Tom 7 Radar

Eulogy for Tom 6

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:00:17 -0500

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.

Some Ludum Dare #22 reviews

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 21:16:24 -0500

Hello everybody. I had hoped to make a game for Ludum Dare this time around, as it is one of my favorite quarterly events. Unfortunately I had to head home to CT early because of my dad's health (more on that later), which has also led to a lot of idle time in which to get really good at iPhone games and play some of the Ludum Dare entries. I've got a lot more to go (a preposterous 891 entries this time), but some favorites so far to discharge my obligation for December 2012:

The Word Alone is a very clever word game. It's pretty easy once you figure out how to do it, but it's quite fun to figure out how to do it. Word games are pretty unusual for Ludum Dare!

The Last Geek should have been called "Super Vegetable Boy"—it's basically an homage to Super Meat Boy with a twist. Really quite complete, probably the most content in the competition.

Nyan Nyan Stack is a cute platform puzzler with charming CGA graphics and dialogue. It's pretty hard but the puzzles are good and it's not too long.

Final Trip Soccer has lovely graphics and plays smooth as laxative. Has a great surprise. Can't believe all this was done in 48 hours!

Urine Trouble is pretty juvenile, but I did laugh a lot at its absurdity while playing.

/follow has some of the best graphics I've seen in a Ludum Dare entry, and is a pretty fun and easy little clicky adventure. I'm happy this one was a three-person 72-hour jam entry so I don't need to feel too inadequate.

I love playing these, especially sleeper hits, so please hook me up if you have found any other gold. And happy 2012!

November 2011 font sightings

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:23:51 -0500

I recognize my fonts like I'd recognize hypothetical children, so imagine my palpitations when I saw one of my hypothetical children hanging out in the battle-ripped warzone of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3:

This is from the multiplayer map called "Seatown". The font is Antelope H, which I don't see as often as some others. Not only does this screenshot tell me that I'm LOSING, you can literally see me being shot (screen turns red with pain), holding the starting noob weapon with full ammo, as I do a double-take and capture a screenshot. I was super dead less than a second later. See what you made me do, kids?? Bedtime!!

And speaking of kids, I really like the popular series of videos called Kid History which are stories narrated by kids but acted out by adult humans. (Episodes 1 and 6 are by far my favorites.) I was showing my family these over Thanksgiving break and it continued on to this "Kid Remix" those same guys made, which features Action Jackson in a few scenes:

It's not quite a Kid History sighting but close. And while we're on the topic of youtube videos that I really like but that don't actually contain my fonts, I think my all-time favorite is bad lip reading (almost all of them are amazing, but my favorites are Dirty Spaceman and Black Umbrella). Make sure you watch the original videos for the musical ones, to fully appreciate it.

Sick Ridiculous - Thursdees

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:55:37 -0400

Behold, Sick Ridiculous - Thursdees.mp3.

tags: #1 CLUB DANCE HIT

T7ES - Polypoidipsia

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 20:35:55 -0400

Here is a new short instrumental tune.

Tom 7 Entertainment System - polypoidipsia

Escape Cod - Ludum Dare #21

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 08:49:03 -0400

Last weekend I did another installment of the 48-hour solo video game programming competition Ludum Dare. They announce the theme on Friday night and then we draw and sing and program all weekend to try to put together a game. This time the theme was Escape, which was a weird theme for me because I've been working on a game just called Escape for like 13 years. The game I made last weekend is called Escape Cod and it's kinda like recursive fish pinball:

The game's best understood by playing. The basic idea came from Ryan. Thanks Ryan. Initially there was going to be more pinball stuff to do inside the fish, but I knew that the transitions and animations were going to be tricky, so I did most of that first. By the time it got to mid-sunday, I was burned out on implementing physics and I had come to actually like playing the game in its current form, so I just kept doing polish. As usual, when the weekend ended I felt kind of down on the finished product (because of all the things I knew were wrong or wished I could do), but after seeing a few people play and the feedback on the entry, I'm pretty happy with it now. Escape Cod for yourself.

Do you recognize the Cape Cod scene illustrated? I had this canonical image in my mind that I thought was from a postcard or t-shirt that we had around the house growing up. I wanted to get it right so I searched around for image. Turns out I was imagining the bag of potato chips! The title screen is a tribute.

I recorded screenshots from my computer every 15 seconds as well as webcam shots of me touching my face a lot. It's stalkertastic.

I've now entered this a few times. Only Disco? Very! placed in the top 20 overall, but I have done well in the audio category several times. Priority Cats was #2, for example. Since all I care about is winning (winky-wink) I spent a bunch of time on the music for this game too, which you can get in a separate soundtrack.zip. Or make it like an interactive music video by listening while playing the game.

T7ES - Dil Pe Mat Le Yaars' Revenge

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:25:06 -0400

Toldja! This is a cover of Graham Smith (of Kleenex Girl Wonder)'s song Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar, ostensibly for his upcoming covers collection disc. Graphic to illustrate:
Dil Pe Mat Le Yaars' Revenge

The original song is one of the best off of Yes Boss, which is my second favorite G. Smith invention. If you've got time, listen to the original first. My version is an instrumental chiptune thingy. Unlike Graham's pithy piece, mine goes jarringly all over the place, but does at least visit all of the melodies in the original. "Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar" is Hindi for (I think) "Don't take it to heart", which is how I justify the excursion to "HEARTLE$$" in the middle. "Yars' Revenge" is an (I think well known?) old arcade game from the Atari era, "cleverly" reillustrated with authentic piano roll above. To proceed, Get MP3.

Sick Ridiculous at Over The Bar

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 22:08:12 -0400

Again I must apologize for silence during the month of June 2011. I have a bunch of projects in the works but it seems all of them are taking longer than a month! I almost got this chiptune cover done but I don't want to rush it. At least I can tell you this: My band Sick Ridiculous and the Sick Ridiculous will be playing a very short set at the hippie-bike themed "Over The Bar" on the South Side on Wednesday next week. Very short like 20 minutes. But we'll just play all our songs, just super fast. We're opening for Uke & Tuba (I believe formerly known as "Uke Skywalker & Tuba Fett") and Aaron Lee who is I think touring the country (U.S.A.) on his bike.

Before / After

Tue, 31 May 2011 20:52:33 -0400

Submitted without comment.

Pittsburgh Marathon 2011: Keystone Capers!

Wed, 18 May 2011 21:18:51 -0400

We did it! You guys know that when I'm not trying to run for time, I like to make things harder for myself by running in costume (shark, hazmat) or carrying a cake. This year was the best/worst yet. Ryan ran as a Keystone Cop chasing me, escaped prisoner, all 26.2 miles. We looked like this: Photo is from the Post-Gazette. This costume was pretty hard because it was full-body Xtra-Chafe™ polyester, with a hat, all of which really lock in the moisture, and that stupid mask that was too small for my face and was usually getting in the way of my eyes. But the real barrel of monkeys was that I was wearing handcuffs, leg irons, and a heavy chain between them. This was, you know, not good for the mechanism.

It took us about 5h30m to finish, which is at least two hours longer than it would have if I was just running. Going into this one I wasn't even confident I was going to be able to finish. In some ways I was hoping that it would be too hard, so that I would be appropriately testing my limits. And indeed as we reached about 4 miles I was worried, because it was getting painful pretty quickly. The running itself was not a problem at all; we were doing like eleven minute miles at first, which I think is probably close to the fastest possible pace with leg irons on—you just can't go fast with such a short stride. So maybe I set a pretty good world record in marathon shuffling. But after a few miles I could tell that the leg cuffs were going to be a real problem, because they were starting to dig into my ankles. Around ten miles they had badly broken through the skin and I was worried that at this trajectory, not even half way through, it would later get too painful to stand. We did a little walking, but this didn't help with the main problem because I still had the leg cuffs on and they were just as abrasive when walking. I found a few ways to adjust the cuffs, pausing every few miles to adjust, that would at least reduce the amount of sweat salt and street grit that the cuffs were grinding into the wounds, which helped. The cuff cuts were not a surprise, but an unexpected growing problem was that the belly chain was doing this periodic superposition-of-waves flappin' around, and every 6 strides or so it would smack me in the back of my left calf, or on my right knee where I already had a knee-being-scraped-previously injury and bust open that scab, but the calf was way worse, because it got really bruised and raw and every time that happened it was like smacking a sensitive tooth with a snapping little miniature rubber band.

Ryan was offering to get some tape from the aid station to tape up my ankles, but I didn't want to cheat unless it was bad enough to quit otherwise. And as we got towards 20 miles, it was getting worse but not at an alarming trajectory like before, so I decided I could stick through it. There were other weird problems like, since I was using this very short and awkwardly duck-footed stride to manage the chain (and my ankles could only get a very limited distance apart), I was only using a small set of muscles, and not ones that I usually use for running, because these were the shufflin' muscles. So those got pretty fatigued, and I was feeling kind of sick from who knows what, but I was mostly able to focus on the ankles. Here are some pictures of the aftermath. I put them behind links so you don't have to see them if you're just like, casually browsing the web.

Bloody shoe — These socks are white, by the way.

Wounded ankle — Two abrasions. Don't really know why my heel got stained black, but it washed out.

Bruised calf — I really don't bruise easily, either.

Days later, my ankles are still bleeding frequently, and it's still kinda hard to walk.

This was Ryan's first time running this far. His costume was basically as bad as mine except without the shackles, and he often gets really hot when he runs, so it was good that it was not sunny until mile 22. I gave him my only handcuff key so that I would not be tempted to leave him (or let him leave me), and so he would not be tempted to run off. Since he was behind me I didn't get to see how he was doing, but he seemed pretty strong—we were going pretty slowly but 26 miles is no joke at any speed, so a nice first showing. Here's a puzzler: Ryan started behind me and finished behind me, but finished one place ahead of me. How is that possible? (The following isn't true but a simplifying assumption: Let's say he was exactly the same distance behind me for the entire race.)

Okay, fun stuff: We got loads of good feedback. Usually what would happen with other runners is that they would start passing us, seeing Ryan's costume and start LOLing, and then see my costume and start ROFLing, and start to say something to us like oh my god those costumes are awesomeeeee but as they were saying something, would see my shackles in mid sentence and it would be sort of like ... costumes are aweee—uhhhhh what the hell??. I got to practice my comebacks when comments were repeated multiple times. Q. Are you running the full marathon? A. Yeah, of course. Who runs half a marathon?! (There is a concurrent half marathon with like 10,000 runners, including some people who asked me this.) Or alternate A. Yeah, it's only like one mile, right? Another frequently asked Q. Does that make it hard to run? A. No, it's actually easier, because it's like an ankle massage. Q. asked by kids running along side me on the sidewalk: What did you go to jail for? A. (very seriously) Running on the sidewalk. (kids slink away). At the water stations I would have some water or Gatorade, but I couldn't actually bring the water up to my lips because of the chain, so I would have to kind of crouch and drink it hunchback style. Ryan would tell them not to give me water, or be like, okay, just ONE more. He'd grab my collar as I slowed to drink, but then after the water station I would bust away cackling, and he would shout "Oh no!". He often tried to solicit help from the policemen stationed all along the race, especially from the ones that were looking really serious. We got some good chuckles, including some of them taking photos. You can find some on Twitter no doubt. Some other people were inspired to run harder, e.g. in this article:

My lungs were burning and my calves were cramping, but my brain was screaming: If I can't pass a dude in a stupid costume with chains around his ankles, I might as well lie down right now.

My favorite racetime pastime is dancing in front of the musicians that are playing about every mile. They are surprised enough to see a costumed prisoner in chains, but when I bust out some moves or air guitar (severely constrained because of the chains), and Ryan either synchronizes with me or starts batoning his hand impatiently, shaking his head no, we can often get them to laugh so much that they screw up their song, which is victory. One band as we were entering Shadyside saw us coming and played a song (you'd recognize it, but I don't know the name), maybe from like Nutcracker Suite, which is often used for chase/nefarious scenes in Looney Tunes. We did an extra long synchronized dance. I loved this so much, thanks guys.

There's lots more to talk about but this blog post is way late and getting pretty long. This was definitely my most memorable marathon costume so far, though we already have ideas for next year that may beat it in both flagellation and congregation. For the record, I didn't do as much manual making of the costume as last year—the prison rags are from a costume shop. I hemmed them from "one size fits all" to "this size fits Tom", and I made a reproduction of my race bib (ironed onto an old yellowing t-shirt and sewn to the shirt) to make it look like it was my prison ID number. And, of course, I braved the world of online handcuff shopping, which consists only of law enforcement shops and sex shops, which I had a hard time telling which made me more uncomfortable, and then I accidentally sent the cuffs to my parents' house. I'll wrap with the prospectus:

I'm interested in any other sightings you guys have!

My 48-hour videogame: Priority Cats in ''It's dangerous to go alone. Take sis!''

Tue, 03 May 2011 00:45:06 -0400

I made a new video game this weekend for the 48-hour game programming contest Ludum Dare! For the contest they announce the theme at 10pm on Friday, and you have until Sunday night to crank something out as quickly as you can. You're allowed to supplement your hacking and drawing and musicing skills with beer and whiskey and coffee, which I did. Not a lot of sleep though. My game:

Play Priority Cats in the browser

The theme this time was "It's dangerous to go alone. Take this!" which is pretty ridiculous. I suspect vote fraud. The line comes from the old Nintendo game The Legend Of Zelda, where at the very beginning of the game a man in a cave gives you a sword and says that. Like as if giving an 11 year old a sword is a recipe for safety! Here at Tom 7 Radar we are big proponents of sword safety (not really. Some people in the computer science department circa 2003ish logout party have some stories about me and swords. But seriously who keeps an actual real sword in their closet at a party?). And there is a fairly famous internet "meme" (that means "picture" in internet language) that is a picture of someone holding a cute cat with that caption. So my game is about a brother and sister cat who go on an adventure outside the house for the very first time. Go ahead and play it (after turning on your speakers) if only for the cat animations and theme song. The controls are pretty intuitive but realistically frustrating! The ending is not too hard to find. If you collect everything then there is a small additional reward.

Also: I recorded 4 brand-new songs, which are available in the soundtrack zip file. And then I made this timelapse video of me programming and drawing and drinking coffee, which has pictures of my screen and also of me touching my beard a lot, via brand-new webcam. I'm goin' all out here, guys.

SIGBOVIK 2011: What words ought to exist?

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 23:06:56 -0400

Today was SIGBOVIK 2011, the fifth one. This is my favorite CMU CS tradition; a fake conference thrown with real aplomb (carefully bound and printed proceedings, entertaining talks, product demonstrations, awards, promotion, budget and steering committees, paper management systems and reviews, etc.). People use it as both a venue for childish drivel and for deeply satirical but essentially real work that in my opinion is too good for actual conferences. I love it because of how it simultaneously scorches (for its pointless navel-gazing) and celebrates (for its pointless navel-gazing) academia.

I always participate. This year I was emcee and I did not have enough time to execute all of my ideas (do I ever?), but I did write two papers. The first was just the slapdash results of the thing I posted earlier, Who is the biggest douche in Skymall?. It's more fun to continue to play the on-line game than read the results, though I did add a douche-detecting image recognition "algorithm" to that paper, at least.

What I spent the most time on was my paper What words ought to exist?.

I tried something different this year. I feel like the conference is filled with loads of satire and irony (which is great), but that the best way to celebrate what I feel is the SIGBOVIK spirit is to be off-puttingly impenetrable about where the work is even coming from. Like "Is this real or a joke? Why did you even do this? I don't understand" is the ideal reaction. So, controlling for SIGBOVIK tenor, this time my paper is a completely earnest and thorough attempt to answer an interesting philosophical question (titular). It starts with a maximalist approach, my variant of Scrabble called Scrallbe (where they can all be words), which is pictured above. It's like God mode for Scrabble. I dismiss this as too coarse and then look at a bunch of different methods for figuring out what words should exist, and justifying that mathematically. I tried to write it for the layperson, but I think my notion of layperson may be distorted. Read the paper to decide for yourself.

I won another award this year (keeping my perfect batting record!), this time for "Most frighteningly like real research," which I think is apt.

There will be two Sick Ridiculous concerts

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 18:26:37 -0400

Guys this is for real. Listen. Guys. Serious. Sick Ridiculous, my band, is playing two shows in the next few weeks, as part of our Q2 Relaunch. Get ready for multiple posters:

See? No joke. Posters, like with an s, and everything. And the thing is, the difference between the posters, meaning in design aesthetic, that is, total, is like a metaphor for how these shows will be totally completely utterly non-redundant. Not one song will be repeated betwixt them, except for our very newest song, which has never been heard before. So worst case repetition scenario, if you go to both shows, is that you hear one awesome song that you never heard, twice. Big whoop. Worst case scenario if you miss one, is you might miss out on special treats. More info on this topic as soon as our PR department lifts the press embargo.

Tom 7 album-a-day #27: Pro se? ick.

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 00:12:41 -0500

Hello. Welcome to my 27th album-a-day, called Pro se? ick.. Editor: Double period warranted because one of the periods is in the title and one ends the sentence, duh.

AAD #27: Pro se? ick.

Thanks to new zip technology, you can now just download pro-se-ick.zip which contains all music! Surely the best way to enjoy music is to listen to it, but some context may help:

I made this one on March 6th and 7th, 2011, taking a vacation day. Realistically I spent almost two days on it, but probably still less than 24 hours. Since I am a bearded old timer I do not feel particularly compelled to follow album-a-day rules. I also violated the rule about not writing the material afresh, i.e. the plaintive version of Spring Break Pittsburgh 2006 wooo from AAD-20, but it seems topical since it is currently Spring Break 2011, wooo. -1,000 points! Spoiler alert: I'll argue self-defense.

I made my life extra difficult with this one by holding myself to modern standards, plus trying to minimize repetition in song structure, plus embedding multi-level puns and references and entendre, plus trying to use diverse and dense instrumentation. I think I succeeded, but I sure sacrificed some stereocilia. I also must say that while some songs are literal, not all songs are literal, and when I got stuck I preferred to go with the good line, even if it made it inaccurately dark.

Now just get zip or browse page!

Pac Tom update: Polar adventures in data visualization

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 23:57:09 -0500

For those just joining us, Pac Tom is my now 4½-year project to run the length of every street in Pittsburgh. This update is about a new visualization of the GPS data I collect as part of the project. Behold the most radar-like image ever posted on Tom 7 Radar:

radial.pdf - click to have your face blasted with maths

I'd like to think that my data visualization experiments are self-explanatory, but this one does not have the ability to write or talk so I will do the needful. Each one of the orange lines is a Pac Tom running trip (now a slot-jackpotting 222 of them). The squiggles always start at angle 0, corresponding to 0 miles. They proceed around the radar circle clockwise according to how many Tom-sneaker miles the trip is, with a full revolution being 32 miles. At every point their distance from the center is based on the number of crow-flying miles that I am away from my home, with the outermost circle being 8 miles. Red dot emphasizes the end point. I hope that you appreciate the radial and angular gradations because those were fiddly to make in SVG, particularly the labels.

What can we tell from the graphic? Well, most trips start and end at home. This is obvious from The Rules, which require it. You can see that a bunch of them end about the same distance away; these are all me fizzling out at CMU's campus, where water and HVAC are plentiful, or sometimes where I used to leave my junk. You can also see that there's some consistency to the specifics of the routes both at the beginnings and end (like if you look at those 15–20 mile ones that end at CMU, you see the same jog patterns leading up to those ends, which is me taking the same turn on the way back). There's even a more bold orange laser at the beginning, which basically corresponds to me taking any efficient route away from my house, regardless of where I'm going (it is roughly an Archimedian spiral, where after 5 miles of running I'm about 5 miles away from my house). The most interesting thing to me is that there really is a characteristic shape of a Pac Tom run when plotted this way. A typical runner's route (out and back) would be a prolate ellipsis, actually maybe more like a vesica piscis if the runner gets to the summit overlook or no tresspassing sign or whatever and turns right around. My shorter earlydays runs, which are hard to see because they're all bunched up on top of one another in the South-East octant, are kind of like that actually. But the canonical Pac Tom run now is obovate like a ginkgo leaf, where I run away from home then zig-zag back and forth for many miles, creating the tiny leaf teeth at approximately the same distance, then run back home. There's not even any reason why these would have to be leaf-shaped at all; you can see the few Pittsburgh Marathons in there (those count), which are more like abortive Spirographs.

I had appendix surgery (meaning they just cut it out and threw it in the biohazard) in September and then a work crunch that disrupted my running for a while, but I'm now back to it. I'm getting in decent shape again for the marathon, which I am excited about mostly because of the costume plans. I just polished off large distant neighborhoods Sheraden and Elliott (after a fairly heartbreaking trip where I thought I had at great effort finished, but had missed a tiny 50-foot segment, so I had to go many miles out of my way to get that one yesterday, in really OCD-affirming style. Having done that is actually one of the diagnostic criteria in DSM VII.) and the remaining cleanup to do on the South Side is pretty light and much closer to my home. I think I can be done with those with maybe two months of regular running, and maybe even finish the North Side, which is all that's left, by the end of 2011? 4500 miles in 27 days 15 hours of running, so far. You may track my progress via the graphics at the Pac Tom ultimate cybersite.