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The Pac Tom documentary!
(28 Dec 2022 at 11:01) |
It is done! I finished the Pac Tom project to run the length of every street in Pittsburgh in October, and (yes it took months) also this video documenting the project and finale:
How I ran the length of every street in Pittsburgh: PAC TOM
The Pac Tom site now has the final data, but the video is the definitive way to see it!
I added the downloadable Soundtrack for completionists. I was horrified to find, when watching this video with some friends after I uploaded, that I had accidentally muted one of the audio tracks for the "final" version. You can rectify this by playing "Street (Trap Remix)" at exactly 11:58. | |
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Oh! WVPA
(31 Mar 2021 at 22:48) |
Helloo! Things are looking up. Last week I was able to drive to Ohio (from Western PA where I live, only a little over an hour, the main difficulty being that I don't have a car) and get vaccinated for sars-cov-2! This was a good blend for me because it's legitimately available for anyone over 40 (no residency requirement) so it didn't require any funny business, but on the other hand I got to express my eagerness to get one by going significantly out of the way. I got the Pfizer version, which along with the Moderna one is just really cool technology and I'm grateful that we live in a time where such things are possible. I was thinking today that it's probably the coolest thing I ever put in my body? It seems like a lot of people around me are finding one way or another to get their shots, which is a good sign!
While I was out there, I had some extra time on the zipcar so I did this run that's been on my bucket list for a while. There's a narrow sliver of West Virginia surprisingly sandwiched between Ohio and Pennsylvania here, so I ran from Ohio through WV to PA and back. (One of my running side projects is to collect border crossings, with a three-way like this being especially good (although not as coveted as a tour around a triple-point such as in post 1158).)
OH-WV-PA-WV-OH
The portion along the river was pretty awful, basically just running in a breakdown lane of a highway, and it seems that WV and OH are having some kind of "Oh yeah, you're building a factory right here to billow smoke across the river to us? Well then we're going to build an even bigger factory where the exhaust is literally on fire!" back-and-forth, but at least I had my mask with me. Otherwise it wasn't a particularly epic run or anything, except that I was cutting it a little close with the Zipcar deadline, so it worse than it normally is when I made a wrong turn on the way back!
After that I spent pretty much an entire long weekend putting together a video for my latest project (actually finished this one) for SIGBOVIK. (It's good that I got a burst of energy because I unwisely started playing shapez.io the week before this deadline, as recommended by jonas on this very blog's comment section, and the game is both good and tended to keep me up way past my bedtime. I think I won it, though!) This project is also nothing epic but it is kind of funny/interesting I hope, and I'm very glad to have actually finished something given the energy challenges that 2020 posed. There's a paper in SIGBOVIK and a 5 minute version during the conference. It's all taking place online this year and there's both audio and video, so I think it will be a good event that anyone can participate in. I'll post the full 24-minute Director's Cut tomorrow after SIGBOVIK, which is project's true Final Form. | |
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2609 * 2^1549069 + 1
(30 Nov 2019 at 21:42) |
Happy Thanksgiving!
One interesting thing that happened this month: A few weekends ago it was feeling cold in my office, so I thought about turning on a space heater, but why do that when I've got a 850W power supply hooked up under my desk that can provide a "useful" resistive load? My current projects don't have any long-running computations, so I fired up PrimeGrid, which is a distributed computing project that lets you hunt for prime numbers (etc.) using your stupidly overpowered home computer. Amazingly, the next day, I had discovered this prime:
2609×21549069 + 1
It's a Proth prime, one of the several special forms of numbers that have efficient primality tests. This particular one is 466,320 decimal digits long, in fact big enough that when I discovered it, it was the 3461st largest prime number known to mankind (see its entry in the list of Top 5000 Primes). As you know, computers are pretty fast these days, and there exist many nerds, so this number has already slipped 62 places to #3523.
Finding this on my second day was pretty lucky, although not really beginner's luck since in college I ran Prime95 ("Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search") on any computer I could get my hands on. You can see my historic page exhorting internet strangers to join the Tom7 prime team for example. Apparently we were once in the top 100 teams in the world, so I think I deserve a prime 20 years later, right?
I finally assembled my current project and it is kind of working! There are several things I can do to improve it, which I am trying, but at this point it at least does something interesting/funny enough to make into a video. Next the trick will be finding the right stopping point. I was hoping to get a lot done over Thanksgiving break (mercifully, not traveling this year), but (not mercifully) I immediately got sick and have spent most of my time playing Pokémon in bed or warming my toes on the prime-powered heat sink. So sad to finally have some free time but not have the energy. Oh, well! | |
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Strawberry Fields Forever
(27 Sep 2019 at 17:33) |
Happy 40th birthday to me! I'm currently in Connecticut visiting with the whole family, which is only somewhat coincidentally on my 40th birthday weekend. The main thing is the pizza! Two quick updates from this month, strawberry-related:
One of my all-time favorite games, Celeste, just got a new free 9th chapter (which is sized more like three chapters). This was a mixed blessing since over a year ago I finished all its hardest levels (all achievements) and then managed to pry myself from it. So I felt compelled to get the two new achievements to get back to 100%, but it was a somewhat hypnotizing and RSI-inducing grind. (Especially since I had gotten pretty rusty. I even forgot that you can hold onto walls, which made the first few levels much harder...) The worst part was that the final level was rumored to be kinda ridiculous, and the "WOW" achievement even moreso, so I was feeling worried about that the whole week it took to get through the prior 99. All told it was pretty worthwhile; the level design is really admirable as usual, and it stays true to the signature difficulty curve. I recommend it.
Second is a font sighting sent by a friendly Internet stranger. This one is from a fairly popular (18M views this month) music video called Fresa, which features Columbian Reggaeton artist Lalo Ebratt. A sighting in such a video would be interesting, but the wildest thing is where it is:
Lalo Ebratt's "THUGGER" neck tattoo
Yes, that is Action Jackson used on his highly permanent neck tattoo that reads "THUGGER" (presumably short for "Tree Hugger"). It seems to be a fairly new tattoo, but you can find many more images of it to verify. I hope it ages well! | |
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Eulogy for Tom 6
(31 Jan 2012 at 23:00) |
Guys, my dad died. It happened earlier this month. We knew it was coming for a while, so we got to do a lot of preparation, which was nice. But still pretty sad. I may write more about this since I think there are some good stories (though it is difficult to write about), but I wanted to at least share the Eulogy I wrote for him, which I gave at the funeral.
✂ clip 'n save Oh, man. I’ve actually been stressed about this since my father spoke at his own father’s funeral (Tom 5), years ago. He did a really good job and I realized I would have to do it for him some day. I thought about it a lot but I didn’t even really write anything until last night, I guess because I was afraid I wouldn’t do him justice. I’ll try.
The most amazing thing to me about my father was how selfless he was. He spent his whole adult life working tirelessly in public service and providing for his family. He saw us become the men and women we are, but didn’t get to enjoy the retirement he deserved. Yet he told me that he wouldn’t do it any differently, and I believe him—at Christmases his favorite thing was not giving nor receiving gifts but just watching us give each other gifts.
Sometimes he was working completely “behind the scenes” to make things go better for you; he didn’t need you to know that he did it. He would silently pay your car insurance or student loans if you were low on money, even if he was low on money. We discovered after he died that he kept a stash of wine bottles hidden so that he could replenish mom’s supply if she ran out at an inopportune time. Before I was born, when he and my mom lived in New Haven, dad protected her from a knife-wielding intruder, wrestling this guy down the stairs after getting stabbed multiple times, puncturing his lung. I didn’t even hear the story until I was an adult. I couldn’t believe that. I would tell my kids all the time: Oh, that’s cool that you’re watching He-Man, but did you know that that I’m an actual real master of the universe? He didn’t tell us, first I assume to protect us from the idea that there were even scary people in the world, and second because he was just that kind of humble guy. He was my hero even before I knew, anyway.
As you probably know he had no fear of doing things openly if he thought that was the right way. Ask any kid for a story of him embarrassing us together or individually. When we visited CMU, which is the school I ended up going to, I had been kind of disappointed with the official tour. He took the unimaginably embarrassing step of just walking into someone’s office in the computer science department (turned out to be like the associate dean) and asking for a tour. She was initially like, um, no? as my mom and I hid our faces in shame. But after he politely thanked her and left, she decided she needed a break after all and gave us a great insider’s tour, and honestly that made the difference for me, and it changed my life.
Which he did in lots of other ways. They’re easy to see: He instilled in us the importance of hard work and family. He valued teaching; Taylor and Kerrigan are teachers and Mike and I loved to teach while in grad school, too. Dad loved making things, his home filled with homemade furniture and most recently the effing greenhouse. Mike and I are engineers, Taylor a carpenter. We really fall in love, and fall hard. And writing, and public speaking, and telling stories, and tennis, and playing guitar. It’s trite to say but I do actually feel like he is a part of all of us. I care about the same things he does, and not just to honor him, but because it’s actually who I am.
Dad loved to brag about us so let me brag about him for a bit. In the days following his death there were several newspaper articles about him, and spots on TV and NPR. At his wake yesterday I counted about 500 people. In addition to the friends and family that made the trip, there were 10 reporters, many who told us he was their favorite to work with, superintendents, the commissioner of education, who told us that at a recent meeting of education bigwigs, they held a moment of silence for him and then went around the table sharing stories and kind words. A US Senator came. But what struck me most was not the volume of visitors but the consistency of their praise: He was a rare and great man. He saved my butt on many occasions. He knew everything but didn’t make you feel like he was smarter than you. He always went out of his way to help. We loved him. You boys look so much like him (which I take to mean that he was very, very handsome).
Dad’s presence in the world made it a better place, and so he deserved to live for decades more. But there are many positive things about the way he died that we’re thankful for. We knew it was coming, despite his attempts to protect us from it, and we were able to prepare for a long time. In the last five years we grew closer as a family. All of the kids got to say goodbye properly, and we heard him say he was proud of us, and that we are proud of him. And mom never left him for his last month, sleeping beside him, watching the sunrise, taking care of him. I saw them share many special moments, and she cherished it like being on a long camping vacation, which is how much they loved each other. We savored little things that in other circumstances we’d take for granted. His stories. His poking fun. His touch. How he won over all of the nursing staff. Pie drawers. Our scrappy and sentimental Christmas Eve and Christmas in hospice, arguably the best ever. We made our old house appear to be wheelchair-accessible and managed to get him home again after more than a month away, and he was so happy to be there that I think we made the van driver cry. The stream of visitors with kind words and stories and pepper spray. Dad counted his blessings for them: His beautiful wife, his children and their loved ones, keeping him company every day.
And he tried to provide for us from that bed, willing himself to stay alive to collect one more social security check, giving me stock tips (which were actually good), life advice, long shots in on-line horse racing, telling us not to miss the stash of diamonds he had in his glove compartment (??) that he was going to use to make mom a piece of jewelry. And he tended to our feelings, always taking an optimistic view in the bleakest of circumstances, making us feel as okay as he did, which was... okay.
So I say that dad won his battle with cancer, because he didn’t let it change him. He was himself to the end, he died right, and as he kept telling us, he had a good run. I’ll miss you, dad, we all will, but you’ll always be with us.
Love,
everybody. | |
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Pac Tom Level 1 Complete, trophy
(30 Jan 2010 at 11:21) |
pac tom level 1 trophy.pdf
Hey, this post is to officially announce that I completed Level 1 of my Pac Tom project. That's a big deal for me but I'm kind of over it because I finished over a year ago, in November 2008! I've been strangely silent on the project since I announced almost being done in the August 2008. It's part of a weird pattern of behavior where I finish or almost finish big projects but then never announce them because my announcement ambitions exceed my announcement wherewithal, which would be such a tiny fraction of the total effort expended (which is weird) so I never actually announce them. This particular case is strange because I'm well on to Pac Tom Level 2, spending many hours every week busting my ass on it in various ways. I'm trying to fix this behavior. Pac Tom Level 1 is done! Soon, the Pac Tom website and my substantial progress on Level 2.
Pac Tom is my project to run the length of every street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. I've been doing it for many years now, accounting for many thousands of miles and many hundreds of hours of running. Level 1 is the area of the city between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers (see map above), which is 23.5 square miles. Those black lines are the routes I ran, tracked with my wrist-worn GPS device. I always start or end at my home or work, usually both. The background map is my old Map of Pittsburgh Neighborhoods which I made for Wikipedia. Click for a PDF so you can zoom to your heart's content, as long as its content does not exceed the limits of IEEE floating point. I have new maps now which are not as sloppy, but also not as colorful.
And then I have to do this: ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED
Every street, continental Pgh | |
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30th birthday: Cake Quest
(28 Sep 2009 at 00:21) |
Sunday I turned 30, as in years. The celebration started Friday when we had a great combo-party (Brianne's birthday on Saturday) in my space age bachelor pad. I hardly ever host parties in my place so I was a little nervous. It turned out almost ideally; like maybe 50 people and never got out of hand. I have one room, now known as the Observatory, which is basically empty since my brother moved to Boston, and so that room just now has a secondary colony of San Pellegrino bottles (kind of ran out of space in my own room), my answering machine (full, useless) and two seats for "Observing" these objects, like a minimalist art project. (This was great. The San Pellegrino collection really drives some people nuts and other people happily make new interactive art with it.) On Nels's suggestion we made the Observatory a bit more partied up for the party, using the projector to show Robot Jox, a classic Robots Gone Wild cold-war-forever piece. No real sound setup in there, but I could only find Spanish subtitles, so I Google-Translated those back into English, so the whole movie was subtitled in this broken doubly-translated language which was especially delightful if you also listened closely enough to the computer speakers for the original EN audio, until the text inexplicably transforms into Spanish because Google Translate gives up once it gets a certain ways into a document that you upload, cuz I guess it gets tired and is like ahem you finish this. But only a few people in there at a time because of the two seats. Most people party 4 regular in the games room, or Gallery, or murder Prof. Plum in the Kitchen with the candlestick.
The highlight for me was the Great Race, a 10K which I run every year. This year it was on Sunday morning, my birthday. Last year I ran it real hard which qualified me as a seeded runner this time, but I'm not in as good shape and anyway have retired from running 10K for speed. So I decided it's costumes. I have pretty complex requirements for a race costume. It has to be pretty conspicuous, so people spot it. It has to not get in anyone's way or be race-ejectingly illegal, because I don't want to interfere (except maybe mentally) with anybody who's taking the race seriously. It has to clearly impede my ability to run, but should also be actually harder than you'd first think. This time I also wanted a birthday theme. I mulled a bunch of ideas with friends (bunch of helium balloons was a frontrunner for a while) and eventually settled on Ryan's idea to run with a birthday cake. So I got a half-sheet cake and decorated it, and ran the whole six miles carrying it:
I can put on a smile for the camera but it didn't feel that good in the arms. It is pretty weird to run a race and for that to be the primary focus of pain. Harder than the H1N1 marathon costume, I'd say, though a much much shorter race. But running with a costume is basically always worth it. For the people you run by (observers or if you start in the back, folks you pass) the costume is new and funny, so the whole race people are laughing or making comments and in this case wishing or singing happy birthday. They love that shit because they're either waiting in the rain for the one person they know in the race to pass, which is otherwise totally monotonous, or they're hurting from running in the race and want to be distracted. And I love overhearing or having other people overhear, "You got beat by the guy carrying the cake?!" Oh yeah so it was raining, and this made the cake very wet, and the cardboard it was on start to have deteriorating conditions and buckle, so this was a disadvantage for ways one could carry it because it needed Total Underbody Support. Eventually there were only like two asymmetric (dual) ways and one symmetric way to hold the cake and I'd cycle between them every 15 seconds as my arms and back were burning up. I made it downtown with the cake about as intact as it could be, which isn't saying much:
 9-27-79 NEVER FORGET
Even my birthday hat has melted. News like spectacles, so some people interviewed me. The best coverage was on KDKA (near the end, though the anchor foreshadows). There's some interviewing of me in the otherwise extremely boring (like it's mostly just video of people standing around?) WPXI Web Exclusive. See 1:55 and 3:30.
Lots of friends helped make this the best birthday weekend ever with their party-going and fun-loving and organizing and driving me to-and-fro since my license expired and I have another flat tire, and the cake eating and wearing hats in the race and writing on me and watching Steelers and not giving me presents that make me feel uncomfortably materialistic and rearranging the art bottles and taking photos and everything. Thanks!!! :) | |
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Our first concert
(08 Feb 2009 at 21:58) |
As promised, we played our first real gig at Smiling Moose last night. This weekend has been real warm for February and nobody that I know of scheduled a competing event so we managed to get a very good crowd (I'd estimate about 40 (?) of our friends plus people I didn't know). I know that most people came on the basis of that's-what-friends-are-for or cuz that's where the party is and not out of legitimate fandom, so I am especially thankful to all of you for coming and being such a top-notch audience. Here is a picture of Nels and me before it got too hot up there to keep all those business casual clothes on:
You can see the remainder of the pics of Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous, Big Hurry, and Central Plains at flickridiculous. These are with my new camera which I am very happy with. To use my old D60 in this amount of light would have been torture. (Thanks to Brendan for taking the glamor shots of us while we were playing.) There is some video too which I will share with you when I've found the best part. (Thanks to Brendan and Ryan for that.)
After we ironed out the sound and screwing-up problems in the first song, I think we did a good job. I had some anxiety about breaking strings. Last time I broke a string during the concert, having just replaced my strings due to breakage two days prior. This time I bought strings that are supposed to last longer ("Elixir") mainly because the store didn't have my favorites (Martin Marquis Phosphor-Bronze Medium), and those broke after a day and a half of mild playing (!). All of these failures have been right at the bridge. I don't get it. Anyway I thought the Elixir strings felt nice but sounded remarkably bad, so I was secretly happy to have to replace them. The night before I had one of those dreams where I'm performing a familiar activity (guitar playing) and something out of my control keeps recurring (string breakage). But these strings held up. It was a good time. I had also thought of some funny or meaningful things to say, earlier in the day, but didn't remember to say any of those during our scheduled banter moments. One I really should have mentioned is that the Smiling Moose bar where we played is immediately across from the place (Pittsburgh Guitars) where I bought my first guitar in college about 9 years ago. That is some hakuna matata shit right there. Also my first band was called Spastic Moose. And speaking of guitars, I really need to get a pickup for mine or get a new guitar with one built in. Is there no one that can advise me on this?
BTW, if you regret missing this show, we'll be playing at the CMU CS dept. semi-official house party at the end of the month. | |
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39m33s or ⊥!
(28 Sep 2008 at 14:25) |
Phew! That was freakin' brutal. But I did it: I got under 40 minutes (this time safely under at an official 39m33s) in this mostly-downhill 10K (6.21 miles). I prepared and trained a lot for this race (maybe not as much as the marathon, but still I took it pretty seriously) and yesterday was my first 29th birthday so I didn't really behave myself on Friday night, but I'm really glad I got my goal time so I can retire from the 10K distance. I hate that distance. Super long distances are painful, but not because I run at an uncomfortable pace, just that I do it for hours. I like that better. 5K is fine because you suffer bad but it's over in 20 minutes. 10K I feel like I am pushing just as hard (indeed my 5K split in this race was my fastest ever 5K and my time was less than twice my Run Around The Square time), just for twice as long. Pukey. The whole long uphill parts on 5th Avenue and Boulevard of the Allies I was continuously doing that giving up game, like literally visualizing myself pulling over to stop at a specific spot coming up twenty yards down the road, really succumbing to it, but then when I get to that point declining (it's really more like forgetting than declining). I don't know how to explain this, really. Anyway, it was definitely my hardest race. I'll run it again, but I currently don't feel any need to improve or match this time.
I don't have any race plans in the near future (basically, I'm heading back to full-time Pac Tommery) so you won't have to see this template for a while, but I must: ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED
Official 10K under 40 minutes | |
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Runnin' with the Devil
(06 Sep 2008 at 14:40) |
Music, running, music, running. That's all there is to do on Tom 7 Radar these days. I even have a music post queued up next. Oh, actually, I have a non-music and non-running post queued up too, phew.
But here's the thing: 'tis the season. So I got up at 4:45am and took public transportation to the IKEA Half Marathon in Robinson, which starts in a shopping center. No kidding. After a big downhill for the first 3/4 mile (which IMO they should get rid of, since I think it cheapens the race) it's a loop out and back on the Montour Trail, which is pretty nice. It is reminiscent of the Farmington Canal in New Haven county. These running stories are tedious but I wanted to share two things. First is I registered in the morning right before the race and smirked when I saw my bib at the top of the pile:
Yeah, really 666. I mean, it's even in bright-ass red. I got some good comments on this one. The other thing is that even though I wasn't taking this race very seriously (in terms of preparation; I definitely ran it hard) I ended up achieving another personal goal, which was to run a half-marathon under 1h30m. I'm not sure exactly what my official time was, but I timed myself at 1h27m48s, which works out to a pace of about 6m45s per mile. It's a small race too (something like 700 runners) so I also got 3rd place in my age group with that time, though I don't know what that age group is (for all I know it could be exactly-28-year-olds). So anyway,
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED
Half Marathon under 1h30m | |
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