I've decided I would like to get myself a small laptop that has a projector built in. It doesn't have to be super powerful, but the projector from a phone would probably be good enough.

I found a reference on the 'net about a week ago about SimTower. I remembered playing it a long time ago and thought it would be fun to try again since I hadn't beaten it. so I found my old copy and started playing. I've acheieved TOWER status in the game in 9 years.

The basic plan I used to beat the game was to build as wide as possible and to use 3 normal elevator shafts per 15 floors, 8 stairs and 2 escalators. Primarily my building was all offices. For the there are two sets of stairs going up 3 floors from each lobby. There is also an escalator going down from the lobby for each set of stairs and one more set of stairs going down a floor from the escalator. For the floors that have stairs going to them, there should be no elevator for that floor.

Now there are only 9 floors left that need elevator transportation. The best strategy I figured out for these floors was 3 elevators, each hitting 5 floors. That way each floor got one elevator shaft and a 3rd elevator shaft provided a bit of extra transport.

The 14th floor in each set is a good place to put cafes, and shops. I put a couple cafes and shops in, a security office at on one end, then put some offices in to use up some of the remaining space on the outside of the building. I left a bunch of space between the cafes and offices.

The first 15 floors are special since those floors should have 3 floors of offices, 6 floors of hotel rooms, one housekeeping station per floor, and a service elevator between the hotel floors. Then topped off with offices.

The basement floors had shops, cafes, restaurants and a cinema on floors b1 and b2. Parking was on floors b3, b4, and b5. The recycling centers were on floors b6 and b7, then the metro was on floors b8, and b9 with the metro taking up b10. I also put shops and cafes on floors b8 and b9 with the metro.

For the express elevator I tried to have on each express elevator go to the basement floors and 1 above ground floor. This way floor 15 and floor 30 has separate elevators shafts. Each elevator had as many elevator cars as it could take.

Using this strategy I used 63 above ground floors to get to 15k people and had 128 million dollars. I didn't lower the rent on any offices until I was building up to floor 100 for my cathedral, where I lowered prices on many offices between floors 45 and 60 where I did lower the price to keep tenants. I did lower the price on some hotel rooms much earlier in the game.

You can browse with my wide tower.

I've been using my G1 phone for a month now. It is nice, but the one that I like more about my old phone was that it had a real number pad. So, I'm pondering how well a touch screen would work on a cell phone with designed sort of like the LG MediaFLO phone.

Sarah came up a great idea for us to do over the long, long weekend after New Years. She wanted to go to the Grand Canyon, and hike in it. I, also enjoying hiking trips, went along.

We organized the trip rather late, I think on the 27th of Dec from my parents house (I think my mom enjoys being around for trip planning since it reminds her of the trips she should plan). Given our late planning we could only get a reservation at Phantom Ranch for the night of the 1st. So the trip plan was get back to SF on 30 Dec 2008. Take bart from the airport, sleep/pack (in either order), then drive to Williams, AZ on the 31st. Take a bus the to Grand Canyon on the 1st, hike down to Phantom Ranch, sleep, hike back up to the top, see the Grand Canyon from the top. Take a bus back to Williams and drive somewhere near the Hoover Dam. Sleep. Drive, see the Hoover Dam, get to Las Vegas, and see the Cirque du Soleil show Ka. Sleep. Drive home.

So that was the plan, now for the execution. We got back to SF on time and picked up our bags from the baggage claim without any issue. The next morning we got up and moving. The optimistic hope was that we would be on the road by 8am to Williams, then stop in Fresno for gear and food. It turns out we weren't ready to go until 10, so we got hiking poles and fake crampons at the REI in SF. We also did our grocery shopping in SF. We were on the road to Williams by noon. We shared the driving Sarah took the parts with traffic, I took the 4 and two lane highways. The fortunate part about this is that I drove through the San Joaquin. One the way there, it was basically IFR conditions (I had no instruments), so I was driving through a cloud (some call it fog) and I couldn't see anything that wasn't on the road. It was really pretty but not the best for a road with lots of ups, downs and turns. I felt like a race car driver. The other interesting part (at least while I was driving) was going through the Mojave desert at sundown. I don't think Sarah has any pictures, but it was very pretty.

Finally we arrived in Williams, AZ and got to the Grand Canyon Railway Hotel, at 2345hrs, (for those counting that means we were on the road for 10h 45m). We checked in by 2358hrs on 31 Dec 2008. So we stood by the fire for two minutes, counted down, and kissed for New Years.

In the morning, things went as expected, we backed our bags to hike 10 miles, and put the rest of the stuff in the car. We got in a van that took us to the Grand Canyon. Our driver up to the Grand Canyon was very nice and showed us the sites along the way. We also met two Japanese exchange students on their way to see the Grand Canyon.

On the way was slow since we took a lot of pictures (Sarah has them all since I lots my 1GB SD card before it made its way into my camera). Unfortunatly, Sarah got tired on the way down, and also hurt her ankle. So we stumbled our way to Phantom Ranch around 1600. From the time we got to the ranch until supper at 1830, we laid back and relaxed, we needed it, our feed were sore and Sarah iced her ankle. The food at Phantom Ranch was good, not great, and there was enough of it after being on our feet all day. At end end of the day, we slept, as planned. In the morning we got up for the early breakfast. Again, it was decently, but not great, but there was enough food. Unfortunatly, Sarah was sick (She'd figured out how to deal with her ankle though) (Oh, and she isn't pregnant). So we harrassed the rangers, got some imodium, and started on our way back up the Bright Angel Trail, we took the Bright Angel Trail down and were planning on the South Kaibab trail up but the Bright Angel Trail has places to stop the South kaibab trail doesn't. Again were were planning on an early 630hrs start, but started a little later at 745hrs. We used our poles with gusto on the way back up and made it up by 1345, 6hrs on the way back up, the same time it took us to get down. The rest of the daylight hours was spent taking the village bus around the Grand Canyon village and seeing the sights from the top.

After the Grand Canyon, we drove to Kingman, stayed there, then continued on, saw the Hoover Dam, it is like Itaipu, but less political and taller, then went on to vegas. In Vegas we saw the inside of a couple hotels, I spent $1 on a slot machine, then we say Ka. Ka is an amazing show, I don't think it really suck in until after the show was over all the things the performers pulled off. That said, the stage itself was an engineering marvel that I watched almost as much as the performers.

After Vegas, the drive back was mostly uneventful, the fog in San Joaquin was a little lighter, but still heavy, Mojave is prettier at sunset and it is still good to sleep in my own bed.

What a difference a border makes.

Compare Windsor to Detroit.

I read my rss feeds through Google Reader. I like it, it is fast and easy to use. I also really like the 'share with note' button. I dislike the share button since you are sharing something without telling me why! Anyway, as a public service announcement.

NEVER SHARE XKCD COMICS ON GOOGLE READER!

Everyone who you are going to share it with already reads xkcd and 6 of your friends
have already shared it. They are wasting your time, as well as mine. (I was tempted to share this annoucement by sharing an xkcd comic.

Apparently someone actually did some research to find out if the fixie trend will die out. This link lead people to debate, on SF2G, about what people should ride to work on next. The ultimate response was that a penny farthing on skyline is the way to go.

It seems someone has figured out where in Canada it is worth strategically voting. So take a look to see if you live in an important riding.

I wonder if it is worth setting up a counter website that says if you live in a riding where the Tories, Grits or Bloc are almost certain to win, then you can vote to give the NDP or Greens money. Remember your vote is worth C$6.

"At least in this part of McCain-Palin energy policy it doesn t seem that Palin will add much to the debate other than supporting the official position on clean coal." -- y Matthew McDermott, treehugger.com .

Where has Mrs Palin ever added to the debate? Well except for me to mention her in my blog and getting mentioned on almost any other news source.

Remember, put your C$6 to work, vote green.

Thanks to all that donated to the MS society in my name. Thanks to the generous donations and a match from Google I surpassed my goal and I may even get a cool bike jersey from the event. The actual ride was a lot of fun. The ride was very well supported. It felt more like 8 12 mile rides the first day instead of one 100 mile ride. The second day was even better. I managed to tag along with a group of cyclists from Deloitte who I could draft off of, for the second half of the ride, which made it very fast and a good learning experience. I have not had many opportunities to draft on rolling hills before.

The first day route had 7400ft of climbing over the 100 miles. The second day route had only 3500 over the 75 miles. However, by looking at the routes it is obvious that neither day was exactly the most direct route to the destination. Which is ok, I had all day to do the ride on each day and didn't have to turn around and ride home afterwards.

Speaking of afterwards, when I got back to AT&T park to pick up my stuff, I tried to ride back to my house. That was the slowest riding I have done for a very long time. The bright spot was I passed a couple of people starting on the wiggle, who did comment that everyone seems to be passing them :)

So, I would like to see the Green party win this election. There are some other good parties running canidates this time around. The Rhino's are back! There is also the 'Work Less Party' and the Bloc Qu b cois.

The corpus clock

So the Google SF office now has a slide. Unfortunatly, this slide is not well tuned. So our discussion over dinner was based around the question: Do professional slide installers exist? If they do, are there professional slide testers? Can I be one?

A while ago I started using Google Reader. Reader has a nice social feature where you can share articles with your friends. This is nicer than posted items in an activity stream since you don't have to click on anything, the article is right there. Anyway, I got a shared item in my stream of articles today with the second sentence as "She somehow got her own claw stuck into her paw.". Then it struck me, I've heard this story before. My dinner guests last week told this same story. So it seems I've found Michelle's blog. Thanks Tony.

Mark is in town visiting after spending this last year at CMU. While here, he graciously organized a hiking trip to Sequoia National Park. We did around 20 miles over two days, 12 of which with full packs, and over 4000ft of climbing with full packs. The consequence of this work was that my old trusty camping backpack finally broke. The duct tape came loose, my sweat helped, and the left shoulder strap broke. This pack has lasted around 15 years, so it has done its job. Now is probably time for a new one.

My other bit of exercise was riding home from the tenderloin without a seat on my bike. Someone managed to get the seat, and post, off of my bike while it was locked up . Normally riding without a seat should be challenging, but not too bad. Unfortunatly, my bike is a fixie and I had clipless pedals and shoes with me today. I learned after the first block that I shouldn't clip in since it is very hard to clip out while pedalling and standing up. I also had a down hill section that was very scary. It turns out if you have your butt too far back on the bike that it becomes wobbly.

I've always thought Canada was overpopulated. I finally have evidence to support that. Canada has a higher population density than Iceland (and Australia)!

So TV has finally come to the browser. The current incarnation that I'm playing with is Hulu. Hulu has two seasons of babylon 5, so that's what I have been watching. The annoying part of Hulu is that even after it has buffered the video, it will still pause during play back if a network connection is lost. My guess is that they have a set of pings they send back to ensure you are still watching. If a ping has not been acked in so long, then a synchronous ping will be send which blocks playback until the video can continue.

So there are three things people should know about stalking on the internet.
1) Every Canadian is on facebook.
2) Every Brazilian is on Orkut (pronouced or-ku-chi)
3) Whoever is left is probably found through a quick google search. Youtube content does help with this.

Two things have been bothering me for a while:
1) Titles that are links. For example my stupid canvassers post has the title linking to the same page. This is especially annoying on link filled news pages since the title should be the only thing to click on to get focus into the browser windows.
2) Pages that refresh themselves. This annoys me because it forces me to stop reading an article as I am trying to read it. It is also annoying since any embedded youtube videos stop downloading, stop playing, and lose my place in the video.

So some canvassers came by my apartment building. They tried ringing a bunch of door bells and someone eventually let them in. They went door to door and tried to knocked on every door.

I leave my apartment door open when I am home, so if anyone wants to visit they know they are welcome. This seemed to confuse the canvassers as they couldn't find apartment 6, which is across from apartment 5, below apartment 8 and above apartment 4. They even joked that the building may not have an apartment 6.