At Christmas, the entire extended family got together to celebrate. While together, we took a group photo that had everyone included except my cousin Alex, who had to work.
Streeter and Nelson Families (minus Alex)
Good thing we left room for me to Photoshop her into the picture.
Streeter and Nelson Families (with Alex)
In October of this year, I traveled to Hong Kong and Nepal over a two and a half week period. From the US, there are no direct flights to Nepal; they all connect through other countries first. And from San Francisco, most connect through Hong Kong. When I saw that we'd have long layovers in Hong Kong, I decided that we should just make them into stopovers, of which I've had great success with before. In the end, I spent around 4 days in Hong Kong with my friend Wenzhe and my sister Amy. Since I've taken several trips to India and parts of Asia, I'd been to the Hong Kong airport on multiple occasions, but never did manage to step outside of the airport (or even customs for that matter). So I was excited to finally get to taste the food and see the skyscrapers I'd heard about.
Spicy Crab
We poured over episodes of No Reservations, reviews on TripAdvisor and tons of other travel blogs and sites we came across. Our plan, arrive, check into our AirBnb place, and get some delicious food. We definitely accomplished that. We ate everything from Roasted Duck (basically Peking Duck, just in Hong Kong), to spicy crab, to a Michelin Star dim sum restaurant (I went back for seconds). We organized our days around what we wanted to eat and where we wanted to eat, then fit in places to see from there.
Fish Market
A visit to Hong Kong is almost never ...
I started a tradition in 2010 that I promptly abandoned in 2011 because I was too busy. However, I'm back! I just finished a write-up of my 2012 adventures, work and activities. Just like last time, I emailed out the write-up to people I've got email addresses for. So if you aren't on that list, you can check out the update on my 2012 in Retrospect page.
As with last time, this turned out to be a lot longer than I had anticipated. But I'm not a concise writer, and a lot happened that I wanted to talk about! Hopefully the write-up isn't too terrible.
You can keep up with me next year here on my site, through Facebook, Twitter or through my photos on Flickr. Hope your 2012 was a good one and all the best next year.
I recently decided to switch to a static site framework instead of my oldWordpress-based homepage. Since Python is so awesome, I naturallychose Pelican as my static site generator of choice because it iswritten in Python. I also wanted something that would be easy to hostelsewhere for free, like on Heroku. I'm tired of managing a personal server.
A few scripts later, and I had a site that looked just about the same as before,but was fully static. However, I decided to also take the opportunity to refresh the design, and bring it forward. I wanted to keep the dynamic headerthat's been part of my site for so long, but I didn't want to create customrectangular photos like I did before. In addition, if I did the rectangularstyle photos, they wouldn't fit all the way across the width of the page,leaving whitespace on either side of them.
So I took a design cue from Kickstarter and created a gridof images that are automatically pulled from a Flickr tag onmy account at compile time. I also added some other custom pluginsto look for special Flickr markdown tags in my posts to automatically insertimages. The result is a site that should load faster, be smaller, and should also be easier keep updated and experiment with. I still need torewrite my travel page to fully port my previous homepage over, but that'll be work for another day as that code is really old, and reallymessy.
It's been a while since we last took any Streeter Family photos. So whiletogether for Thanksgiving this year, I rounded us all up and took a hundred pictures. Then I picked out two that actually came out. See them below, alongwith one we took while at Lake Tahoe cutting down trees.
Streeter Family
Streeters on Lake Tahoe
Streeter Family with Grady
I haven't taken many pictures lately, and wanted to get back in the habit. This past Sunday, I woke up early and drove up to Russian Ridge Open Space for the sunrise. Here are a couple pictures from the trip.
Valley Sunrise
Bay Area Sunrise
Setting Moon
The Olympics are in full swing, and I've really been enjoying watchingthem. I spent some time tonight figuring out how to stream the BBC's iPlayer. While doing the research, I figured out how to easily streamthe BBC's coverage of them on my Mac, for free. It involves a bit of terminal hackery, but isn't too bad for a layperson.
First, open up Terminal.app. Then do the following:
> cd /etc > sudo mkdir resolver > cd resolver > sudo sh -c "echo 'nameserver 142.54.177.158 nameserver 198.147.22.212' > co.uk" > sudo cp co.uk bbchdsodsecure-f.akamaihd.net > sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder
So, this will set up two new nameservers for tunlr.net. But thenameservers will only be set up for any sites under the *.co.uk and*.bbchdsodsecure-f.akamaihd.net domains. The final line will flush theDNS cache on Mac OS Lion and Mountain Lion (all versions are here).
Then point your browser to http://www.bbc.co.uk/ and enjoy thestream.
This wasn't my first 50k, and it sure won't be my last. But it was quitea memorable one.
My first 50k was back in December 2011, at The North Face ChallengeChampionships which are held every year in the Marin Headlands.After completing my 30k in 2010, I went on to do really well (for a first time 50k) on The North Face Course. I had a goal of finishing within 8hours, and then I ended up completing the ~32 mile course in 6 hoursand 45 minutes, demolishing my goal.
Since I had done so well, and enjoyed the 50k, I was easily swayed by myfriends to sign up for another 50k; the Tahoe Rim 50k. The run starts at 6900ft above sea-level, has around 6800ft of climbing, reached a low of6500ft and a high of 8900ft. I signed up for the run in January and decided to start training. Then I forgot to keep training.
Months kept going by where I would remember to train and that I shouldbe ramping up the miles. Then I'd get busy and forget to run far. I wasstill running, but not the double digit runs that I probably should behave doing. Around late May is when I really tried to get more seriousabout running. Looking at my GPS logs, I see that I ran about 30miles in May (mostly back-loaded), before stepping it up to 72 miles in June. And my longest run in June was a crazy 11 miler with 1300 feet ofelevation gain (end sarcasm). Before I knew it, it was July, and just afew weeks remained. Plus I was supposed to taper at some point. Thelongest run I went on was somewhere around 16-18 ...
I previously had a script that notifies me of updates to Homebrewpackages via Growl. However, I recently upgraded to Mac OS 10.8Mountain Lion. And since Mountain Lion has a Notification Centerbuilt-in, I figured I'd try to use that method of notifications ratherthan Growl. I found terminal-notifier which seemed to be great for this purpose. So I updated my script to use terminal-notifier andpublished the script as a gist. Make sure that you have terminal-notifier installed first (justrun gem install terminal-notifier).
Assuming the script is at ~/bin/brew-update-notifier, you can install the script to a crontab by running sudo crontab -e, then adding the line 0 12 * * * /Users/<username>/bin/brew-update-notifier to the endof the file (substituting <username> for your username, or whereveryou've put the script). I've chosen to run the script every day at noonbecause ...
I frequently find myself wondering if a bug in a Python package has been fixed and whether there is an upgrade for that package that might fix the bug. So I find that I end up running pip freeze and then having to compare the package versions to those on PyPI manually. Well, anytime you say "run X manually", you're being a chump.
I just saw down and wrote a script to get the list of currently installed packages in the current environment (so it workswith virtualenv). Then it checks to see what the latest version of thepackage is on PyPI and prints out the status. If you work with Pythonand packages, this is awesomesauce.
I added the script to my dotfiles on github.
Assuming the script is at ~/bin/pyupgrades.py, you can run ...
