The Outdoor Game

I've been playing indoor soccer for many many years now. I played a couple of games outdoors in an EMC summer league and pretty much hated it. Outdoor fields are notoriously uneven and either unmowed or barren of grass. Add a little rain and they become a mud pit. Passing and controlling the ball is difficult due to the crazy bounces and all the little undulations in the turf make it frighteningly easy to roll your ankle or twist a knee. Plus, the bigger fields and larger number of players results in a lot of running but far fewer touches on the ball.

A couple of the guys from indoor also play in an outdoor league and have been pestering me to play with them for a couple of years now but I always declined, citing the above reasons. This year, they finally wore me down. It was a combination of a couple of things that finally made me give it a try. The first was that I now qualified for the over 50 league. This is actually kind of depressing of course, but it also meant that I wouldn't be trying to keep up with the 30 year old "whippersnappers" who apparently don't have to get up on Monday morning and go to work, and who never seem to have a couple of Ibuprofen tablets that I can bum.

The other thing that pushed me over the edge was the fact that most of the fields the teams play on now are the artificial turf fields that have perfect bounces and no holes to swallow your ankles. These fields are very grass-like and have those black rubber pellets that give a more realistic bounce and provide a little bit of "looseness" to the field so your cleats don't stick and rip your knees and ankles out.

So I showed up to my first game, which was on our home field in Hopkinton. It's located down a dirt road that goes past the town maintenance yard and I'm thinking "This is not looking good." Well what do my wondering eyes behold but a spectacular complex with a suite of pristine turf fields. Here's a photo I took later in the season when it was getting quite chilly in the morning. It's not a great picture but it gives a pretty good look at the nice fields.

Turns out, I'm really enjoying playing outdoors. The turf fields play as nice as they look and I'm actually enjoying doing a bit of running. The other thing is that the I can hold my own against most of the players in the league and it feels good to contribute and feel like I can make a contribution to the team.

Despite this contribution, we didn't win many games this season and have been relegated to a lower division. Oh well, I've never really cared much about win-loss numbers, I just like playing the game.

Now I find myself looking forward to the Spring session and getting back outside. Who'd a thunk it?

I Want My WIFI

We embarked on our annual trip to the Vermont Quilt Festival this weekend. I had taken the RV into the shop about three weeks ago to fix a weird problem with the brakes - the left front brake would stick on and either pull to the left or just make a terrible grinding noise - until we would run over some rough road and it would shake loose.

Also, the air conditioner, which for a long time, would only run when the fan was on high, started having a thing where some louver or door deep inside the dash would flip and cause it to stop blowing cold air out the vents and apparently get re-routed into the engine or something.

So I took it in and picked it up this week. The guy said it was all fixed and when I asked him what was wrong with the brakes, he looked at me like he'd never heard of the problem. Great. He assured me that nothing was wrong with them so what could I do.

Well the drive up was uneventful. The brakes seemed to work fine and not stick. The air conditioning you ask? Well, I wouldn't know because it was so cold that we actually had to turn on the heater. This, on June 24 - Summer!

We got to the campsite and checked in. When they showed me where the site was, I remembered what had happened when I made the reservation. They didn't have any room in the section we always stay in so they put us on the upper level. I remember having walked around this area and it seemed like it was more of a tent/pop-up area. I remember wondering if this was going to be okay or not but I didn't have much choice.

We drove around to our site and our jaws dropped open. It was a tiny site and we were practically wedged between two other rigs. I looked at Deb and we knew we couldn't stay here. I managed to get my door open and walked up to the office. They were very nice and said we could have another site in that area or we could take an overflow site in the "regular" area. I walked back and took a look at the other site and it was really no better so I drove around to the overflow site. It was basically a grassy field but with hookups. It actually looked like pretty much the best site in the place.

I parked the rig there and walked back to the office to claim it. They sent a guy over to show us where to park - since it wasn't really that clearly marked. He also helped us get power and water since they were in the process of changing things around.

The next day, I drove Deb to the quilt show and came back to the campsite to do some web site work. I walked up to the office to buy my 24 hours of WiFi access but when I went to pay, they said they only took cash. Of course, Deb has the only money I had.

"Um, can I write you an IOU?"

"No, they might come collect the money at any time. Sorry."

"Can I *buy* a ten dollar bill from your cash register with my credit card?"

"What?"

"Can I buy something in the store and you charge me for that plus ten dollars on my credit card, and then give me ten dollars in change?"

"No, you can only pay for WiFI in cash."

(face palm)

So I walked back to the camper fuming. Of course, before I had walked up to the office, I had unrolled the awning, hooked up the water and power, and got settled in for the several hours it takes Deb to do the show. After fuming some more and deciding against a frontal assault on the office cash box, I packed up the rig and headed down the road to find an ATM that I had located on my phone browser.

I got the money and pulled back into the camp site and stopped at the office. I had played out the entire scene - the one where I walk in and calmly ask for WIFI access. She looks at me cheerily and says "Oh, found some money huh?". I look at her, my eyes piercing her soul - "No, I didn't *find* the money, I packed up the rig and *drove* to an ATM to get it."

That was take one. In take two, I don't say a word. I just look at her and she gets very uncomfortable in the silence and hurries to give me the password.

A few dozen variations on those scenes play in my head. I'm not sure which one it will actually be but I will cut her down swiftly and mercilessly with my icy stare and acerbic wit.

I open the office door and - she's not there. Crap!

In reality, she's probably just on her lunch break but I push that thought from my head and convince myself that she spotted me getting out of the RV with a ten dollar bill in my hand and that *look* in my eyes, and had to get out of there. She asked Mildred to cover for her because she was "feeling a little queasy" and slipped out the back of the store. Clever girl...

So I buy my WIFI password, park the camper, and setup with the laptop in our little screened-in patio thingy. I quickly forget about the WIFI Nazi and work on web sites until Deb calls. Heaven!

We had a good rest of the day, booming thunderstorms, kabobs on the grill, and a few rounds of Rumikube.

On the drive home the next day, it was warm enough to turn on the A/C. It ran fine for a while and then started blowing inside the dash again. If I turned off the A/C and put it on vent only, it would eventually start blowing out the vents again. Turn the A/C on again and it would run for a while and then stop blowing. Seems like something is either getting cold or hot enough to cause some door to close or open. Turning off the A/C let's it cool down (or heat up) and open (or close).

All in all, a pretty normal camping trip.

Ridin' the Rails

A little follow up on the new GoPro helmet cam I got a couple of months ago. Over the Memorial Day weekend, we went camping on the Cape and took the tandem. The campsite is right near the Cap Cod Rail Trail which we've ridden a few times. As the name implies, it's a railroad right-of-way that's been converted to a MUP - Multi Use Path - (a bike path) that covers a good part of the upper Cape.

We really enjoy the trail, there's a great little Mexican Cantina right off the trail that has the best pulled pork soft tacos in the world. We usually get on the trail in Brewster and take it down to Dennis and then over to Chatham on the cost. I have an app on my iPhone that uses the built-in GPS to track my rides and then uploads them to the MapMyRide web site as a sort of personal training log and ride sharing system.

Here you can see how it captured the ride.





Not only that, but they also create a Google Earth "fly over" of your ride.



I captured some video of the ride with my GoPro camera and edited it into a short little movie and posted it to YouTube.

Old Black Water, Keep on Movin'

Ah, black water. In the context of RVing, the muddy  Mississippi is positively sparkling compared to our version of black water. Last year, on our last camping trip, I went to dump said black water and found we had a bit of a problem.

Our black water system has two dump valves. One is on the right side of the RV, right next to the holding tank, and one is one the other side where the dump tube fits for draining into the dump station. I guess there are two so that you have a backup in case one of them fails.

The general dump procedure is to connect the hose, and open the dump valve on that side. Nothing comes out because the other valve is still closed. Then, I go around to the other side and open that valve, unleashing the torrent from Hell. Of course, this means that I'm not able to make sure that the dump tube stays in the hole in the ground so I have to race back around to the other side and hope that the end of the tube isn't whipping around like a garden hose, spewing effluent hither and yon. Don't laugh, it's happened.

I had noticed on a few previous trips that I would get a couple of drips from the valve on the tank side during the course of dumping. It's kind of gross but nothing really bad and frankly, I was kind of hoping it would go away on it's own.

It didn't.

This last time, it was pretty much pouring out of the valve. It happened to be doing this while the campground owner was standing there talking to me about his nice campground. Oops.

Of course, I didn't do anything about it at the end of the year so, with our first trip scheduled for Memorial day a couple of weeks away, I had to fix it.

The first step was to drain the system. I had drained it after the last trip but I had put antifreeze in over the winter so I had to empty that out. I ran the hose into the camper and had Deb put a bit of water in the bowl and flush. I cut off the top of a gallon milk jug and started ferrying buckets of goop from the camper inside to the toilet.

And ferrying.

And ferrying,

And ferrying.

I think I moved about 25 gallons of slurry into the house. Yuck. I called it quits when the water was running somewhat clean.

This weekend, I took a look at the leaky valve. The valve is a knife valve which means that it's basically a gate that you push in to drive a blade across the with of the pipe to cut off the flow. The valve is sandwiched between two flanges and held in place by four bolts in the four corners of the flange. The first thing I noticed was that one of the corners of one of the flanges was completely destroyed. Hmm, I guess that's probably why it's leaking. I got a couple of wrenches to take the bolt out and, as I turned it, the corner just disintegrated and the bolt basically just fell out. Great.

As I looked at the damaged flange, the ramifications began to sink in. If the flange is broken, I can't fasten a new valve between it and the other one since there's nothing to put the bolt into. In order to put a new flange in, I'll have to cut the other one out of course, but it's right next to an elbow so there's not really any room for a coupler that I would have to get to splice in a new flange. As I look at the whole system, I'm coming to the realization that I'm going to have to cut the pipe on the other side of the elbow and re-build the entire elbow and flange assembly. Wonderful.

I go ahead and attempt to undo the other three bolts holding the valve in-place and proceed to twist the heads off of each one. I guess there's a bit of rust going on down here. I finally got the bolts and the valve out. Mercifully, no liquid came out but the smell was less than pleasant.

I also noticed that the other flange, the one that goes into the black water tank is also damaged on the same corner as the destroyed one. The hole in the corner looks like a "C". It might be able to hold a bolt but it could be dicey.

I got on the web to see if there was any info on replacing black water valves. There were a few posts but nobody had any info on what to do when you had to splice in new flanges. I found one post where a guy suggested using MarineTex or equivalent to repair broken plastic parts. I remember Dad telling me about MarineTex and how it was a wonder material - a plastic that hardens into a sand-able, drill-able material that fixes anything. If figured that might be a good thing to use to reinforce the "C" on the tank flange.

This weekend I went to Home Depot to get the new elbow, couplers, and new pipe. Luckily, they had 2 foot lengths of pipe so I didn't have to buy 10 feet of it. Of course, I forgot the MarineTex so I had to go back and get that. I didn't find MarineTex exactly but I found a similar material that they said would do the same thing. Basically, it's like a putty that comes in a "log". You cut off a section and knead it in your fingers which mixes and activates the two components of the epoxy. You press it into place and wait an hour for it to harden.

To fix the "C" I decided to just mash a bunch into the hole and form a new corner. Then I could drill a new hole and have a stronger corner. As I was thinking about how that would work, I realized that I could probably just rebuild the destroyed corner of the other flange in the same way and not have to remake the entire flange/elbow configuration. So, I proceeded to rebuild the damaged corners, applying a layer of putty and letting it cure for an hour, and then repeating the process a couple more times to build up the missing corner.

After building up what I figured would be enough of a corner, I went about getting the holes drilled and the valve installed. The hole with the little damage was easy. I put the valve in place with two bolts in opposite corners and ran a drill through the hole in the valve that was over the repaired hole. The drill zipped through and, when I unbolted the valve, I had  nice clean, repaired corner.

I bolted the valve into the other flange and drilled through into my totally rebuilt corner in the same way. I ran the bolt through and found I didn't have enough bolt to get the nut started since I had built up so much putty. I had planned on that though so I got out the trusty Dremel and ground down the hardened putty/corner enough so that I could get the nut on the bolt coming through. I fastened everything together and gave it a quick leak test.

So far, so good. I cracked the rebuilt corner a bit when I was tightening the bolt so I added more putty in the cracks and tried to beef it up a bit more. I'll be able to give it a real test this weekend when we hit the road.

Let's hope she holds.

GoPro or Go Home

Well, the video bug has bitten me again. It's actually been percolating for a little while now and was born from our bike rides. See, we ride through a bunch of really cool areas and I've always wanted to capture the experience somehow. The solution, of course, is to have some sort of camera that records the ride.

A still camera isn't really practical and not what I want. I don't want to pull over and take a picture. I want to record video that I can then edit and make into a kind of travelogue. There are basically two options - mount the camera on the bike, or mount it on me. Mounting on the bike limits the visibility of the camera as it's fixed in position and can't see the various views I'm seeing in different directions. It also would get a lot of road vibration and probably wouldn't look very good.

So, the solution is to get a helmet cam. Yeah, like the kind the skydivers wear when they jump out of planes. There are two main contenders in the small, relatively inexpensive helmet wars - Contour and GoPro. Initially, I liked the Countour since it was small and relatively unobtrusive (as much as a camera mounted on your helmet can be unobtrusive). Recently though, I'd been hearing a lot about the GoPro so I looked into it further. Here's their promo video

Not that I want to jump off a mountain on my skis or anything but that's some pretty cool video.

Anyway, I did a little more research and decided to go with the GoPro camera. I got a helmet mount and a few other so I could attach it to the bike as well for some other shots.

For a test, I attached it to the top of the car and drove around. Kind of boring footage but I wanted to make sure I aimed it properly and could bring the video into my editor and cut and trim. That all seemed to go okay so, if it ever stops raining, I'll try to get some bike footage.

Should be fun.

Big Data

It's the new buzzword. Big Data refers to the vast quantities of information that is being generated and collected by various companies, web sites, governments, whatever. More specifically, it refers to what those entities might want to *do* with all that data.

Working at EMC, we've been dealing with large amounts of data for a long time. Our products (in general) are gigantic disk drives that store and protect "Mission Critical" data for companies large and small. Our Marketing people are quick to point out mind boggling statistics like - the amount of information produced last year is larger than all the of information produced in all the previous years combined - things like that.

Information production is only getting faster and faster too. It's one thing to have to store all that information but increasingly, companies want to be able to *mine* that information. As the amount of information grows, data analysts can apply statistical methods to look for patterns in the data and 1) determine behaviors and 2) predict activity.

So, analysts can look at sales figures and see that people are buying more of one product than another and adjust inventory levels or do other things to make sure their business is positioned correctly. They can also look at the data, combine it with other data and create models that let them predict what people are going to do when this or that changes.

Now, analysts have been doing this kind of thing for a long time - it's not really new. What is new is the amount of data being processed and the need to process it very, very quickly - real-time analytics.

Real-time analytics means looking at the data as it comes in and analyzing it right then. In the past, the analysis had to be performed on small subsets of the data in the "Data Warehouse". The analysis systems were not big enough or powerful enough to plow through all the data, they had to take a sample and hope that it had enough information to provide meaningful insight. Plus, it took them hours and hours to run those models and get an answer

Obviously, if you don't get a big enough sample, you could arrive at inaccurate conclusions. For example, you can take a look at the stock market values over any period of time. Depending on which week you happen to pick, you might conclude that the market is going up, down, or staying the same but that might not represent the larger trend. To get a "better" picture, you really need to look at more data - data that represents a longer period of time. In general, some patterns don't emerge until you get a sufficiently broad look at the data. Thus the dilemma. You need large samples of data to analyze and the bigger the sample, the more time it takes to analyze. But, to beat your competition, you need to get the results in seconds, not hours or days of the traditional systems. You want to be able to look at the cash register as the clerk is scanning items, find what else that customer has bought from you, and offer them an accessory that would beautifully match the dress they just bought today and the shoes they bought last month. Winning!

So the term Big Data not only means the *amount* of data out there but how to process and use that data to gain an edge in business. At work, we've been getting into this more and more. We're no longer interested in just storing the data for our customers, we need to help them mine it and get value out of it.

There are lots of interesting applications. We are currently working with Utility companies to help them figure out how to manage Smart Meter Data. It used to be that the power company would come by every month and read your power meter to figure out how much electricity you used so they could send you a bill. They got a little more advanced by installing meters that they could read from a truck as it drove by your house - no need to get out, find the meter, and write it down.

Enter the age of Smart Meters. These meters will now look at your power consumption and send it back to the Utility company every 15 minutes. So, instead of getting 12 readings a year from each customer, they are now getting 34,000 readings per year from each user. That's 3,000 times more information than they had been getting previously.

Not only are they looking for ways to manage this info, they are looking for ways to *use* it - beyond just sending you your bill. For example, it's really, really, expensive and hard to build a new power plant but there is a never ending demand for power. And it's the peak power demand that is killing the power companies. When everyone comes home at night and cooks dinner or washes clothes on Saturday, they have to have enough capacity to handle the peaks but that capacity goes unused in the valleys. If they could lower the peaks, they wouldn't have to build more plants.

Enter the Smart Meter. The power company can offer you an incentive and say, if you reduce your consumption from 5:00 pm to 11:00 pm - our peak demand time - we'll offer you a rebate (or some other incentive) on your bill. With the Smart Meter, they can tell not only how much power you use but when you use it, and try to adjust your behavior. In some scenarios, they can even tell what kinds of things are using your power and be able to send you a letter that says "We see you have a 1995, Kenmore model C-RAP dishwasher. Newer models use much less energy so we'll give you a rebate if you replace it."

They can also look at the grid of meters and get a better picture of their delivery system. With real-time analytics of the information coming in, they can detect say, voltage variations in a particular neighborhood. They can see that one particular transformer is common to all the affected meters and, using their statistical models, predict that it will fail in 2 weeks. They can then roll a truck to replace it *before* it blows, avoiding down time, angry customers, and unfavorable news reports..

Cool.

Okay computers, this is getting ridiculous

Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted. Have to get better at this.

I'm a little late on this latest bit of technology but it's still amazing. To set the stage, I've started doing Sudoku puzzles. I held off for several years while Dad, Carly, and Deb all exclaimed how fun it was. In fact, I was a little worried that Dad was on a personal mission to convert everyone to be a Sudoku Jedi Master.

I'm not really into puzzles or brain teasers much so I ignored them as best I could. What finally converted me was I downloaded a Sudoku App for the iPad and tried it. It took a few runs but now I'm hooked. Deb and I now play a game or two on the iPad before turning out the lights every night.

The App itself is pretty amazing. It has different levels and actually has teaching modes to help you learn different techniques to solve the tougher puzzles. While in the puzzle, if you get stuck, you can ask it for hints. It will start by saying something like "Ponder the digit 8". This will usually be enough to help you move on since you can focus on all the 8's and see a move you hadn't noticed before. If that doesn't help though, you can ask for more and it will give more and more specific hints, to the point where it will just fill in the square for you. I have the sound off but I think it makes a little noise like "Jeeeezus!" when it has to hold your hand that much.

So that's cool but not really the reason for this post. I'd heard about Google Goggles which is an app for the phone that let's you do Google searches but in a couple of interesting ways. You can type in your search words like normal of course but you can also just speak your search. You press the microphone icon, say "Nuclear Power", and it will pull up search results just as if you'd typed it in. Amazing, but oh so five minutes ago.

No, to really be cool, you just take a picture of what you want information about. So, take a picture of say, a book or DVD, and Google will bring up information about that item. In the bookstore, take a picture of the barcode, Google will identify it and tell you what the price is on Amazon so you can order it right then.

(Which really sucks for the bookstore of course. Reminds me of a funny picture I just saw. It was the front window of a Borders Bookstore with signs listing all the liquidation sales. There was also a sign that said "No bathrooms. Check Amazon" Ouch!)

Which gets us back to Sudoku. We do the puzzle in the paper on Saturday and Sunday so today I tried a trick I'd heard about. In Google Goggles, I pointed the camera at the puzzle in the paper and took the picture. Google identified it as a Sudoku puzzle!

Then it asked me if I wanted it to solve it.

Two seconds later, it was done. 

Hello Sky-Net...