Up to Things

Last night after guitar lessons, Eryn and I popped into Doolittle's in Eagan to catch the smurf fracking event.  I thought we'd miss it, but we were right on time.  She kicked up Ingress for the first time in a long time.  She really likes the social aspect.  There were about eight of us there, nine if you count the frog in the parking lot.  Eryn and I noticed him on the way out.  He was trying to look nonchalant, but we pulled up next to him in the convertible and Ingressed next to him.  Eryn was giggling.  I pinged the Smurfs inside so they came out to say hi and have him in for a beer.  Good team.  Eryn took down the towers and remodded the local park today, so she's having some fun if only temporarily.

This morning I had IGH Career Day. I think this is my third year.  It's difficult to compete against cops with targets and dogs and firefolk in their uniforms.  Dev Manager is just not that exciting to most kids. I tried to jazz it up by talking about salaries which are good compared to most jobs (except the pharmacist, but I pointed out the pharmacist had to spend a lot more on school), my 17 year old team mate who's doing big data as a junior in college and making a real salary, and how we process 2 trillion pieces of information, and that's if I'm really lowballing it.  Cloud and AI aren't as exciting if you can't see them in action.  Not a ton of questions, but some.  Surprisingly, two related to security.  Even eighth graders don't completely trust the cloud.  I mentioned that yes, your data isn't completely under your control anymore, but cloud providers spend way more time on security and updates than we ever did internally.  Practice makes closer to perfect.

Illuminator

Got my 1,000,000 MU (mind unit) Illuminator badge tonight throwing layered fields in the hood.  I think I'm at around 650 days of playing Ingress so far.  I'm still not great at fielding, but I've been learning layers. 

I had dinner with another player last week to talk shop as he was feeling frustrated.  And I've been having a good time with my team in Eagan.  Fun folks.

I used to think we were pretty chatty.  We've gotten chattier.  More players locally on our team.  Definitely made a positive difference.

Hastings

Last weekend I rode out to Hastings on an Ingress hunt.  There was a portal at Spring Lake Park Reserve that was holding up big fields.  The ride there...not so bad.  Sort of downhill into the river valley for about 30 miles.  The ride back...different story.  I don't think it helped that I didn't eat because the breakfast joint I was targeting in Hastings opened an hour later than Google said.

Ride back: mostly uphill, 25 miles, slight wind, and a lot of road construction.  At one point I had to go under an under-construction under/overpass on Highway 52.  Going to Hastings it wasn't so bad because it was early and traffic was light.  On the way back it was around noon and the traffic was buzzing.  I was pinned against cement separators making sure I caught the eye of every motorist buzzing down the detour on/off ramp at 65 mph.  Nasty.

Those Hastings Ingressers are nuts.  The whole thing was back up within a few hours and I think they even scored some high rankings in the fielding standings thanks to rethrows.



On the way back I was running out of water, so I was excited when I found a pump.  After a huge chug of water, I realized it was slightly off tasting well water.  I thought about it for a few moments, and realized this bottle of water comes from directly between the enormous covered mountains of trash deposited by the refuse company and the cracking/processing plant on the other side.  I can't imagine, despite all their precautions, that this isn't one of the most fucked up bottles of water I could have chosen to drink, at least in my area.  I'm going to choose to believe that somehow nothing leaked into the water table.

Blackhawk Park

A few random photos from Blackhawk Park while I was out wandering around doing a bit of Ingress-ing.

The trail...


The frozen lake, which had a few ripped up spots in the ice.  I couldn't tell if they were from people or thawing.


And a very big tree that gave me an old man or Ent vibe...

St. Mary's of Marystown

I was way down Highway 169 tonight cleaning up an Ingress field.  I went to the wrong place first, which I've done before, and which is incredibly annoying.  It's sometimes difficult to tell from the portal description where the place is; I end up looking for a nearby intersection.

Made for a beautiful photo taking down 4 AXA covering most of Eagan and beyond.

Thursday Ingress

I realized I forgot to blog on Thursday that I spent the evening over at Doolittle's at an Ingress gathering.  I've been playing for about 9 months, roughly since just before I went to San Antonio last year.  Our team is pretty cohesive and social, so we got together - 12 of us, although there was at least one other one hanging in the bar with his girlfriend not at our table - drank beer, ate dinner, and "fracked" the double portal.

That picture is generally what fracking looks like.  We all dropped resonators on the portal until it was Level 8, the max level portal you can get, so you get the highest level gear out of it.  You can only put one level eight resonator on a portal, so you need to have at least 8 people around to max it out.  Then we added multihacks - you can hack more than four times - and heat sinks - the time between hacks is reduced - and used a fracker.  Fracks cost real money, but usually a few people have some of them on hand.  They effectively double every single hack.  So if you'd normally get a few weapons and a few energy cubes (batteries), you get twice as many.  Looks like that picture on the left.  Out of the 2000 possible items you can have, I was at under 1000, so I had a long way to go.  I burned out my ability to hack both of them fairly early on, but bumped myself up to about 1800 items.  Mission accomplished.  Gear to get through the next week or so.  We talk about our team, about good places to throw a field (a way to score points and compete by linking three locations), trading keys and items, and where to attack next/strategy.  A strange little hobby, but I enjoy the folks I play with and they're a good time when it comes to beer, dinner, and shooting the breeze.

National Bike Challenge - LIES!

I have not put as many miles in this summer as I usually do, but I've been trying to mimic my at-least-one-mile-a-day goal that I attempted last summer.  With few exceptions, I do at least two miles, even when it's pouring so hard I'm riding in a few inches of water.

Which is why this calendar irritates me.  I did NOT miss the 29th of May.  Not, not, not.  It's far more likely my odometer glitched.  I love my Garmin, but sometimes (including today) it gets stuck, and unless I'm very careful about making sure it synced, it doesn't catch up and log the ride for the current day.


As you can see, that becomes the ONLY day I've missed.



Most days even have multiple rides.  Although that's more common now that I pedal somewhere, Ingress, and then pedal back or pedal somewhere else.  I've got a few weekends where I pedal to Caponi Art Park, pedal to Schultz beach, and then home.