It was the first day back to school for both kids. Hallie began middle school at Ligon and Travis entered fourth grade at Conn. Both kids were beaming this afternoon, very much where they need to be.
I feel like it’s going to be a great year for both of them!
LED bulb. Excuse the white balance as my phone camera has no setting for LED.
I was once an enthusiastic supporter of CFL bulbs, with their promise of long life. It didn’t take long before I determined those claims were bunk, leaving me with a pile of hazardous waste. I can’t say I pined for the says of incandescent bulbs but I was anxious to find something better than CFLs.
Then a few months ago I saw that Costco was selling deeply discounted LED bulbs. Normally $12, they were on sale for $6. Now that would normally be a lot of money for a light bulb but the promise of going 22 years before replacing it seemed to make it worthwhile. I bought one bulb for our den as a test and then bought a half-dozen of them for our bathroom. Why the bathroom? Because when hung upside-down, CFL bulbs burn out about 5 times as fast in my experience.
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Interesting commentary.
So if we already knew that the government was spying on us, what’s the big deal? And more to the point, as I often hear many Americans ask, if you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you care?
The big deal is simply this: once you allow the government to start breaking the law, no matter how seemingly justifiable the reason, you relinquish the contract between you and the government which establishes that the government works for and obeys you, the citizen—the employer—the master. And once the government starts operating outside the law, answerable to no one but itself, there’s no way to rein it back in, short of revolution.
Speaking of the N&O, I’m perplexed at the N&O’s portrayal of Russ Stephenson in recent stories, all written by municipal reporter Colin Campbell.
I like Colin. He and I both volunteer for Little Raleigh Radio, bringing an LPFM station to downtown Raleigh. He’s also interviewed me on occasion on Parks board matters and does a good job in his reporting. Still, his reporting on Russ has raised some questions.
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The News and Observer has gotten me talking about it, which in my view of the media is usually a good thing.
The criticism
Earlier this week, N&O Executive Editor John Drescher defended T. Keung Hui’s reporting on the Wake school superintendent search, a story on which he extensively quoted former board member Ron Margiotta. Margiotta must have been in on confidential board discussions, and some allege boardmember John Tedesco was the source. Says John:
Margiotta’s comments angered some board members, including chairman Keith Sutton. The board members didn’t dispute the accuracy of Margiotta’s comments. But they were upset because they believed a board member must have told Margiotta, who left the board at the end of 2011, about the vote for Merrill.
I am a staunch supporter of our “Sunshine laws” and the First Amendment. Anyone doing public business need to answer to the public for their actions. That said, the most important decision a public board can make is the hire of the administrator who will actually carry out its decisions. The law provides an exception to the Open Meetings law for these personnel decisions and rightfully so. Job candidates take a huge risk in interviewing for these positions because the likelihood is high that word will get back to their current employer.
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I plan to post a follow up to my solar PV post with a few more things you probably didn’t know about solar but that’s not this post. Instead, I want to rant if I may on one particular piece of my solar setup that annoys me.
It should seem pretty obvious that shade is the enemy of a Solar PV installation. That’s fine, you might say, but what if my panels are only partially shaded? Well, in an array of panels a few shaded cells can muck up the power supply far more drastically than it would at first seem. This paper sums up what happens:
In a series connected solar photovoltaic module, performance is adversely affected if all its cells are not equally illuminated. All the cells in a series array are forced to carry the same current even though a few cells under shade produce less photon current. The shaded cells may get reverse biased, acting as loads, draining power from fully illuminated cells. If the system is not appropriately protected, hot-spot problem can arise and in several cases, the system can be irreversibly damaged.
Irreversible damage? To my expensive solar installation? Yikes! What can we do?
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Fascinating.
“We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals,” according to John Hawks -University of Wisconsin anthropologist. “Five thousand years is such a small sliver of time – it’s 100 to 200 generations ago. That’s how long it’s been since some of these genes originated, and today they are in 30 or 40 percent of people because they’ve had such an advantage. It’s like ‘invasion of the body snatchers.’What’s really amazing about humans,” Hawks continued, “that is not true with most other species, is that for a long time we were just a little ape species in one corner of Africa, and weren’t genetically sampling anything like the potential we have now.”
via Human Evolutionary Change 100 Times Higher in Past 5,000 Years Today's Most Popular.
I was mining my blog for some unrelated information (isn’t that always how it starts, eh?) when I came upon this post I wrote last December after the job networking site LinkedIn had its entire password database stolen. I made the point that 99% of passwords being used out there are trivially cracked by modern computers.
The post made me recall how time and again how the federal government has sounded the alarm over how vulnerable American business is to cyberattack. In light of the revelations of massive, illegal NSA spying on Americans, these warnings seem patently ludicrous. You see, the whole time the federal government has played the cybersecurity good guy in public, in reality the last thing it wants is for American business to secure its data. Make it secure, they tell us. Just don’t make it too secure.
Yeah, right.
Solar PV deck
Solar PV is not rocket science. Solar PV literally once was rocket science, as one of its first practical applications was to power orbiting satellites. Apollo astronauts even left solar panels on the moon. Fortunately, a PV system no longer requires a NASA-sized budget nor an engineering degree. While the jargon may be confusing at first, you’ll quickly learn what’s what and things will start to make sense.
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We got back Friday evening from a great vacation in Abingdon, where much of our activity was spent outdoors.
I found a little cottage (the “Craftsman”) on the Cottages on the Creeper website and booked it last minute for a good price. We hauled our bikes with us, too, which allowed us to roam much of the town and Creeper trail without an automobile.
We had dinner Sunday evening at the Bone Fire Restaurant, mainly because it was one of the few places open. The meal was only so-so, and afterwards we roamed the town a bit before relaxing at our cottage.
Monday was spent riding the Creeper trail from Abingdon to Damascus and back, stopping in Damascus for lunch at the Blue Blaze Cafe. The Cafe had good food but had very slow service. Kelly and the kids wandered the nearby stores while I waited at the table for our order to arrive. Afterward we got ice cream at a corner shop, the Dairy King, before riding the 16 miles back to Abingdon. Oh, and it rained on us a bit while we were in and near Damascus.
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