Dec 23

Photo 28,000

Posted on Wednesday, December 23, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


June 8, 2015: US 67/State Street heading toward I-74 in Bettendorf. The view ahead will change as part of the I-74 bridge construction project. It’s hard to tell how many standalone I-74 shields with the state name will remain after that, but it’s safe to say there will be fewer.

You don’t want/get to see 27,000 because it was in the midst of my move to Cedar Rapids last year (and to be honest, I still haven’t unpacked much). From the middle of last year forward, these library totals don’t include nearly 500 photos taken on the farm immediately after the tornado.

In fact, from now on, the count is going to get both more and less accurate. It will be more accurate because the pictures actually related to my travels and the state of Iowa will make up a greater percentage of my additions; less accurate, because photos of other activities (such as sporting events and presidential candidates) will be excluded from the total. While I still use the same main camera, a base photo with the new camera is twice as big file-size-wise, which means a fourfold increase once it’s duplicated in the iPhoto library.

Posted in Iowa Miscellaneous, Sequences | Comments Off on Photo 28,000
Dec 22

At least the number is in the right place

Posted on Tuesday, December 22, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
January 30, 2012: This sign on I-35 in Texas could have an interstate shield in its future, I-14, running west along US 190 to Fort Hood.

Embedded in the five-year highway bill recently signed into law is designation of more national high-priority corridors. One mainly follows US 190 in Texas, but if you look at a map, that highway is anything but straight. Through the same congressional subterfuge that gave us Interstate 99, the corridor in Texas will be named Interstate 14. The number is in the right place, between I-10 and I-20, and in the far far future an interstate could extend eastward to Montgomery, Alabama. There’s another designation in the law too, Interstate 11 between Las Vegas and Reno. (Of course that will never ever come to fruition, but remember who the Senate Minority Leader is.)

(By the way, do you know we have an Interstate 2 now? It’s about 47 miles long in the southernmost part of Texas, running west from Harlingen to where development peters out. It puts a big hurdle in my desire to have at least a little of every interstate west of the Mississippi, that’s for sure.)

However, there are only about 30 miles of US 190 that are interstate-grade today, between Fort Hood and I-35 in Tyler, Texas. I happened to drive it in 2012, but wouldn’t count it as interstate mileage because it wasn’t signed as an interstate then. That’s the piece that could get new shields in the next 18 months. I-14 would not be the shortest two-digit interstate (that’s I-97 between Annapolis and southern Baltimore) and it lives up to the formal name of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (much like I-185 in Georgia goes to not just Columbus but Fort Benning).

The agencies that are supposed to be in charge of numbering are the Special Committee on US Route Numbering and the Federal Highway Administration. Their track record recently hasn’t been the best as far as roadgeeks like myself are concerned. (North Carolina, in particular, needs some sense slapped into it.) Whether you think I-69 is pork-barrel spending gone mad or a necessary addition to our transportation system, the number is a monstrosity going where it shouldn’t and then splitting into suffixed routes southwest of Houston. The I-69 designation also was written into law as part of a highway spending bill.

The numbering committee meets during conferences of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), which recently elected Iowa DOT Director Paul Trombino as its president. As a perk of that office (or at least I presume it’s a perk), the AASHTO spring 2016 conference will be in Des Moines. It’s meant for transportation bigwigs in the public and private sectors, but I wondered if there would be a way to go as a private citizen… and then I saw the registration fees. Yowza.

Speaking of I-69, another long section of already existing freeway in Kentucky has been designated as I-69, and Indiana now has completed the interstate from Evansville to Bloomington. The University of Indiana in Bloomington was the last in the Big Ten not to have an interstate connection ever since State College was reached by — and here’s where the blog post finishes circling around itself — I-99.

Posted in Highway Miscellaneous | Comments Off on At least the number is in the right place
Dec 21

Reverse-engineered football brackets, analysis for 2015

Posted on Monday, December 21, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

After the Iowa high school football playoffs ended, I took the finals and started working backwards to create a post-hoc bracket for the season. I had two tools I didn’t last year: The IHSAA published a list of qualifiers in order, and I had the foresight to copy the list of games before each round so I knew where the games were being played.

Link to combined football brackets for all six classes, 2015 (PDF)

It takes a lot of time to make these, so if you find them useful, please drop an e-mail to let me know. Next year’s playoff field is being cut in half, which is a blessing for this work. After creating all the brackets and looking at the results along with the standings, here’s my analysis based on records and geography. Team regular-season records (overall, district) are included when they have a bearing on the factoid.

  • All top-two teams in every district had home games the first round, so this makes me think I had some errors in the order of finishers in 2014.
  • Gladbrook-Reinbeck was the only non-district champion to win a state title.
  • Four fourth-place teams won their first-round games, including Creston toppling Harlan and Estherville-Lincoln Central over Southeast Valley.
  • Speaking of Southeast Valley, Class 2A District 8 was a good example of why the brackets were expanded. SEV (7-2, 5-1) was the district champion over East Sac (5-4, 5-1) because of a one-point victory during the regular season, but East Sac in turn had the higher seeding over Shenandoah (7-2, 4-2). Then the latter two ended up playing each other in the first round anyway.
  • Iowa City West (3-6, 3-1) was the second-place finisher in Class 4A District 7 by beating Dubuque Hempstead (6-3, 2-2) — with Davenport North (1-8, 1-3) finishing fourth because, well, someone had to.
  • Some teams had one fewer game in the regular season because of heavy thunderstorms across Iowa the Friday before Labor Day, giving us two 4-4 teams (Harris-Lake Park and West Bend-Mallard). Springville (5-5, 4-3) got in a 10th game before losing to Don Bosco, which only played seven before the playoffs. Three 8-player district champions — and then Xavier and Dowling, who were supposed to play each other in Week 1 — had undefeated eight-game seasons.
  • There were eight 3-6 teams and 21 4-5 teams.
  • Four of six North Tama opponents in the postseason advanced to the second round, and that was only because East Buchanan played at GR.
  • South Tama and Albia outscored their opponents by a combined 177-0 before playing each other (Albia won 17-6).
  • Only Class 4A had a pure east/west split. Class 3A almost did, except for the node containing Pella, which eventually resulted in an all-District 7 faceoff in the final. But Class 3A overall is heavily tilted to the east; there were District 1 and 2 rematches in the first round and Sergeant Bluff-Luton was the only team west of US 169 to make the quarterfinals.
  • Second-round matchups with notable distance between teams: Panorama at Dike-New Hartford (2A), HLV at Elkader (8), West Bend-Mallard at Janesville (8), Akron-Westfield at Logan-Magnolia (A), Boyden-Hull/Rock Valley at Webster City (3A). Council Bluffs Lewis Central had to make three trips to the Des Moines metro.

Creating the bracket knowing the home teams brought up an interesting design quirk. In a convention so widespread I wasn’t conscious of it until about a year ago, when sports websites give scores the home team is always on the bottom. However, in brackets (e.g. the NCAA tournament), the higher seed starts on the top or outside. So I had to pick which convention to use, and since I have the district placement coded beside the name, I went with putting the home team on the bottom. This is one of those things that you only consciously think about when the two styles pop up beside each other. (Another would be the 10 days before and after Thanksgiving when you see home football teams playing in colored jerseys while the away team is in white, but the home basketball team plays in white while the away team plays in color.)

Posted in Sports | Comments Off on Reverse-engineered football brackets, analysis for 2015
Dec 19

Carmike theaters now charging sales tax

Posted on Saturday, December 19, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

I don’t go to the movies as often as I used to, partially because I no longer have a theater in walking distance, partially because so much out there is uninteresting dreck*. So it was a surprise when I went to see The Force Awakens** and find that the ticket price was the same as earlier this year — but now sales tax was tacked on to that price.

The ticket-taker said the change happened “a couple months ago,” which is one of the times of the year the Carmike chain has raised prices in the past. It’s a stealth move to pretend that prices haven’t increased — much like Mediacom giving one rate but neglecting to mention the “local broadcast surcharge,” “regional sports surcharge,” and sales tax on the franchise fee. Now the ticket-takers have to deal with loose change rather than exclusively in quarters, which I’m sure doesn’t make things go any faster.

Is this an Iowa thing, a national thing, or what? I don’t know. Here’s an article about North Carolina adding a sales tax to admission tickets starting Jan. 1, 2014, but there wasn’t any such modification to Iowa law. Regardless, it’s yet another example of average consumers being nickel-and-dimed, and that’s before checking out the highway-robbery prices at concession stands.

*ENOUGH with the dystopia already. It’s very difficult nowadays not to connect the sheer volume of that genre with the larger national mood, especially since the multi-book series followed by the even-more-multi-film series seems to be the only thing in the young-adult section these days.
**Go see it before the Internet spoils it. I had to break my “never on the first weekend” rule to be sure I got the complete experience.
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Carmike theaters now charging sales tax
Dec 18

New Mapquest de-emphasizes county lines

Posted on Friday, December 18, 2015, at 10:14 AM by Jeff

Yet another website redesign takes away something inherently obvious in the name of … what?

After rising to dominance in the late 2000s, Google Maps has steadily grown fat and happy in the 2010s, and by “fat” I mean resource-hogging, shiny-for-shiny’s-sake and sometimes downright sloppy on accuracy*. It dominated the new and growing mobile Internet until Apple Maps overcame laughingstock status and roped in iPhone users. While Street View is a great component, the actual map-drawing part of the website has gone downhill. Meanwhile, depending on your perspective, Mapquest was either happily un-messed-with or left to wither out of benign neglect. That changed this fall, when a “new” Mapquest was unveiled. The new version has a different typeface, a really stupid logo, and one unfortunate departure from an interface that had been around since the 20th Century.

The new Mapquest doesn’t show county lines until a very small zoom level. Displaying county lines was one of MQ’s strengths over Google — since Google doesn’t show county lines at all — and the new designers tossed it. Whereas county lines were obviously visible on the old version at the 10-mile scale, the new version won’t show them until the 1-mile scale, and then the line is faintly dashed with the county names in small type.

(Side rant: WHY ARE WEB DESIGNERS USING GRAY TEXT EVERYWHERE STOP IT RIGHT NOW ESPECIALLY WHEN IT’S LIGHT GRAY ON DARK GRAY WHAT POSSESSED YOU TO THINK THAT IS GOOD DESIGN)

(I needed that.)

Anyway, somehow, in exchange for not showing us county lines, the new Mapquest will show us…township names. Yes, township names, styled just like every actual town name on the map. In northern Sac County, for example, at the 3-mile zoom you see “Eureka”, “Eden”, “Nemaha”, and “Douglas” all in a row — except the thing is, Nemaha is the only town of the four and it’s so close to the center of Delaware Township that that name is hidden. But just looking at the map you couldn’t tell that, just as you couldn’t tell there are not towns or even long-extinct villages named “Boyer Valley” and “Clinton” on soon-to-be-rerouted US 71 south of Early.

The new Mapquest also switched to icons for triggering map and satellite views, since apparently using the words “Map” and “Satellite” were too obvious. To get satellite view now, you click on the globe below the plus/minus arrows. That switches the view, and also makes every highway shield square — every highway shield. I have no idea why it does that, especially since the map goes to the trouble of rendering state highways with the actual shield design (another nice thing MQ does that Google doesn’t).

The old version of Mapquest is still active, at classic.mapquest.com (with a much less ridiculous logo), but as is so often the case, the plug could be pulled on that at any time.

*The next time you look at parts of Iowa on Google Maps, notice how many highways that were decommissioned in 2003 are still alive and well.

Posted in Maps | Comments Off on New Mapquest de-emphasizes county lines
Dec 17

Hardcore gaming, meet hardcore farming

Posted on Thursday, December 17, 2015, at 10:15 AM by Jeff

“Farming simulator is way bigger, more fun than you think” from Vice:

I’ve done many challenging things in games recently, from slaying hordes of humanoid rats in Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide, to beating the magic-casting game Magicka 2. But the most hardcore gaming experience I’ve had this year was was trying to lift a bail [sic] of hay in Farming Simulator 2015 while using the $300 Heavy Equipment Precision Control System.

Farming Simulator 2015, in case you’ve missed the phenomenon, is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a game where you manage a farm much like you would manage a city in SimCity,

[We had this 20 years ago. We called it SimFarm!]

but you can also perform a wider variety of seemingly menial tasks, like hoeing, sowing, harvesting, and transporting crops, all while driving any number of accurately recreated, brand-name tractors, combines, and other heavy duty farming equipment.

I think the entire Corn Belt just strained muscles in their faces from looking at the author funny. Let me get this straight: It’s all the stuff farmers do every day because it’s their job, except out of the elements while sitting your desk holding the steering wheel from Pole Position?

Yes. Yes it is.

You may not have heard of Vice, but you’re going to: Disney is investing $400 million in Vice Media and also killing the H2 channel on cable to make room for “unconventional content that’s avowedly targeting millennials.” Which not only includes experiencing a farm simulator, but hiring a 21-year-old to be a life coach. (Life experience is not a prerequisite for being a life coach, apparently.)

I can think of one way a “farming simulator” like this could be useful — as a course for agriculture and ag-related majors at college. If this sparks someone’s interest in the real thing, that would be great also.  The Midwest has an issue with a lack of young farmers for a combination of reasons, but they’re needed in the real world, not the virtual one. But I suppose it’s better than spending that time on a smartphone application that picks its users’ pockets one in-app purchase at a time.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Hardcore gaming, meet hardcore farming
Dec 16

If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve

Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

A reversal of sorts from Monday’s blog item about Branstad:

Second Swaledale write-in candidate turns down council seat

Is it possible more tiny towns in Iowa will end up disincorporating because they can’t get people to run the town? This already happened to Mount Sterling.

Elsewhere in the West Fork school district, Sheffield — a town with more than 1000 people — has lost its only grocery store.

Posted in Iowa Miscellaneous | Comments Off on If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve
Dec 15

A sense of humor, the DOT has

Posted on Tuesday, December 15, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Drivers on major Iowa highways yesterday were greeted with a batch of “Star Wars”-related messages encouraging good traffic safety practices.

Did you know “Star Wars Episode VII” comes out Friday? (he typed, while a Star Wars-themed Ford commercial played on TV). If the Force is indeed awakening, please, try not to spoil it for me. It’s not a spoiler to know that Jar-Jar Binks was supposed to be the true villain of the prequels.

At least one Star Wars movie has debuted during five of the six most recent presidents’ terms (George H.W. Bush fell in the 16-year gap between Return of the Jedi and Phantom Menace).

Posted in Iowa Miscellaneous | Comments Off on A sense of humor, the DOT has
Dec 14

Branstad now nation’s longest-serving governor

Posted on Monday, December 14, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

For Iowans born after 1974 (including myself), Terry Branstad has run Iowa for more than half our lives. Now his record for longest-serving governor in US history is official.

On Monday, Terry Branstad will have been Iowa’s governor for one out of every eight days that Iowa has been a state according to calculations by a University of Minnesota political science professor. It’ll be a total of 7,642 days. It pushes him past record-holder George Clinton, a Revolutionary War hero who served as the governor of New York for nearly 21 years.

The Register’s Kyle Munson and Kathie Obradovich have written about the record too.

Posted in Iowa Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Branstad now nation’s longest-serving governor
Dec 11

License Plate Letters — DXY

Posted on Friday, December 11, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

It looks like the state of Iowa will come close to using up four letters’ worth of plates in a span of three years and three months. There are a few stragglers out there whose county offices didn’t check the “replacement time” on renewals, so spotting the really old ones is possible. Meanwhile, I think the N’s from the previous cycle are the ones being replaced now.

Posted in License Plates | Comments Off on License Plate Letters — DXY