Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

The first try was an unmitigated disaster.

I plotted a running route in Vancouver's Kensington-Cedar Cottage neighbourhood using online tool. I accounted for the part of the route that crosses a busy street at an uncontrolled intersection and instead had it take the crosswalk near King Ed. A test run, which is to say, a test walk with the Co-Rider app to make sure turn-by-turn directions with a previously-defined route was successful. I made the mistake of updating the app the night before. And it started to snow just as I started my run.

Arriving at my hand-picked start and end point on February 22nd in the alleyway at E. 28th and Ross and Fraser area, I encountered a critical bug introduced into the version I updated to the previous night. The app itself would start but I could not press "play" for the turn-by-turn directions. I followed the route by looking down at my phone at every turn to see where I'd go next.

Apple recommendeds that one operate an iPhone 5 in between the temperatures of -20º and 45º Celcius. At the end of the run, with about 20% battery left, at an outside temperature below or just at freezing, the phone turned off on its own accord. Miraculously, the Couch-to-5k app had already logged it (twice, somehow), so I can count Feburary 22nd, 2014, against Week 7 Day 2 of the program.

This was the first run where I let a website randomly generate a running route which started and ended at the same point. As a way of seeing as much of Vancouver as possible, I didn't want to decide what direction to go it to see it. RouteLoops can randomly generate a map suitable for different modes (walking, running, cycling). You set the distance and it calculates the route, ending you where you started.

Things were decidedly different for my run in Kerrisdale. A week after my first run, on March 1st, instead of hand-picking a starting point, I used the Random Point Generator. It chose a spot on W. 47th Ave. between Yew St. and West Boulevard. The route, randomly generated by RouteLoops, had me turn right on West Boulevard, skip over to the parallel East Boulevard using 49th Ave and then run down East Boulevard to 50th Ave. With its lack of sidewalks, I had to run on the street. Turning right on Angus Dr., I found these pleasant little stop signs.

The second-longest leg of the run, Angus Dr. took me to W. 57th for a block, then turning left back on to West Boulevard where I saw a trolley pass by.

Hanging a right on W. 60th took me past Dr. R.E. McKechnie Elementary School, around Arbutus Park (by taking Arbutus St. and 59th Ave.) to SW Marine Drive.

Suspecting that SW Marine Drive lacked sidewalks, before the run, I looked it up on Google Street View. Arriving at the scene I got my final confirmation:

I ran against traffic, which was a little harrowing. At least one car cut the white line separating traffic from the shoulder, right in front of me no less. I know better than to run on any street like that again.

My 5K program for the "week" ended about 2/3 on SW Marine Drive. I was determined to finish the rest of the route and saw some construction on the 45th Ave. bike route.

• construction on the bike path
• Ryerson church.

All the while I had the Fog of World app track my movements. How do I describe Fog of World? I remember playing Warcraft II, and any movements into unkwown territory would reveal the map. As you left, the map would stay but you couldn't see any of the activity there. Fog of World operates in the same way: you visit a place you've never been to, and it "unlocks" that area.

The app runs in the background and when tracking is turned on, shows you the places you haven't been to yet. (It's possible you've been to that place before, just not with Fog of World turned on.) My FoW data suggested that I had already been on a portion of 45th, and it wasn't until I came upon the Ryerson United Church that I remembered how that was possible: at some point a few years ago, it seems I had been going in the wrong direction biking from Kerrisdale and must have turned around. (This was captured by RunKeeper, the data of which I imported into Fog of World.) I took a quick photo of the church and I was back to finishing my randomly generated route.

The result of yesterday’s run of a randomly generated route from a random starting point on my Fog of War. @ollixsoft pic.twitter.com/DwHOJfgQVA

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) March 2, 2014

Kerrisdale doesn't loom large in my image of Vancouver, so I'm grateful that a computer chose for me to go there. Without randomly selecting a starting point and randomly generating a route, I'd have to rely on the invitation of others or know about its significance. This way of exploring a city leads to little surprises, like the mansion surrounded by trees, (barely) seeing unusual architecture, and a little exercise along the way.

There’s no better way to see a city than to generate a random route from a randomly chosen starting point.

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) March 2, 2014

A degree confluence is the intersection of longitude and latitude lines. For example, the closest confluence to Vancouver, B.C. are 49°N 123°W (in Boundary Bay) and the closest land-based confluence is 49°N 122°W (on the Canada-U.S. border near Abbotsford). The project to document them all on the web is big enough of a deal to have its own Wikipedia page. Since confluences of latitude and longitude have mostly been documented, Charlie Loyd set out to document microconfluences, which he defines as the intersections of hundredths of latitude and longitude points. I found this out after stumbling on his tweet late last year.

To find microconfluences, Charlie built a web page you can load up in your phone pointing out your current location and how far away from and which direction to find the nearest microfluence. I found my first microconfluence in my hometown of Courtenay, British Columbia over the Christmas holidays. I could only get as close as the front door of a new housing development on Piercy Ave., taking a photo of my iPhone's screen with my iPad mini. Later, not wanting to always carry two cameras around, you'll notice I take screenshots of Charlie's web page with a photograph of something notable next to the screenshot.

About as close as I’m gonna get to a microconfluence here in Courtenay. Context: https://t.co/sN0w6S1Iw4 pic.twitter.com/C6J0TgjAlc

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) December 23, 2013

On the same trip, Karen indulged me as we came across a microconfluence downtown in an alleyway, just before having dinner at a Mexican restaurant nearby, and took a picture of me.

Me at a microconfluence in Courtenay, B.C. Context: https://t.co/sN0w6S1Iw4 pic.twitter.com/WDyRjXWjTX

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) December 28, 2013

I found my first microconfluence in Vancouver a week later, just behind the NO TRESPASSING sign of an apartment complex in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood (near 12th and Main).

Past this gate in Mount Pleasant is a Vancouver microconfluence. Context: https://t.co/sN0w6S1Iw4 pic.twitter.com/lYWPBu52M5

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) December 30, 2013

Closer to King Edward and Cambie, a microconfluence on Heather and W. 24th features a stop sign with blinking lights.

The microconfluence at Heather St. and W. 24th Ave. in Vancouver features stop signs with blinking red lights. pic.twitter.com/738tvO65Ej

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) December 30, 2013

Separately from deciding to locate microconfluences in Vancouver, in December of 2013, I made a new year's intention to let fate decide more frequently in my day-to-day decisions. That means making lists of things that I like or might like do or eat or read or places to go, then letting a computer randomly decide which item on that list to do. To help further another goal of (eventually) seeing the entire city of Vancouver, I use a random point generator to pick for me which part of the city I venture to. On January 5th, I put that into practice, and it chose the point of 49°13′54″N and 123°04′48″W. That converts to 49.231667, -123.08 in decimal, and the hundreths of those are just rounding down to 49.2300 and -128.0800 (the last one was already conveniently a hundredth). That turned out to be a house between E. 43rd and and E. 45th on Inverness St. in Vancouver. (There is no E. 44th on Inverness.)

House at the microconfluence between E. 43rd and E. 45th on Inverness St. in Vancouver. pic.twitter.com/LiJgyXZpqI

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) January 5, 2014

Not pictured: three teenagers rolling by on a single ATV, which reeked of gasoline. "Hello sir," they said to me.

Just recently, after scoping out some office space in Chinatown and heading to the library to finish up some work, I came across a microconfluence on the Dunsmuir and Cambie corner of Stadium–Chinatown SkyTrain Station near B.C. Place and Rogers Arena (formerly GM Place).

Just outside Stadium–Chinatown SkyTrain Station is a microconfluence. Context: https://t.co/sN0w6S1Iw4 pic.twitter.com/4Cp8QClxnJ

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) February 6, 2014

Along with my SkyTrain Explorer walks, microconfluences are non-random but still somewhat arbitrary points on map to explore the surroundings. In the future, I'll add more randomness to documenting microconfluences, removing the need to decide where to go based on the characteristics of the neighbourhood and letting a random number generator (memories of RANDOMIZE TIMER flooding back) make the call.

I see Nathen is also ground-truthing microconfluences, same with, I hope, others Should we build a microconfluence community website? With microconfluence antipodes?

The receipt says I bought the app on or about November 20th, 2012. That means it has been a little over a year since I started running. There's a gap in the summer months of this year, even though it doesn't really get very hot in Vancouver (maybe for 2 weeks). Maybe it's my Icelandic blood, but I prefer to run in the cold.

The reason I avoided running for so long, all through college and after, even on the treadmill, was that it was so high-impact. I'd always done the stationary bike for cardio, and now regular cycling in the not-freezing months. When running, I do notice strain on my calves and shins sometimes, but rest, yoga and stretching helps with that.

Running in the morning is a struggle, but then, so is everything, being a not-morning person. I mostly run during evenings on weekdays and afternoons on weekends. On some mornings I'm able to sit down and will myself to run. It's mostly just a matter of finding pre-existing will from the previous night, after setting out running clothes and making sure there is something small to eat. I finally bought a pair of dedicated running shoes after a year with my basketball shoes (since washed so I can use them indoors).

Which app do I use? More like which apps, plural, do I use? I stopped using the Couch-to-5K app pending a support request. The app doesn't add up the total time right (right now the number is negative) and while all my runs are logged, the dates are missing from some of them. I've started the training program over again, and with a different C25K app.

I listen to podcasts while running. The Welcome to Night Vale podcast and Joseph Planta's interview podcast are my favourites.

The Moves app runs constantly in the background, and using Moves Export, if the running stretches are long enough, it will post to RunKeeper. (I used to have RunKeeper for the runs, but no longer.)

I wouldn't have started running without using an app to track it. Running seemed daunting until having a program, and even though the programs were available for quite some time (like those training programs marathon have always put out beforehand), having a handheld computer tell me when to start and stop is better than having to track it myself. It's also fun to relive it through the map right after the run and the stats, and having Fog of World tell me where I haven't been shows me alleyways and streets and neighbourhoods I'd never consider otherwise and gets me running farther and father away from home.

Has it really been almost three years since my last SkyTrain Explorer walking tour? It sure doesn't feel like it. Not including the Metrotown Station tour, which only takes you through the mall, all that's left is Burrard Station, Stadium-Chinatown Station, Broadway Station, and, up until this weekend, Granville Station.

The route took me from Granville Station heading south to Smithe. Along the way, I gazed upon the Sears building renovation project and the Vancouver Block. Past Granville and Robson, I admired the facade of the Commodore Ballroom, a venue I've been fortunate enough to attend a few concerts at. Atkin points out the B.C. entertainment hall of fame plaques lining Granville Street and especially the one in from of the Orpheum. Along this section of the tour, changed since the book's publication date has been the tearing down and rebuilding of the building on the corner of Robson Street, formerly an optical store, soon to be an Old Navy store, and the closing down of the Granville Seven theatre.

Taking me along from Granville and then onto Smithe, Atkin directs me to walk up the stairs to Robson Square. How did I not until now visit this side of it? The view of downtown Vancouver is incredible. Did I know the multicoloured sculpure by Michael Banwell was there until yesterday? No, I did not.

After some confusion as to which route to take to get there (Hornby? through the square?), I found myself on the west side of the Art Gallery, where we see a memorial to Edward VII (Shakespeare quote!) and an entrance to the old law courts (now the art gallery) with Police and Sheriff signs outside. (I'd been watching a little bit too much Doctor Who, 2005 edtion, so I half expected the Doctor to pop out of it with Rose.) Through the art gallery's square, where so many protest has taken place, we are led to gaze upon Hotel Georgia.

All in all a short tour, just south down Granville, hang a right on Smith, then back north through Robson Square to the Art Gallery. For all the photos, visit my Granville Station SkyTrain Explorer page, or the set on Flickr.

For no other reason than to eliminate fog from my Fog of World, I rode my bike around the 22nd and Kingsway area in Vancouver and came across three nice discoveries at Sir Charles Tupper Secondary School. The first is a Tupper Neighbourhood Greenway, pictured above. The second, below, is a cul-de-sac sign with "Except Bicycles". Are there any other cul-de-sac signs in Vancouver that say "Except Bicycles"?

The third discovery (not pictured) was an organized game of touch football, with three refs, flags, and first down markers (placed by one of the refs, on the playing field no less). That looks like a lot of fun. I'd do it just for the huddles.

It's time, belatedly, to reflect on my reading of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, which I read as part of the most recent 24-Hour Book Club. The fictional narrator, Rose, writes a biography of her family life after she discovers that she feels the feelings of the people who make the food she eats. It's empathy in the extreme sense, that is, Rose actually feels the same feelings of others rather than "simply" being able to recognize them in others. We don't know when the novel is set, though we do get a clue. The novel left me more with questions than answers.

(If some of the text below looks like gibberish, that's because it contain spoilers, and if you've read the book and/or you're curious, use ROT-13 to decode them.)

• Can a 9-year-old girl really recall, or experience as viscerally, as much and so vividly in a day as our Rose does?
• What does it mean that her mother went on a work retreat to Canada (and on the opposite coast) for a week and not somewhere within the continental U.S.? Qbrf vg zrna gung fur jnagf gb "trg njnl" yvxr ure fba qbrf crevbqvpnyyl?
• Why doesn't the father ever confirm or refute the idea that hcba ragrevat n ubfcvgny, ur'yy svaq bhg jung uvf frperg cbjre vf? Wouldn't finding out answer a lot of questions he had about himself and his family? Or maybe they would raise too many other ones.

The family lives near the Fairfax District in Los Angeles, which I coincidentally read about the week previous to reading this book at A Los Angeles Primer. That means that if I ever spend longer than a few days in L.A., that I'll have to make a pilgrimage. One scene of the book, when Rose learns to drive a car, details the route she and her father take. Has anybody mapped it out yet?

The 24-Hour Book Club is a self-organizing group of people who agree to read the selected book all on the same day and share their thoughts. According to the ReadMore iPhone app, the first book of the club (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan; my highlights) took me 7 1/2 hours to read over 3 days. The second book (Both Flesh and Not: Essays by David Foster Wallace; my highlights) I devoured within the allotted day, skipping the word definitions in between essays. ReadMore tells me that I spent 5 hours and 38 minutes reading the third book (my highlights), and just like the first book, over the course of 3 days. It's safe to say that I can't binge-read a book within a single day, and that The 24-Hour Book Club is, for me, more like the 72-Hour Book Club. The next day is fast approaching, and all signs point to that being a travel day, finding me on trains, planes and maybe even an automobile.

Resources I consulted (after reading the book):

• The Rumpus interview with Aimee Bender (“He’s not a kid, but he’s also a kid.”)
• Notes on The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by : Part one, part two, part 3 and 4, and reader questions answered by the author.
• Diana Kimball, conspirator of the 24-Hour Book Club, shared her thoughts on the book

Some highlights I shared in "real time":

“Eight, whispered my cake. You still just want to go back to eight, when you didn’t know much about anything.” #24hourbookclub

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) May 8, 2013

“Light is good company, when alone” —@aimeebender #24hourbookclub

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) May 6, 2013

“It can feel so lonely, to see strangers out in the day, shopping, on a day that is not a good one.” —@aimeebender #24hourbookclub

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) May 6, 2013

“How I loved those flower moments, like when he pointed out the moon and Jupiter” readmill.com/sillygwailo/re… #24hourbookclub

— Richard Eriksson (@sillygwailo) May 5, 2013

Still lots of Vancouver to explore. Even though the SkyTrain Explorer book has taken me to places in the city I wouldn't normally venture to, there remain many pockets of the city that I have yet to encounter. Looking at the Jane's Walks in Vancouver a couple of weekends ago, the one along Fraser St. caught my eye, in part because of the subject but also because of who was presenting it.

Our guide, Mike Klassen, took us from 29th north to 16th, with a short detour in a back lane. The highlight for me was at the very beginning of the tour, the Fraser St. country lane. It does duty as a back lane for cars and a gathering area for neighbours. Mike tells us that he's vary rarely seen anybody drive with excessive speed, and kids can be seen playing in the grassy areas. He wants to see neighbourhoods learn from the trial and offer up ideas to the City for their own lane ways, suggesting they could enter into a competition as to which neighbourhood can design the best one, with the winner getting it built.

We also saw an unusual church roof, a wood bench out side Fray on Fraser, and we topped it off with a walk through McAuley Park and a visit to Matchstick Coffee at Kingsway and Fraser.

You can find all the photos I took in a set on Flickr, taken with the Samsung Focus on loan to me while my iPhone traveled across the country with Karen. Thanks to Mike Klassen for delivering a great tour and to Jane's Walk and to the volunteers around the world who put them on.

Another successful, if short, trip to America. With a little trepidation, not knowing if it was "worth it" to stay in Seattle for a couple of nights, I set out on the first day starting at 5 o'clock on a dark and early on a Friday morning. I traveled by train via Amtrak Cascades, coincidentally sharing a car with John and Rebecca Bollwitt. They discovered that I had only planned to see if there was a ticket available for that night's Seattle Mariners opening night, having only planned to attend Saturday night's game. When John and Rebecca found this out, with their extra ticket in hand, they kindly offered the seat next to them in Safeco Field's Terrace Club. After arriving and taking a much-needed (and very much planned) three-hour nap, I bused in from the Bellevue Westin, eyes wide open as we passed through tunnels and over the floating bridge, and proceeded to my first tourist attraction.

Just before the game on Friday, thanks to the advice from a traveler to Seattle, I took the Seattle Underground Tour. For the first 15 minutes our guide regaled us with tale of how the city got its sewer system before spending 45 minutes walking underneath the streets, looking at the "first floor" of some of downtown's buildings. Highly recommended for an hour's worth of tourist activity.

That night at the ballgame, I got to use up two of my Major League references prepared for the night: "Give him the heater!" deep in the count of an at-bat and "Too high!" when the visiting Athletics hit a home run. I didn't get to use up my third reference, though I would get my chance the next day.

Saturday proceeded with no agenda except sleep in, do a light workout in the hotel gym followed by a quick swim and hottub. I also wandered around the Bellevue Square mall and a few blocks of the Seattle suburb's downtown, if only due to their proximity to the hotel. The evening's plans were to bake in right field during batting practice of the second game at Safeco Field. Having brought my glove, I managed to catch a "home run" ball that had, unfortunately, ricocheted after striking a little girl, not paying attention, in the shoulder. Being a Blue Jays fan, I immediately offered her the ball, her mother throwing me a loop telling me that it was OK, she already got one. (I kept the souvenir.) Seemingly my luck is improving, as this now makes it two major league baseballs that I've caught at a ballgame, the first being a foul ball at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum in 2010.

Three beers deep and a bowl of nachos later, former Toronto Blue Jays relief pitcher Brandon League took the mound and promptly bounced the ball over the catcher. To the amusement of very few from the hometown crowd, I yelled out "Wild thing, you make my heart sing!" fulfilling my third and final Major League reference. Nobody laughed, but, a couple of pitches later, someone yelled out "Wild thing, you make everything, groovy", so I felt vindicated.

On Sunday, after working out and swimming a second time at the hotel, spending the afternoon hour on the obvservation deck of the Space Needle proved to be the final highlight of the trip. $19 just to see the panorama of a city, you say? I had hummed and hawed about it at the outset, but realized as soon as I walked on the outside deck I found it far more peaceful that I'd imagined it would be. Drinking a beer in the sky was a nice cap to a weekend visit.

The train trip back had no compadres on it, so I was stuck in a car with a loud party of four. That's why the good lord invented the dining car.

Upgrading Drupal sites between major versions can be tricky. The community of developers that numbers in the thousands has taken great care to maintain upgrade path between adjacent versions of the content management system. This is especially true of Drupal's core, though one must go through each version to get to the destination. (An example: going from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7 requires passing through Drupal 6.) Contributed module upgrades take place with a very slight degree of peril, though typically a developer will include upgrade paths between major versions. Though incredibly rare, some modules will not upgrade their database to the new version of the module, and even then someone will flag it as an issue and it will get resolved.

Official Documentation

If you came here looking for guidance on upgrading your Drupal site, please consider visiting the official documentation at Drupal.org. The following only deals with two specific cases that may not apply to your site. read more →

Readability represents a new way for publishers, writers and readers to support each other. I've written a module that integrates Readability into Drupal sites. read more →

Lars Svendsen: “Anthropocentrism gave rise to boredom, and when anthropomorphism was replaced by technocentrism, boredom became even more profound. Technology involves the dematerialization of the world, where things disappear into pure functionality. We have long since passed a stage where we could keep track of technology. We scurry along behind, as is perhaps particularly clear in IT, where hardware and software have always become obsolete before most of the users have learned how to use them.”

From a review of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by Sherry Turkle: “Turkle points out, when we have no privacy we lose the ability to privilege some thoughts and actions over others. She quotes Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, who says that "if you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Like many others, he ignores the possibility that there might be privacy without shame or crime. We might want to keep things to ourselves for any number of reasons; when we "put everything out there," that "everything" is somehow trivialized. Turkle quotes a girl who claims there's nothing much to know about her; "I'm kind of boring." Will the loss of privacy lead more people to dismiss themselves as boring?”

The somewhat recent release of the Situationist iPhone app, which encourages nearby strangers to playfully interact, sparked a revisiting of Social Acupuncture by Darren O'Donnell. And there it is, on page 79, my first introduction to the Situationism movement. Here's the paragraph in question from Social Acupuncture: “Art's drift out of the field of representation and its move into relational forms, as well as the ever-increasing economic expediency of culture in the so-called creative economies described by [Richard] Florida and others, have created a proliferation of avenues through which to distribute artistry. The Situationists may have had some fantasies about the liberating potential of art as an everyday lived experience, where all moments of one's life become a creative opportunity; now we have the concomitant penetration of every moment by the potential to create, and in turn, to work. Hardt and Negri point out that capitalism is always innovating in response to resistance against it. The freeing of labour from the Fordist regime of the factory floor was imagined, at first, to be a positive movement, but capitalism easily incorporated these innovations. The idea of working from home was once an appealing notion, but now it brings with it the opportunity to never escape work, to field emails at all hours, to be lured to the humming for just another minute or two of labour.”