Yesterday (7/31) was an awesome day
Long Red Light
This morning (Mon 8/9), I got back to Oracle from Yosemite around 1:30 AM. I got in my car, drove out of the 300 garage, drove to the end of the 300 street, and turned right onto Oracle Parkway. I drove to the end of the street and signaled to turn left as I stopped at the red light at the intersection of Oracle Parkway and Marine Parkway. Here I proceeded to wait for the red light to turn green. This was the same traffic light featured in my Random things post from July.
This time, I wasn't as fortunate as last time. I started timing immediately after arriving at the intersection, and did some things while I waited for the light to turn green, including:
- listening to the radio
- putting my car into park
- turning off the engine
- shifting my car backwards and forwards in the hopes of triggering a sensor (which I now think probably does not exist or is broken)
- timing the crosswalk sequence - it is 28 seconds total: 6 seconds of a white pedestrian signifying Go, then a 22-second countdown, with a flashing hand every second. If the intersection were working normally, at 0 seconds, the hand would flash one last time and stay lit up, while the number 0 would disappear. However, since the intersection was clearly broken, 0 seconds would flash and then the white 'Go' pedestrian would appear and the cycle would repeat.
- Watching two streetlights on my left cycle through all permutations of on and off:
- thinking about xkcd #277: Long Light. I felt like the driver depicted, and it really did seem like the light wouldn't change until Tuesday. I like the tooltip (hover your mouse over the strip) for this strip.
After waiting at the traffic light for over 30 minutes, it still hadn't turned green, so in my mind, I officially declared it horribly programmed (major bug), and temporarily used a work-around (ignoring the red light and making the left turn anyways).
The end :).
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Geohashing
This summer, as most of you know, I've been interning at Oracle in Redwood Shores, California. I haven't been too busy at work, so I've been attending a lot of cardio and yoga classes at the Oracle gym as well as fooling around a lot on my computer. One of the things I've gotten into is reading xkcd. I've been keeping up with the newest strips (released every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), and I've also been catching up on the old ones by reading from xkcd #1 forward. I've reached about #215. Still 500+ more to go. One reason it's taking me so long to get through the old xkcd's is that they often cause me to look things up on Wikipedia, either because there's something I didn't understand or there's something interesting I want to read more about. This often leads to "The Problem with Wikipedia":
xkcd #214
Another interesting xkcd (there's a lot of them) is xkcd #426 - "Geohashing":
xkcd #426
I had read this comic a while ago and had even browsed the Geohashing Wiki a bit, but I had never made the effort to go to a geohash. Well, this summer, I have a rental car paid for by Oracle as well as a bike, and I'm not too busy, so I figured, why not give this a shot? Plus, where better to start than the graticule (a 1° by 1° block) shown in the original comic (37°,-122°, which includes Redwood Shores as well as San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley)?
I didn't get the idea to start geohashing until the July 4th weekend. On Saturday, July 3, I went with Sherwin Yu and Jeffrey Huang to the SF Exploratorium. Then, on Sunday, I went for a bike ride along the SF Bay Trail up to SFO. I had already biked this trail a couple weekends earlier (though I hadn't gone all the way to the airport), and I had seen the airport in the distance and it didn't look that much further away. But when I actually tried biking to the airport on July 4, the trail turned out to be much longer, due to all the curves of the coastline, which the trail followed. The ride there took about 2 hours, with 1.5 hours of actual biking time. On my way back, I was starving and my knees were giving out a little. I contemplated stopping for at a restaurant several times, but all the ones I passed looked expensive. Finally, at Coyote Point Park, I found a snack bar where I bought and devoured a bag of Cheetos, a pack of Nutter Butter cookies, and a granola bar. With that break and extra fuel, I finally made it back to my apartment. I had planned to go to Redwood City later to see some fireworks, but being exhausted, I just crashed on my couch and ate non-stop for about 1.5 hours while watching TV.
The next day, on Monday, July 5, which I had off, I was pretty sore, so I just stayed in and rested. On a whim, I decided to check the geohash locations for that weekend. It turned out that the geohash for Saturday, July 3, was on land and it looked reachable. Sunday, July 4's geohash was also on land, but was in the middle of some trees, so it might've been hard to reach. Alas, the geohash for Monday, July 5, was on water. (Most geohashes for the 37,-122 graticule are on water, since about 60% of the graticule is water.)
Disappointed at having missed two geohashing opportunities, I vowed to check the geohashing coordinate calculator daily and go to the next land geohash in my graticule.
Two days later, on Wednesday, July 7, I got my opportunity. I checked the geohash calculator at work and discovered that July 7's geohash was only 20 minutes away! So I wrote down the coordinates and after work, I drove to the location. The exact coordinates were N37°26.9393', W122°12.7995', but unfortunately, since the location was on someone's property which was gated, I was unable to reach the spot, though I got very close:
I rang the doorbell on the gate several times, but no one answered. Thus, the end of my first geohashing attempt.
Two days after that, on Friday, July 9, the geohash location was again within reach, only about a half hour drive away, on the other side of the SF Bay, in Newark, California. After work, I drove there and found the location. Again, I couldn't get exactly on the spot (N37°32.6304', W122°1.7726') because it was on someone's property and was fenced off:
I think the exact spot was probably on top of the trailer. I decided not to knock on the door of the house behind the trailer since it was getting a bit late and the neighborhood seemed a little sketchy.
After this second geohashing trip, I took a bit of a break for a while. Either a geohash location was on water or it was in the middle of a forest or I already had plans for that day.
Finally, about a week ago, there was a viable geohash and I decided to go for it. The geohash was for 2010-08-11, and the coordinates were 37.644745°, -122.49595°. The geohash location was actually a few hundred feet offshore in the Pacific,
but I decided it was close enough to just reach the shoreline by the geohash. I wore swimming trunks just in case the water and weather were warm and I was feeling ambitious. However, when I got there and exited my car in a T-shirt and swimming trunks, I became very cold very fast. It was so windy and cold that I didn't even go down to the water. I just stayed on top of the cliff overlooking the ocean.
The weather was kind of bleak, too.
Afterward, I went to the nearby Pacific Manor Shopping Center and ate an appetizer sampler tray at Straw Hat Pizza for $5.
Four days later, on Sunday, August 15, 2010, there was another reachable geohash, this time in Redwood City! It was close enough that I decided to bike there. I left around 11:00 AM and got to the geohash location around 11:30 AM. Then I spent about ten minutes trying to get my GPS coordinates exactly right, but my GPS was too inconsistent and imprecise, and I eventually gave up and just took some pictures.
Looking at the Google Map street view of the geohash location, I believe the geohash is right where the tree is.
So, on my fourth geohash attempt, I finally reached the geohash location (after getting very close several times). This was also my first time reaching a geohash by bicycle, so I think I can claim the bicycle geohash achievement, even though I forgot to take any pictures involving my bike, so I don't have proof. It's the personal satisfaction that counts, though.
I have yet to meet any other geohashers or reach a Saturday meetup, but I hope to some time in the future. Also, though I won't have a car back at college, I will try to reach at least one geohash while on campus.
I would like to do a geohash with a buddy some time, too.
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Geocaching, August 2010
I was reading the geohashing achievements page, and I stumbled across a few other interesting things.
First, I was able to claim another geohashing achievement - a displaced origin geohash - on Sunday, August 22, 2010, when I flew out from SFO back to EWR. The displaced origin geohash achievement is for reaching a geohash for a graticule other than the one you were born in for the date you were born. So, for me, I reached the geohash for 1990-10-26 in the 37,-122 graticule. The reason I was able to reach this geohash on the day I was leaving was because the geohash was on SFO property!
If you look at the geohash on a satellite map, such as this one, you'll notice it's located on the runway somewhere. So of course I wasn't able to walk out onto the runway and reach the exact spot. But since I've flown into and out of SFO over ten times in my life, I'm pretty sure at least one of those times, I've gotten within 100 feet of the geohash location, and I think that should count as a successful geohash, considering the geohash location is on airport property. Thus, since there are no precise rules for what is considered a successful geohash and I think I've gotten pretty close to this one, I'm now claiming a displaced origin geohash achievement. Win.
The second interesting thing I came across was geocaching. This I stumbled upon by reading the page for the hash collision achievement, which can be claimed when a geocache is within line of sight from the geohash location. This of course prompted the question in my mind of "what is a geocache?". I googled it and stumbled across the official geocaching website, geocaching.com.
Geocaching is even older than geohashing and involves finding a "cache" (usually a small box, container, jar) hidden somewhere in the world based on the GPS coordinates of the cache, which are posted online. It's basically like a high-tech scavenger hunt.
Interested, I used the "Seek a Cache..." search on the geocaching website to see if there were any caches hidden around Redwood Shores. Surprisingly, there were many! There was even one hidden behind the Redwood Shores Public Library, where I often went after work and on the weekends to do some pleasure reading.
According to the site, this cache was hidden in March of 2007 and had been found over 200 times already! The last time it was found was only about a month ago (in July). It was surprising to me that a cache could remain out in the public world for so long without being removed. Very curious whether this cache was still there, I left work on Wednesday, August 18, and headed to the library, armed with my GPS, the coordinates of the cache, and the clue "Under walkway, south side". The library was still open when I went, and while I was walking around the brush looking under the walkway, a person peeked over and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was geocaching and explained what geocaching was. He seemed both confused and amused and walked off. A short while later, a woman appeared at the end of the walkway and called to me, "Are you geocaching?" I said, "Yes! How did you know?" She explained that she was geocaching, too, and looking for the same cache that I was. We searched together for a bit, and after about five minutes, she found the cache by the end of the walkway.
The cache ended up being a rectangular, medium-sized plastic storage box with a snap-on lid.
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