WT8P's Notes to Self

Well that was an enjoyable week!

The excitement of visiting colleges with my daughter, her applying to the short list, and waiting on the results has is over and I’m seriously craving a week unplugged from work.

If you give a mouse a cookie, they’ll get crumbs and chocolate all over their clothes.

After 3 3/4 years, I finally completed the 50k elevation challenge (for geocaching) in October with my friend Jes.

(Continued from part 1.)

Lake Louise, AB Cycle Canada – Icefields Parkway trip summary: 9 days, 582 miles, 26k elevation gain, 95 geocaches and a hundred insect bites.

What I think about when I am having a bad day at work… In the dark world the natives call “January in Seattle,” I was pining for a week-long bike ride as a “carrot” to entice myself to get back to riding.

The Cholesterol Nuclear Option.

During the summer of 2011, I had some mythical Spare Time to blow the centimeter-thick layer of dust off my programming skills and port FizzyCalc, a Windows-based geocoordinate conversion utility that I’ve used for solving several puzzles in my obsessive…

I had my gallbladder out Thursday.

Booyah!

Despite a concerted effort to keep my inbox tamed, it’s now back above 30 undealt-with emails.

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, I had an opportunity to head down to Pendleton for the tenth annual Century Ride of the Centuries (aka “CROC”).

I was going through yet another hard disk of photos to find an appropriate “timeline” image for Facebook.

After finishing my commercial pilot rating, I was really hankering for owing my own airplane to avoid all of the randomization with renting and, ultimately, _go someplace far.

About three years ago, on the way to our summer camping trip to Mt.

I did my initial flight training at an uncontrolled airfield outside of the Austin city limits.

For my birthday, I took a cheese making class at PCC, the local organic food chain.

Despite scant information on ganglioneuromas (many just repackaging the NIH blurb in a different style sheet), I wasn’t losing sleep while waiting for the pathology report.

Finally had surgery for the thing.

During last month’s Stone Concert, the CT scan showed two unexpected somethings.

I’ve gotten into a nice groove where my daughters’ evening dance classes have provided an excellent excuse for me to bike to work.

As GPS-enabled phones become more popular, there have been a lot of geocaches placed by people using phones.

My kids were feeling somewhat left out each time I dropped a Star Wars reference in conversation – something I apparently do a lot.

Supercomputing 2010’s keynote was Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma (and its numerous follow-ons), whose research, studying the demise of companies over time, is utterly fascinating (to me) and I can’t believe I hadn’t read before.

The other night, one of my kids managed to spill soup into the vents on the top of the oven door, which then dripped between the two oven door glass panels.

As I’ve aged, evidence of my lost cat-like stealth comes in the form of various snapping, crackling and popping noises I make when I walk.

When I first heard someone mention the term dolphin kick, I thought it was a reference to the 1980s Patrick Duffy show, Man from Atlantis.

I’ve been researching date/time formats for inclusion in a software product, and wanted to share some of the thought processes involved.Use case: an engineer or scientist wants to plot something over some time period.

There are a variety of milk-based products available in the store.

Bellevue is blacked out.

I don’t watch much television , but when I do, it’s because my Tivo’s found something cool.

Mister Peabody, set the Wayback Machine to three years ago, pick a spot during a really long product release cycle.

In April of ought six, I pondered two options for saving for my kids’ college: the 529-plan I have and Washingon State’s 529 program, Guaranteed Education Tuition (“GET“).

Day 4: Lake Selmac, OR to Glendale, OR – With the big hills out of the way, they ratcheted up the distance.

This year’s route was: Medford, OR to Yreka, CA 66 miles 5,450′ Yreka to Happy Camp 74 miles 2,600′ Happy Camp to Lake Selmac, OR 54 miles 5,200′ Lake Selmac to Glendale 71 miles 4,192′ Glendale to Grants Pass 77 m…

**1Q 2008:**Travel to Reno (NV), Vancouver (BC), Portland (OR).

Day 3: Baker City to Halfway – The big epiphany today was that skipping the (now monotonous) breakfast meant I could sleep in.

Almost time for the product launch!

Not that I need another hobby, but… I’ve belatedly taken my friend Tracey’s suggestion to try geocaching, essentially a treasure hunt.

I don’t drive as much as I used to, but yowza, $54.87 to fill up my gas tank today.

Inspired by Spring being officially upon us in the northwest (while the rest of you in North America are having “summer”), I went on another cleaning rampage the weekend before CROC, this time focusing on the garage.

I felt great when I rolled into Greenwater, the point geographically farthest from the start of Saturday’s 200k brevet.

I’ve been having a lot of fun reading “How to Fossilize Your Hamster“[1], an entertaining and enlightening collection of quirky science questions and experiments one can do to observe the the principles.

I was going through Statistics Hacks and came across Benford’s Law, which states that in naturally occurring numerical data, the distribution of the first, non-zero significant digit follows a logarithmic probability distribution described as: P(D1 = d) =…

In anticipation of my physical, and partly to assuage fears that the post-big four-oh one would entail uncomfortable things, I sleuthed around for things on what to expect, thinking.

Hi, I’m Jim (WT8P).

Last week, I read a story about 143 million pounds of beef products from California-based Westland/Hallmark Meat Company being retroactively recalled to February 1, 2006.

[](http://www.basicinstructions.net) Scott Meyer’s [Basic Instructions](http://www.basicinstructions.net/) Elizabeth poses two questions: What would you tell your younger self?

1Q 2007: Traveled to: Reno, Trondheim, San Diego.