Curious.Judith

Inspired by Samuel Pepy’s practice in his journal, here’s a record of our household at the end of 2008.

Christine and I live in the same second floor unit in a pleasant complex in Mountain View, our deck filled with plants and bird feeders. We have two cats, Mr M and Greycie Loo, and we still miss the cats who accompanied us through the first seventeen years of our marriage, GreyBrother and GreyBeard. Mr M is a hearty grey middle aged cat, territorial with a fierceness from his time as a Philadelphia stray. Greycie Loo is a two year old who is still skittish from her time wild at Moffett Field. We have a home office, where Christine works when she’s not visiting with clients , taking classes, or tutoring digital mapping (GIS) students. I work there as well, several days a week.

When folks give directions in this part of the bay area they often say “north” to mean up the peninsula towards San Francisco, about forty miles away on the freeway convenient to our home. On that same freeway I can commute quickly to my workplace in San Mateo, twenty miles “north” of Mountain View. I’m in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays for many meetings with my team and colleagues, video conferences to my colleagues in Dublin, Ohio.

North would actually take one into the wetlands of the bay, and the creek I walk as a streamkeeper is in a north-flowing man-made channel between our home and the bay. South from our home is walking distance to the main street of Mountain View, filled with restaurants and bookstores. Foothill College straddles the San Andreas fault further to the south in the foothills of the Santa Cruz range, which is between us and the Pacific. Christine attends classes there as well as helping teach in the lab sections of some digital mapping (GIS) classes.

We are closer to San Jose, sprawling across the end of the bay to the east, than San Francisco, to the north-west. We strongly identify as living in Silicon Valley, close to the headquarters of the internet driven companies like Google and Yahoo. We live near the Computer History museum and near Moffett Field, previously a US Navy air station for the USS Macon, a rigid airship that acted as a flying aircraft carrier. We’re reminded of that now by sightings of the Zeppelin now using the field to provide air tours over the Bay.

Towns here are not clearly separated, residential, shopping, office, and light manufacturing districts all run together, with little indication of where towns begin and end when driving along major roads. One of the towns Mountain View is quite close to is Palo Alto. I’m a member of the Friends Meeting (Quakers) there, and the meetinghouse is just five miles from our home. Christine attends Meeting with me on the first Sunday of the month. The second Sunday has an afternoon Meeting for Business as well as morning Worship. The third Sunday is the morning meeting of the Library Committee on which i serve. On alternating Monday nights we may attend a book discussion group; sometimes Christine’s commitments at Foothill keep her from joining us.

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I’ve updated my blog entry about my GPS unit today with some notes. The Garmin Webupdater works! I may have lost the code to unlock the map detail on the device: that’s a chat to have with Christine. Otherwise, the documentation is of a number of software frustrations that ate up a good bit of my free time. *headdesk*

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For some months we were having an intermittent access issue, which seemed to be tied to too many spam comments in another blog on our server. We installed Akismet there, and all seemed much better. Then it seems someone started pounding the server with track-back spam.

It’s not clear when the site will be stable, as neither Christine or I have a great amount of time to track down these issues. (Although it’s very tempting as a procrastination method.) The past few days seem like an almost complete outage, so we’ve restarted the server.

I know i haven’t done several months of Creek-In-The-News posts, as well as posting on other topics as they come to mind.

Hopefully, the technological barrier of the Denial of Service will drop, but i fear we’ve just worked around it again.

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A Visit to “Dr. Blog” yields skin art on spouse

Originally uploaded by greycatMV

A side note to the new kitty was the bite infection, which had me out of commission for a good while. Christine finally posted her photos of the visit and here you don’t see my arm looking like a balloon. There was slight swelling though — but the heat of the inflammation was the most remarkable signal. Unfortunately, the next day, the heat and redness had passed my elbow, going way out of the purple bounds of the surgical marker.

I did keep my arm elevated, As “Dr. Geek” instructed in his blog.

It’s the first time i’ve received medical advice via youtube!

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Whatcha Doin?

Originally uploaded by Elaine with Grey Cats

This is Greycie, our new cat.

At the end of September, Christine & i visited the Pet Club, an independent pet warehouse store. We looked at the bulletin positing regarding kittens & cats who need homes, who had been trapped and collected at NASA Ames/Moffett Field by the Ames Cat Network: two females estimated at eight months including a Russian Blue. Awwwwww. We’re beginning to feel we’re ready for a third cat, and this connection seemed good. Off went the message to discover that the greys were gone, but there were other options including some black & white females. Much email back and forth to establish our suitability and then we were connected to the fosterer — and we picked up the kitty last night on the 5th of October.

The fosterer has a cat room and Greycie was hiding in a cat carrier on top of a cat tree in the bathroom. She’s very frightened and skinny but sweet. She had already been spayed when they took her to the vet, so she must have had some contact with responsible people before her time on her own.

We were all willing to let her stay in that carrier, and we took her home. I petted her in the carrier all the way. She loved being scratched under her chin, and gave very gentle nips once or twice when i stopped. I was smitten.

So, when we got home, Christine took GreyBeard for his evening walk — he zoomed out right under the cat carrier, totally ignoring the new presence — and i took the carrier back to the bedroom. We knew we were going to set her up in the full bathroom, but i just wanted to sit with her for a while longer.

But, you know, the bed is very much the other cats’ territory. So Mr M came in, sniffed the back of the carrier, and slunk low around to its front, and peered in. When he started to hiss, i reached to pull him away, and that’s when his amygdala fired. He chomped me HARD. Christine and i ended up being distracted from the new cat for the whole following weekend as we took me off for IV antibiotics and an aggressive treatment of the nasty infection.

Meanwhile, we’ve gotten to know Greycie (Miss Grace). For the past few weeks she’s demonstrated a fondness for hiding in the darkest hiding places she could find, including crawling under the kitchen sink and disappearing behind the dishwasher. She mewed and chatted quite a bit early on, but now most of her discourse seems to be hisses and growls at the other cats. She does seem to enjoy being held and petted and is very curious about us bipeds. Time will tell whether she gets along with the grey Boys.

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With a headline like “Officials descend into Saratoga roadkill pit” i wondered if it was important to read this article on an empty stomach, but the report about the US’s current diplomatic relations with Iran had already turned my stomach, so i’d nothing to loose.

Apparently, the news that a Caltrans worker or workers have been dumping roadkill into a ravine has been out for a week or so, broken by CBS5 on Sept 28. Unfortunately, the reports had the wrong creek. The ravine is a tributary of Stevens Creek not Saratoga Creek (leaving the folks interviewed by CBS5 to continue to ponder the mystery of why that creek is “so polluted”). Also, the reports have a very high number of carcasses quoted. This article quotes Beth Ward, vice president of animal care for Humane Society Silicon Valley, as saying there were thousands of “carcasses” and that her number was based on conversations and what she saw, “It’s hard to count how many ribs and vertebrae. You’d think you were standing on leaves and then you could shuffle your feet and you were standing on bones.” I note bones are different than carcasses, and i’m suspicious that somewhere along the way the story was blown out of hand. (Christine notes there’s something to the notion of “breaking the news.”) That, or there’s some other ravine into which folks must descend.

Fortunately, despite the grisly title, the Mercury article was only sensationalistic about the descent of officials into the ravine. Apparently, while there is dumping, and there are non-animal dumping (two vespas and a half dozen caltrans garbage bags), the inventory amounts to under fifty animals with only one canine that is believed to be a coyote. The inventory was reported by Chris Rummel, senior environmental health specialist with the Santa Clara County Resources Agency.

New water samples have been taken, since the prior testing has been on the wrong creek. Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District owns the land and believes the Caltrans and Fish and Game clean up and erosion mitigation will be successfully completed by Oct 15 , the deadline state fish and game officials have set for work in watersheds.

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I don’t just find Peter Brantley’s post about the Library of Congress’ rate for charging for data interesting due to my own work, but also because of the similarities to the parcel data “brouhaha” here in California. I’ve posted before about the court case to determine whether the digital descriptions of the parcel boundaries* are subject to the California public records law. Santa Clara county has charged a great sum for the data in the past, but if the data falls under the public records law, the records should be “provided to anyone requesting them for no more than the cost of duplication.” Santa Clara is appealing the decision on Homeland Security grounds. * parcels are the land units on which property taxes are assessed.

In looking for an update to the appeals story, i found this 2007-05-07 article from before the decision. It notes that Santa Clara county hired an outside consultant to examine the cost and after that study, officials noted that the fees might be dropped from $250,000 to $22,000. At least the $22,000 is the same order of magnitude as the copyright registration database. On the other hand, my spouse got the parcel data (for noncommercial use) for San Mateo county (immediately north of Santa Clara on the San Francisco peninsula) for a buck. (The cost of the CD on which it was distributed.)

Brantley reports that the copyright renewals database is congressionally mandated to be made available “at a charge of production and distribution cost plus 10%,” and reports that cost is ” $55,125 to obtain the retrospective online database, and $31,500 for a current-year subscription that must be annually renewed, for an entry cost of $86,625.” Assuming “production” doesn’t describe running the Copyright Office but production of the distribution copy, it’s somewhat difficult to understand how data distribution — not a live database serving hundreds of concurrent users but collection of records in MARC format — could run $50,000 in the digital age. However, the LOC notes a “recent cost savings,” so perhaps the new prices will be reduced by an order of magnitude or two.

The restriction Christine encountered of “for noncommercial use only” did stir up my memory of a different federal agency, the National Weather Service, and a noncompete clause proposed in 2005 by Senator Santorum. [Information Week overview, and opinions from the WeatherUnderground's Director of Meterology in April, May, and June of 2006.] I wonder if the amended law had gone into effect whether these forecasts would have been available under a FOI request.
Freedom of Information, copyright registration, public data, cost of data

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This morning, while listening to the clip of Miss teen South Carolina on the NBC morning show, Christine and i talked a little about maps and cartography and map colors and our cartographic education. I muttered something about no mention being made of the four color theorem and promptly checked the wikipedia article. Lo, it seems that the theorem is not particularly relevant to cartography.

This reminds me, though, that i’ve been meaning to respond to a rare comment, and praise the refreshed look of the Yahoo Maps. They’ve been refreshed for months now, and i still react with pleasure when i see the design. Starting at the city scale (a search for Mountain View, CA), which a common scale to many regional driving paper maps, the first distinct difference that strikes me is the multicolored roadways. The cherry red double line clearly communicates the restricted access nature of interstates and some highways. It is somewhat conventional, but clarity in communication is often dependent on convention. (Jakob Nielsen is consistent in pointing out that, no matter how goofy the metaphor, shopping cart is the expected label for the ecommerce function of a website.)

When that distinctly different line and color is compared to the gold and grey (in two weights) major thoroughfares and streets, the difference in the type road is unambiguous. Yahoo has clearly communicated difference. I love the little triangle flanges that indicate the access ramps as well — that seems a true innovation over standard symbology. The two other services are less distinct in their symbology. Both Google and Mapquest offer four “distinct” road symbols at the same scale. Mapquest uses three different gold colors in three different weights, plus grey. Google uses two different yellow colors in three weights — although the weight distinction is subtle — and grey. A final note, by using such a powerful red for the limited access highways, Yahoo does not need to use such a heavy line weight to distinguish them from the major arteries.

It seems the text labels have a more intelligent algorithm behind them on the Yahoo map. Google’s text has a large halo that ends up looking cluttered, as labels don’t quite fit the domains. I suspect the Yahoo algorithm chooses to suppress those labels. It is a common cartographic practice that is far less troublesome in a digital map than on paper, as zooming in brings a scale at which a label can fit. Google’s labels show a hodge podge of regional park labels, and i’m not sure which label goes to which green area. Yahoo also uses a variety of fonts and font formats to show counties, different towns and populated areas, which are all well supported by distinct color grounds for the different regions.

I’m sure a more careful review could turn up more details and innovations, but this brief review is long overdue. Congratulations to the team at Yahoo Maps for such a lovely cartographic upgrade!

Yahoo maps, neocartography, digital cartography

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I briefly mentioned this case earlier, when there was an article in the Mercury. Christine had heard Bruce Joffe speak at a BAMMA talk, and he spoke to our GEOG054 seminar class at Foothill. I’m happy to report that Santa Clara county’s parcel data is going to be released according to California’s Freedom of Information act. I’m also very happy the judge denied the claim that GIS data is a program, which was one of the more egregious excuses for not submitting to the act.

Press release after the cut:
(more…)

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