It Must Be Him
No auto-tune, no post-processing, just wow. The passion that captures the feeling of young love. It Must Be Him – Vikki Carr
More Oregon Hike recommendations
- No Name Lake and Bend Glacier via Broken Top Trail – considered one of the best hikes in the state.
- Tamanawas Falls – Mt Hood
- Tom, Dick, and Harry – Mt Hood
- Hamilton Mountain Trail – Gorge
- Maxwell Lake – Wallowas
- God’s Thumb via The Knoll – Oregon coast near Lincoln City
- Clatsop Loop Trail – Ecola Park – easy but good views. Great intro trail.
- John Dellenback Dunes Trail – Oregon coast near Reedsport
- Natural Bridges Viewpoint Trail – South Oregon Coast – probably most amazing views of multiple natural rock bridges and coastal rock formations.
- Trail of Ten Falls – Silver Creek State Park
- Misery Ridge Hike – Central Oregon
- Tumalo Falls Trail – Bend
- Green Lakes/Soda Creek trail – Bend –
- Cleetwood Cove Trail – from rim to water at Crater Lake
Major multi-day hikes:
- Three Sister’s Loop – 46 miles
- Steens Mountain Gorges Loop – 28 miles
- Paulina Peak trail – gorgeous sunrises, rent a snowmobile in winter
- South Sister Trail to summit – 12 miles
More information and some of them taken from here.
Tools for wildflower season in the Gorge
It’s springtime, and that means wildflowers are blooming in the gorge! Knowing when to go and what trails you want to take can be overwhelming. Here’s two good resources.
- Oregonwildflowers.org, is created and maintained by flower superfan and photographer Greg Lief. The exhaustive site collates recent trip reports from wildflower wanderers. Follow links to discussion groups and “up to the minute bloom conditions” as well as links to further information including handy wildflower databases and local plant lists.
- ReadySetGOrge.com, a clearinghouse maintained by local partner agencies. ReadySetGOrge offers complete information — maps and directions; trail lengths, elevations and difficulty levels; facilities and required passes — for all 181 recreation sites in the Gorge.
- OregonLive list of some popular trails (where I stole most of the above info from)
With the increased popularity of the gorge, you now need permits more than ever before to hike trails and see the flowers. Here’s some links for that:
- Waterfall corridor car permits: oregon.gov/odot/waterfall-corridor-permits
- Dog Mountain permits: recreation.gov
- Columbia Gorge Express (Oregon side): ridecatbus.org/columbia-gorge-express/
- Skamania County Transit (Washington side): gorgetranslink.com
Read Your Body Language—Without Cameras
More and more of our devices have cameras that watch you and microphones that listen to you – and in many cases, all the time. This data almost never stays in your house nor in your device, it gets sent across the internet where it is collected, saved, monitored, and used to improve the product’s AI and pattern matching. Under many of those license agreements we blindly click through, those recordings can be kept and used for a wide variety of purposes.
This has led to disturbing problems like voice records from our devices being subpeonaed and used in criminal trials. Recordings from Alexa devices are regularly listened too by Amazon workers. It doesn’t stop there: outside vendors are often allowed access to your Google data (which can include recordings/messaging/email data). Facebook uses humans to read and train data from the Messenger app. Voice messaging services can use overseas human labor to listen to and transcribe messages. There are whole 3rd party services such as Scale that sell human labor that is allowed access to the primary company’s collected data to identify video, photo, audio, and any recorded data from their services into machine training data.
It sounds futuristic and perhaps more than a little invasive—computers watching your every move, devices listening to everything you say. There are already privacy and consumer protection groups raising these issues, and growing lack of trust of companies to use the data in the safest way. To combat that increasing lack of trust, Google’s Advanced Technology and Products division (ATAP) is exploring technologies that don’t have to rely on a camera to see where you are and what you’re doing. Instead, they can use radar and radar-like mechanisms that don’t need direct image data. ATAP spent the past year exploring cool new radar-based methods to understand our intentions and then react to us appropriately.
I for one welcome advancements that keep the privacy of our homes private.
Take a walk through some beautiful European Rail Stations
Enjoy an armchair visits to some of the more beautiful train stations in Europe
Take the train From Pancras up to Canterbury.
From the Antwerp station, take a ride up to Ghent.
Art of the Brick
BricksBoy Studio does a complete walkthrough of the San Francisco ‘Art of the Brick‘ installation. Currently only in San Francisco and Chicago, this video is perfect for Covid time adventuring without leaving your couch.
Physical Aimbot Mouse
Kamal Carter built a servo-controlled robotic rig that moves a mouse exactly where targets are by scanning the screen for specific colors. It works well in the FPS trainer AimLab, but it’ll need more work to be accurate in a real game.
Greatest show in baseball
The Savannah Bananas are exactly the kind of baseball game I’d go see and the kind of sports teams we should have instead of a bunch of millionaires.
The hero we deserve
Wisdom from Robert Martin of Clean Code
Some really wise quotes:
No matter how bad your legacy code is, never EVER create a project to ‘clean up the code’. It will never get completed, you’ll inevitably have to stop, and it will end up worse than you started. This has happened every time in my experience.
The only proven way to get out of bad code requires EVERYONE on the team to get on the same page of how code is supposed to be written. Make them take the Clean Code class/read the book and then use the boyscout approach. That approach is every checkin you check in the code a little better than you found it. That’s it. In time, those little refactors move the ship in the right direction, become dominant, and then surround and destroy the bad code.
Code that has not been touched for years likely doesn’t NEED to be touched. Sure, it may be messy, but if it works, there’s no point in spending time on something you aren’t going to improve functionally.
Code reviews are largely useless. People go in, listen for 5 minutes and then at the end everyone leaves saying, “I sure hope he knew how it all worked because I toned out.”
TODO comments are fine, but should be completed before submission and never checked in. After they are checked in, they become TODON’T comments because they never get completed.
If people get into an argument about syntax/details and it lasts more than 5 minutes, then neither person has solid evidence for why it should be their way. Just flip and coin and move on.