The Frontier

Posted on January 15, 2011 by Granger Meador

Here’s a great remix clip compiled by NASA fanboy Reid Gower:

Reid said:

I got frustrated with NASA and made this video. NASA is the most fascinating, adventurous, epic institution ever devised by human beings, and their media sucks. Seriously. None of their brilliant scientists appear to know how to connect with the social media crowd, which is now more important than ever. In fact, NASA is an institution whose funding directly depends on how the public views them.In NASA’s defense, they have embraced social media. I guess my point is that they don’t fully understand how to best use it. In all of their brilliance, NASA seems to have forgotten to share their hopes and dreams in a way the public can relate to, leaving one of humanity’s grandest projects with terrible PR and massive funding cuts.

Thankfully Reid could draw upon a variety of sources, from the wonderful film Baraka to the late great Carl Sagan, for some help.

Posted in physics, random, video | Leave a comment

Golden Voices

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Granger Meador

Through the wonders of the interconnected web I stumbled upon a musical treat today. Ted Williams is the latest internet sensation, a homeless former radio announcer whose amazing voice has landed him commercial work after years of drug abuse and crime.

We all hope he gets the mental health counseling and support he will need for a successful recovery. The shock of hearing a homeless man by the highway talking like he did reminded me of similar past surprises from Britain’s Got Talent. First there was Paul Potts, the cell phone salesman, who sang opera so beautifully in 2007.

Then there was Susan Boyle, who stunned everyone with her rendition of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables in 2009.

A New Treat for Me

In her initial appearance Susan famously said she hoped to be as successful as Elaine Paige. Elaine is known for her starring roles in the musicals Evita, Cats, and one of my favorites, Chess. The music of Chess is by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and one of its best songs is I Know Him So Well.

During a radio appearance, Elaine responded well to the news of Susan’s performance, even mentioning they might sing a duet.

And sure enough, they did! I was particularly delighted to see a link for a duet of I Know Him So Well by Elaine Paige and Susan Boyle.

I don’t watch American Idol and similar talent shows, as there is too much dross to sift through for a few bits of gold. But I am truly glad that YouTube has brought these Golden Voices to my ears, each a modern parable about judging by appearances.

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91-year-old Superhero Grandma

Posted on January 2, 2011 by Granger Meador

How funtastic! A French photographer cheered up his 91-year-old grandmother by creating hilarious superhero photographs…of her!

 

Posted in funny, photos, web link | Leave a comment

Passing the 300 Mile Mark for 2010

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Granger Meador

As I finished my post yesterday about my day hike with Betty Henderson at Fall River Lake, I noticed that, by the count on my spreadsheet, I was only 6.1 miles shy of 300 miles of day hikes in 2010. You know what that meant – I had to get in one more long day hike so I could top the 300 mile mark for the year!

Boot Lace Surgery

I’ve walked farther than that if I include many walks along portions of the Pathfinder Parkway, but I don’t count Pathfinder walks as day hikes. After all, the Pathfinder is paved and sneakers work as well as hiking boots on it. Speaking of boots, the pair I’ve used since I started tracking my day hikes in July 2009 are still working well. True, too many creek immersions and my own sweat have made them rather stinky. Spraying Lysol in them helped, but soon I’ll add some OdorEaters. To mark the end of the year I decided to finally solve one drawback of my boots – the laces have always been ludicrously long, with me laboriously tucking them under themselves every time I put on my boots. Enough of that nonsense and no need for new laces at this point – I took a pair of scissors and cut 6″ off each end of the laces for a full foot of lacing removed per boot. Homemade aglets of Scotch tape finished them off.

I didn’t want to stray far from town – the weather would start in the low 50s but slowly drop throughout the day and I did not want to be out on the roads when New Year’s Eve arrived. So I returned to a favorite haunt: Osage Hills State Park. A year ago I started mapping all of the trails with an iPhone GPS app and I’m now familiar with all of the landmarks on the various hiking trails and the mountain bike trails. I knew that if I combined the Bugle Trail (a loop formed from the lake, cabin, and falls trails) with the Red Mountain Bike Trail I’d surely go over six miles and the magic 300 mile mark.

My final hike of 2010

I drove over to the park, along the way admiring the new water tank up on the mound above the airport and research center, which is being nicely fancied up to look much nicer than the old tank. In Osage Hills I parked at the stone building by the bike trails, which a Flickr user recently identified as an old CCC pump house. I set out on the Red Mountain Bike Trail with my new EveryTrail Pro app running to document the journey.

I shot photos with my iPhone 4 of every landmark along the way and then, having gone just over three miles, set out on the Bugle Trail Loop as a separately recorded hike. Once again I shot photos of every familiar landmark, opting to skip the Creek Loop and Bluffs Trails this time since it was getting noticeably colder as I walked. I added a few short side trips along the way.

Stone stairs at Osage Hills

One new discovery was that the park employees appear to have cleared a grand rock stairway down from the cabin trail to the ball field. I broke out my regular camera for a shot of this welcome surprise.

When I finally returned to my car I’d hiked another 4.3 miles, bringing my total for the day to 7.4 miles and my total for 2010 to 301.3 miles. Whoopee! I spent 47 days out on the trails in 2010, so I averaged 6.41 miles per hiking day. That’s up from an average of 6.02 miles per hiking day for the 25 days I hiked during the second half of 2009.

I drove back to Bartlesville for a late lunch at Señor Salsa, where I added captions to the photos from the Mountain Bike trail. Then I tried to upload that hike over the 3G cell connection, but it ended with an error. I tried again at home over WiFi, but the errors continued. In the end I only got the track, in pieces, to upload to EveryTrail and only two of my photo placemarks were intact. How dreadful! Perhaps it was a mistake to use EveryTrail Pro?

But I’m not one to let technological glitches thwart my ambitions. As Jerry Pournelle is wont to say, “I do these things so you don’t have to.” By golly, I wanted an interactive map of this hike with all of those photo placemarks and that was what I’d get…somehow.

I’d set the app to save all of my photos to the camera roll and was able to download them from the phone to my desktop computer. Then I exported the track fragments from EveryTrail’s website into Google Earth and re-exported them as a single KML file, which I then uploaded as a new “trip” to EveryTrail.  Then I uploaded all of the photos as well to that trip. Alas! Their geolocations were not recorded in them, unlike typical iPhone 4 photos. I then tried to sync the iPhone photos with the saved GPS track using GPicSync, but the darn photos also had no date/time data embedded in the JPEG images. Drat!

I knew what I needed was the photo file’s date and time copied into the EXIF data embedded in the JPEG file. But I couldn’t find a utility to simply do that. Instead, I settled for using EXIF Date Changer to manually set the date and time stamp based on the precise time stamp for each file, which I could view with ThumbsPlus. Then I ran GPicSync again. That added geolocations to most of the photos, which I then renamed and uploaded once again to EveryTrail.

Scanning through the results, I found that most of the photos were now in place, only having to manually relocate a couple of them. Voilà, my hike was restored!

Red Mountain Bike Trail at Osage Hills

Red Mountain Bike Trail (click image for interactive map)

I reluctantly told the EveryTrail Pro app on the iPhone to try uploading my Bugle Trail hike next. Thankfully that went without a hitch and I was able to rename the photos online and have a completed record of landmarks on the main trails:

Osage Hills Bugle Trail

Bugle Trail (click for interactive map)

Lesson learned: Don’t try uploading EveryTrail hikes over a cell connection. Wait until you get a reliable WiFi connection and then have at it. And be sure to have the app save the photos you take to the camera roll in case the upload goes awry.

I’m willing to give EveryTrail Pro another try on my next day hike, which will be sometime in early 2011. A new year’s resolution: keep finding new trails to day hike in the region – they’re not exhausted yet.

Happy trails, and Happy New Year!

Posted in day hike, photos, technology, travel | Leave a comment

Warm and Windy Day at Fall River Lake

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Granger Meador

Fall River Lake (click image for slideshow)

The penultimate day of 2010 was unseasonably warm and windy, reaching over 70 degrees Fahrenheit with winds of over 20 miles per hour in southeastern Kansas. I drove 20 miles north to Caney and picked up fellow science teacher Betty Henderson for a day hike 45 miles more miles north at Fall River State Park.

We paid a day use fee and drove into the Fredonia Bay area to hike the 1.5 mile loop at Casner Creek. This trail was mostly a mown path through grassland and was not photogenic this time of year. After an uneventful trip through the grass for over half a mile we reached a small bridge over dry Casner Creek. The trail soon turned back north and we could glimpse Fall River Lake up ahead. The lake was down considerably and we managed to spook a deer or two. I spied an old board and tried to windsurf on it, but the water was too low. After crossing what I termed Brokeback Bridge, we returned to the trailhead, with tall grass leaning over in the strong south wind.

A drive over to the lake shore gave Betty a chance to explore a small ledge below a tree before spotting a massive tree with exposed gnarled roots. It was surrounded by partially eaten hedge apples. Throughout the day she was on the lookout for an eagle she had seen earlier, but mostly saw hawks and gulls. Driving over to the Quarry Bay area northeast of the dam, we ate Subway sandwiches we had purchased in Independence.

We then set out on the linked Overlook, Post Oak, Catclaw, and Bluestem Prairie trails for a combined loop of three miles. Thankfully most of these trails were in hollows and amongst trees offering some shelter from the strong wind. We saw a small sandstone ledge which we would return to later in the loop and use for a breather. The Post Oak trail was the prettiest one, with a few lichen-covered sandstone outcrops and a view over Craig Creek. The trail wound around to an overlook of the lake, and then we crossed the largest pedestrian bridge of the day to a small creek leading into Quarry Bay. There were a few large boulders by the trailside and after crossing the creek we travelled through a winter-barren thicket towards Quarry Bay. The trail led south down the east side of the bay through tangled trees which in winter resembled a massive cobweb.

Our last stop was over below the dam. As soon as Betty saw the old bridge across the river here, she recalled this as where her parents took her and her brothers to fish many years ago. We went down to the river to shoot the bridge. Along the way Betty hooted about a crazy set of signs that seemed to encourage those in wheelchairs to cautiously wheel down a steep metal stairway.

It was a fun sunny day allowing me to experiment with different iPhone trail apps, using one of them to easily create an interactive trail map, albeit for the inferior Casner Creek trail.

Click here for a slideshow from this day hike

Click here for an interactive map of the Casner Creek Trail

Posted in day hike, photos, travel | 1 Comment