It’s a pretty cool town to get to know. It’s really grown on me; getting used to the midwest is nice when you’re in the town that’s surrounded by reality. The facilities that Madison provides for bicycles along with the recent conversion of State St. are absolutely fantastic and really cater to alternative ways of getting around town without depending on a car.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped me from getting my hands on a car! If you want to get anywhere our of town, a car it’s nearly essential. Sure, there are buses that go to Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Chicago, but there are no transportation to places in between. To get to Devil’s Lake, I went on a 100 mile bike ride with fellow grad students… it’s definitely feasible, but it’ll take the whole day.

I ended up getting a Zipcar membership; they are a national car-sharing company that just started up operations in Madison. I’ve already used their cars to drive over 700 miles in the I’ve month that I’ve had my membership. It’s a great value, especially considering gas and insurance are included.

This winter has been very mild as well, with snow hardly staying on the ground for more than a week. There was a cold spell in early January, but the snow melted fairly quickly within a week. The trail runners that I bought at the local REI does wonders for keeping my feet dry!

Anywho, this was an overdue post… I’ll post more soon!

One thing I’ve noticed is that people get so locked into their routine commute.  They may not be aware of the multitude of alternate commutes that can perfectly fit their schedule.  Sure, there’s tons of ads and pushes from local government and employers to use alternate forms of transportation for repetitive commutes, but not a single place to gauge YOUR options.

I live in an area where the nearest bus stop would take me to UW.  The next closest (but up a steep hill) takes me to downtown.  I have easy access to a regional bike/ped trail, and I’m within 15 minutes of a heavily used Park & Ride (P&R).  I have so many options for my commute… so how did I end up with my current commute?  I believe it was simply the first one I thought of! 

Before I moved in to my current place, I had already planned out my commute.  Since this place is within easy reach of a bike trail, I reasoned that I could just bike from the new place to my old bus stop.  I’ve been doing it ever since I moved — at least 60 roundtrips of a 25-mile bus ride and 7-mile bike ride.  It takes ~70 minutes outbound and ~55 min inbound.

There are some instances that could force changes in a commute. The first could be shifting hours at work. Something like new or revised bus service could also change the commute as well… but it seems like even if the options change, the commute won’t switch to a more efficient trip unless the change is mandated by work or home obligations.

A trip planner that takes into account all of these modes of transportation (especially non-traditional modes) would be fantastic and fill this void.

It’s often striking to observe what my fellow Seattleite does when confronted with sudden weather changes and weather of that they don’t approve (which is another topic in itself). Many people lament the fact that it is raining, despite being shielded from the elements by being in buildings at work/school, parking garages between work and car, in a closed car while commuting, and a warm home in the evenings. People seem to absolutely abhor stepping outside into the rain. When they do, it’s never at a walking pace.

Putting down the weather always seemed like needless arrogance to me. There’s a reason that everything in this region is so green and living – this wonderful rain that sprinkles down now and again makes sure that Seattle and the surrounding area never go brown. While it may be an inconvenience if you’re trying to stay dry for your skip-level meeting, it is incredibly beneficial for so many animals, plants, and soil.

Besides, it’s so much more fun playing soccer in the rain.

It’s always been my goal to stay humble about the weather – at least we can give Mother Nature the control that she desires.

Using Jason Smith‘s Wiimote Presenter, I just remapped some keys to make more sense for Hulu.  The Hulu configuration file for Wiimote Presenter is here.

Windows 7 also comes with Bluetooth support in-box, so all you have to do (if you have a BT dongle or laptop) is right-click the Bluetooth icon in the system tray, go to add device, press 1+2 on the wiimote, click the wiimote in the device list, and select the option to pair without a code.

Basically, ipconfig /all would give me the following message:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::ed42:547:5d1b:20ef%9
Autoconfiguration IPv4 Address. . : 169.254.32.239
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

Ooooh, how fun, they say.  169.254.x.x is the IANA-defined black-hole.  Oops.  Of course, rebuilding the IP stack or turning off IPv6 didn’t help.  Sigh.  Probably recommending that everyone remove Norton now now that MS Security Essentials, AVG, Ad-aware, etc etc do a better job without destroying the computer while updating.

After adding all the data to a sql server instance, I hacked together a C# program to extract the lat/long points for each shape and encode Google Maps polylines, with the help of an implementation Mark Rambow did in java.  That put info back into the database, so I exported it into mysql and put it up on Alpertopia.

It seems to work pretty well!  There’s a wacky issue with some routes completely screwing up the map though; so if a route doesn’t display, you’ll have to reload the page.  I haven’t pinned down the bug yet.. One of the coolest things here is jQuery, which everyone on the internet says is awesome.  I really didn’t like the syntax at first, but my then-roommate Chris was using it in his research and was extoling the virtues of it.  Looking at the code of my hacking above, I’ve gotta admit that it’s pretty nice

Those shape IDs correspond to individual trips that the buses take, so that a  bus can have more than just two trips (allows for express, weekend, snow routes).  That’s the next step, hopefully.

If there’s any interest in the code behind it to generate the polylines, I’d be happy to make it available.

I have graduated from the University of Washington and am now working with Microsoft in Windows Core! It’s an interesting transition as I’ve been in academia for nearly all of my life as the expectations, responsibilities, and obligations are different, and free time is radically different (only in the evening, usually not on my terms!). I’m working with a great group of people, and they’ve been really accommodating to me.

For my senior thesis, I wrote a little bit about quantum computation. You can learn more about it by clicking on the image on the right-hand side or by browsing to the projects page.  It went pretty well, but I’ve been rather anxious at how quickly it ended; I feel like I need to actually complete the research in order to tie it off!

I recently trundled down to the SDOT warehouse in SoDo to pick up some surplus signs.  I took a couple pictures with my phone and some pictures of the spoils!  Greenwood Ave., Sand Pt. Wy., Fremont Ave., and Newton St. all made the cut!  See the pictures below or at the Flickr set.

I’m hoping to get a lot of backpacking in this fall, keep your eyes posted for pictures soon.

I’ll be moving hosts in the next couple of days, so this post will serve as bookmark whether the domain has propagated over to the new site or not.  This way, I’ll know it has not if I still see this post on the front page! 

I’m in the middle of redesigning the site, hopefully to give it a better look than it looked like before! I hope to use this to keep old friends and teachers up to date on what’s happening in my life and to touch base with other people interested in public transit, chemistry, and quantum computation.

Hopefully by the beginning of May this will be up and rolling; for now, it’s time to edit those darn WordPress templates.