I mentioned yesterday that we stopped at Scratch Beer in Ava, Ill., on the recommendation of a local.
It's pretty remote, but worth the trip. They make one barrel of each beer, and when that barrel is empty, it's gone forever. So, yes, we'll have to go back, even though the 561-kilometer trip home took almost 6 hours. At least Scratch is dog-friendly (outside). So maybe the next road trip down there will be when it's warmer.
...this app might be fun. CityLab explains:
Floating in space among the stars and planets are more than 2,250 satellites and “space junk” traveling at up to 18,000 miles an hour. Some are large enough to be seen with the naked eye—though you’d have to first figure out which ones are within your line of sight.
Luckily, there’s a map for that now, by Patricio Gonzalez Vivo, a graphics engineer at Mapzen who has a knack for turning pure data into mesmerizing visuals (like this one of New York City). His latest project, Line of Sight, traces the orbital path of more than a thousand of those satellites and predicts their current location using open-source data from tracking sites like CelesTrak andSatNogs. Plug in your address (or choose one of the pre-selected cities) to see if there are any satellites—shown as yellow dots—nearby. Or zoom out to watch all the satellites orbit the Earth at once in a dazzling visualization.
His city visualizer is also really cool.
Parker and I are home, unpacked, and well-rested. Part of the well-rested bit resulted from three days of rain. When you go to a cabin in the woods and plan on lots of hiking, and no hiking happens, there is disappointment.
There is also a serendipitous find: Scratch Beer in Ana, Illinois. They make beers from locally-found ingredients: Pignut Ale, from local pignut hickory nuts. Pumpkin seed ale, which "DOES NOT TASTE LIKE PUMPKIN SPICE OR PUMPKIN PIE." I'll have photos tomorrow.
Right now: unpacking, laundry, deleting hundreds of emails, and sampling Grand River Spirits whiskey.
I might follow this map. Explanation:
Community beer and brewery review site RateBeer puts out a list every year of the top 100 breweries in the world, “according to reviews taken last year and weighted by performance within and outside of style, balanced by indicators of depth.” From this year's list, 72 of the breweries are based in the United States.
Randal Olson found a pretty good solution using genetic algorithms and the Google Maps API. He computed an optimal road trip to visit a historical landmark in each state.
Forget that though. I want beer. Tasty beer. I applied Olson's solution to breweries to get the order in which to visit them in the least miles possible.
The trip to see just the 70 breweries on Yau's list takes 197 hours over 19,789 km. He thinks he can do it in 8 days. Or he can stop at any of the 1,414 other breweries in between and extend the trip to a month.
On the other hand, given the same amount of time off, I might rather do a oneworld explorer fare.
Lottery, anyone?
No, really. In 1998 Microsoft wanted to demonstrate its SQL Server database engine with a terabyte-sized database, so it built a map called Terraserver. Motherboard's Jason Koebler has the story:
Terraserver could have, should have been a product that ensured Microsoft would remain the world’s most important internet company well into the 21st century. It was the first-ever publicly available interactive satellite map of the world. The world’s first-ever terabyte-sized database. In fact, it was the world’s largest database for several years, and that Compaq was—physically speaking—the world's largest computer. Terraserver was a functional and popular Google Earth predecessor that launched and worked well before Google even thought of the concept. It let you see your house, from space.
So why aren’t we all using Terraserver on our smartphones right now?
Probably for the same reason Microsoft barely put up a fight as Google outpaced it with search, email, browser, and just about every other consumer service. Microsoft, the corporation, didn't seem to care very much about the people who actually used Terraserver, and it didn’t care about the vast amount of data about consumers it was gleaning from how they used the service.
In sum, Microsoft saw itself as a software company, not an information company. It's similar to how Borders got destroyed: it thought of itself as a bookstore, while Amazon thought of itself as a delivery service.
I remember how cool Terraserver was, and how sad I felt when it disappeared for a couple of years before it morphed into Google Earth.
...not everywabone would look like these guys, getting in a few waves just past 9 in the morning today:
These are just some quick edits on my Surface. When I get home I'll spend some more time with the few hundred photos I've taken today and yesterday.
Two from last night, near the Hermosa Beach Pier:
Cooling my heels (just what does that cliche mean, anyway?) at JFK. I miss New York. I don't want to live here again, but I do like visiting.
I mean, look:
That might look a little better if I could get Lightroom to work on my Surface Pro. Time to reinstall it, again.
For the next 52 hours, I'll be traveling, for a really horrible reason. I'm not traveling for work, nor really for vacation, though I will admit to enjoying it (in a way my friends don't really understand).
No, I'm trying to keep my American Airlines elite status for another year, because so far in 2015 I have traveled less than in any year of the past 10. So tonight I'm flying to New York, tomorrow to Los Angeles, then back to Chicago on Saturday evening, about 5,500 miles total.
The routing provided not only the best ratio of miles to dollars I could find, but also the chance to fly on American's new A321T and B787-8 airplanes. So far it looks like I'll be in coach on both, as AA3 on a Friday may be one of American's most profitable (read: both premium cabins are paid for rather than upgrades) and the 787 is new enough that lots of dweebs like me are flying on it even if it takes us out of the way. (I'll be taking it on a LAX-DFW segment Saturday afternoon.)
I did bring my real camera, and also I scheduled a full 24 hours in L.A., so this won't be a completely intangible trip. I've also got a couple of books with me. And I really do love flying. So it's not torture, and if I can eke out Platinum for one more year, not pointless.
Next report from New York.
More things I haven't read yet:
And a customer technician spent 90 minutes over two days worth of conference calls denying that something obviously his responsibility was not, in fact, his responsibility, until a network tech from his own company said it was.