May 2011

There were 37 posts published in May 2011 (this is page 1 of 4).

Repair conditioning

This week’s heat wave has taxed our upstairs AC unit to the maximum. I work upstairs every day and became alarmed at the rising temperatures there. The AC was not keeping up with its settings. I didn’t notice this last year but this is the first summer we’ve had our new upstairs office/bedroom, so any cooling issue has become more apparent.

I called up the neighborhood HVAC guy who went through his troubleshooting checklist. Refrigerant was fine, the compressor was fine. The blower coils were fine. Everything looked good. That is, until he checked the bottom of the blower in our attic.
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College and enterpreneurship

I read with interest PayPal co-founderPeter Thiel’s publicity stunt of paying 20 college students $100,000 each to drop out and innovate. He’s got a point when he says:

“Turning people into debt slaves when they’re college students is really not how we end up building a better society,” Thiel says.

Some of the most successful folks I know in the tech industry do not have computer science degrees. Most of them attended college and most have earned degrees, but many of their degrees are in fields other than computer science. In many cases they might as well have skipped college entirely.

I worked with one guy who was so smart it was freaking scary. He could code rings around our degreed developers and yet his formal education ended with high school (and half of that home-schooled). I’ve met enough of these folks that I can say with certainty that college is absolute a waste of time and money for some people.
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Tree crew makes short work of tall pine

My neighbor got a pair of her tall pine trees cut down on Thursday. I broke out my digital video camera to record the process for the second tree. It was fascinating to watch them work, and even more fascinating to watch it again on video.

I sped up the video to 5 times the normal speed to show how the tree guy went about dismantling this pine.

The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse – Businessweek

It’s a lonely calling. “Washington is full of Carnegie and Brookings Institutes with people who can tell you every option we have in Egypt or Pakistan,” laments Herr, who has a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. “Try and find someone who does that on the postal service. There aren’t many.”

Yet Herr finds the USPS fascinating: ubiquitous, relied on, and headed off a cliff. Its trucks are everywhere; few give it a second thought. “It’s one of those things that the public just takes for granted,” he says.”The mailman shows up, drops off the mail, and that’s it.”

via The U.S. Postal Service Nears Collapse – BusinessWeek.

Air France 447 black boxes

Ages ago when I was taking ground school, thinking I would get my pilot’s license, I asked my pilot friend some questions about the mechanics of flying. To my surprise my friend, a retired Eastern Airlines Boeing L-1011 pilot, could not answer my simple questions. I wondered to myself how a seasoned pilot could not know the basics. It seemed to me that, like many things people do in their jobs, the skill of flying a plane becomes second nature to many pilots and they no longer have to think about what they’re doing.

Except when they do have to think. Like in an emergency.

The news today is that investigators of the doomed Air France flight 447 have found evidence that pilots were pulling the nose up on the plane in reaction to the stall warning.
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Doggie arms race

The suspect

I’m locked in a doggie arms race when it comes to the garden. Once the plants were in the ground, I surrounded the garden with a two-foot-high wire fence, thinking that that would be enough disincentive for Rocket, our boneheaded Labrador, from wandering in and grazing.

I should’ve known better. At first I surrounded the garden on all sides but one, leaving a three-foot-wide opening to walk in. I was anticipating Rocket would be too lazy to walk all the way around. Needless to say, it didn’t take long to see that this wasn’t working. A few days later, I put up more wire fence to block it all the way around.

Then I saw the fence next to my new fence was dented outwards, as if a big, clumsy, lazy dog had not quite cleared it on his way out. I didn’t do much about that, preferring to keep an eye on it. Turns out I never saw that happen again: it seems the height was enough to keep him from jumping it.
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Shaken

Got a call tonight from my fellow coach of Travis’s T-ball team, which just wrapped up its season. He told me that his daughter was out riding her bike on Sunday and got hit by a car, sending her into the windshield! If it weren’t for the helmet she had been wearing she would’ve died instantly, he said. Instead, she suffered no brain damage but has a seriously broken leg that will take a long time to heal.

I was shaken when I heard that, as I’d just seen them the day before. She and my daughter, Hallie, had become fast friends during the games and practices. As a parent you try to protect your kids from harm but sometimes the unexpected happens.

I don’t know any more details about the accident but I am reminded of my recent post about many drivers just not respecting cyclists. This is one collision that could have had far more tragic consequences.

Please be careful out there. And hug your loved ones every day.

Gardening

As I mentioned before, I’ve been enjoying gardening this season: all two and a half weeks of it (ok, ok … I’m obsessed with it). My plants are going like gangbusters with the exception of my jalapeno pepper plants, which seem to be withering. They’re hanging on, though, so I haven’t given up on them yet.

I spend spare time during my day in the garden, pruning the plants. I was delighted to see many of my tomato plants sprouting flowers already. And, thanks to sites like vegetablegardener.com, I now know what kind of care these plants need. The 15 minutes I spent before work this morning out pruning my plants was some of the most delightful time I’ve enjoyed all day. There really is something zen-like about gardening.

After my plants were finally in the ground I saw how much our kids enjoyed gardening. That gave me the idea to start a gardening email list for Raleigh gardeners. After only a few days it had 65 enthusiastic subscribers. It’s now up to 67 and I’m expecting that to rise. If you’d like to join in and share your gardening experience, you can sign up for the list here.

Watch Lent Carr tell whoppers

I’ve been watching the raw video of Carr’s interview and my bullshit detectors have flat out exploded. Watch about 8:38 into the interview when he discusses his current job as a “Business Development Specialist” at Allstate Insurance and spends the next few seconds mumbling phrases about policies. Carr tap-danced around that question like Miss Teen South Carolina Caitlin Upton did. Nowhere on his LinkedIn profile (which is mostly fiction, granted) does he mention working for Allstate. Nor do any Google searches turn up any hits linking him with Allstate.

The guy isn’t simply a liar, he’s a pathological liar. It makes me feel sorry for him.

Lent Carr and District C

Lundsford Lane’s once-in-a-blue-moon blogging at Below the Beltline has apparently attracted the press’s attention to Lent Carr, the District C candidate for Raleigh City Council. About the same time Lane got wise to Carr I had done the same, though I chose not to post about Carr because frankly I was embarrassed by the guy.

Carr seems to me to be a con man. A harmless one, perhaps, but a con man all the same. His so-called credentials are completely bogus. Anyone can find that out with a few targeted Google searches. Like Lane, I’ve done my homework and can back Lane up on what he says.

Lane also reports that Carr no longer lives in District C, which is going to make it tough for folks who do live in District C to support him. If he has any supporters, that is: the folks I know around here know better than to fall for this guy’s tricks.

On the other hand, I am happy to see that Eugene Weeks is running to keep his District C seat. Eugene is a hard worker and a dedicated public servant. He doesn’t play the games that some folks in Southeast Raleigh play. He is his own man and has served District C very well in the time since he was appointed to replace James West. Things are looking up for my side of town.

Now if only Lane could find the time to post something more than once a quarter. Come on, Lane! Surely there is more dirt out there to be had!

Update 9:20 PM: WRAL ran their story on Carr on this evening’s newscast. The web version has more details.