Kurt Johnson

Location is a huge factor for us when considering where to live, particularly as it affects how long it takes to get to the places we go most often.  This spreadsheet + macro allows you to quickly assess the convenience of each potential neighborhood you look at in terms of the number of minutes a week you’ll spend in the car.  Here’s how it works:

1. Put in up to 10 origin addresses (these are locations you might potentially choose to live)
2. Put in up to 10 regular destinations (work, gym, neighborhoods, whatever) and how many one way trips you make to each of them each week
3. Click the blue button and wait a minute or two while the macro goes to Google Maps to find the drive time between each pair of address (up to 10×10, or 100 pairs)
4. Look at the pivot table to see the total minutes per week you’ll spend in the car

This might seem excessive but it actually shifted our thinking substantially as we considered moving to different neighborhoods.  Places that seemed nice and only slightly out of the way ended up incurring another 2-3 hours of commuting time every week while the neighborhood we’re in already emerged as the clear winner in terms of convenience – and by a much larger margin than I would have thought.

This is not a very sophisticated macro, so if Google changes the layout of their maps page it will probably break…but at least you can use it for a proof of concept.

Download the model in Excel

For the benefit of a co-worker with red-green colorblindness I wrote a short powerpoint add-in that finds red colors and turns them blue. It’s useful when somebody makes edits to a document in red text since he can’t differentiate the red from grey or black to distinguish the edits from the original text.

Given that 5-10% of males have some degree of color blindness I thought this might be worth sharing so that other can find it via Google.

Download the power point add-in

To use the add-in:

1. Make sure macro security is set to Medium or Low by going to Tools/Options/Security/Macro Security
2. Download the add-in below, then go to Tools/Add-ins and select the “Replace Reds” add-in you just downloaded
3. Apply the code by going to the Tools menu; at the bottom of the list you should now have a command to “Replace Reds”

You can uninstall the add-in via Tools/Add-ins. You can access the source code in this file.

Further evidence that I am a pathological collector of gadgets; the chart below shows the altitude recorded by the GPS unit I got for Christmas.  The unit, a Garmin Foretrex 101, is cheap (~$70), easy to pocket, and logs 10,000 data points that can be downloaded via serial cable; my only beef is that there is no native USB support.  After downloading the datapoints with G7ToWin I use RoboGeo to sync the GPS tracklog with my photos and stamp GPS coordinates into each photo's EXIF headers. 

I am realizing that my gadget bag carries ~4 hard drives that are not supposed to work about 10,000 feet (ipod, laptop, 2x 4GB microdrives). Hard drives require a certain density of air to let the heads "fly" over the platter and apparently 10,000 feet is the design limit; some devices work fine, some refuse to power up, and some crash forever.

This is suddenly a concern because my time in Peru is going to be largely at 10,000-12,500 feet while next summer's trip to Tibet will be 12,000 feet or higher. Given that a week of photography in someplace like Tibet could potentially generate 10-20 gigabytes of images I'm trying to see if there's any way to avoid carrying a wallet full of solid state CF cards.   If nothing else I could probably just ration my photos and shoot JPG instead of Raw to fit onto a couple of large CF cards…

If anyone has any experience or thoughts I'd love to hear them. 

Update: Everything worked up to 12,600 feet without any issues, although I avoided using the microdrives whenever possible in favor of my solid state card.  The ipod may have balked once around 13,000 feet on Taquile; I had to reset it but I'm not sure whether this was related to the altitude.

Newish stuff that I can recommend from experience:

About a month ago I switched from Readyhosting to Bluehost. I’m unequivocally glad I did; Bluehost offers vastly more powerful database/ftp/http tools as well as more useful analytics and accessibility plus 8x the disk space, all for roughly the same price. Highly recommended.

I think the move to the new host is 99% complete – there may be a few hiccups as the information percolates through the internet but it’s pretty well done. The only significant problem has been breaking my old blog feed when I moved servers (and concurrently switched from using blogger to Wordpress).

Along with getting a new host that offers a lot more features than the old one, I’m stoked about the new blog software – it’s much, much more powerful than blogger. I’ve got some format tweaking to do but in general I’ve been very happy with how quickly setup went (including importing blogger posts). Since Wordpress is free/open source software I’m sending them the $100 I would have spent on Movable Type/Typepad.

I’m going to switch web hosts from Readyhosting to Bluehost.  Hopefully this causes minimal disruption to the site but things may be a little wacky for the next week or so.  I’m primarily moving to increase disk quota (from 500MB to 4000MB) and get access to Perl/PHP/Apache.

I’ve had some headaches keeping my personal email in line recently; I’m lugging around archives of email for the last 5+ years spread across several webmail accounts, and my primary personal email account has suffered recurring corruption problems lately (and I’ve outsourced my server admin). Finally, I’m accessing email from 3-4 different PCs in any given week and I turn over PCs frequently enough that trying to move archives around is a real hassle.

My solution, for now, is to move all of my archives to gmail and forward my personal mailbox there as well. Hopefully this simplifies my life a little as I can put the archiving out of mind and let gmail administer spam filtering instead of doing my own. I haven’t figured out how to get POP downloading to work across multiple PCs yet, but the gmail interface and options make it attractive enough to forego local email except on whatever laptop I’m using for travel.

The other thing I’m doing is setting my personal mail to be BCC’d to a second gmail account so that I’ve got a permanent archive of sent mail. I ran this for a while on my own server and like the way it works, but going to gmail is an easy switch and frees up some disk quota on my web server.

Based on what I’ve seen in the last week I’m giving two thumbs up to gmail. Thanks to Tomur for the invite; I’ve now got 50 invites if anyone else wants to try it. I started using GML to upload my local mail archives to gmail and then switched to gExodus. Neither of them is perfect but they’re easier than writing my own script.

A few months ago I decided to try out some noise cancelling headphones for the time I spend on airplanes. After looking around at the conventional over-the-ear designs which are too big for me to lug around and too expensive for what they are ($300 for the Bose model) I stumbled across an alternative headphone design that fits in the ear canal like an earplug. It’s relatively cheap ($80 for pretty good quality sound to $500 for top of the line), no larger than a standard set of ear buds, and I can objectively say it’s way more effective that the over-the ear models.

Besides the benefit of totally blocking out all of the audio going on around me, I love these headphones because I can enjoy music played at a relatively low volume since I’m not turning up the volume to overpower airplane engines, kids screaming, or coworkers chatting. I recommend these to pretty much anyone who likes listening to music in places with ambient noise; everyone I know who has them loves them. The only reservation that some people have might be with the sensation of having something in the ear canal; if you think this might be an issue you should buy from a vendor who guarantees satisfaction and allows returns.

The two vendors that make these headphones are Etymotics and Shure. Both brands have a product range from ~$80-500 and both have excellent reputations. I went with the Shure E2/E2c because it was reputed to be more comfortable, easier to insert/remove frequently, and better optimized for bass response (with a slight tradeoff vs the Etymotics in the clarity of mids and highs). I’d post some links to vendors I don’t have internet access as I’m writing this.

P.S.; since the headphones are small and efficient they will make any noise in your audio system very obvious; I had to give up playing music via my laptop/desktop since their audio feeds had too much signal noise. I bought an Ipod and have not regretted paying the premium for the design of the Ipod over the cheaper competitors.