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Walking around and painting the town


bernorange

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I suspect whoever recorded all that green did so in the early morning hours and/or on a weekend when there wasn't any traffic.

~~~

I went walking a new neighborhood this morning under the nearly new moon (just a slight crescent in the sky).  It was about 5:30am as I was approaching an intersection (walking on the sidewalk) and I became aware of a car approaching from behind.  The car slowed to a stop right behind me by the mailbox of the house on the corner.  The driver didn't kill the engine, get out or turn on any interior light on the car.  It seemed odd to me.  I proceeded to turn right at the intersection and another right one yard down.  I walked about one more yard down the street when I heard the car's engine approaching.  I got a bad feeling that there could be some fuckery afoot. I took a few steps up the nearest driveway (which thankfully was dark without illumination), held my phone to my chest and turned my back to the intersection to block any light from my phone.  The car drove past me and turned left at the cross street up ahead.  I continued walking and when I got to the cross street, I looked down the street to the left.  I saw the car coming back from a cross street to the cross street I was scrutinizing and it turned left (away from me).  It drove off and I didn't see it again.  It dawned on me later that this was probably someone delivering newspapers.  People still do that, right?

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So I woke up late this morning and didn't start my walk until after 6am.  As a consequence, I chose to walk around the grounds of a nearby park that has a bunch of soccer fields that remained virgin hexagon territory.  When I got there and saw all that open field, I was thinking:

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Anyway, even though it hasn't rained and the ground was dry and the fields were freshly cut to less than a quarter inch of grass, my socks and shoes were thoroughly soaked through after about 10 minutes of walking.  That tiny layer of grass really holds a lot of overnight/morning dew apparently.  Grassy areas really are better left to walking in the afternoon/evening hours.

Today I hit the 60k milestone for hexes discovered.  Huzzah!

 

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Walked an older neighborhood this morning.  Saw some pretty cool looking mature trees.  I also saw a house that had a single Live Oak in the front yard.  The diameter of the trunk eyeballed a couple feet up from the ground was easily between four and five feet in diameter.  I'm no expert, but I'm guessing that tree was easily 60 to 80 years old or older.  My inner Lorax was crying though because every branch on the tree had been cleared of all foliage.  The ends of every branch had been cut off (topped) like the tree was a Crepe Myrtle.  I have never seen that done before on a Live Oak.

Also, I was walking along a sidewalk at dark thirty and came upon a stretch where the street lights weren't working and none of the houses had any lights on.  I tripped on an uneven section of pavement (that I couldn't see), stumbled forward and caught my balance (hands free) with my face/chin just inches above my knee.  I didn't even drop my phone.  Not bad for an old man.

I much prefer walking in the street to sidewalks before sunrise.  Sidewalks are trecherous.

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I would have taken a pic of the atrocity if there had been sufficient light. It's hard to describe how shocking it looked with mere words.

I was up early this morning and went for a long walk.  Found another one those "neighborhoods" with the brick wall signs that turned out to be a single street.  Roughly half way down this street, I found a two story house that looked like a cube/box.  The front of the house had a slight indentation for the front door area, but otherwise looked like a giant white cube.  I don't even remember seeing a roof but I might not have been paying enough attention.  The house was ugly enough already, but as I walked past the house and looked back, I saw a (roughly 10' x 10') platform jutting out from the wall between the first and second floor over the driveway.  It was clearly intended to be a carport cover, but it was too small.  It also was not supported by any columns or cross beams.  It was framed, but looked from the street like a large sheet of plywood jutting out of the side of the house.  It looked like the wood was very slightly warping under it's own weight.  Totally bizarre.  I might go back some time to snap a pic. 

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Posted (edited)

I lost my streak Sunday. We were at a large outdoor mall that was prime check-in territory as my wife hiked around earning Noise Coins for the household, but my tiny breakfast got me through tent and table set-up, then it was blood-sugar-dive collapse-in-chair until I was given a chicken sandwich and got my groove back. But then the people had shown up, and I extroverted enough of em into visiting my booth so I could break even.

My friend in a "better" part of the mall grossed $3, and the person wanted to pay with a card. Breaking even did not seem so bad after that. That mall was a rocky place where our art could find no purchase.

About the streak, yeah I could have recovered it, but all I care about is the map, not the coins. So I guess I should have paid some coins to save the streak. I ain't no monument to rational thought.

The other day I took a tunnel under a street, and the app recorded it accurately. As opposed to when I walk under a parking deck, and it goes crazy.

Edited by RDCanecutter
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I'm not even sure what you have to do to continue the streak.  Obviously initiating a recording and claiming it when you are done (even just a few seconds worth) counts, but I think you just need to load the app really.  I'm on day 91 of my current streak and I seem to remember days where I just loaded the app without recording anything.  But I am getting old and my memory isn't the steel trap that it used to be.

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Silencio says each hex covers 43.870 square meters.  Internet math page tells me a path through that hexagon is roughly 21-25 feet.  Sometime you paint hexagons without traveling through most of it (ie. you just clip it).  If I take the total number of hexes that I've walked and multiply by 15 feet (to account for clipped hexes) and divide by 5280, I've walked around 270 miles with Silencio over the last few months.

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I got my walk on today. Plan was to hit a Hobby Lobby and walk every aisle N-S and E-W, make the map look like a giant crossword puzzle.

Instead, the satellites twerked my location so it looks like I noodled around half the store, snuck out back to play in the creek, vibrated through the wall to the gym next door, then ran around screaming all over the front parking lot.

Hexes is hexes.

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Yesterday while walking I spotted a coin on the pavement.  I stopped to pick it up.  I used a proper squatting form with a straight back to reach it and it seemed like every fiber of muscle in my thighs (quads, hammys, etc.) screamed in complaint at the same time (I definitely need to do more stretching).  Still, I managed to claim my prize - a beaten up 1992 Washington quarter dollar worth ... $0.25.  Huzzah!

Today while walking I spotted another quarter on the ground.  I thought that was pretty lucky until some minutes later when I happened upon another shiny metal object on the side of the road.  I couldn't tell if this was a coin or a battery (the kind you find in garage door openers/clickers).  I picked it up and it was so rough from being run over on the pavement that it was like sandpaper with tiny glass shards embedded - every surface felt like it was going to cut my fingers.  It turned out to be a nickel though you can barely see any of the features that identify it as such.

So, if this keeps up, and I invest these treasures with a 3% APY compounding monthly, I should be massively wealthy in about 4 billion years.  So I got that going for me, which is nice.

Also, I posted a couple of pics from my walks in the CR as a joke.  Enjoy:

https://www.surlyhorns.com/board/topic/38242-happy-halloween-neighbors-yard-decorations/

 

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The weather is turning quite nice for a before sunrise walk.  I got another early start this morning and actually walked a long street clear across my city into the next city this morning.  My legs feel a bit like jello today and I'm having to do some stretching exercises several times a day now that I'm walking so much.

I managed to make a detour this morning and snap a pic of that ugly cube house I mentioned previously:

cubehouse.thumb.jpg.4fc1a82c6582389b14058dfacef6b806.jpg

I farmed that tree in the foreground with purpose to block the view of the house's street number and the two football shaped signs in the landscaping bed with their kids' names.

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Down at the bottom of my street there are three houses almost in a row, they were fairly well-kept 1950s houses, but all 3 owners decided within a few years to rebuild and compete in the "Who looks the most like an inn full of hobbits drinking pints of proper 1420?" Think Olde English without the smell of shit.

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4 hours ago, bernorange said:

Happy Halloween there neighbor!  Would you like to experience our home made haunted house?  It totally won't collapse on you if a strong gust of wind happens to blow...

halloween.thumb.jpg.5e03741dcf55507584a1ccedeb515c10.jpg

That's gotta be the main Karens of the block, anybody else and they'd be screeching about it.

But it brings back fond memories of when some Older Kids (probably the Toltecs) built multi-floor child-scale castles out of building supplies left in a field. We had fun exploring them until my Dad found them and disassembled them. He also destroyed a tunnel we had almost caved in on ourselves.

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Been finding a lot of shiny treasures on the pavement over the last week or so.  I try not to stop and pick up any coin that isn't worth at least one whole cent, but sometimes I get fooled.  My eyes are eagle eyed on finding the glint of metal in the moonlight, but without my reading glasses on, it's hard to discern exactly what I've found until I get home.  Here's a pic with two treasures found over the last couple of days:

obverse.thumb.jpg.35d1c287033db461c2b842e3993f9827.jpg

reverse.thumb.jpg.de892b2efd4c6c6452f94433f69d8817.jpg

It's really hard to tell because it's so beat up, but the coin on the right is actually a quarter that's been smushed, bent and scratched to hell.  I have no idea what the token/coin on the left actually is.  The obverse has an image of a guitar, but the reverse is so scratched/damaged that I can't make out what the design was supposed to be.

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5 hours ago, bernorange said:

Been finding a lot of shiny treasures on the pavement over the last week or so. 

Mrs. Canecutter has the eagle eye for lost jewelry. There are a couple of found earrings I still need to examine. In the past she has scooped up 18k gold hoops that we sold for 50 bucks. I run them through a specific gravity rig that I cobbled together way back when. It's not high-precision, but it'll sort the gold from the plated copper.

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On 10/11/2024 at 10:16 AM, bernorange said:

Been finding a lot of shiny treasures on the pavement over the last week or so.  I try not to stop and pick up any coin that isn't worth at least one whole cent, but sometimes I get fooled.  My eyes are eagle eyed on finding the glint of metal in the moonlight, but without my reading glasses on, it's hard to discern exactly what I've found until I get home.  Here's a pic with two treasures found over the last couple of days:

obverse.thumb.jpg.35d1c287033db461c2b842e3993f9827.jpg

reverse.thumb.jpg.de892b2efd4c6c6452f94433f69d8817.jpg

It's really hard to tell because it's so beat up, but the coin on the right is actually a quarter that's been smushed, bent and scratched to hell.  I have no idea what the token/coin on the left actually is.  The obverse has an image of a guitar, but the reverse is so scratched/damaged that I can't make out what the design was supposed to be.

I wouldn’t have guessed that the token was from Chuck E. Cheese. It’s cool that people leave things behind like that.

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Silencio rolled out v2 of their app yesterday.  This morning I used it quite a bit on my morning walk.  They totally revamped the UI for the app and as someone used to the old app, it took a bit of experimenting to figure out how to navigate the new system.  I've compiled a few thoughts about the new app:

The Good

  • The live map display while recording works great and is very helpful for capturing hexes that I missed in previous sessions.  This is the best enhancement in the new app IMO.
  • The display of the timer is now presented in high contrast black letters with a larger font and its much easier for me to read without a pair of reading glasses.  This might not matter to you younger folks whose near/reading vision is still sharp, but in my case, this is a huge quality of life issue.
  • They expanded the number of "quests" (now called achievements) that you can earn.  It's a small thing, but it's nice to be rewarded for achieving occasional milestones.
  • They got rid of that sometimes frustrating "pick one of three multiplier rewards" system when finishing/claiming a recording session.  They now have a "Vegas one armed bandit slot machine style scrolling wheel".  I see that the wheel includes a 100x multiplier in it (which I missed by one tick once).

The Bad

  • On my phone, the display of the overlay with the decibel levels clips into the "your current position" marker on the map so I can't see hexes behind me at all or to the sides (partially clipped).  They need to allow us to minimize that overlay to make the live map easier to use when you are going for unclaimed hexes in an area you've previously traversed.
  • If you want to apply a bonus multiplier to your earned coins from a recording session now, you have to watch an ad first.  I suppose this could be a good thing in the long run for the health of the Silencio project, but it is annoying for someone that is trying to maximize their recording time and phone battery life.  I chose to watch ads several times and so far have seen a couple very short (~5s) ads for Kraken and a few longer ads (~15s) for "CTsomethingorother".

The Ugly

  • I don't know if it's the app or my phone, but I'm unable to record a venue check-in presently.  When I select that option and then select the nearby venue, the app shows a screen with recording info (decibels, record time) and then freezes.  It doesn't record anything.  If I click to abort the session, I get a confirmation pop-up that has two options to cancel the abort, but no option to confirm the abort.  I have to close the app completely and restart to reset to the main screen.
  • I thought this app was running more stable than the previous app.  I successfully recorded several sessions >20min each.  But on my way home, I had a recording that was running on 17min.  When I checked it again a minute or so later, the app had crashed and I lost the recording.  I had to restart the app several times as it would not start a new recording session - just gave me "something went wrong" error messages over and over - until it finally started working again.

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just reading this thread.

you could have literally taken my (paid off) house and wife (also paid off) from me in a bet that bernorange, of all people on this planet, would install an app that activates his phone's microphone to soak up recordings of all the ambient noise in his daily life.

you think you know someone...

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Was walking before sunrise this morning in a new neighborhood when I spotted some sidewalk chalk writing on a driveway.  It was dark so I couldn't initially make out what it said.  It caught my eye though, so I stopped to take it in.  Written in very fluid cursive (looked like a female's handwriting), the words announced: "OU still sucks!"  I laughed.

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3 minutes ago, bernorange said:

??? You should be able to log in to your old/previous account.  Just do a password recovery if you don't remember it.  That's what I had to do.

Nope. It told me to pick a new user name. I entered my old one, it wouldn't let me use it. Used a new one, now I can't get rid of it even if I delete the app and reload it.

It is dead to me.

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