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.

Data, backups, and CrashPlan

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Wow, we almost got through October without making a post. I’m not ready to let this journal die (or be updated less than once a month) yet, so I guess it’s time for a general update.

Theme of the past couple weeks have been hard drive deaths. It started a couple weeks ago with Greg’s work, where they had a RAID drive fail (apparently resulting in data loss because the RAID controller hadn’t previously reported that the other disk was dead… so both disks dead == unhappy data).

Not to be outdone, last Wednesday, my external hard drive decided to start issuing checksum errors everywhere, and slow reads and writes down to unusable speeds. This prompted a panic and a rush to get new drives and restore my backups. (At least I’m super anal about backups, so I didn’t lose any data.)
(This is actually my first hard drive failure ever, which is kind of interesting. It’s not my first data disaster, as I previously had rogue virus scanning software wipe the hard drive while trying to clean a virus, but it’s the first time a drive has actually become unusable.)

Now today, Greg’s laptop seems to be having problems and freezing shortly after boot. Hopefully it doesn’t indicate another hard drive failure. But regardless, it seems this is not the month for technology.

Ben has previously written about cloud backups. I’d previously written them off (after all, I do local backups and off-site backups at my parents’ every time I visit them), but after the recent not-really-a-problem-at-all-but-still-scary “disaster” that was my hard drive failing, I took another look at them. After all, my data is priceless to me (especially my photos), and all of my careful backing up would be worthless in the event of theft or fire.

The service of choice for a lot of people seems to be CrashPlan. We use them at work, and I have 4 friends who use it (including Ben), so it seemed worth a look. The main benefit there (in addition to their great pricing and support for external drives) is their $125 seeding service, where they’ll send you a hard drive in the mail for you to do your initial backup on instead of having to upload everything over the internet. For me, with over 1TB of data to back up, this was a no brainer, and combined with their extremely reasonable prices, I decided to take the leap.

It took less than 24 hours from my order for the drive to ship, and less than 24 hours after that for me to actually receive it. This was last Friday (before my backup had even finished restoring onto my new drive!), so I kicked off the seed backup and it ran through the weekend. After it completed Monday morning, I realized I’d forgotten to exclude a couple directories, so I excluded them and ran an archive maintenance on the backup to permanently remove the files. Little did I know this process would take days to complete… it’s now Tuesday night, and it’s on the third step (of who knows how many) of maintenance.

So, as far as CrashPlan goes, a few first (and second) impressions:
1) Their customer service is amazing. Their reps are polite, knowledgeable, and responsive. It’s everything you want in customer service. So bonus points for that.
2) Their client is written in Java and therefore hogs memory like nobody’s business. My backup actually crashed on Saturday because the client had exceeded the default 512MB RAM limit, and I had to increase it to 2GB. Woke up some mornings to it using over 1.5GB, and had to reboot to get it back down to reasonable levels.* Negative points for that (although the Java aspect means they do support Linux, which I suppose is a plus).
3) Don’t do archive maintenance on your archives. :P It takes literally days to run (at least when you have 1TB of data like me), and there isn’t any warning beforehand about how long it could take. (And, as far as I can tell, there isn’t a way to cancel or delay the operation once it’s started.) Negative points for that.
4) Seeding service (assuming it works, of course, since I still haven’t sent back the drive) is awesome and totally worth the money if you have a lot of data to back up. It would have taken me months (like… almost a year) to send my 1TB of data over the internet. Seeding gets it done in a matter of days. So bonus points for offering that service.

*This is actually concerning to me, as my laptop only has 4GB of physical RAM, so CrashPlan regularly consuming half of that would be a serious problem. Fortunately, memory usage seems to only spike while a backup is actively occurring, and it otherwise uses a reasonable 150MB of RAM to run in the background and monitor files.

Anyway, this post has gotten a bit longer than I would have liked. I haven’t had a chance to do anything with photos while my computer has been restoring and backing up and maintenance-ing, so there isn’t anything to break up this wall of text for you today.

But yay for cloud backups. And boo for hardware problems.
(Also? Boo for the NSA being able to easily access my data now. But I suppose that’s a given for anything you put online, and I’d rather have a safe backup than worry about the government seeing my not-at-all-interesting files.)

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:

Summer

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I guess summer is coming to an end.


It’s been a fairly quiet summer, except for the trip out West. I didn’t really pay attention to the freshmen moving in this year, and didn’t bother with Playfair or House War photos. Meh.

I also kind of ragequit The Tartan (at least its senior staff) recently because I was unhappy about the way things were (or, I suppose, weren’t) getting done. Not much to discuss there. We’ll see if things improve.

I’ve been playing a lot of board games lately, which has been awesome. We recently got 7 Wonders (during a board game sale on Amazon), and I’m really wanting the Cities expansion now.
All the board games!

Ground Floor

Nertz

Carcassonne

Viticulture

7 Wonders

Ingenious

Thurn and Taxis

The basil plant cutting Yubin gave us has grown into a full plant, and yielded some tasty results.

Also the burgers finally happened. They taste disgusting, although they’re also a few months expired so that might be a contribution. Chris tried eating one of the french fries and had an unhappy stomach that night. (Whether those things are related are not, who knows?)

In sad news, Anna moved away this past weekend to start a job at the York Dispatch in York, PA. She’s doing copy and pagination for the sports section there, which is awesome for her. She had a going-away party where there was lots of Nertz and also Cranium.


Yay for life and people and games and things.