It is Moving Eve.

We’ve enjoyed something like 80 months in this trusty chalet on the Ridge, and now it is time to move on. Perhaps not unlike your own most recent six years, we, too, have experienced highs and lows with amplitude beyond what we could have imagined or hoped for or expected. We have poured a lot of energy and love into making this place Home, and it still feels like that, to me, even as the decorations are mostly all wrapped away in air bubbles and confined to cubic containment.

I will miss the Ridge. We picked this place. It is the first one that we chose to live in on the merits of the geography, the culture, and the locality. All of our other homes — good and bad — were dictated to us by family, education, or jobs. It’s likely we’ll never again live in such a small town with such a combination of altitude and attitude.

Maybe I should be fairer with you, Dear Readers. After all, this is just a wooden and styrofoam structure, on a chunk of dirt, with a nice view and some sunshine and fresh air. I don’t mean to devolve this post into schmaltz and saccharine. But… I will remember this Home, forever.

See you in the next chapter.

I’m sure some of you are using the wonderful, free Google Reader right now. This tool, like others, consolidates multiple blog syndication feeds into one convenient place, so you don’t have to go around and visit each individual site tediously each day that you want to read. These aggregators make it possible to subscribe to ten or more times as many blogs — especially low-frequency ones — and still catch every post.

Reader rolled out a new UI today, and it made an already-bad problem worse. To the left I have embedded a screen shot to illustrate the problem. What you are seeing is a thin vertical sliver of my desktop with Reader open at 150% zoom in Google’s own browser, Chrome. I use 150% zoom because it hurts my eyes to read text that’s much smaller, and it’s worth noting right up front that this exacerbates the problem I’m about to describe. (If you always read at 100%, that’s fine — the problem is still there, but a bit less markedly so.) I have shrunken the image by half to make it fit better in this blog post, but click on it if you want to see it at original size.

My laptop screen is 1,200 pixels tall. Let’s do a little accounting:

• The OS X menu bar takes up 20 pixels. (Not shown in the screen shot.)
• Chrome’s frame, tabs, and omnibar use 72 pixels.
• The Google Account bar consumes 42 pixels.
• The giant Search box, Google logo, and its related controls eat 90 pixels.
• The second panel of controls hogs 106 pixels.
• The title text of whatever blog or category you’re reading uses 50 pixels.
• Then you get to the actual content.
• Finally, the browser status bar is 20 pixels tall.

All of those measures are give or take one or two pixels, but it’s safe to sum them and calculate this horrendeous result: 400 pixels. That’s right, folks, fully one third of my 1,200 precious, expensive display pixels are being consumed with UI in an app that is specifically devoted to, err, reading. Now, you folks with smaller laptop screens are much more likely to have something closer to 900 or 1,050 pixels. On a MacBook Air, where pixel pitch means it is even more important to use browser-zoom to avoid eye strain, you could well devote almost half of your screen to the controls.

Some controls are good. I also applaud the design team that is striving for clarity and a clean UI by making it more open feeling and less like a rocket control-panel with lots of buttons and gizmos. The problem is, Reader is really easy to learn, and anyone who is adept enough to employ an RSS aggregator is probably going to be a quick study on the four or five day-to-day commands (with keyboard equivalents, no less) needed to chew through large volumes of blog posts. So, I think part of the problem here is that there’s no way to put the thing into an experienced-user mode. It would be great if we could collapse away all the controls and just get a full, top-to-bottom-of-browser reading panel.

It feels like one of those all-too-common situations where the design team and the product managers forgot to talk to the customer. Who knows — maybe this is how they talk to us, by rolling this UI out and seeing how many people complain.

Here’s the official lodging of mine, anyway.

But, Happy Halloween anyway!

Little pumpkins…

Big pumpkins with Norah Sandwich…

We’ve had lots of adventures with food lately. Norah enjoyed her first bites of Real Food a few days ago. (She did fine. She seems to eat most anything.)

Then we went to the pumpkin patch (they’re food, right?) and Norah posed in them. Here she is saying, WHO U LOOKIN’ AT, FOOL?

Then I figured out that she likes chewing on Real Food for a lot longer than Plastic Toys, even if she never gets anywhere.

And then, as if things couldn’t get any better, Kathy made some of her scrumptious crab cakes.

Regardless of whether you think it’s a bad idea or a good one, you have to love the two special interest groups that have formed on each side of this issue. First we have the Boulder Smart Energy Coalition. Seems reasonable enough. They’re firmly on the side that the risk and cost are disproportionate to any gain that might be realized.

How about the opposition? Why, they went with the best possible name: the Boulder Smarter Energy Coalition.

It makes me wish there were a third option for this debate. I’m pretty sure I could pick the very bestest name if only I had the opportunity…

We climbed over Arapaho Pass (about 12,000 feet and part of the continental divide) and quickly scurried down to the meadow on the other side in case the very aggressive-looking clouds that were building on all sides of us decided to try to turn us into fried Brantleys on the exposed ridgeline. Here’re the puppies leading the charge down the back side:

We had a nice series of pretty exposed switchbacks to contend with on that side, which are getting harder for people who are getting older ankles!

Wait, let me move this into just the perfect spot:

Everything was extra-cozy overnight, and I don’t think any of us could lay claim to a really relaxing, solid six or seven hours of rest. And certainly not Norah, shown here napping the next morning only about thirty minutes after we’d gotten up:

It turns out that Kathy not only neglected to put sunscreen on herself, but she decided the baby could go without as well, so now we have Scab-Face Norah for at least a few days. (It’s amazing how fast their skin moves through the healing process; somewhere in the neighborhood of 2.5x what ours would do!)

Anyway, the trip was yay fun, the weather wonderfully merciful, and the mosquitos plentiful but slow and stupid. We had a fun time.

We enjoyed the almost instant-onset of aspen leaves about a week ago. There is an ephemeral period where they have just popped out but not yet fully chlorophylled up during which they have a distinct lime green shade. It’s really hard to capture on “film,” but here’s my model to help show it off:

We took another hike with the Babe and the Dogs today, knowing we’d be in for quite a wet, swollen-river experience.

Zamba and Chaco did their usual number on the National Forest (and Zamba brought home what seems like a third of it in her yak fur).

And Nor-Nor, well, she just enjoyed the ride. (?!)

How do you like my little diorama?

The Sleepless Elite

Fortunately, even if you’re depressed after learning that 2% of your fellow humans have an automatic advantage over you, there’s plenty of other little nuggets of recent sleep science in there. Including that the average person needs somewhat less sleep when she or he gets old.

Of course, I mostly go for the cherry limeades poured over the delicious nugget ice. (Don’t know what nugget ice is? Enjoy the suspense — I’ve got another blog entry about those chunks of goodness coming later.) The rest of the food makes a pretty good approximation of paperboard.

Anyway, last time we were there, I noticed the following statement atop their order boards: “Enjoy our 398,929 drink combinations.” Now, let’s be fair: Sonic has more drink options than any of you or I can shake a stick at. You can get slushies, iced beverages, they have all kinds of syrup flavors, there are ones with cream in them, and so on. Sonic is to be commended on their willingness to offer us Americans Whatever We Darn Well Want.

Unfortunately, my head got stuck for the rest of the meal/drive-in/limeade trying to figure out how to factor that number — hoping it would give me insight into how they came up with it in the first place. Of course, when you factor any positive integer, you only have to check the primes smaller than the square root of the number. In this case, it means I only needed to try dividing every prime up to 631 (which itself happens to be prime) into it.

I quickly eliminated all the little numbers using all the standard mental-arithmetic tricks for doing long division with small divisors, which frankly left me stymied: no twos, threes, fives, sevens, or elevens in this thing? I was left frustrated on two counts:

a) I was now pretty sure the number couldn’t have been calculated correctly by Sonic Corporate, because there are several independent binary choices for drink modifiers, like whether you want extra cherries or not, whether you want the delicious nugget ice or not, and so on. There are also a bunch of other obvious, independent choices of low cardinality, like what kind of drink base you want (Coke, Diet Coke, etc.). Since all of these should be independent, it should have been easy to start finding that they factor out of 398,929.

b) I was now going to have to try doing long division of big, three-digit numbers into a messy six-digit number in my head, and that was going to make my cherry limeade not taste as good, maybe.

Anyway, I gave up with some potential prime factor around 100 and saved the rest for Mathematica–er, Wolfram Alpha, when I got home. The answer?

398,929 factors into 367 and 1,087.

It’s an intriguing and, at the same time, disappointing result. My guess is that someone made some simplifying assumptions, or they got overly fancy and tried subtracting out some combinations that didn’t seem reasonable, or they capped the number of electable drink features. My guess is that it should be considerably higher. (And I think they should give me free limeades for life if I go figure out the real number and empower them to update their marketing campaign.)

By the way, middle school math teachers, this would make for a fun field trip/problem.

I actually walked by it the first time thinking it was another bespoke ice cream maker. It turns out it was, but just for dogs. And it’s some kind of yogurt concoction instead. Anyway, after I finished inquiring as to whether those little pints were the biggest serving size they had (“no, we have single-serve as well!”), they kindly dolloped out a peanut butter-flavored sample onto a sheet for Z to taste.

Of course, I made her do a “leave it” in the middle of the road. What you can’t see from this picture are the twenty or thirty people that started forming a semi-circle around Zamba watching her stare down the yogurt. I guess even in Boulder most people don’t teach their puppies to wait to eat? Concerned about creating too much of a spectacle, and because we were clogging the very crowded thoroughfare, I hurried up and let her “up, up” it, and then POOF: the giant black dog disappeared.

Well, not really. She just got up and sniffed her way back over to the booth to see if there might be any more treasures.