THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

Little update for the masses. I know that you all must be devastated when you can’t get all of the Dan Miller that you need in life.

Today I took a half-day off work. The plans were to go see Dr. Manning, down at the Kelly O’Leary center at Children’s. She was very impressed with the progress that all 3 of the kids have made.

Before that though, I took some time to do some errands. Stopped by Meijer and picked up 12 cups of yogurt, 2 loaves of bread and 2 dozen eggs for 70 cents. Then I stopped by a secret location for purposes that may not be named, due to certain readers.

I had recently found a thread over on FatWallet about getting stuff for taking test drives. I’ve done this before (twice), picking up a free movie and then a $50 gas card. The one I did today was at a Suzuki for another $50 gas card. This was the first time I actually had to take the test drive. The first two times they just signed my card, since they don’t want to really waste their time on someone that isn’t going to buy a car. The front-desk guy here was rather snide to me, IMO. The salesman that I rode with was okay, plus he had an Australian accent, which of course makes everything better. Gas card should come in a few weeks/ months.

After the trip down to Children’s, we stopped by Home Depot to pick up the plants to fill the final section of the retaining wall, along with a few other things. We also had ordered some ReadyStrip a few days ago in our attempt to spruce up the kitchen. So we put it on the first cabinet today, we’ll see how it goes. WHAT’S THE NEXT ACTION, BABY?!?!?

Tomorrow is my lovely wife’s b-day, and we’ll be heading over to Donna’s house to drop off the kids and go out ring shopping (to replace the lost wedding band) and then out to eat at Olive Garden.

That’s right, folks. Not content with my madness on visiting all 88 Ohio counties in 24 hours, I have endeavored to find routes to visit all the counties in other states in 24 hours. Consulting this list of states by land area, I put the practical limit on 24 hour county trips somewhere around Alabama (28th in land area and 30th in total area). Though some of the larger states are also doable due to their small number of counties. Specifically, I have already figured out routes for Nevada (7th in land area and 17 counties) and Arizona (6th in land area but only 15 counties). I think Utah (12th in area and 29 counties) might be doable, but I wouldn’t count on getting Texas done in 24…

My latest project has been the neighboring state of Indiana. Slightly smaller than Ohio, but with 4 more counties (92 to 88), it seemed definitely doable. Here is my first completed route:

This route is estimated at 22 hours, 48 minutes. But now it’s time to spend a bit of time refining it. From my experience (and I am the self-declared world’s top expert in such matters), the best way to do this is to first get one completed route. Once you can see it graphically, it is easier to determine where you might be able to tweak it and save some time.

For instance, my first thought was whether or not it was worth time to cut north on the west side of Hendricks county (west-central) and pick up Marion county from the east after Hancock. It’s not.

It does cut 7 minutes off to get Hamilton (just north of Indianapolis) from the south off of I-465, which allows a straight line east from Howard to Madison to Grant (north-central), since you then don’t have to cut down south to get Hamilton. So the current best time is 22:41, but I have a few more ideas.

As always, I will keep you posted, even though I know nobody but me cares

I don’t know if any of you have seen it, but the latest issue of Time magazine has a cover story on autism / Autism Spectrum Disorders. Here’s links to the articles inside. I’m not sure what Time’s policy is on free-ness, and/or how long these links might be available / free. I just read the one and I had to watch a 30-second commercial to finish it.

Anyways - here they are:

• Inside the Autistic Mind
• A tale of two schools
• The most difficult decision of my life
• Education for Autistic Children - photo essay

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’ve been taking part in a Google / Da Vinci code web quest. There were 24 mini puzzles.

The last one was today. There is a final puzzle that is open to the first 10,000 people to finish the original 24 puzzles. So Jeff, Mike and I were all sitting around hitting refresh constantly to await the 1 p.m. release of today’s puzzle.

The 24 puzzles have all been quite easy and todays was no exception. I feel pretty confident that I was one of the first 10,000 - I was very quick today. There were 3 questions, and 2 of them I knew off the top of my head, and the other one just took 3 quick guesses till I got it.

If I am one of the finalists, then I will get a “cryptex” mailed to me that will have the instructions on how to win the whole thing. I doubt I’ll win the grand prize, but hey, free cryptex!

Yeah another one. If you didn’t see the one I posted an hour or so ago, scroll down. I seem to get blogging ideas in spurts. This one is about our school levy. As you may or may not be aware, the school levy in Madeira failed by 15 votes. (1680-1665 for those of you keeping score at home)

So Carolyn is on the Madeira email list and today she got an email from the Superintendent, mentioning that there were 97 ballots that were not counted (due to problems at the polling places) and 38 provisional ballots (usually people that have recently moved to the district and whose voter records are not updated yet).

The superintendent’s letter said (among other things) that since the final result of the levy was not known, that he is going to hold off on making the $1 million in cuts that they’d have to make if the levy failed, since the outcome is not yet decided.

So, the math/stats geek in me was wondering what the odds were that these 135 ballots would be enough to make up the 15 vote difference. One problem is that there is exactly 1 thing that I remember about my Probability and Statistics classes from college. And that is that when Jay heard that my teacher was “M. Levine”, he unleashed the witty quote (commenting on her age) “She’s 100 if she’s a day”, a quote which has incorporated its way into the Miller family lexicon

Unfortunately, that didn’t help me much in trying to figure out the odds. I thought that it seemed like a binomial distribution. Pascal’s Triangle figured to be heavily involved. My assumption was that there was a 50/50 shot that each vote would be pro or against, and 76 yes votes needed to pass the levy (75 yes would be 60 no and therefore a tie). Essentially it is the same question as if you flip a coin 135 times, what are the odds that 76 or more will be heads?

I used the Excel formula

=BINOMDIST(59,135,0.5,TRUE) (with 59 being 135-76), which comes out to 8.143%

That seemed really low, but upon further review, I believe that to be correct. There was one guy here that I asked that was adamant that the odds were 59/135. I was pretty sure that he was wrong, but he was so adamant that I gave it a second chance, but I am now 99% convinced that he was wrong, and the analysis above is correct.

I emailed a copy of this to the Superintendent too, because I thought he might be interested.

So…. I’ve been having a….problem lately…. with my pants….

And that is, my pants are too big!

As I have posted previously, I have recently been embarking on a bit of a health kick. I still am doing that, at least sort of. As you may or may not be aware, my “revolutionary” diet plan is called “eat less, exercise more”. I haven’t really been exercising more. I do exercise some, but that is mostly just incidental stuff - play basketball occasionally, mowing the lawn, walking around the block, working in the yard, etc.

But I have definitely been eating less. For awhile, I was tracking my caloric intake daily on a website. I haven’t been doing that lately, but I still have been trying to limit myself to approximately 2000 calories a day. Mostly what this entails is not snacking in the middle of the day, and especially at night.

I’ve also been trying to not eat late. I have always heard that not eating right before you go to bed can help weight loss. Though this seems to indicate that that is a myth (Myth #10). So I’m not sure about that. It seems to make sense to me, along with its corollary that eating right after you exercise is good since your metabolism is good. Though I suppose if you think about it, if you didn’t eat right after you exercise, then your high metabolism would be put to work burning off fat stores. So I’m not sure about the timing.

In any case, I feel good about my 2000 calorie diet. The results have been good so far too. As I posted back in March, I was at 210 lbs. We later got a new digital scale, which seemed to indicate that the other scale was off by 4 lbs, so I think my start weight was 214 lbs back on 3/22. I currently tip the scales at 194.4, as measured this morning. 20 lbs in a little more than a month and a half is a pace I don’t expect to continue. Part of that I think is due to the fact that I started (at 214) at the high side of general weight fluctuation.

Goal remains 170 lbs by next March. Phases 2 and 3 involve exercising more as well as eating better. Right now I am just concentrating on eating less. I do believe that exercising more and eating better are both important but I am not currently focusing on that.

I don’t really feel like I’ve lost that much weight, besides my pants problem. Though Carolyn says that she thinks I look skinnier, and I guess she looks at me more…

Now this is one of the funniest things that I have read in awhile. It’s a bit long, but the basic gist of it is that a group of about 50-80 people all dressed up in khakis and blue polo shirts and went into a Best Buy.

Not really impersonating Best Buy employees, but conveniently dressed exactly the same. Wacky hijinks!

Here’s a picture of the group that I am bandwidth stealing

The site has a very detailed write-up from several points of view, along with audio and video clips. Good read.