31 Jan 2023 · Travel stats and photos for my January 2023 vacation, including the TWA hotel, Reykjavík, Akureyri, and mall cats.
Creating a Fictional Airline With ChatGPT
16 Jan 2023 · I was playing around with the ChatGPT language model, and accidentally ended up developing a fictional airline.
31 Dec 2022 · This year I spent 97 nights traveling, visited my 100th airport, flew 74 times (including my 1000th flight), and had some issues with rental cars.
Automating myTracks Driving Log Filtering with iOS Shortcuts
18 Dec 2022 · How I use iOS automation to record when I start and stop driving.
4 Dec 2022 · A size comparison of the Seattle Convention Center (Seattle, WA) and the Orange County Convention Center (Orlando, FL).
I’ve Flown Through One Hundred Airports
21 Jul 2022 · In 2013 I set a goal to travel through one hundred different airports. In July 2022, I finally achieved my goal.
9 Apr 2022 · All of the enclosed shopping malls in the United States, color coded by whether I’ve visited them.
31 Dec 2021 · My travel statistics for 2021.
Fixing Driving Log Inter-Track Gaps
21 Dec 2021 · How I fixed gaps in my driving log data.
A Water Salute and the Breaking of a Voucher Chain
30 May 2021 · I earned a United voucher from a trip I booked on another United voucher, but I finally broke that trend by taking United’s first flight between Columbus, Ohio and Portland, Maine.
How I Store My Driving Logs (2021)
9 Feb 2021 · I organized my driving logs into a single KML file and wrote a script to automatically import GPS data.
15 Jan 2021 · Using a gravity metaphor, I calculated the U.S. cities with the most attraction from my hometown based on population and distance.
1 Jan 2021 · On average, I’m furthest from home in mid-February each year.
31 Dec 2020 · My travel statistics for 2020. For obvious reasons, travel has been substantially lower than in recent years.
11 Nov 2020 · My job has had me fly a few times since COVID-19 restrictions started, and it’s an odd experience.
19 Sep 2020 · The geocaching game Ingress has been a great way to explore new cities when traveling, and it gave me the opportunity to create some maps as well.
20 Aug 2020 · Playing around with county parcel data to create maps of questionable usefulness.
29 Jul 2020 · A map showing the progression of ZIP Codes throughout the contiguous United States.
13 Jun 2020 · I combined a word cloud with a graph to show both how often each word appeared in song lyrics, and which words followed which other words.
26 Apr 2020 · For my 2010s Decade in Travel post, I manually created a heatmap showing the parts of the United States and world where I’d spent the most time traveling. Since I’ve been playing around with QGIS recently, I went ahead and used it to create a proper heatmap of my travels.
19 Apr 2020 · While I’m fortunate that my health and finances have both been well during the COVID-19 crisis, this has been the longest time I’ve been home for this long since I started traveling for work in 2009. I created a chart and some statistics about this time spent at home.
18 Jan 2020 · Map of U.S. airports with or without a gate 13.
1 Jan 2020 · My maps, charts, and other travel statistics for the entire decade of the 2010s.
31 Dec 2019 · My travel statistics for 2019.
Generating GPX and KML Maps with Ruby on Rails
1 May 2019 · How to use Ruby to create GPX and KML map data files.
Size Comparison of NRT and DFW
18 Feb 2019 · This past week, I took a trip to Tokyo via Dallas/Fort Worth. Since I just completed my Tokyo Narita terminal silhouette yesterday, I used it to create a size comparison of the two large airports I visited on my trip.
7 Feb 2019 · Using math to figure out which of my layovers were the most out of the way relative to the net distance traveled.
31 Dec 2018 · A summary of my 2018 hotels, flights, and driving.
20 Jul 2018 · After a trip to Nashville, I realized that the city’s central freeways mostly intersect at Y-intersections. That meant that I could draw Nashville’s freeways on a hexagonal grid.
8 Jul 2018 · Visualizing which US state abbreviations are one letter different from each other.
29 Apr 2018 · Some tips and tricks for your first car rental.
21 Apr 2018 · A visual representation of major cross-country interstate highways on a grid, inspired by Cameron Booth’s “Interstate Highways as a Subway Map.”
31 Dec 2017 · My 2017 travel statistics.
Switching Flight Historian to ICAO Regions
7 Sep 2017 · I used to manually keep track of which airports were within the contiguous United States in Flight Historian’s airport data, but I realized that I could determine airports’ regions by looking at their ICAO codes instead.
Creating Multiple Flash Messages in Ruby on Rails
5 Apr 2017 · On my Flight Historian application, a number of my pages make use of the Ruby flash and flash.now session messages for alerts. However, some of those pages needed to have multiple messages of the same type, which flash didn’t allow me to do. To fix this, I wrote my own messages structure.
Parsing Boarding Pass Dates in Ruby on Rails
16 Jan 2017 · Boarding pass barcodes contain data that’s useful for automatically filling in flight data, but their dates are particularly difficult to parse.
31 Dec 2016 · Overall, my travel increased slightly this year. Unlike in 2015, my travel was relatively evenly spread throughout the year.
4 Jul 2016 · In the summer of 2016, I visited every one of Ohio’s 88 counties.
10 Apr 2016 · With two recent work trips and a five-city European vacation, combined with the changes to summer time in the US and Europe, I’ve gone through quite a few time zone changes in the past six weeks.
Counting Visits to Airports: The Significance of Trip Sections
25 Feb 2016 · Why did I build my own flight log instead of using an existing one? One big contributor was that existing flight logs all seemed to double-count layovers.
31 Dec 2015 · 2015 was a relatively strong year for me for business travel, with the first and last thirds of the year being particularly busy. Due to that, my total flights and hotel nights just edged above 2014’s numbers, for another record year.
No, I’m Not Flying From Honolulu
1 Oct 2015 · Somehow, I managed to get an already used record locator for a trip I booked, which led to some issues on the airline’s website.
Size Comparison of the Busiest US Airports
21 Sep 2015 · The three busiest airports in the United States—Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Chicago-O’Hare—are all enormous, but I was wondering how big they are compared to each other.
Finding Your Tail Number (When You Can’t See It)
13 Sep 2015 · Every aircraft has a unique registration number, usually printed on or near the tail, which you can use to track which specific airplanes you’ve been on.
Creating a Regular Expression for US Tail Numbers
4 Sep 2015 · Each country has its own assigned format for tail numbers, so it’s possible to look at each tail number and determine what country it’s from. I wanted to create a regular expression to recognize US tail numbers.
4 and 6 Way Turbine Interchanges in Cities: Skylines
18 Apr 2015 · I decided to try to create a 6-way turbine highway interchange in Cities: Skylines.
31 Dec 2014 · 2014 has been a record travel year.
A Single Flight Round Trip at DFW
7 Nov 2014 · Due to a mechanical issue, my flight had to return to Dallas.
29 Aug 2014 · It’s not uncommon to have delays going through Chicago, but this Monday’s trip to Tulsa was a bit involved.
Percentage of Flights on American Airlines
31 Jul 2014 · For a while, over half of my total flights had been on American Airlines.
10 Jun 2014 · Comair’s strike meant I got to avoid the uselessly short flight between Cincinnati and Dayton.
Valentine’s Day Winter Weather
17 Feb 2014 · Due to the system delays caused by Winter Storm Pax, my flights home on 14 February went through rather a lot of transitions.
20 Jan 2014 · States I’ve driven in with my car versus states I’ve only driven in with other cars.
31 Dec 2013 · The end of 2013 is here, which seems like a perfect time to summarize my flight activity over the last year.
15 Sep 2013 · I was able to use BTS data to help me fill in a good portion of my missing tail numbers.
16 Aug 2013 · My long-term travel goal is to fly through 100 different airports.