Everyone has their issues that are important to them, and for very large fraction of the US population, tech policy is not one of them. I wish it would rise to be something more than a niche issue for nerds. Maybe someday soon.

Sidenote: There were lots of jokes in the media that day about people going to look up random useless trivia, such as the name of somebody in the Cantina band in Star Wars. Wikipedia is a legit information source. When was the last time you pulled out letter “C” of Encylopaedia Britannica? I think most people would agree with me here, but a lot of them publicly make fun of it, or are in denial. I don’t quite get it.

Hi! My name is Patrick, and I’m going to sharing my experience as a Penn State World Campus student here. I have only been out of school for two and a half years, but I love my job and want to keep getting better at it. I work on a global model of energy and land use; I try to understand how people across the world might use energy in the future, and how policies might change or influence that. Lately I have noticed an increasing reliance on spatial data; where power plants are located, or where biomass crops such as switchgrass might be grown.  I want to be able to use this kind of information to do my job more effectively, and even present data in these formats. Maps have a way of grabbing people’s attention more than bar charts. After trying my hand at open-source GIS software for a couple weeks, I decided I wanted some more formal instruction, and applied to the online GIS program through Penn State’s World Campus.

The application process was easy and straightforward; I was done before I knew it (literally, I think I hit next on the application and got a “You’re done!” message about 30 minutes before I was actually expecting to be done).  It made me think back to the long process of applying to grad schools I went through several years ago. If only it was this simple then…

So now I am in, and registered for my first class, GEOG 482: Nature of Geographic Information. I can’t wait for this class to get rolling! I have never done an online class before but am optimistic about this one.  They tell me this program requires Windows, but I’m going to give it a shot on my trusty Macbook for the time being.  I think I can work around such pesky requirements with virtualization or Boot Camp, but we will see shortly. I look forward to continuing to blog about my experience with my first online GIS courses at Penn State, and hopefully it can help some people out, or at least provide a little entertainment.

I read this book faster than I have read most books lately, and not just because it would have disappeared from my Kindle in a few weeks.  It’s no problem to hold the book in one hand, and to turn pages you barely have to move a muscle, other than one little tiny one in your thumb. I know flipping a paper page is not very difficult, but trust me, it is a worthwhile improvement. It is easy to completely immerse yourself in a book and read for hours on end.  I’m not surprised Kindle book sales on Amazon have surpassed paper book sales; this thing makes you want to read.

It’s no iPad; you won’t be watching movies, checking Twitter, or listening to podcasts. You won’t even be reading full color magazines. I didn’t pay the meager $20 more for the Kindle Touch; if I want to enter text I use that little 5-way button at the bottom to hunt and peck around an on-screen keyboard, like in a video game. But all of that is just fine with me. I got this thing to read. It does an impeccable job at that.

All of this helped me reflect on the value of all the friends I have in my life, as well the importance of time for reflection. Down time is important, and it’s been harder and harder for me to get away from all the distractions in my life for more than a few minutes. But I need to do more of just that.

Saturday drove out to Mathias, WV for the Lost River road race. Awesome race run by one of the biggest clubs in the nation, and always well done. Here’s my race report:

Saturday afternoon I lined up with a whole crew of Coppi Cat 4′s (Chris, Doug, Geoff, Taylor, Jason, Rich, Skip) for the annual hot and hilly Lost River road race. This year it ended up being a 27 mi Cat 4 race. This race report is going to be fairly brief and/or rambling, as my memory is somewhat lacking.  The first two laps were pretty steady. Not a hammer fest, but enough to keep things moving along and shrink the field substantially. Several people tried to get off the front, but we were happy to let them dangle, for the most part. I did my best to stay near the front, but not on a front. Chris Rabadi from Raw Talent Ranch put in about 10 half hearted attacks.  At one point a group of 7 of us had a little gap, but we didn’t work well together and were shortly caught. As the third lap was under way, I looked around and noticed Jason right behind me. Awesome, teamwork opportunity. Which came shortly later, when Rabadi and sketchy Route 1 Velo guy (who’s name I forget, lucky him) crashed each other out. I came to a full stop, but didn’t go down. I wove around the wreckage, looked back, and saw Jason coming up quickly behind me. With a quick “let’s go, Pat!”, I was on his wheel and Jason dragged me back to what was left of the pack. At this point we were ~24 miles in and I figured we had 7 miles left, because the race flyer said 31 miles. But then we got to the finishing hill, and I said to myself, “hey, the finishing climb surely isn’t 5 miles long?”. We kept the pace hard up the hill, but nobody wanted to attack too early. I started to fall off, and thought about yelling some encouraging words to Jason to also let him know I wasn’t going to be a factor. But I held off, and clawed back on. At which point Jason put a little dig in, but forgot we had 300m to go to the finish. He sat back in, and I sat on his wheel. With about 150m to go things got going in earnest, and Jason did a great job of following wheels. I did what I could to stay on him, and passed one guy in the mix.  He got 4th, and I got 5th. And, on top of that, as soon as grabbed my cold towel from a volunteer and turned around, I saw Geoff roll in for 14th, refusing to let the painful final climb slow him down. Overall it was a great race, and I had a great time hanging out with everyone afterwards in our heat-induced stupor.

I earned myself $20, which I promptly spent on burgers at Foster’s on the way home for Clara and I.

Ride data

The other highlight thus far has been playing Gauntlet on Gamecube with Chazz and Brian for a few hours. It’s amazing how quickly time can fly shooting away at random baddies.  The fantastic announcer (“Green Knight needs food badly”) combined with jeering at incompetent teammates makes co-op awesome. On a somewhat related note, I need a version of settlers that travels well. And not a second-tier travel edition. Either that or I need to strategically place copies (or friends with copies???) wherever I travel regularly.

I found this article from Engadget a year ago noting how Apple revised it’s privacy policy with the release of iOS 4 to allow Apple to anonymously collect real-time location data and share it with partners and licensees. Related? Who knows.

[Wired ; New York Times]

The first 10 miles was pretty flat. About 6 miles in there was a nasty section of potholes. They had a flagger there to point it out, and circled them with orange spray paint, but there were too many to avoid completely. Chris hit one the wrong way and eventually broke a shifter cable. Riding this race in your 39-11 was not a good plan, so he had to turn around.

I carried on, and the pack stayed largely together until the first real steep climb at mile 24. Things strung out a lot here, and we shed a good fraction of the pack. I was able to hang out in the top 10 and keep a good cadence.  There was a second little riser a couple miles later. I was sitting 6th wheel or so, and a TOMS guy comes up from the left, at the same time as another TOMS guy from the right, and all of a sudden there are 3 TOMS guys off the front having a go of it. I yelled something to the effect of “3 guys on the same team, we can’t let that go”. Nobody else could really chase, so I went up the front and gave it my all. I couldn’t make it all the way up, but ended up in a 2 man chase in no man’s land. A few miles later 3 other guys caught us from behind, and at some point 4 or so more caught us. We tried to get something going, but just couldn’t make it happen. The TOMS trio took it to the finish.

With about 4 miles to go on the 50 miles loop, there was a  short hill, and 4 of us opened up a gap on the rest of our little chase group. We traded pulls well and were able to keep it to the line. I lost the sprint, but was happy with 7th place on the day. I put in a fair amount of work during the race, but I think everyone in the top 10 did. Overall, it was a great course and a well-run race in Western Virginia and Pennsylvania.

After the race Clara and I drove down to Front Royal, Virginia for a weekend of adventure in Shenandoah National Park/Skyline Drive. On the way down, we passed Dinosaur Land. Clara refused to stop; maybe next time. It was still early afternoon when we got to Front Royal, so we had time to do a short warm up ride on Skyline (or maybe a cool-down ride, post-race for me). Clara was a little surprised by the fact that Skyline just continues to go up (and up). Saturday we did the same thing. More climbing. Lots of it. Despite being a little chilly, the weather was perfect for a weekend out there. The fact that it was still off-season meant traffic was light. Monday we took a day off the bike and went for a hike on the Appalachian Trail. And now I have an annual pass to go back whenever I want. Overall it was a great weekend, with both some solid training miles and a lot of time to relax.

A short breather at a Skyline overlook

Clara patiently waiting for me

From a policy perspective it sort of makes sense. Obama wants to pass some sort of energy legislation. Cap & Trade, which he campaigned on, didn’t go anywhere. Congress couldn’t even agree on a renewable portfolio standard, because there are a lot of  republicans who I think have a knee-jerk reaction against renewables. So now we have a clean energy standard, which seems to encompass any sort of new power plant that would be built today. I guess it would be cool if the policy could force the retirement of existing coal.

I worry they won’t even be able to pass this, with so many republicans that want to disagree with Obama just because, and the inclusion of nuclear and some sort of coal more than likely to anger the far (and not so far) left. Regardless, despite the continued dilution of the policy, I think it’s cool that energy is important to this administration.