Ready for Halloween Trick-or-Treaters but suspect the 32 °F and dusting of snow is going to keep counts low. 🎃👻🥶
Snow isn’t a great way to start Halloween! 🎃 👻🥶
iMac Upgrade
It has been time for us to upgrade our 27" 3.7 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i5 (2019) and 27" 3.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 (2017) both with 2TB Fusion Drives. The later can’t even upgrade to macOS Sonoma.
The iMac is the form factor I wanted, but I wasn’t willing to go with an M1 Chip in 2023! With the “Scary Fast” announcements tonight and the Apple Silicon M3 iMacs I can get the chip I want! Placed orders for two of them, both with 24GB of unified memory and 2TB SSD storage. Decided to get the Blue and Orange combination.
Apple Silicon M3 is here! A MacBook Pro with an M3 Max has an incredible amount of power. Wow! I’ll be ordering two of the iMacs with M3.
We saw Spirited Away at Willow Creek Theater today as part of Ghibli Festival. First time we had seen it and enjoyed it a lot. 🍿
I’m gobsmacked by the awesomeness of RSS Club. I want to figure out something to publish RSS only now. And the logo is brilliant! I must make this a sticker!
Excited to see the optical fiber connection installed to the outside of our cabin! Still won’t be setup until spring but this is a big milestone!
Last night Eight Sleep Autopilot made 25 temperature adjustments throughout the night. I can’t speak to the specifics (I was sleeping!) but I did sleep well and was comfortable all night. 😴
We made the final batch of candles for the Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser tonight. We have 204 candles with 8 different scents! Looking forward to selling them all and raising $5,100 for four charitable organizations!
Took a pre-order for the Things 4 Good Candle Fundraiser and the purchase was made with Bitcoin Lightning! ⚡️ That is the first sale for our annual fundraiser done using crypto! No fees, instantaneous settlement. Magic. 🙌
Seeing Laamar & Lanue at the Dakota tonight. A collaboration between Geoffrey Lamar Wilson and Lanue. Never heard them before but am enjoying it. 🎶
Rainy dusk in Downtown Minneapolis.
I claimed my POAP for participating in the KZG Ceremony. This is one of the POAPs that I will treasure for a long time, right alongside the ENS 6th Anniversary and the Ethereum Merge POAP.
Had a great time at Big Cedar Lodge and driving home today. Departed at 6:40 am after being the first customers at Truman’s cafe for coffee. 9 hours of driving with a couple stops on the way. Final total of 1,338 miles in four days!
Dogwood Canyon Pasture Raised Premier 32 oz Bison Tomahawk at Osage Restaurant. 🦬
View from our table at Osage Restaurant at Top of the Rock, Big Cedar Lodge.
Big Cedar Lodge Signature Old Fashioned (Russell’s Reserve 10 yr). Osage Restaurant at Top of the Rock. 🥃
We successfully finished “The Zeros” escape room at Escape Code today with 1 second on the clock! We missed one clue so had to make an informed guess at the time end, but it worked out!
See list of escape rooms.
Road Sign Math Rebooted
As you drive on I-94 East toward the Twin Cities there is a wonderful road sign that always made me smile. I saw it regularly when I would return from visiting family in North Dakota. The sign had this wonderful mathematical significance to it. 3 times 33 equals 99.
After seeing this sign for a while I kept wondering how many other mathematically significant road signs are there? And just like that the idea for Road Sign Math was born.
History
Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine I can see the history. I launched the website in February 2005 with a simple post. Initially it was a blog that I posted my signs on, but people were also welcome to send photos of their own mathematically significant signs as well. Since multiple people were playing, there needed to be some rules on how to play.
We had multiple people playing and I thought it would be fun to have a scoring system and a scoreboard for players as well as states!
I believe we got signs from all 50 states. We had a sign from the Serengeti. We had signs from most continents. In 2011 I moved the site from a blog to a wiki with the idea that folks could submit and maintain their own signs. This was all before the rise of mobile phones. When the iPhone arrived I thought it would be amazing to make an iOS app to capture road signs, but that never happened.
In 2016, after 11 years of running this site and several others, I made the decision to do some technical downsizing and turned off a number of hobby projects I had been running.
Road Sign Math was one of the sites shut down. I let the domain name expire and squatters have had the domain ever since, and still do. But the idea of Road Sign Math has never left completely…
Reboot!
In 2021 I registered the domain roadsignmath.xyz. That is an even better domain name for Road Sign Math!
I’ve had multiple sessions looking through various backups thinking about relaunching Road Sign Math in all its wonder, but I’ve got gaps in my archives. Also, the transition from blog to wiki made the archive hard to track.
On some recent road trips we’ve been grabbing some signs. And earlier this year I captured anew the Genesis (2023) sign.
I decided it was time to reboot it, not relaunch it. Start back as a simple blog with the awesome MathJax library. Just my signs. No scoring system or leaderboards. Just a fun place to share mathematically significant road signs.
Consider it my little contribution to keeping the Web weird. 😎