Personal Musings

UPDATE:  Since I made the waypoints anyway, I thought it might be fun to make a video flythrough of the entire 21.1KM of the course.  It’s quick and dirty and more than a little silly but it does serve to demonstrate that this is not going to be easy.  Check out the video here:

I’m as surprised as anyone but I have officially registered and paid to run a 21.1km half marathon this October.  Specifically I have entered the 2019 Okanagan Half Marathon which takes place in Kelowna, BC on October 20th.  For those keeping score at home, that’s just 6 months from the time of this writing.

I wanted to know what the route looked like so I could better visualize and mentally prepare during my training.  Unfortunately while the official website (available at https://www.okanaganmarathon.ca/route-maps-p183040) includes a “Route Map” for the “21K”, it actually only includes written directions.  That’s not terribly useful.

So I decided to manually map out all of the waypoints of the course in Google Earth Pro.  I figure I’d post this here in case it’s useful for anyone also participating in the same race or more generally are interested in what 21KM actually looks.

To start us off, here is what the course looks like when taken in as a whole.  The segments highlighted in yellow are those that have to be completed twice (once in either direction).

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I heard tonight that a local radio station will celebrate International Women’s Day by playing songs exclusively by women for 24 straight hours.  This got me thinking — could I fill an entire day’s worth of music sung only by women and do so using only songs that I actually know and like?

I realized I have almost 1,000 songs in my MP3 collection that have been acquired over two decades.  I figure if I have it, it’s a safe bet to say I like the song so I wondered how many hours all those songs would add up to.

First I needed to set a couple of ground rules.  Since the objective is to fill “24 hours” of Radio airplay, I have to take into account commercials and DJ banter.  Some googling suggests that a typical radio station plays 80% music every hour which sounds about right.  That works out to 40 minutes each hour or 16 total hours of music over a 24 hour period.

Finally, to be eligible for this list, the song must be sung exclusively by a woman or women.  Duets or guest spots make the song ineligible.

To figure this out, I needed to scan all of my MP3s and dump the list into Excel along with each song Duration.

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For those of you that live in Canada, you are no doubt aware that the Bank of Canada recently increased their policy rate from 0.5% to 0.75%.  I heard of a lot of media reporting that said this is the first change in 7 years.  I further read that we could expect further increases in the near future.  Since this policy rate directly impacts the rates that regular consumers get on any new loans and impacts even existing with variable rates, it seemed important to understand how this rate has fluctuated over the years.

To that end I did some research and found that on the official Bank of Canada website, you can download a CSV containing a list of every single day for the last 10 years and what the interest rate was on each of those days.  That is available here:

http://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/interest-rates/canadian-interest-rates/

I wanted to know what the shortest number of days has been between interest rate changes.  Given the large scale impacts of changes to this rate in the country I assumed it would be something that was done exceptionally cautiously and once changed, a long waiting period would take place to review the impact.  According to my research though this assumption doesn’t appear to hold true over the last decade.

First though, a comment on the news reports that this is the “first change in 7 years”.  That claim turns out to be patently false.  The recent change represents the first increase in 7 years.  Over that time frame however we’ve seen 2 decreases to the rate.  Below are my findings:

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I was browsing the news today and learned that Adele recently performed on Saturday Night Live.  It’s clear by this point that she is a very capable singer. But for a major television performance, I always just cynically assume that the artist is seldom actually singing.  I often expect them to be either dubbed based on a studio recording or with liberal use of Autotune being applied.  Here is an example of what I mean:

Or how about this?  Here is a much more humorous take on how much work is required to make singers sound actually good called “Sound Engineer’s Hard Work”:

All of this brings us to the point.  The reason I knew Adele performed on SNL is because her raw mic audio feed was leaked from the performance.  If this were to happen to a good chunk of modern musicians these days, I suspect their PR teams would be working a lot of overtime.  But Adele is not most musicians.  The raw audio feed was in my opinion even better than the full song with all of the other instruments and backup singers.  There are not many artists that can carry a song entirely on their own with nothing but their voice but Adele would be one of them.

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I’m in the process of spring cleaning when I came across something that really gave me a good chuckle and at the same time made me appreciate how far things have come.

While going through some old papers from University, I found this wonder piece of memorabilia:

I genuinely have no idea what’s on that disk.  I’ve long since gotten rid of any device capable of reading it so unless I go out of my way, I suppose it’s lost to the sands of time.

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During a recent swim, I happened to overhear a conversation between two other people in the pool that was distinctly Korean. I introduced myself and we ended up having a great chat that was probably 70% Korean. After that encounter, I came to the realization that I’ve learned enough of the language that I’m right on the precipice of basic fluency in Korean. To that end, I decided, to resume my Korean studies. One of the skillsets I wanted to work on was my ability to touch-type in Korean. I’m already reasonably OK at the task and can type in Hangul without looking at the keyboard. But I still make a ton of mistakes which of course frustrates the learning process. I decided the first thing I need to do was to obtain that last 15% and master Korean typing. I then went out searching for a Mavis Beacon style typing tutor for Korean. It turns out there is one that rises above all others called 한메타자교사.

Unfortunately, the application was written in 1999 and as such had two issues, one highly annoying and one show stopping. The first is that the application is hard coded to run at 640×480. The second is that it has a really clever game built in that for some reason doesn’t allow accept Korean input. I suspected this had to do with the fact that I was running the application on an English language Windows base OS with Korean language added as an additional IME. After much troubleshooting and trial and error trying to solve the symptoms, I decided to go for broke and fix the problem at the source.

I checked the build date on the executable and it was written in February of 1999. According to this Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Microsoft_Windows), the most recent version of Windows available at the time this application was written was Windows 98.

I then scoured the Internet to try to find an ISO for the Korean version of Windows 98. This proved to take a lot longer than I would have otherwise expected. But I did eventually find one and installed KO_Win98 into a virtual machine. (As an aside, holy hell I forgot how long Windows 98 takes to install. Even with the modern CPU, memory and SSD backend, it still took almost half an hour to install and *4* reboots! We truly live in the golden age).

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This is going to be one of the more unusual HOWTOs I’m likely ever to produce for this site. It all started earlier today when I asked myself a seemingly simple question:

What is the average weight of famous celebrities that are roughly my height and age?

I was curious because I was wondering how far off the mark I currently was in terms of weight compared to what pop culture considers attractive.
In this day and age, finding the stats on celebrities is frighteningly simple. Aggregating those stats into something meaningful to my question however proved to be more complex.
First and foremost, I’d like to give full credit to the website with which the following information is based on:

http://www.celebheightandweight.com/actor.html

With that out of the way, let’s have a look at their site:

It looks nice enough. The vital statistics of over 400 celebrities are listed here. However, filtering it to get the information I wanted was impossible.
The only option then would be to extract and compile the data myself. Let’s begin shall we?

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