I figured out yesterday why our upstairs is like an oven in the afternoon: our house has no ridge vents. That keeps the hot air trapped in our attic instead of venting out. The gable vents on the house might meet code, but that doesn’t mean they’re any good.

It’s much worse in our office, over the attic. The ceiling in that room is closer to the roof than the rest of the upstairs, thus it’s closer to the heat. Luckily, ridge vents aren’t too difficult to have installed on existing roofs. We’ve got to find some recommendations for local roofers to do the work.

I totally forgot to mention yesterday’s thirty-fifth anniversary of the first man on the moon.

NASA was always bigger than life to me as a kid. Who didn’t want to be an astronaut when they grew up? The great thing is that Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites might actually let everyday people get to space.

I found a UHF repeater up for bid from the state. It’s ancient, but might still be useful. I’m hoping it can be modified for amateur radio use (most radios can – we amateurs are crafty!) My plans for it have it either going up on the Wake County tower near my home for purely selfish reasons. Or, better yet, being set up on a tower in Garner.

Now you may wonder why I want a repeater in Garner, since I don’t live there anymore. The reason is that I decided it would be neat for the area’s growing Hispanic community to have their own repeater. I’d love to have a repeater in the area that’s primarily Spanish-speaking. It would provide another tool to help this community connect with others. It could help English-speakers learn some Spanish, and vice versa. And it might spur these new residents to become hams.

I might get out to see the repeater this week. If it’s a piece of junk, all plans are off. But if it isn’t, it could turn into a wonderful experiment in community-building.

Right after I bragged to Mike how I knew how DOCSIS works, I realized I really don’t. Thus, I found these interesting links on the Internet.

I’d love to put together a closed-circuit DOCSIS network to see how this stuff really works.
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DOCSIS home page
DOCSIS project home page
DOCSIS Server Project
Slashdot: Hybrid Community Networks

I called Time Warner Cable yesterday to find out the costs of Roadrunner Business Class service (motto: Same unreliability as normal Roadrunner, now for twice the cost!) I want to get service that I could use to host my home business websites. Turns out that some new packages will be debuting August 2nd. The most exciting one offers 768/768Kb and one static IP for $180/month.

Then again, what’s to stop me from ordering another residential cable modem and aggregating the two together? I already get 3 Mb/s down and 384 Kb/s up. If I bridged two cable modems together, that would give me an effective 6 Mb/s down and 768 Kb/s up for the cost of the low-end business service ($80). I’d have to do some tricker Dynamic DNS stuff to use two dynamic IPs, but I think it could be done.

I’ve started work on the Windsor Forest website. It’s using the latest Drupal, version 4.4.2, which looks really nice. I’ve done virtually no customization yet, so it’s ugly, but it’s a start.

Thanks to my brother Jeff for posting some Tivo’d pics of me at the Kerry rally. Note the hat.

Today’s thought for the day: The world is a global place.