Training Log Archive: cedarcreekIn the 30 days ending Apr 30, 2015:
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Saturday Apr 25, 2015 #
Event: OCIN Armco Park
12 PM
Orienteering race 1:12:56 [3] 3.69 km (19:46 / km) +80m 17:50 / km
shoes: Inov8 Mudclaw
Brown course at Armco Park, near Lebanon, Ohio. Courses by Stryder. My GPS got turned off just before 9, and when I finished I turned it back on, so part of the track is a straight line.
I felt pretty good during the course. Cold, wet rain, but I was okay in a standard heavy fleece jacket. In exposed areas the wind went right through it, and I forgot to pack a baseball cap to keep rain off my glasses, which just sucked.
But I don't remember ever getting so cold so fast when I stopped. It was crazy. We had shelter from the rain, which really made all the difference. Steve had started a fire, which helped a lot.
I had at least four jackets, two fleece, a high-tech membrane North Face Apex, and my normal orange synthetic fill liner jacket. Needed a rain shell badly.
My 300-weight fleece (a NF Denali) was just soaked with water. Normally when that happens, you just take it off and wring it out gently, which I didn't do---I just changed out of it. I was surprised the fabric shoulder area and wrist wear patches held water so badly. My older fleeces never hold this much water. I might need to try a DWR treatment. I actually bought a 200-weight fleece on the way home (from the NF Outlet Store in Monroe). My go-to 200-weight has a busted zipper, which I'm planning to send to Patagonia to fix.
I'm having a metaphysical crisis over packing and gear. I normally actively deny my engineer's-extreme-over-preparedness gene and just try to gently plan and pack without overthinking it. But it's been failing me lately.
I read an interesting essay I found on twitter, "The Psychology of Packing", which really hit a nerve. It says women tend to be much better packers than men, because women tend to carry a bag or purse, and they tend to unpack and repack it regularly. I certainly don't unpack and repack enough. My wallet has Constanza tendencies unless I really stay on top of it. My car is a bright, shining example of this.
So, I've got some things to work on.
My biggest short term goal is to keep a workout bag packed (and maybe in my car), so I can orienteer, run, bike, or go to the gym without stopping at home first. I'll be making some purchases to get certain extra items, like ankle socks, which I don't have enough of. I really need some decent bike shorts, but I hate almost every pair I've looked at. I might have to just hold my nose and try a pair---I'm like Elaine in the Sponge episode---I don't want to try an unfamiliar chamois design.
Map geek stuff: I've been playing with some maps for biking. Not MTBO, but more like longer road or gravel rides. I really like the USGS 30x60 minute series maps for this, which are 1:100,000 scale, or 1cm=1km. Interestingly, these maps date from the late 70s to the early 90s, and are "native metric" maps, with spot elevations in meters, and metric contour intervals. It was part of metrification that lasted well past other changes. I just love the aesthetic of these maps, which don't show a lot of road names. The green for woods really obscures details, though.
I was looking at Shawnee State Forest, near Portmouth, Ohio, though, which is a really big park, many USGS 7.5-minute quads. But this is a case where the 30x60 shows the roads nicely, but the topography is like 20m contours or something and for some reason, it's really hard for my eye to pick out the overall shape of the land. The relief at Shawnee is about 200m, compared to about 100m for Cincinnati.
Here's an example of the 30x60 series at Shawnee. Try to find a "big picture" by looking at the index contours. The thin-line grid is 10cm = 10km. One click "in" is 7.5-minute. "Out" one click is still the same 30x60 map. You can download that map from the USGS Downloader site (which is hard to figure out). It's the "Maysville, KY" 30x60.
Anyway, I happened on a weird combination of contours and DEM that made the topography just pop out. Surprisingly, the contours are 50meters! What I did, in QGIS, was load a 1-arc-second DEM (that's approx 100x100 foot "pixels"), and create 50m contours. Then I edited the DEM-layer settings to have false color (pseudo-color?). It's literally checking a box. It picked colors that almost matched the 50m contour inteval, and I noticed that turning on the contours added a nice contrast to the false color. It's pretty big, about 5MB, but if you want to see it, let me know. I'll try to post an image here, but it'll take me several days.
Cool links o' the day:
http://sovietmaps.com/uscities
http://www.sovietmaps.com/examples
These are examples of Soviet maps of the US and Britain. I found the US page more interesting because I'm used to USGS maps much more than OS maps.
But the Russian maps are shockingly good next to USGS. There's a weird use of negative space for certain road networks, and some "invasion" details, like the bridge width, length, and capacity and the "crossability" (or "dock potential" of the bay "walls") with what we'd call a cliff symbol. (See the M1 Miami Eastern Shore link.)
I'm trying to read a book called "The Look of Maps", but it's pretty hard to read at lunch. I might have to sit down at home and turn off all distractions to get through it. Interestingly, it is 100% text only, with no illustrations or photos.
I felt pretty good during the course. Cold, wet rain, but I was okay in a standard heavy fleece jacket. In exposed areas the wind went right through it, and I forgot to pack a baseball cap to keep rain off my glasses, which just sucked.
But I don't remember ever getting so cold so fast when I stopped. It was crazy. We had shelter from the rain, which really made all the difference. Steve had started a fire, which helped a lot.
I had at least four jackets, two fleece, a high-tech membrane North Face Apex, and my normal orange synthetic fill liner jacket. Needed a rain shell badly.
My 300-weight fleece (a NF Denali) was just soaked with water. Normally when that happens, you just take it off and wring it out gently, which I didn't do---I just changed out of it. I was surprised the fabric shoulder area and wrist wear patches held water so badly. My older fleeces never hold this much water. I might need to try a DWR treatment. I actually bought a 200-weight fleece on the way home (from the NF Outlet Store in Monroe). My go-to 200-weight has a busted zipper, which I'm planning to send to Patagonia to fix.
I'm having a metaphysical crisis over packing and gear. I normally actively deny my engineer's-extreme-over-preparedness gene and just try to gently plan and pack without overthinking it. But it's been failing me lately.
I read an interesting essay I found on twitter, "The Psychology of Packing", which really hit a nerve. It says women tend to be much better packers than men, because women tend to carry a bag or purse, and they tend to unpack and repack it regularly. I certainly don't unpack and repack enough. My wallet has Constanza tendencies unless I really stay on top of it. My car is a bright, shining example of this.
So, I've got some things to work on.
My biggest short term goal is to keep a workout bag packed (and maybe in my car), so I can orienteer, run, bike, or go to the gym without stopping at home first. I'll be making some purchases to get certain extra items, like ankle socks, which I don't have enough of. I really need some decent bike shorts, but I hate almost every pair I've looked at. I might have to just hold my nose and try a pair---I'm like Elaine in the Sponge episode---I don't want to try an unfamiliar chamois design.
Map geek stuff: I've been playing with some maps for biking. Not MTBO, but more like longer road or gravel rides. I really like the USGS 30x60 minute series maps for this, which are 1:100,000 scale, or 1cm=1km. Interestingly, these maps date from the late 70s to the early 90s, and are "native metric" maps, with spot elevations in meters, and metric contour intervals. It was part of metrification that lasted well past other changes. I just love the aesthetic of these maps, which don't show a lot of road names. The green for woods really obscures details, though.
I was looking at Shawnee State Forest, near Portmouth, Ohio, though, which is a really big park, many USGS 7.5-minute quads. But this is a case where the 30x60 shows the roads nicely, but the topography is like 20m contours or something and for some reason, it's really hard for my eye to pick out the overall shape of the land. The relief at Shawnee is about 200m, compared to about 100m for Cincinnati.
Here's an example of the 30x60 series at Shawnee. Try to find a "big picture" by looking at the index contours. The thin-line grid is 10cm = 10km. One click "in" is 7.5-minute. "Out" one click is still the same 30x60 map. You can download that map from the USGS Downloader site (which is hard to figure out). It's the "Maysville, KY" 30x60.
Anyway, I happened on a weird combination of contours and DEM that made the topography just pop out. Surprisingly, the contours are 50meters! What I did, in QGIS, was load a 1-arc-second DEM (that's approx 100x100 foot "pixels"), and create 50m contours. Then I edited the DEM-layer settings to have false color (pseudo-color?). It's literally checking a box. It picked colors that almost matched the 50m contour inteval, and I noticed that turning on the contours added a nice contrast to the false color. It's pretty big, about 5MB, but if you want to see it, let me know. I'll try to post an image here, but it'll take me several days.
Cool links o' the day:
http://sovietmaps.com/uscities
http://www.sovietmaps.com/examples
These are examples of Soviet maps of the US and Britain. I found the US page more interesting because I'm used to USGS maps much more than OS maps.
But the Russian maps are shockingly good next to USGS. There's a weird use of negative space for certain road networks, and some "invasion" details, like the bridge width, length, and capacity and the "crossability" (or "dock potential" of the bay "walls") with what we'd call a cliff symbol. (See the M1 Miami Eastern Shore link.)
I'm trying to read a book called "The Look of Maps", but it's pretty hard to read at lunch. I might have to sit down at home and turn off all distractions to get through it. Interestingly, it is 100% text only, with no illustrations or photos.
Saturday Apr 18, 2015 #
Event: OLOU Deam Lake
12 PM
ARDF 2m 29:17 [2] 1.7 km (17:15 / km) +54m 14:53 / km
Quick 2m ARDF at Mt Airy, set by Dick Arnett. Mostly for attracting new people into ARDF. Neat course. Too short to have much value as a workout (too much standing around waiting). But some new people tried it, and kinda liked it.
Tuesday Apr 7, 2015 #
Note
A small success story tonight. I've been struggling to figure out how to handle aerial photos for both large and small mapping projects. Often when I get aerials, they are tiled, usually in the same tile system as the lidar. So once in a while I'll get lucky and have the entire area covered by one lidar tile. Usually, though, it's two, four, or more tiles.
With lidar, for small projects I get UTM coordinates from Acme Mapper for a rectangle around the area of interest. Then I'll reproject (las2las), then merge and clip (lasmerge), using the UTM rectangle. This gives one file that is usually small enough to process without having to tile the input files. For large projects, I do the same process, but end up tiling the laz input files into 1km tiles (although smaller tiles of 250m or 500m also have advantages, especially if you have to classify lidar using lastools).
Oh---I discovered laz files. They're compressed las files, and they're awesome. They take up about 1/7th the space of las, so they're easy to email and don't hog hard drive space. Highly recommended. Everything I use (software) uses laz files seamlessly. Again---awesome.
So I had to combine four las tiles to make one laz tile for processing. Up til now I haven't had a way to combine aerials. But---it's pretty easy. I haven't tried this with overlapping aerials such as those from Pictometry, but only with tiled aerials that line up nicely in the native projection. Here's how I did it:
Open QGIS and start a new project. Go to "File, Project Properties, CRS, and Enable on-the-fly projection changes and select the native projection of the aerials. For me, it's Southern Ohio with feet. Now load the aerials using the checkerboard button (add raster layer). They should load up and be visible without gaps or black wedges. Now select "Raster--Miscellaneous---Merge". This opens a dialog box. Select the aerials again, and create an output file name such as "Mosaic_OH.tif" (for Ohio projection). The gdal tools really prefer tif, so this stuff gets big, but the tif has the world file embedded, so you can ignore world files (until the last step). There might be some more things you have to select, but I don't think so. Run it. If the box is checked to automatically load it to the current project, you can X the boxes and verify the mosaic file is correct.
But, it's still in the Ohio projection. So select "Raster-Conversion-Projection" (??? I'll update if that's not right. It might be a day or two.) This brings up a dialog box where you select Mosaic_OH as an input and Mosaic_UTM.tif as an output. You also have to select the source and target projections. I use 32616 (UTM zone 16, northern hemisphere) as a target.
Now I go to File--Project Properties, and change the CRS to UTM 16N (32616). Again, I click and unclick the X's for the two mosaic files to verify they're perfectly aligned. One will have black wedges, though.
Now you clip to the same UTM coordinates that you used for the lidar "park" file. Got to "Raster--Conversions---Clipper". Select Mosaic_UTM as input, and a park file name as output, such as storywoods.tif. Type in the min UTMs into the "1" boxes, and the max UTMs into the "2" boxes, and run it. I do one more step here, but it hasn't been helpful because it's not in UTM: I force a world file. Click on the pencil tool and edit the command line. I clicked at the end of the line and added:
-co "tfw=yes" and then run the command. (-co is creation option.)
Again, check and uncheck the boxes between the park file and the mosaic_UTM file to verify it's all perfectly aligned.
Now, if the park TIF file is small enough, you're done. But if you want a smaller file, it's a bit messy. Here's what I do. I open the tif file in Paint, and "Save As" a jpg. If the tif is big, like bigger than 125MB, it won't work. I was able to open big ones in GIMP (free open source, like "photoshop") and "export" as a jpg.
Finally, you need a world file, but the one created by gdal isn't in UTM, but rather long-lat or something. Here's what I did. I went to my OL-Laser output directory and grabbed a random jgw file. I pasted it into my aerial directory and renamed it to match the jpg. The upper left hand pixel should be the min X and max Y UTM coordinates. But rows 1 and 4 will probably be wrong. Write down the x and y pixel counts of the donor jgw file jpg (from OL-Laser or Karttapullautin). Then write down the x and y pixel counts of your clipped "park" aerial. (My lidar files tend to have 1m pixels, and aerials are much higher resolution.) So the donor jgw file has 1 and -1 as row 1 and 4. Divide the lidar pixel size by the aerial pixel size. My aerials were one-foot pixels, so the number was a touch bigger than 0.3048. Now edit the donor jgw file, changing row 1 to 0.3048xxx, and row 4 to -0.3048xx (it needs the minus). Click save, and load it up into QGIS. I was using FR (for Forest Run) as my park aerial name, and I couldn't tell the tif from the jpg in QGIS, so I edited the file names to be FRt.tif and tfw, and FRj.jpg and jgw. Be careful that your "clip" coordinates are fully within the lidar and aerial files, or it will cause problems.
(And if you got any improvements, I really want to know.)
Future research:
1. Try this with overlapping aerials, such as those from Pictometry.
2. Try the selection "creation options" "Use JPEG compression" in the merge and later steps. It will still be a TIF file, but I'm hoping it's more jpg-like in filesize.
With lidar, for small projects I get UTM coordinates from Acme Mapper for a rectangle around the area of interest. Then I'll reproject (las2las), then merge and clip (lasmerge), using the UTM rectangle. This gives one file that is usually small enough to process without having to tile the input files. For large projects, I do the same process, but end up tiling the laz input files into 1km tiles (although smaller tiles of 250m or 500m also have advantages, especially if you have to classify lidar using lastools).
Oh---I discovered laz files. They're compressed las files, and they're awesome. They take up about 1/7th the space of las, so they're easy to email and don't hog hard drive space. Highly recommended. Everything I use (software) uses laz files seamlessly. Again---awesome.
So I had to combine four las tiles to make one laz tile for processing. Up til now I haven't had a way to combine aerials. But---it's pretty easy. I haven't tried this with overlapping aerials such as those from Pictometry, but only with tiled aerials that line up nicely in the native projection. Here's how I did it:
Open QGIS and start a new project. Go to "File, Project Properties, CRS, and Enable on-the-fly projection changes and select the native projection of the aerials. For me, it's Southern Ohio with feet. Now load the aerials using the checkerboard button (add raster layer). They should load up and be visible without gaps or black wedges. Now select "Raster--Miscellaneous---Merge". This opens a dialog box. Select the aerials again, and create an output file name such as "Mosaic_OH.tif" (for Ohio projection). The gdal tools really prefer tif, so this stuff gets big, but the tif has the world file embedded, so you can ignore world files (until the last step). There might be some more things you have to select, but I don't think so. Run it. If the box is checked to automatically load it to the current project, you can X the boxes and verify the mosaic file is correct.
But, it's still in the Ohio projection. So select "Raster-Conversion-Projection" (??? I'll update if that's not right. It might be a day or two.) This brings up a dialog box where you select Mosaic_OH as an input and Mosaic_UTM.tif as an output. You also have to select the source and target projections. I use 32616 (UTM zone 16, northern hemisphere) as a target.
Now I go to File--Project Properties, and change the CRS to UTM 16N (32616). Again, I click and unclick the X's for the two mosaic files to verify they're perfectly aligned. One will have black wedges, though.
Now you clip to the same UTM coordinates that you used for the lidar "park" file. Got to "Raster--Conversions---Clipper". Select Mosaic_UTM as input, and a park file name as output, such as storywoods.tif. Type in the min UTMs into the "1" boxes, and the max UTMs into the "2" boxes, and run it. I do one more step here, but it hasn't been helpful because it's not in UTM: I force a world file. Click on the pencil tool and edit the command line. I clicked at the end of the line and added:
-co "tfw=yes" and then run the command. (-co is creation option.)
Again, check and uncheck the boxes between the park file and the mosaic_UTM file to verify it's all perfectly aligned.
Now, if the park TIF file is small enough, you're done. But if you want a smaller file, it's a bit messy. Here's what I do. I open the tif file in Paint, and "Save As" a jpg. If the tif is big, like bigger than 125MB, it won't work. I was able to open big ones in GIMP (free open source, like "photoshop") and "export" as a jpg.
Finally, you need a world file, but the one created by gdal isn't in UTM, but rather long-lat or something. Here's what I did. I went to my OL-Laser output directory and grabbed a random jgw file. I pasted it into my aerial directory and renamed it to match the jpg. The upper left hand pixel should be the min X and max Y UTM coordinates. But rows 1 and 4 will probably be wrong. Write down the x and y pixel counts of the donor jgw file jpg (from OL-Laser or Karttapullautin). Then write down the x and y pixel counts of your clipped "park" aerial. (My lidar files tend to have 1m pixels, and aerials are much higher resolution.) So the donor jgw file has 1 and -1 as row 1 and 4. Divide the lidar pixel size by the aerial pixel size. My aerials were one-foot pixels, so the number was a touch bigger than 0.3048. Now edit the donor jgw file, changing row 1 to 0.3048xxx, and row 4 to -0.3048xx (it needs the minus). Click save, and load it up into QGIS. I was using FR (for Forest Run) as my park aerial name, and I couldn't tell the tif from the jpg in QGIS, so I edited the file names to be FRt.tif and tfw, and FRj.jpg and jgw. Be careful that your "clip" coordinates are fully within the lidar and aerial files, or it will cause problems.
(And if you got any improvements, I really want to know.)
Future research:
1. Try this with overlapping aerials, such as those from Pictometry.
2. Try the selection "creation options" "Use JPEG compression" in the merge and later steps. It will still be a TIF file, but I'm hoping it's more jpg-like in filesize.
Saturday Apr 4, 2015 #
1 PM
Orienteering race 17:02 [2] 1.64 km (10:22 / km) +35m 9:22 / km
shoes: Salomon Speedcross CS
White Course at Gov Bebb, set by Mike Minium.
My leg has been weird this week. It was really bothering me Wednesday and Thursday, but Thursday morning the swelling was noticeably reduced---almost the same as my non-injured L leg. But I did the Thursday white course, walking, and the swelling had come back, even though I wore a compression sleeve on that side. As had happened before, the pressure of the compression sleeve was just too much, and the pain forced me to take it off. I'm guessing this is mostly an infection of the open wounds, rather than a bone thing.
Thursday night it was swollen and pretty painful, as well as a bit hot and red, and I was, for the first time, seriously considering seeing a doctor.
Friday. Wow. It wasn't good. Excruciating pain when I'd stand up or stand still without moving. I had called my doctor's office at 8:30am, but they didn't answer, so I assumed they were closed. Decided I'd go to urgent care Friday night. But at lunch, I tried one more time, and my doctor's office answered. Appt at 2:30pm. Treatment: Antibiotics.
Wasted 90 minutes waiting on the pharmacy. I was standing in line bouncing from foot to foot to reduce the pain. Left and sat for about an hour. Still not ready. Walked around the store---finally, got it.
Got home, took two doses (recommended by pharmacist), elevated leg and watched a movie. Not three hours later, the pain was noticeably less, and the swelling a bit better.
Saturday---almost normal size. Used a compression sleeve, which I tolerated all day. Was almost feeling good enough for e 3.2km Brown course, but decided to play it safe and do White. I did run a bit, and I think that is a problem. I told the doctor that I suspected a dented bone, and she wrote a prescription for an x-ray, with instructions to use it if the antibiotics didn't work. They're still working, but I'm really believing I've got a bone issue. I took it easy all day Sunday, and it's kinda better. I'm still having specific, intense pains when I do certain things. (The real issue is---if it is dented, what would a doctor do? I'm guessing it would just be to take it easy, so that's what I'm doing. I'll do some biking this week to keep impact forces off of it.) If it's still bugging me Friday or so, I'll go get it x-rayed. I'm pretty confident the wound infection is handled, but if the bone is dented, then having the infection nearby is semi-dangerous.
My leg has been weird this week. It was really bothering me Wednesday and Thursday, but Thursday morning the swelling was noticeably reduced---almost the same as my non-injured L leg. But I did the Thursday white course, walking, and the swelling had come back, even though I wore a compression sleeve on that side. As had happened before, the pressure of the compression sleeve was just too much, and the pain forced me to take it off. I'm guessing this is mostly an infection of the open wounds, rather than a bone thing.
Thursday night it was swollen and pretty painful, as well as a bit hot and red, and I was, for the first time, seriously considering seeing a doctor.
Friday. Wow. It wasn't good. Excruciating pain when I'd stand up or stand still without moving. I had called my doctor's office at 8:30am, but they didn't answer, so I assumed they were closed. Decided I'd go to urgent care Friday night. But at lunch, I tried one more time, and my doctor's office answered. Appt at 2:30pm. Treatment: Antibiotics.
Wasted 90 minutes waiting on the pharmacy. I was standing in line bouncing from foot to foot to reduce the pain. Left and sat for about an hour. Still not ready. Walked around the store---finally, got it.
Got home, took two doses (recommended by pharmacist), elevated leg and watched a movie. Not three hours later, the pain was noticeably less, and the swelling a bit better.
Saturday---almost normal size. Used a compression sleeve, which I tolerated all day. Was almost feeling good enough for e 3.2km Brown course, but decided to play it safe and do White. I did run a bit, and I think that is a problem. I told the doctor that I suspected a dented bone, and she wrote a prescription for an x-ray, with instructions to use it if the antibiotics didn't work. They're still working, but I'm really believing I've got a bone issue. I took it easy all day Sunday, and it's kinda better. I'm still having specific, intense pains when I do certain things. (The real issue is---if it is dented, what would a doctor do? I'm guessing it would just be to take it easy, so that's what I'm doing. I'll do some biking this week to keep impact forces off of it.) If it's still bugging me Friday or so, I'll go get it x-rayed. I'm pretty confident the wound infection is handled, but if the bone is dented, then having the infection nearby is semi-dangerous.
Thursday Apr 2, 2015 #
Event: OCIN_Rentschler_Apr_2015
7 PM
Orienteering race 19:50 [2] 1.46 km (13:35 / km) +16m 12:53 / km
shoes: Salomon Speedcross CS
Wednesday Apr 1, 2015 #
10 PM
Cycling 4:00 [2] 0.8 km (5:00 / km)
Day 1 of the 30-day April Cycling Challenge. I can't remember the real name. I'll edit later. Almost forgot. Put the front wheel on a mountain bike and rode to the pool and back with my pants leg tucked into my sock for chain grease protection. (Shin liked the blood flow.)