Train to Oregon via Glacier National Park: Itinerary
Jun/090
Here’s our itinerary for those who’d like to follow along:
Saturday June 27:
Leave Boston 11:55 a.m.
Sunday June 28:
Arrive Chicago 9:45 a.m.
Leave Chicago 2:15 p.m.
Monday June 29:
Arrive East Glacier Park 6:45 p.m.
Pick up rental car 7:30 p.m.
Night at Glacier Park Lodge
Tuesday June 30:
Drive around Glacier Park
Night at St. Mary’s Lodge (in a Teepee!!)
Wednesday July 1:
Drive around Waterton Park
Leave East Glacier Park 6:45 p.m.
Thursday July 2:
Arrive Portland 10:10 a.m.
Night at Nine’s Hotel
Friday July 3:
Leave Portland 4:45 p.m.
Sunday July 5:
Arrive Chicago 3:55 p.m.
Leave Chicago 9:00 p.m.
Monday July 6:
Arrive Boston 9:10 p.m.
Trip on the Empire Builder: What I’m Taking
Jun/090
So I’ve just finished the majority of my packing for the big train trip, and here’s what I’m taking:
- Change of clothes for 4 days (we should be able to wash our clothes in Glacier National Park).
- Nice pair of pants and a shirt so we can go out to something more than casual if need be.
- A sweater. I’m not taking a jacket, which I may end up regretting. No umbrella, either.
- Laptop (MacBook Air), and very light external DVD drive.
- Earphones. Rechargers. Cords.
- iPhone (set up for tethering).
- Digital camera. Adapter to get photos off of the camera.
- Kindle.
- Passports.
- Sunglasses.
- Toys and entertainment for Caroline: E.g., portable “Battleship” game, deck of cards, MadLibs, etc.
Am I forgetting anything?
Books for the train trip
Jun/090
So as I’ve said, I’m going to be taking a long train ride with my family coast-to-coast: To Chicago, then Chicago to Portland, Oregon on the Empire Builder via Glacier National Park . . . and then back.
So there will be a lot of time for reading.
Here’s what I have on my Kindle in sample form, in the order in which I will probably read them:
Reynolds Price, Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back. Price is one of the most distinguished old-school “men of letters,” and this is his book about his time at Oxford, coming of age. Not sure if it gets up to his shift to the wheel chair.
Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor: A Novel. About an upper-middle-class African-American teen, somewhat younger (in the time period of the novel) than I was, dealing with the social contradictions of his milieu.
William R. Forstchen, One Second After. This is a novel about how a small town deals with life after North America’s technology is wrecked by an electromagnetic pulse. Forstchen has co-written some novels with Newt Gingrich. I won’t hold that against him. I’m not a big fan of the politics, but I’m a sucker for a good end-of-the-world novel (my recent favorite being World Made by Hand).
Clancy Martin, How to Sell: A Novel. About . . . well, I don’t know what it’s really about, but the setting seems to be the diamond district in NYC.
Joseph Findler, Paranoia. Everyone deserves a good corporate thriller.
Christopher Buckley, Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir. I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Buckley, especially, of course, Thank You for Smoking. The extract of this memoir in the New Yorker was a great read, and it would seem that it’s also great at this length.
I’m also thinking about this new chick-lit book called Commencement about a group of Smith College grads. And there are books people have recommended to me such as the Kite Runner, Wikinomics, In Defense of Food. We’ll see.
And why these books? Dunno. A lot are memoir or memoir-esque; some are about places; they all seem to be page-turners, and none are horribly serious.
More suggestions welcome!
Train trip to Portland, Oregon, and back on the Empire Builder
Jun/090
A week from today I’m taking a train trip with my family from Boston, Massachusetts to Portland, Oregon; the leg of the trip from Chicago to Portland will be on Amtrak’s Empire Builder train.
For Father’s Day (well, a couple of days early) my wife and daughter gave me a couple of books to read about the Great Northern railway. The first one is All Aboard for Glacier, by C. W. Guthrie (Amazon). I can recommend it without reservation; it is packed with great pictures and anecdotes, and tells the story of James J. Hill, the entrepreneur who greated the Great Northern, the building of the tracks, the founding of Glacier National Park, and the evolution of passenger rail service.
I’ve just started the other book, which is Claire Strom’s Profiting From the Plains: The Great Northern Railway and Corporate Development of the American West (Amazon). It looks more academic, but promises to be interesting as well.
In the following weeks I’ll be making more posts regarding our preparation for the trip and the trip itself.
All aboard!
Nice post at Geezeo regarding BeatThat!
Mar/090
Geezeo — the community-driven personal finance site — did a nice blog post on our product BeatThat!
About the Kindle
Mar/090
So I bought the Kindle. My motivation was to stop buying books; I’m sick of accumulating the mass and killing the trees. It’s both less and more than I thought it would be.
On the “less” side, it is amazing what it can’t do. It can’t flip rapidly between pages. It isn’t super-easy to make notes or search (though you can do all of these things). . . . It is optimized for reading, that is, reading paragraphs of prose text, moving from page to page. Because of the small size of the screen, it wouldn’t be very good for reading computer manuals which frequently have important images or bits of code that shouldn’t wrap to the display. The fact that it is optimized for this particular kind of reading also means that it is really not a general tool for, say, students who want to conduct research. Apparently Amazon designed to do this one thing very very well (read prose, page by page); if you’re a student, you probably want your whole computer anyway, as you might have a PDF open in one window, a caculator or Excel or MATLAB open in another.
On the “more” side, the free network connectivity is going to be interesting. I’ll be taking a coast-to-coast train trip this summer, and I was wondering what I would do to rent an AirCard for the 10 days we’ll be traveling. Well, you can read your GMail just fine on the Kindle. And there are no charges for this connectivity — it’s included in the purchase price.
Another surprise is that there are quite a few Kindle books (4,000+) from Amazon that are free; most in the public domain. So I downloaded the Bible, Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” and a few other goodies. Unfortunately, not all of these free editions have tables of contents, so my download of Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age isn’t so useful if you want to jump right to “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Still, that’s pretty neat.
Juliana Hatfield, When I Grow Up (Book Review)
Jan/090
Juliana Hatfield, When I Grow Up: A Memoir (2008). $24.95. [Amazon
I’m a sucker for a good rock and roll memoir, and picked up Juliana Hatfield’s when I first saw that it was available. Hatfield was the lead singer and bass player of the Blake Babies, and went on to a decent solo career (for the history and discographies, see Wikipedia and allmusic). She has a wonderful sense for melody, and the good sense to pick great producers who can beef up her guitars and voice to balance out her sound. She spent time at Berklee and knows her musical onions.
The book is a mixture of nearly present-day tour diary and reflection on past days, alternating chapters (more on less) on these two topics. The tour is a multi-city trip of her most recent band-effort, Some Girls. In both parts, everything that is concrete and detailed is funny or thought-provoking or memorable. You hear about the creeps who want more than her autograph, the jerks who have interviewed her unfairly, the bad hotels and good hotels (I want to go to the Congress Hotel in Tucson based on her brief assessment here), the friends and lovers (?) she sees only on the road. Good stuff. There is a great story of the first meeting of the Blake Babies. She is trenchant on the difficulties managing personalities on a tour. And she’s honest about the money.
Picture: Christian Kock
There is also a lot about her personal weaknesses and artistic efforts: This was tougher for me. She is hopelessly shy and self-doubting, but at the same time driven at the core to make music. But there was maybe too much of this. When she does go into detail on her emotional ups-and-downs — for instance, on her trouble with food — she gets interesting again. But, really, I’m on already on her side emotionally because her music is great.
One thing for sure: If you’re in a band and thinking about a tour, or about making a career of music . . . This is one to read, because it’s a tough road.
Faster Net::HTTP for Ruby 1.8.6
Dec/081
We’ve been a bit frustrated at work with Net::HTTP performance (as have so many others) so here’s a monkeypatch for 1.8.6 that combines the buffer size increase in 1.8.7 with Aaron Patterson’s recent tweak to use non-blocking IO (unfortunately, the non-blocking IO patch doesn’t work with HTTPS, which is why we use the buffer size tweak when the @io variable suggests that HTTPS is happening. No guarantee implied, etc.
class Net::BufferedIO #:nodoc: aliasld_rbuf_fill :rbuf_fill def rbuf_fill BUFSIZE = 1024 * 16 # HTTPS can't use the non-blocking strategy below in 1.8.6; so at least # increase buffer size over 1.8.6 default of 1024 if !@io.respond_to? :read_nonblock timeout(@read_timeout) { @rbuf << @io.sysread(BUFSIZE) } return end # non-blocking begin @rbuf << @io.read_nonblock(BUFSIZE) rescue Errno::EWOULDBLOCK if IO.select([@io], nil, nil, @read_timeout) @rbuf << @io.read_nonblock(BUFSIZE) else raise Timeout::TimeoutError end end end end
DNS failover: Short TTL vs Multiple A Records?
Dec/080
Note to self:
Apparently the reason people do round-robin DNS with multiple A records is because Internet Explorer retires a bad IP better when the A Record disappears vs. the TTL expiring (worse case for the latter: 28 minutes!).
http://www.netwidget.net/books/apress/dns/info/failover.html
Atrocious Rails API doc of the week
Nov/080
Here’s an example of some atrocious Rails API documentation.
(I say “of the week” which raised the question whether I could really find an atrocious Rails doc every week . . . but I probably can.)
Here’s the doc for the link_to helper:
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/UrlHelper.html#M001378
Notice that there is a heading “Options” describing keys such as :confirm, :popup, etc.
Well guess what? Those Options are for the second Hash, i.e., html_options. How a newbie would ever figure this out is beyond me. I suppose you’re supposed to follow the link over to url_for and figure out that those options are for the first Hash . . . and then somehow that the “Options” given for link_to are for the 2nd Hash. One of my students in my Harvard Ruby/Rails course stumbled across this.
