Check It Out

Links to cool places or things.

There are 1,524 posts filed in Check It Out (this is page 138 of 153).

Watts the price?

The News and Observer had a fascinating article today on how Progress Energy trades energy. John Murawski got a glimpse of Progress’s trading department in action as it negotiated electricity transactions worth millions of dollars.

It reminded me of my consulting gig with Weather Predict, a commercial weather forecasting company based in Raleigh. Weather Predict has a number of electric utilities as customers: customers for whom a one degree rise or fall in temperature equates to millions of dollars in fuel costs or savings.

I’ve often wondered how those customers used that information and now I know.

Zenoss book

Oh, I forgot to mention this before we left for vacation. For the past few months I’ve been helping edit Mike Badger’s new book, Zenoss Core Network and Systems Monitoring. Its a good introduction to Zenoss for those who might have been intimidated by it before.

Mike and I used to work together years ago at the Raleigh startup company formerly known as NeTraverse (and even more formerly as Lastfoot.Com). It was fun working with him again.

Who knows? I may write a book yet.

Video of substation fire

Yesterday I came across this cool video posted to YouTube from Florida Power and Light. In 2001, an electrical substation in Miami short-circuited and blew up – and all of it was caught on tape by a FPL employee. Watch as the high voltage slices through the substation, finishing itself off in a massive fireball. It reminds me of the fire at the substation at the corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard and East Street in 2001.
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Sunday’s fatal car wreck

Lee Wilson, Raleigh Fire Department’s semi-official photographer, just posted his photographs of the fatal Mustang accident that occurred at 2:30 Sunday morning near the bowling alley on Capital Boulevard. This is the accident where the driver was exceeding 105 MPH when his car left the road, hit a tree, and split in two.

I’m amazed that ANYONE walked away from that, but the odds are that all three might be alive if they’d been wearing seatbelts. That and if they were not driving 105 MPH.

Balloon man flies office chair for 50 miles

Remember my mythical weather balloon project? Its become totally lame in light of Jonathan Trappe’s trip in a chair tied to 55 balloons. Saturday, he strapped himself in at the Franklin County Airport and flew 50 miles east, reaching an altitude of 14,000 feet. My put-a-camera-on-a-balloon idea just doesn’t measure up.

And how is it that a guy can risk his life tied to an office chair floating at 14,000 feet but he can’t put up a webpage chronicling the project? There’s not even anything on Youtube yet.

Update 28 May 2010: Jonathan’s crossed the English Channel!

Hey makers! Check out the FlyCamOne2!

Remember the Neuros Recorder2, the tiny MPEG4 recorder I’ve raved about?

Old and busted! The new hotness is the FlyCamOne2. It is a gadget with 640×480 video and audio recording, built-in camera, and an infrared motion sensor. It records straight to an SD card. Heck, it even charges from a USB port! And the whole thing is just 100 bucks!

This thing might be small enough to mount on my mythical weather balloon project.

Update: Nevermind….the FlyCamOne2 is old and busted, too. That didn’t take long. The new hotness is the Oregon Scientific Action Cam, which apparently has better video (and the upcoming 3K release supports 4GB SD cards). The 2K model can be had for $92 at Circuit City.

Check out the videos [warning: self-playing flash] from the ATC 2K, including this cool model rocket video.