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Got an email from my mom while I was on vacation saying she won’t be going to Columbia after all. Well, not THIS time. :-)
So, about 15 hours and 9 minutes ago the 2003 Q3 Random Vacation to the vicinity of Mackay, Idaho officially ended. Only Day 0 and Day 1 are posted so far. I’ll start working on more days shortly. Since I’m getting commentary from Marilyn and Chad too, it will take some time. Not to mention that it takes a lot of time even without that. I’d estimate it takes about 4 hours of work to get each day done in terms of selecting the pictures, resaving them in the right size, writing the text, etc. I’ll make my tentative goal to have the whole thing up within a month of today. Maybe less. We shall see. :-) Day 1 is now posted. Since we have been spending more time doing vacation stuff than updating the website (Duh!) we are falling further behind each day in terms of the log. But that was expected. We are currently in Day 4. Just finished posting Day 1. We’ll be lucky if we actually get Day 2 up before the end of the vacation, but the rest will follow in good time over the next few of weeks until it is done. Anyway, Day 1… 2003 Q3 Random Vacation – Day 1
Day 0 is now posted. Enjoy. 2003 Q3 Random Vacation – Day 0
The new monthly top ten email list is out. Woo!
Day Zero of the 2003 Q3 random trip will begin in about 9 hours. I am of course not ready yet. I will be leaving work early (shortly) since I have completed everything I really need to complete before leaving on vacation. Then I will scramble this afternoon to get done a bunch of things I have been putting off all week, but need to get done before leaving. Bills first and foremost, so I know how much money I have, or don’t have, for the vacation. But also a couple email top ten related things, and UNpacking some things, since I need to take some things wiht me on vacation that are currently packed away in boxes. Problem is, I have no idea which boxes. Oops. I may also go shopping real quick for some camping supplies. Dunno. We’ll see how things go. Anyway, once on the random trip, I probably won’t blog much. I intend to put out a blog entry whenever I add a new “Day” to the trip log. I try to get them up just a day or two after they actually happen, but realistically… last time it took me about three months to complete the vacation website. I don’t plan on letting that happen again, but it isn’t going to be real time or anything. And I probably won’t put up many (if any) entries on other topics. Maybe sometime after I get back from vacation and the vacation is fully posted, I will start blogging on other topics, like, you know, the news. Oh yeah, one more thing, from what I’ve been hearing through the grapevine, it is highly likely that I (and all people of my rank who used to but no longer have actual formal teams reporting to them) will lose our offices and be put into cubes when we move to a new space around October. Lovely. Whatever. I wonder if there are comapnies looking to hire closer to my new house. :-) And people get on me for occationally haveing a “Triple” at Wendy’s. Get a load of this guy. Jared eats a 16 patty cheeseburger Makes me want to never eat a burger again! Hmmm… or maybe I’ll pick up one of those triples from Wendy’s on the way home tonight. Yum! (via BuzzMachine) Well, this was it. The couple from “Excellent Cleaning” came over one last time. They did a final once over of everything and vacuumed and scrubbed everything down. Even some things I wouldn’t have thought of cleaning. Then after they were gone, I stood there for a bit, and looked at my old apartment to say goodbye. I went through every room, thinking about things that had happened there over the years. It was sad. And yes, I teared up a little. OK, the place wasn’t much. Just basic housing. But it had been home for almost seven years. Sniff. I locked the door one last time, went to the leasing office, turned in the keys and headed out. One last stop at the post office to return the mailbox keys, and that was that. I am no longer a Quail Ridge resident. Of course, I still have to pay rent for two more months. But that’s how these things go when you leave before the end of your lease. Oh well! So now I think I’m 100% Yardlean. Or however you say a person from Yardley. Or Lower Makefield. Or whatever. :-) Following up trips in the past few years to Mozambique, Thailand and Sri Lanka, my mom is at it again…
I am jealous of some of these trips, they sound like a great deal of fun and would be very interesting and educational. Perhaps one day my random trips will expand to take me to some places of that sort. Although I must admit, that would really stretch my comfort zone! But that can’t be a bad thing, right? On my random trips I *do* exclude places with current State Department Travel Warnings though. My mom appearantly does not. There is indeed a Current Warning for Columbia:
Nice. Well, I’m sure my mom will enjoy it. :-) I am working on a graph and analysis I think will be interesting to quantify the oft repeated but infrequently quantified statements about taller candidates winning more often in presidential races. I have a lot of data already, but for completeness I still need the heights of a bunch of losing presidential candidates of the past. If anybody out there has this information (and a URL or reference to document it) or just has pointers on where to look, I would much appreciate it. With a little googling I was able to quickly find the heights of all the top two electoral vote getters for every election since 1788, EXCEPT these guys: 1800 – Aaron Burr (Democratic-Republican) OK, that is a lot I still haven’t found. Finding the heights of the people who won and became president was easy. Unless the height was unusual though, finding heights for the losers is harder. I may do a bit more google hunting, but I am suspecting a trip to a dusty old library to find out of print biographies or contemporary reports on some of these people may be needed. Right now with the data I do have, the “taller usually wins” thing is definately holding up, with the effect being much stronger in the 20th century than the 19th. In addition, there seems to be a correlation (albiet a very weak one and possibly not significant) that the greater the height difference, the larger the margin of victory. Effects can be seen both looking at popular vote results, and electoral college results. Very interesting. However at this point I only have complete height data for 25 out of 54 elections. That’s less than half. So the trends I am seeing in the graphs may completely go away and turn into something else entirely based on the remaining data. So I’m not ready to show any graphs or actually draw any conclusions until I have more data. Anyway, this is fun stuff. I’ve kept hearing the “taller wins” story for years, but never seen the data to back it up, and I’ve searched for it on the web multiple times before. I’m sure the research has been done before, what I am doing here is not original, but I guess it just hasn’t been put up on the web, or perhaps I just haven’t been using the right search terms to find it. Since I couldn’t find the info on the web or any actual statistical analysis, I thought I would do it myself. But getting the heights of some of these famous at the time but now completely obscure people from the 1800’s, egads! Not to mention even people still around like Walter Mondale. I would have thought his height would have just popped up right away on a search, but NO. They have to make it hard! :-) On each I would try various google searches for about 10 minutes, then if I hadn’t found a height I would move on. If I did find one, I’d document the source and get my data point. But like I said, some of these heights may take more than 10 minutes on Google to find! Anyway, if anybody has some tips or info on the people above, please let me know! |
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