They keep making them…
I keep laughing at them…

I’ve just been thinking about how bad the Bruins are sucking these days and it made me think of this… I can’t wait for baseball season.

Jen asked me a question the other day. She asked, “When we car pool, are we really saving that much money?”

Sure we are. We worked up an idea to track our mileage on a day we car pool and then compare it to the mileage when we don’t car pool.

Sounds easy, right?

Nope.

On Tuesday I zeroed the trip odometer in the mini-van. I drove Jen to work, then went to my work. Then after I got out I went back to Jen’s office and got her. This is where you would expect me to say that we went home, but no. This is the part of the story where the stats get skewed. We took a bit of a detour to my parent’s house to pick up the blue car, which had spent the previous day in the shop, and then went home. So the round trip was actually longer than it would have been on an ordinary car-pooling day.

Odometer Reading: 88.7 miles

Then on Wednesday I zeroed the trip odometer again and drove to work and back without any detours.

Odometer Reading: 77.0 miles

A difference of 11.7 miles.

The other reason I call this data skewed is… well… I don’t know how long Jen’s trip to and from the office was. There is also the small issue of her picking up the kids in the evening which adds quite a bit to her trip as well. I can say this with full confidence though: Her round trip to work and back without any additional stops is a whole lot more than 11.7 miles. So yes, my love, we are saving gas money and miles by car pooling.

There is also another bit of commuting that gets tacked on to my trips a couple of days a week. On the days when the kids wake up at our house I drive them to their dad’s in the morning and he drives them to school. That means I have to make a drive in the wrong direction for a bit. I tracked the mileage for that route this morning. 51.3 miles. On top of that I sometimes pick them up in the evening too. That would make my round trip that much longer. That really doesn’t have any affect on the car pool question, I am just sort of on a roll here and can’t stop the data collection. You know how it is.

About a year ago my friend Larry bought one of those Google phones. The G1, not the Droid or the actual Google-made phone the Nexus One. His is the first phone to run the Google Android operating system. I’m not sure who made the hardware. Anyway, given the Googleness of his cell phone, he had an application that ran Google’s Latitude. That’s the GPS tracking service they have that allows you to see where your friends are while they have the phone on them.

He was telling me about it and we thought it would be cool in a nerdish sort of way to both sign up and friend our accounts. Unfortunately there is no actual application for the iPhone. There is a nice little web app though. I signed up and checked in a few times and that was it. Then I noticed that if I am plugged into the car charger while using the iPod on my phone and open up Safari to the Latitude page it would automatically update itself every three minutes or so (instead of stopping when the phone goes to sleep, which it doesn’t do when it is plugged in and running the iPod). That was cool. Pretty much useless to me, but cool. After that I found out that you could opt in to a Latitude history routine that will show a Google map with all of the locations that the app has checked into. You can restrict the display to specific date ranges too. It’s silly, and pretty much useless, and it is only viewable to my account. But, it lets me have a picture of just how much ground I cover on a Wednesday morning in February…

Note the one spot in Lawrence was actually my GPS placing me in the wrong spot, making the application even more useless. I kinda like the picture though.

I will update again with the total mileage of my round trip today because I can just tell you’re all salivating at the chance to know such important information.

Right?

Today I got the bright idea to go through my entire Flickr photostream and add a tag for each person I know in every single photo.

It went fine until I got to the wedding pictures. DAMN there were a lot of people at our wedding! I think I’ll save that for last and go on to the pictures that have one or two people tops.

whew!

What’s Up?

The answer? Nothing.

I watched most of the Bruins game last night. I missed the first period and the last few minutes of the third. They played hard. They played well. They outplayed their opponent (who happened to be the best team in the East) and got slammed 4-1.

They have now lost eight straight games. Over that span they have scored 12 goals. Given that statistic, are we surprised by this streak? Are we surprised they’ve dropped all the way to 12th in the East? Nope.

Last night the Krejci/Ryder/Wheeler line was awesome. Krejci had the B’s lone goal… scored on a five on three power play. Yup, the only way this team could score last night was to have a two man advantage. For the rest of the game the three of them were skating like mad men. They were impressive in everything they did, especially the way they consistently failed to score on gift wrapped chances. How many perfect passes leaving a winger all alone in front of the net could they fail on? There was one instance where a back door pass that beat Caps goalie Jose Theodore had me literally jumping up ready to celebrate only to have Theodore magically make the save… He was good last night, but he wasn’t that good. Lets also not forget that Krejci had a penalty shot and missed the net. We just have no forwards who are capable of scoring. All of the offensive magic they had last year is gone. None of them can get it done. And don’t go looking for some magical trade to fix all of our problems. Ilya Kovalchuck is not going to cure what ails us. He’s just going to cost us a fortune in future and then sign with some one else in the off season… probably the friggin’ Rangers or Canadiens, just to spite us.

Oh, and the player on the team with the second worst +/- rating, Matt Hunwick who after a -2 last night is now -11, was paired with the player who has the worst +/- rating on the team, Dennis Wideman who after a -2 last night has a -15. Am I the only one who thinks that particular defensive pair should have been rethought? Probably not.

The team is saying that after the last three games they are playing well and think they’ve turned a corner… but somehow the end results are the same. I think I read that this is the longest winless streak the team has suffered since the 55/56 season? And still Dennis Wideman is in the lineup every night? The team futility record is 11 straight without a win. That happened in the team’s first season, 1924/25 I think. Here’s to breaking records then.

Once again I was too tired to get my fat ass out of bed this morning to play the RPM Challenge game. It’s February 3rd and I’ve pretty much decided to screw it this year. Why bother.

To top it all off my 19 month old nephew is going to have a chest x-ray today because the doctor didn’t like what he heard while listening to his breathing yesterday. He’s had ear infections and fevers over and over for the last few months. Now this. I am really worried about the little guy. I want him to get better and stay that way. Make it so, doc.

Does Mary Timony have a new record coming out? Possibly with the new band called Soft Power? (I think… isn’t that what it’s called?)

I took a few pictures at a show at the Middle East a couple of years ago and those terrible shots have gotten regular activity on Flickr over the last three days. Is there something on the way that would inspire people to be searching for her?

Just curious. I picked up a live recording from a few years ago today but I haven’t listened to it yet. I guess the searching has inspired me a bit too.

Last night my wife showed me how to do something that no class I had during my eternity of computer programming courses at Middlesex Community College and the University of Massachusetts Lowell (yes, that is the name… the grammar error is actually correct… that should tell you something about the University) ever taught me how to do.

I wrote a little snippet of code (actually, two little snippets of code in two different files) that linked a text box on a web page to a database. It pulled specific pieces of data out of the database and displayed them in the browser in the correct places. Part of me is tickled to death by this. Another (smaller) part is very disappointed in myself for not having been able to do it prior to last night. A third (even smaller) part is pissed off at UMass Lowell for never having touched that, even when I took a senior level database course and a senior level graphical user interfaces course that should have dealt with exactly this topic but didn’t.

Of course, when I tried to write another couple of snippets that would let you write data into the text boxes displayed on a web browser and then store that data into the database it didn’t work. (in other words, the same steps in reverse order) Obviously we’ll be spending more time on that. Yeah. We will.

The car pooling was successful yesterday as our blue car is sitting in my parent’s driveway with a new battery. As we feared, the car started right up when the mechanic began looking at it. A weak battery combined with a 6 degree (Fahrenheit) temperature kept our car from starting. Although the tow truck driver did try to jump it. I guess the thingie (that’s a technical term) he used to jump it didn’t have enough juice to bring it back from the great beyond. Anyway, we car pooled again today and will pick up the little blue guy tonight after work.

Today is day two of the RPM challenge and for the second day in a row I have done nothing. We were up late programming last night and I couldn’t get out of bed this morning. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

The Bruins have lost seven straight games. The Washington Capitals have won 10 straight games. The two teams meet tonight at the Garden. I am going to go out on a limb and say both streaks will still be alive tomorrow morning.

I can’t think of anything else to say right now so your humble narrator is signing off.

Sorry for basically the same post as yesterday but Camera Bag released an update with a new filter. (shrug)

Does this mean we have to start watching Smallville again?

It got pretty weak around season 6 or so. We’re part way through season 8, patiently waiting for that moment when all the fanboys and fangirls keep telling us that it’s going to stop sucking.

Still waiting…

Now I see this trailer (why can’t I embed it? Hey CW, I wanna give you free advertising for your show, let me embed the freakin’ video!) along with lots of comments saying how great season 9 has been.

Urgh, I hate leaving things like this unfinished, but seasons 6-8 have been so lame. I don’t know if I can bring myself to keep watching.

But a Justice League movie sounds so cool!

Urgh!

A new film directed by Kevin Smith (but not written by Kevin Smith) that was originally called “A Couple of Dicks.”

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