Good weekend and catch-up

It was a great weekend. Hallie had her fourth birthday party Sunday at Durant Nature Park. Over thirty of her friends and family were there! The weather was perfect and everyone had a great time. Good to see my parents, too. We’ve been spending more and more time with them and its been great.

Kelly’s parents stayed with us this weekend, too. It was great to have them visit. They kept saying how nice the house looked. I didn’t realize they hadn’t been here since we’d done our painting and stuff. They brought with them some backyard playhouses which the kids absolutely love. In fact, I came home to a yard full of neighborhood kids. What a happy scene.

We finally planted our vegetable garden two weeks ago. Amazingly, the plants are still alive. We’ve got four tomato plants, one squash, one cucumber, and a handful of herbs. With a little TLC we should have a nice crop at the end of the summer.

I went to the doctor last week to get help fighting off a lingering cold. The nurse took my vitals and asked “are you an athlete?” I laughed and told her I get in a bike ride every now and then. “I can tell, “she said. This either means I’m in great shape, or I look like death warmed over and my vital signs seem good by comparison. I found it amusing, at any rate.

I’m feeling the itch to better apply my creativity. The subscription to Make Magazine has inspired me to hack some things together. Last night’s musical post came in the midst of me jamming out to my MP3 collection. Music is one of my stronger outlets, though many who know me have probably never heard me perform. I had some fun doodling at work Friday, too, which reminded me of my love of art. Sometimes I daydream of escaping the cubible to make a living with drawing or music. Or podcasting. Maybe podcasting where I draw and play music! Who knows?

Yet another outlet is, of course, MT.Net. I need to do more posting here. Look for more here shortly.

Deuces Are Wild

Deuces are Wild
Aerosmith
From the album Big Ones

Ohhaho… yeah e yeah now
Ohhaho… lah bi dea lah laahhhh

I love to look into your big brown eyes
They talk to me and seem to hypnotize
They say the things nobody dares to say
And I’m not about to let you fly away

My lover with no jet lag
We’re staying up all night in my sleeping bag
You got a heart beatin’ rhythm from the subterranean
I really love you little girl
I don’t need to explain
Continue reading →

USS Oriskany Sinking

The ex-USS Oriskany, a World War II-era Essex-class aircraft carrier, was sunk this year off the coast of Pensasola to become an artifical reef. A mailing list I’m on had a link to pictures of the sinking taken from a helicopter.

Pretty impressive to watch an aircraft carrier sink. Check out the photos here.

I can only imagine that the sinking of my ship, USS Elliot (DD-967) , was similar, though I believe it lies in deeper water and thus was probably not anchored like the Oriskany was (the anchors make the ship land on the seabed right side up).

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On The Wings Of A Dove

One of the best values for our money has been buying a bird feeder. We have one right off the back porch, viewable from the kitchen table. At times I can look out and see up to ten birds – typically cardinals and finches – chowing down on songbird mix. We even get an occasional furry bird, though we chase the squirrels away whenever we catch them.

Here’s a list of the birds we’ve seen from our yard (not necessarily at the feeder!):

Whew!

Cheap Thoughts: Chance Of Rain

Is there anything more worthless than the weather service information on “chance of rain?” Why bother to provide it at all? Rain is so hit-or-miss that any stats are essentially worthless.

If you think about it, the chance of somebody getting rain is pretty much 100 percent. It just may not be anywhere near you.

While driving around today, I noticed gathering clouds. Rain clouds, to be exact. They’re gonna rain on somebody nearby; the chance of that is 100 percent. Still, the official forecast says 40 percent.

What the forecast needs to say is the chance that rain will fall somewhere within the area. In addition to that, there needs to be a chance that that rain will fall on any particular spot, which is what is done now. Thus, there is a 100 percent chance of rain in the area, but only a 40 percent chance it will fall any particular place.

Or I can just poke my head outside every now and then to check. That might make more sense.

Tropospheric Ducting

This past weekend I spent some time installing my mobile ham radio into my car. The radio install went well, though disconnecting the battery cables had some reprocussions. My factory-installed car stereo has a stupid security code enabled which you have to enter each time the radio loses power. Like anyone would want to steal a boxy, Honda factory stereo! I had to track down the code before I could listen to any music.

Once I finally got my stereo working again, I found it tuned to a frequency just below the FM band: 87.7MHz. That frequency is in the low-VHF TV band, so I only a little surprised to hear something on that frequency. I was thinking it was Raleigh’s WRAL-TV Channel 5, but further listening proved it to be WECT Channel 6, the NBC affiliate in Wilmington! That’s a good 127 miles, according to Google Maps!

Yesterday, I also heard a repeater in Greensboro, itself a nice hop away. There’s been some pretty impressive tropospheric ducting going on lately.

NASA’s World Wind: Google Earth For The Rest Of Us

I think Google’s Google Earth is an amazing tool. I mean, being able to view any point on the globe like you’re flying over it is captivatingly cool. I’ve used it a few times to map out the route to a customer meeting ahead of time. The only problem with Google Earth is that it has no Linux client. Sure, you can run it under WINE, but its buggy: the screens make you dizzy and the menus don’t draw.

NASA has a lot of satellite imagery in its collection, so naturally they built their own mapping project called World Wind. World Wind offers access to all of NASA’s high-quality imagery, including all the data from the shuttle’s Topography Mission. The result is a rich, 3D view of the world.

Still, World Wind does not in itself offer a Linux client so an enterprising Russian hacker named Vitaliy Pronkin made his own WW2D is a free and open source, Java-based client to NASA’s World Wind data.

World Wind’s detail rivals Google Earth’s, though the WW2D client doesn’t offer 3D views (NASA’s version for Windows does). Still, its great to see that the Linux community now has a place to play with maps.

For more information:
News Forge article on World Wind
NASA World Wind
World Wind FAQ
WW2D – a Java World Wind Client

Applying The Heat Shield

Going on the bizarre theory that houses are easier to cool if the heat is kept out of them to begin with, I finally got around to installing a radiant barrier on our garage door. I got the idea last year when looking at solutions for our attic heat. A lot of university cooperative sites were steering people away from powered cooling (gable fans, for instance) in favor of passive solutions, like radiant barriers. Radiant barriers reflect heat back into space, before it can seep into the conditioned part of your house. I’d like to do the whole attic, but a test was needed first. The garage door is a good candidate for a radiant barrier, as it faces due west and gets cooked by the afternoon sun.

Applying the barrier wasn’t hard at all. It’s essentially bubble wrap covered by aluminum foil. All I had to do was cut it to fit the panels of my door. The barrier fit so snugly into the door panels that they didn’t even need to be fastened.

The results were immediately obvious. As I insulated panel after panel, I could feel the source of heat – the hot door – disappearing. An hour later, I had 95% of the door covered in foil. The windows are the only remaining problem, the sun’s rays still burn right through them.

Radiant barriers aren’t cheap. The 2′ x 25′ roll I used for the door cost around $23. Still, but the radiant barrier seems like a good candidate for the attic, especially considering our air conditioner can’t keep our house cool on hot summer days. If a barrier can cut the attic temperature from 140 degrees to 100, it will make a world of difference in our summertime comfort.

Gunslinger Followup

I think I may have solved the Curious Case of the Nighttime Gunshots. At a Memorial Day neighborhood party, a neighbor who’s a golfer sounded convinced it was the owner of Cheviot Hills golf course. He told me the owner is an older gentleman who owns the lone house out there. He thinks the guy picks up his rifle and takes an occasional shot at the rabbits and deer that are on his property.

Since the course is on county property and not in the city limits, he’s probably within his rights to shoot his gun. That doesn’t make me any happer that he’s doing it at 1 AM, though. Maybe I’ll have a friendly, neighbor-to-neighbor chat with him sometime and suggest he consider other, safer ways of passing the time.

Like golf, for instance.