And You Thought I Was Smart!

Apple iPadAs I reported on my Facebook page yesterday, I received an email shipping notification from Apple stating that my iPad had shipped. As is typically the case with a shipping notification, based on the tracking number, UPS stated it had no notion of the packages location initially but did state it was aware of the shipment. So this morning I checked again.

I expected the package to have originated from the Bay Area of California. Silly me, I was wrong.

Here is the tracking information:

Location	Date	Local Time	Description
GUANGZHOU, CN	03/30/2010	9:45 P.M.	EXPORT SCAN
	03/30/2010	9:42 P.M.	ORIGIN SCAN
SHENZHEN, CN	03/29/2010	4:45 P.M.	ORIGIN SCAN

Tracking results provided by UPS:  03/30/2010 1:33 P.M.  ET

Turns out the iPad is being shipped directly from the country of manufacture, China!

That got me to thinking about the journey my iPads are on:

• Where the heck is Shenzhen?
• How far away is it?
• How long would a direct flight from there to my home take?
• If my iPad were sound, how long would it take to reach me?
• Better yet, if my iPad were light traveling in fiber, or even in a vacuum, how long would it take to reach me?

I know, these are the standard questions everyone asks themselves when the are waiting for a package to be delivered.  Sorry if I am boring you…

Where does one turn to glean the answers to the questions that plagued me? Had I any math skills whatsoever, I could probably compute the answers myself, but I have none. (I grew up during the computer revolution.) Instead I have THE INTERNET! The Wizard of Oz can’t even match the internet.

I took to my iPhone an called up one of my dearest and most interesting applications. That application is called Wolfram|Alpha which is a front-end to a unique query/answer engine of the same name that is described by its creators, Wolfram Research, as a “computational knowledge engine.” Now I can’t do the engine, nor its inventors, any justice with a description here. Your best bet is check it out firsthand and walk through some of their demonstration queries to get a glimpse of the stunning and valuable contribution they have made to the web and its users. So, back to my story…

I “asked” Wolfram|Alpha about the distance between Shenzhen, China and Ontario, California, my hometown. Here is the output from my query:

Results from “Ontario, CA to SHENZHEN” query asked through Wolfram|Alpha

Pretty cool, huh?  When my iPad finally reaches me on Saturday it will have traveled over 7,300 miles and nearly 1/3 of the circumference of the earth.

And you thought I was smart!

ChasingSteel.com is Now Optimized For the iPhone and the Web

Being a huge fan of the iPhone, and all Apple products for that matter, I spent Saturday learning how to make ChasingSteel.com more iPhone friendly. 

I had to learn the details of my web site provider’s elements so that I could craft a CSS file that would take the standard web content and make it more appealing and usable in Safari on the iPhone without altering any of the content’s format on my main site.  A full day of effort later, I am proud to announce that ChasingSteel.com looks better on the iPhone!

I do plan on tweaking the format as time passes and I feel the need to do so.  However, I am happy with the first release.  It turned out that about a 10-line CSS file was all that was required. Man, technology is cool, once you understand what you need to do and why. Google played a big part in the effort, obviously.

I have tested the final product and it seems to function fine, however, you may encounter something that is a problem or doesn’t display right.  If so, please let me know so that I can correct it.

I hope you find the new design useful and it makes visiting ChasingSteel.com on the iPhone a better experience!

Some of My Recent iPhone Art

I was creating a few new icons for use on our Facebook page and as our Twitter avatar while I was commuting yesterday and thought I would share a couple with you.  Please let me know what you think of them.

Terminal Slide #8076

ChasingSteel Locomotive 

Here is a shot that I like from downtown LA. The tallest building is the U.S. Bank building, formerly known as the Library Towers building:

Downtown LA