Jeff's Journal

Back in October of 2001, just two months after I moved into my apartment, my vacuum cleaner died while I was attempting to clean my apartment before my friend David came up from Bowling Green for the ACM’s Reflections|Projections conference. The vacuum didn’t catch fire, but it did smoke. In order to avoid having to live with the smell of the burnt out vacuum, I decided to sit it outside, against the building, in front of my car. When I woke up the next morning the vacuum cleaner was gone.

Now as far as I was concerned the vacuum cleaner was worthless; however, I have always wondered if perhaps the thief would plug in the vacuum and have it catch on fire. Wouldn’t that be justice? Since that time I’ve been convinced that anything set outside my apartment is destined to be quickly stolen. I have decided to test this hypothesis by attaching a large red bow to my door. I installed the bow just before 6:45pm today November 15, 2004. I will report back here when it is stolen.

Once again it’s been much too long since we spoke. My new job is going well, and I’ve made decent progress on my thesis research.

I’ve also done a lot of road tripping. Back on August 7, I traveled down to Southern Illinois to check out the railroad overpass in Benton where the train derailed onto I-57 and to hike a section of a rail-trail. I’ve gone home a couple of times, and each time I took some pictures for KentuckyRoads.com. And I’ve also followed several rail lines and added pictures to my railroad photography page.

I’ve also taken some trips of which I have no photographic evidence. I explored the Richardson Corn Maze in Spring Grove, Illinois, and I attended the Pumpkin Festival in Morton, Illinois. After the Pumpkin Festival, I followed the Illinois River from Peoria to Alton. I also went to St. Louis on October 8, and stood outside of the debate site to show my support for President Bush.

Since last we spoke lots of things have happened. There has been some sad news in the Carlyle family: my grandmother died in late July. There has also been some exciting news: I have a new job.

Read more below to find out what else I’ve been up to in the past month.

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As promised, I have finally charted the number of email messages I received each day, and it turns out that over 50% of the email I receive is spam.

Click the read full text link below to see the chart.

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I’ve once again graphed the amount of email I receive each day. This time the chart covers from Jan. 28 to July 11. It seems that the aggregate size of the mail I receive has been decreasing of late.

On July 9, 2004, a Union Pacific unit coal train with three locomotives and a consist of 136 cars derailed on an overpass over Interstate 57 near mile marker 71 between the towns of Benton and West City in Illinois. The train, on its way between East St. Louis, Illinois and Paducah, Kentucky was using Canadian National/Illinois Central track and many news outlets have erroneously reported that it was a CN/IC train. The derailment dumped eight train cars carrying a total of 800 tons of coal onto I-57. Though the falling rail cars and coal narrowly missed several vehicles below, reports are that there was only one relatively minor injury. The accident closed the highway in both directions between Benton and West Frankfort—about six miles to the south.

I found out about the incident late in the morning and decided I that I needed to travel the 160 miles south to Benton from Urbana to check out this accident. Variable message signs along the highway beginning at exit 96 on I-57 warned of the highways closure. I decided it would be best not to contribute to the traffic along the detour route (and who wants to sit in a traffic jam anyway), so I planned a course I thought would avoid the diverted traffic. I planned to exit onto Illinois 154 at exit 77 and take Illinois 37 and then local back roads to a railroad crossing just to the west of the railroad overpass; however, just south of exit 83 I began to encounter stopped traffic. So I turned around on the interstate—there was almost no northbound traffic at this point—and exited the highway at exit 83.

It turned out that southbound traffic was being diverted from the I-57 at exit 77—one exit north of the interchange nearest interchange to the accident. From exit 83, I made my way over to Illinois 37 and took back roads through the northern extremes of Benton and West City over to the railroad as I had originally planned. Despite the fact that traffic was being diverted from I-57 to part of Illinois 37, I encountered only very light traffic—aside from the tail end of a massive traffic jam leading into downtown Benton.

I had spotted the railroad crossing nearest the overpass on a map of the area. When I arrived at the crossing, I found it to be located in a rail yard storing hundreds of empty coal carrying rail cars. A Union Pacific locomotive was also in the yard; it appeared to be pulling cars from the tail end of the train that had derailed. The overpass over I-57, along with several derailed cars, was clearly visible from the crossing. Dozens of CN/IC employees and several pieces of heavy equipment were operating in the area. I spoke briefly to a local teenager who had ridden his bicycle to the crossing; we walked along the rails about a quarter of the way to the overpass before deciding we’d better not go much further.

After spending a few minutes at this crossing, I traveled to a street overpass over I-57 that was about a quarter of a mile north of the railroad overpass. The bridge was crowded with onlookers watching work on the highway below. Crews were working to remove the coal from the highway and load it on to waiting coal trucks. Vans from several television stations were parked on the highway along with a number of emergency vehicles and various other vehicles. From the bridge, I walked down a local street along the interstate to get closer to the bridge.

After awhile, I returned to the crossing that had been my original destination. By this time, a truck carrying two forty foot sections of railroad track had arrived. I found the driver and spoke to him for sometime. He had brought the load in from a yard in St. Louis. It was now nearly 7:00pm; he said that the railroad had asked him to be there by 6:00pm and now he was getting paid overtime.

I stayed in the area of the overpass for a few more hours waiting to see how the track was to be removed from this flatbed truck. In the meantime, CN/IC worked had positioned two derailed cars back onto the track, and the Union Pacific locomotive that had been in the yard pulled those and several other cars out of the area, clearing the main track into the area. Finally, around 9:30pm a railroad crane pulling a flat car and a short equipment train entered the area. There were some complications—power lines blocked the area the crane operator had originally planned to use and the truck driver had some trouble finding a way to position his trailer on the tracks; however, by 10:15pm the crane had lifted the two track sections onto it flat car.

After this, I left for Urbana. I figured that operation was probably the most interesting operation I could see up close. At exit 71, I found the local police still blocking the south bound entrance to the I-57; however, the northbound ramps were open. I-57 between exits 71 and 77 was a dark and desolate highway. The southbound lanes were still closed at exit 77, so the only cars I encountered were two northbound vehicles. Traffic that had been diverted along Illinois 37 re-entered the northbound lanes at exit 77. The local news had been reporting that the intent was to reopen the highway by midnight.

On the way back to Urbana, a large thunderstorm far to the north of I-70 provided a spectacular late show. I finally encountered the rain associated with this storm at exit 190; however, I had been seeing the lightning from the storm ever since I left Benton—120 highway miles to the south. Another somewhat momentous event occurred on the drive back: just short of the northbound rest area on I-57 at mile marker 166, my car reached 100,000 miles. When I took possession of the car back on April 21, 2001 it had a mere 120 miles on it. I am planning on it lasting at least another 100,000 miles.

More information on the derailment:

• St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Derailment snarls traffic, draws gawkers (July 9, 2004)
• The Southern Illinoisan: Train Wreck Eyewitness (July 9, 2004)
• The Southern Illinoisan: Train Derails on Interstate 57 Overpass (July 9, 2004)
• The Southern Illinoisan: I57 Train Derailment Photo Gallery (July 9, 2004)
• Associated Press (in Chicago Sun-Times): Coal Train Details Downstate (July 9, 2004)

For the first time since March 2000, I have new glasses. It's nice to see a world that is in focus and not covered in scratches.

Rock on.

School is finally over for the spring, and once again I can relax.

This summer should be interesting. I’m teaching my first class: CS 231—Software Architecture I. That starts on June 14th, so I have to find a way to entertain myself until then.

I’ve finally posted photographs from several road trips I’ve taken, some of which date to as far back as February 22nd. You can find these photos here:

• Hennepin Canal Road Trip – March 11, 2004
• Several Kentucky Road Trips dating from Feb. 22, 2004 to May 23, 2004

Also, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with railroads recently. I’ve started a new photo gallery devoted to my railroad photographs here.

My Spring Break this year (March 20-March 28) consisted of a couple of brief road trips, a visit home, and an ophthalmologist appointment.

I devoted the first Sunday of Spring Break to visiting the last few counties in Kentucky I hadn’t yet visited, so now I’ve visited all 120 of Kentucky’s counties. You can keep track of the counties I’ve visited over at mob-rule.com. As of today, I’ve visited 33.1% of the counties in the United States.

On Monday, I found out that I don’t necessarily need new glasses, but I’ve had my current pair for four years and they are starting to wear out. So it’s new glasses time for me.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, I headed out west to Oklahoma. I had the desire to go on a longer road trip, and Oklahoma was the nearest state I had never visited before. I covered lots of a ground those two days and saw a number of interesting things: Little Rock at rush hour, the Sonic made famous by the Simple Life, the Oklahoma City National Memorial, parts of the Oklahoma turnpike system, Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters, Branson, and Bass Pro Shops’ largest store (in Springfield, Missouri). You can browse a few pictures from my journeys below.

For your viewing pleasure (and my entertainment), I’ve once again graphed the size of the email delivered to me each day. This time I’ve used data collected for the eleven weeks between Jan. 28 and Apr. 13, and I’ve added a running average so we can identify general trends in the size of the mail delivered to me each day.

I suppose I should eventually graph the number of emails I receive each day; perhaps some sort of neato zero-sum graph divided spam and ham.

Today, I took a road trip with the intention to take in some Illinois history. I headed through Decatur and took US 51 south from there. The US 51 corridor, like the rest of central Illinois, is incredibly flat and boring, I happened to pass the Vandalia Correctional Center on the same day Gov. Blagojevich proposed closing it: there was a TV news van from WAND-25 there; however, what I went to Vandalia to see was one of Illinois’ old state houses. A stone building in downtown Vandalia served as Illinois’ state capital for three legislative sessions from 1836 through 1839 before the capital was moved to Springfield. Vandalia had been home to the state capital since 1820. It turns out that Abraham Lincoln had lead the effort to move the capital.

Old Illinois State House

I continued further south and west from Vandalia to Kaskaskia. Kaskaskia is one of the oldest towns in the Illinois country. It was founded by the French on the bank of the Mississippi River during the late 1600s or early 1700s. In 1703 the Mission Church of the Immaculate Conception was founded there. In July 4, 1778, General George Rogers Clark captured the town from the British for the American cause. This was his first victory in his campaign to take the western frontier from the British. For years afterwards, Kaskaskians rang a bell donated by the King of France every July 4 to celebrate Clark’s victory. This bell became known as the Liberty Bell of the West. When Illinois was organized as the Illinois Territory in 1818, Kaskaskia was named as its capital. Kaskaskia remained capital when Illinois became a state in 1818; however, the capital was moved to Vandalia in 1820.

Today Kaskaskia lies on the west side of the Mississippi. It can only be reached from Illinois by traveling into Missouri. A flood in 1881 caused the Mississippi River to cut through a strip of land separating it from the Kaskaskia River. This moved the course of the river eastward and forever cut off Kaskaskia from the rest of Illinois. Today, Kaskaskia is home to only 18 residents.

Starting in late January and for no particular reason, I started monitoring the total size of the email I received everyday. A program takes a measurement around noon US/Central time everyday.

It turns out that I get multi-megabyte amounts of email everyday. For the first couple of weeks I was getting 9 MB of email a day. Finally, around Feb. 11 the MyDoom virus died out, and my email suddenly shrank to a measly 3 MB per day.

I'm measuring the amount of email before I do any filtering on it, so I don't actually have to read most of this email. Procmail and SpamAssassin successfully filter out most of the stuff I don't want to read.

While browsing through the MSDN Subscriber Downloads today, I discovered that I could download Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and Windows Code Name "Longhorn" Preview. I decided to try them out, and I must say I really like the idea of running multiple OSes concurrently. I've never had a chance to try other tools like VMWare, so I don't know how Virtual PC compares, but it is nice to run Windows XP, Windows 3.1, and Longhorn on the same computer all at the same time.

I took a few screen shots and added them to the screen shots gallery.

Well, at least I'm not writing the 2003 Wrap-Up in June...

So, I went home for Thanksgiving and came back to an extremely busy three weeks of school before Christmas. I finished up all of my grading and projects late in the evening of Dec. 22 and drove home that night. I spent a couple of weeks at home this time. I came back up to school to spend New Years Eve in Chicago, and then drove down to Nashville on New Years Day. Over all, I did a lot driving.

I've been around Urbana for most of January, and used that time to get some work done on KentuckyRoads.com. I finally have a layout for the site that I am mostly pleased with.

Nearing the top of my TODO list is writing a little program to make adding these entries even more trivially easy, wish me luck.