tests the day of (a few hours before) from all attendees, the venue was largely outdoors, and the indoor portions were in a room where one side was almost entirely open to the outside (with good air circulation).

<PHOTO HERE>

The second is that my mom came to visit for a week last month, on her way to DC to see my uncle, who hadn’t visited the US since the pandemic began. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make the trip with her (work obligations and also a bit of fear of travelling, still), but it was amazing to see her again. I think the 2.5 years was the longest I’ve gone without seeing her in real life, although we have been sporadically Facetiming.

<PHOTO HERE>

In any case, in terms of December updates, I guess there’s a few things?

In the world of TV, we finished Deep Space Nine and started The Original Series, and I’ve also started watching my way through Community with small interludes into a small SciFi show called Dark Matter and an attempt at a series called Under The Dome, along with finishing a series called Second Chance. Let’s tackle these in a fairly random order?

DS9 as a whole was much, much better than I was expecting. I think, of all the Star Trek series, it has by far the most coherent overall narrative, best character development and growth, and the general feel of realness that none of the other series really have. I think they did just about everything right within the context of the series and, except for a few really bad episodes (why does everyone like “Move Along Home” and “Take Me Out To The Holosuite” so much?!), has outstanding episodes that deal with difficult issues (like war) in depth.

Unfortunately, that’s also a lot of why I think Voyager is still my all-time favorite series? As a whole, I would say I watch TV (and entertainment) to ignore the realities of life and the world at large. There are a few exceptions (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend arguably being one of them, but it’s a show I have no urge to return to at the moment despite my love for it, so maybe that just reinforces the point), but there’s something about being able to jump into Enterprise or TNG or Voyager provides an escapism that DS9 just doesn’t, even though it’s obviously not contemporary.

This leads to maybe why Dark Matter and Under The Dome just didn’t click for me, and maybe some of that is thanks to the depressing state of the world at the moment. Dark Matter is a well-done SciFi series that strikes me a lot like Firefly or BSG (closer to the former than the latter). Under The Dome is a town sealed off from the world where people start fighting amonst themselves and, uh… yeah, too close to home for the pandemic-laden world. I didn’t watch beyond the first few episodes of either series. Maybe I’ll come back to them later.

Not much to say about The Original Series of Star Trek. It’s about as bad as I expected it to be, so far. I guess I can understand how it was groundbreaking at the time, but yeah… in today’s world, it’s sexist and strangely acted and has honestly irritating sound effects. We’ll watch it just because I feel like we have to, but we’ll see how that continues to go.

Second Chance is a decent show. It was apparently billed as “a modern take on Frankenstein” and, uh… I guess you could call it that? It’s really just an investigative-themed show (like White Collar or kiinnndddda like Psych) that has techy elements around it. Not a huge fan of how the series ended, but it was an enjoyable enough watch through.

Community though… is a gem. Its first season was great, its second season is better, and even its special features (with a deadpanning Dan Harmon interviewing cast members) are hilarious. It’s exactly the kind of light-hearted escapism that still tackles serious issues that I need right now in the screwed-up pandemic-laden world. I’m looking forward to bingeing through the remaining seasons.

Speaking of the pandemic-laden world, I feel like that’s all I ever write about anymore, but everything seems like it’s going backward. No one masks up anymore, anywhere, even though there are new and still more contagious variants spreading. Everyone’s living their lives as if the world is normal now, and it’s really, really not. It’s both infuriating and depressing at the same time.

I haven’t flown since February 2020. I’ve eaten in exactly one restaurant in the past three years. I can count the number of non-home indoor places I’ve been maskless in on two hands (in-laws’ house, dentist, hair salon, the one restaurant once, one friend’s house to play with his cat while he was not home, and “Lea/David wedding venue even though that was basically outdoors”). Even my friends who I consider to be careful people have stopped masking when we stop in places to grab takeout. It makes me feel like I’m one of very, very few sane people left in the world who actually consider covid a threat.

Blah.

Anyway, life goes.