Events

Programmer Sean Hickey demonstrates the evolution of a software engineer.

Despite spending more time in my hotel room than intended, I did get around downtown Bend some, and I did drive to and from Portland Airport through the Mt. Hood National Forest. So I did manage a couple of photos. First, the coffee shop I would go to every day if I lived in Bend: Second, Mount Hood itself, viewed across the fields around Madras, Ore.: More when I sync up my phone.

Scroll down and you'll see that I did not achieve my goal of 25,000 steps on Saturday because (most likely) I ate contaminated kefta kebab on Friday night. My Fitbit did provide some interesting data, however, that underscores how disappointing the trip turned out to be. Sleep: I average 7 hours a night, generally. Friday night, more because I had absolutely no responsibilities than anything else, I slept in, getting 9:34 total. But then the sleep chart goes almost full-circle as the Fitbit recorded all...

It's great that I spent 21 of 44 hours in Bend asleep. Yeah, that's just special. It's a beautiful day both in Oregon and in Chicago today, which is why I'm even happier to be inside the PDX terminal. Still, the extra-special-fun symptoms I've experienced over the last two days seem to have subsided. I may attempt to eat solid food in a few minutes, which I haven't done since 9am yesterday. Can I get a do-over, please?

The good news is, I've gotten almost 12 hours of sleep in the last 18. The bad news is, of course, I'd rather be exploring Bend, not passed out in my hotel room clutching my stomach. It's not alcohol; I had precisely one beer with dinner and one glass of local wine after. And I went to sleep at my usual time (11pm CT/9pm PT). But when I woke up this morning, I felt a general malaise that became, after a bagel and coffee plus a one-hour walk around town, light-headedness, nausea, and unbelievable...

I'm in Bend, Ore., today, doing nothing of value (except blogging and photographing). I'll have a few photos tomorrow or Monday. My goal for the next several hours is to get 25,000 steps in this perfect weather. (I have sunscreen.)

I went to my first Cubs game tonight after not entering the park for an entire season. As I write this, they're up 8-0 over the Reds going into the 9th. But I'm not there, because I didn't dress appropriately. By the end of the 4th inning my teeth were shivering. It's April; 8°C is not that unusual. I'll be back, when it's warmer. Possibly by then the Cubs won't be in first place anymore. I think it's going to be a weird season.

Pilot Patrick Smith wishes Boeing would update the 40-year-old aircraft instead of pushing the 737 into ungainly configurations: What I think about the 737 is that Boeing took what essentially was a regional jet — the original 737-100 first flew in 1967, and was intended to carry fewer than a hundred passengers — and has pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, and pushed the thing to the edge of its envelope, through a long series of derivatives, from the -200 through the -900, and now onward to the 737 “MAX.”...

Because no one has actually cleaned up a database of IP address geocodes, a Kansas farmer is getting blamed for all manner of bad behavior on the Internet: As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point...

This is wonderful: