I’ve forgotten..
Last year it meant a couple months of 40-80 degrees.
The year before it meant three months of 40-60 degrees.
And now it apparently means…
84 out of the past 87 days have averaged freezing temperatures or below..
26 days reached zero degrees or below…
I’m going to look up the causes of global warming and turn it into my personal To Do list.
I turned off email alerts for moderation of comments. I thought it passed through the filters and auto approved, but apparently not. I think I’m going to have to do like Erik and install Captcha. A necessary evil that will just make administration much easier. I just don’t have the time at the moment.. but I’ll install it soon and let you all know.
Well, that was quite the storm last night. Anne and I came home from meeting her parents at a restaurant, then visiting my grandfather in the hospital. Highway 280 had a couple of people stuck and stalled in a foot and a half of water. I switched to the right lane (northbound) because it was “only” about 8″ deep there, and the left lane was impassable without a lifted pickup truck. I noticed a car trying to pass us on the left, and I just thought, “that guy’s gonna stall” (along with other comments indicative of his lack of intelligence). Sure enough, he got up just about to being beside me (we were going about 20 mph), and slowed down to a halt… I guess some people don’t realize that water deep enough to go in your tailpipe will stall your car. I saw even more people like that on the news last night.
Anyway, we often get a small pond in our backyard in the spring due to overflow from the creek that borders the back edge of our yard. Now we have more like lake front property.. Our two neighbors to the north have about 80+% of their backyards submerged, including their sheds. It’s nice to live on a bit of a hill.. Anyway, you can see the pictures by clicking here.
I was checking out Erik’s blog, who posted his results to a dialect quiz (that he saw on Andrea’s site..), and I saw another quiz that I thought was cool (there are a whole bunch of them). The quiz I found the most interesting was “What age do you act?”
Apparently I’m 29 years old.. That’s pretty close, for better or worse.. 
Upon the suggestion of Erik, I decided to try the FreeBSD-based M0n0wall firewall/router/VPN concentrator. After some initial hardware issues, it works like a charm.
Initially I had problems with an old quad speed CD-ROM drive that is 10 yrs old, but I just tossed it in the trash after my DVD-ROM drive worked fine with it. Then I had problems using an older (5 yrs) 10/100 NIC, but I ended up just using two gigabit NICs that I have, and it didn’t have a problem after that. The box I have it in is a PIII 450 w/64MB of RAM. M0n0wall uses a CD-ROM to store the OS and applications, and a floppy disk to store a config.xml file for all of the configuration information.
I now have a fully-functioning router, a PPTP VPN concentrator (of which Erik helped me test via his remote connection), and a traffic shaper, so my VoIP connection can be given highest priority when in use. I don’t quite have that setup yet because I need to reset the VoIP box and it’s downstairs and very late, so I’m not going to wake our tenants for that…
Overall I’m very happy.. works at least as well as advertised.
Well I finally got around to upgrading Wordpress as Erik had advised me to do.. I did the same for Anne’s site, and applied themes to each of our sites. She can perhaps choose another one when she gets time. For now, I just have a random image generating theme at the top (had to remove the two default images of cats though… ech). I might find some cool images that kind of describe the different “trades” (hobbies) I’m interested in. I think that will fit the title of the site quite well. Of course, I’m not going to spend much time on it..
My sister Caryn gave birth to J’s and her firstborn (girl) at 11:41am EST this morning! She’s probably “big-boned” as she was 9lbs,11ozs and 21″ long! Name to be determined, but I’ll edit this post when they decide - Edit: Her name is Greta!
Congratulations, Caryn & J!
That was definitely quite the storm last night (as reported by Erik as well). We had straight line winds coming off our backyard last night (from the west) and it made a puddle in our dining room from going under the patio door.
After the initial storm hit, I grabbed our electric chainsaw, hedgetrimmer, and Anne and I took the truck around town (New Brighton, Arden Hills, Moundsview, Roseville) around 8:00pm to check out the damage and potentially help move trees out of the way. We found plenty that were down, including a 40′ pine pulled up and laying on Long Lake Road 3 blocks down from us.
We headed over to church (Roseville Covenant) and the entry area was flooded with about 1/2″ of water, but the wooden bench was moved out of the way and only the mats were soaked. Coming from the north down Hamline, just as it curves to the right, there was a huge tree in the middle of the road, sitting on a powerline that crosses the street.
Then we went to Perkins in Roseville… everything north of County C had power out, everything south still had power. There were a bunch of people at the Perkins, and we walked in and grabbed a couple pies and headed back home, and ate them with our tenants. We stopped at Hamline to check out that powerline again, and there was a police car on the north side as a warning.
At around 11pm I was beginning to think it wouldn’t be until morning that our power would come back on (it went out at 7:30 pm). So I called my dad and went up to Forest Lake to pick up his generator (they didn’t have anything but some rain up there). Brought it back around 12:30am and hooked it up to the two refrigerators and freezer, and a light, and ran the exhaust out the back window in the upper garage. It was relatively loud, but at least our food didn’t go bad (the milk probably is though..haven’t checked).
Our power was back on at about 8:00am, and there are chainsaws humming along near the road. “Rush hour” traffic down Long Lake road was essentially stopped as everyone gawked at the 40′ pine uprooted in the road. All in all, a very fun & interesting, though tiring, evening.
After reading a /. article that referenced emergency gadgets, I was led to find a very cool device for emergency use. It’s a hand crankable radio, flashlight, and battery charger. A 30-second crank will last 35 minutes.. You can plug your cell phone into it and it’ll charge that, too.. Or just listen to the radio or the weather station. The best part is it’s only fifty bucks. Link
There’s good news about the deployment situation. Since I was only really given less than two weeks notice, my commander pushed hard for me to be able to be delayed in when I have to start my training down south. It turns out that I won’t have to start training until mid-October! So we have an extra month or so to get things taken care of around the house, with work, etc. Much relief, and much more to do…
A few other huge benefits to the delay:
- I’ll be able to attend my friend Bobby’s bachelor party and more importantly, be a groomsmen in his wedding the first of October
- I’ll be able to go to a concert Anne, my family, and I have planned on
- I’ll be able to finish up a project at work that wouldn’t have gotten done otherwise
If you haven’t heard yet (we’ve told family and announced in church yesterday), I got the call that I’m deploying to Iraq, which will involve 6 months of training in the southern states, then flying across the pond for 12 months somewhere in Iraq; estimated return is March 2007.
I was initially supposed to be leaving this weekend (activated 18th, leave 21st), but my civilian employer and I are working with the military to request an extra month before I actually leave, since most of those that are going have known for months. I’ll be deploying as the Assistant Automation Officer for the 1st Brigade Combat Team (part of the 2,700 soldiers from MN, and 4,000 total, that are deploying), which means I’ll manage the data and networking infrastructure of the brigade. It should be an interesting challenge.
It’s also an answer to prayer, as Anne and I have been wondering when I’ll get the call — statistically speaking, it’s inevitable, and we’d rather have me go now than after we have kids, so I guess it’s God’s way of saying now is your time. We’d both appreciate your prayers and support through this trying time…
I finally installed a photo gallery program. The same one as Erik’s, but the newer v2.0 (RC2). You can get to it from the link on the right. The first album is of my niece Veronica’s 5th birthday party this last weekend.
Many more to come, now that I have a high ease of use in adding many pics…
As I was leaving for work today, I noticed our neighbors across the street are having a garage sale. I used to think this was a cool idea when I was a kid, and fun to go shopping at garage sales. It seems that any I’ve been to lately though, have been mostly clothes (surprise, not that exciting for me). Ebay has also somewhat made them obsolete.
My main point is that, if you itemize your tax return, it’s a bad idea to hold a garage sale since you’ll get far more from your items by donating them to goodwill and writing them off on your taxes (and 100% of your items “sold”). Even if you don’t itemize your return, you’ll be helping more people through donating and you probably make a few dollars an hour for your time of sitting there.
The only reason I can see to have a garage sale (Anne pointed this out to me), is for conversation and to meet people. Apparently, typically the elderly will hold one so they can talk to people, etc, which seems like a good idea actually.
We finally got some motivation and great weather to continue painting the house. We had only gotten the bottom half of the north and front sides done, but we went crazy on it this weekend. My dad was awesome and helped out for the whole day Saturday! Thanks, Dad!
Click below to see some progress pics of the house as it stood at the end of Sunday’s work. I’ll describe how far we are on each side. You can click on each picture to get a full-res image.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been realizing that the more people I talk to, the fewer people I find that actually watch the news anymore. Most people get their news either online periodically, or via the radio on the commute home. I find this interesting, and wonder if it’s a matter of convenience, or apathy?
I personally am probably a combination of the two, but I think the single biggest reason why I don’t watch the news on television is due to the very low signal to noise ratio. There is actually very, very little that is interesting to me with the news. Click below to see the typical breakdown as I see it:
Read the rest of this entry »
Grrr… We were going to go to Mateo & Rebecca’s to chill out (or warm up?) with them tonight, and I remembered I still needed to plug the oil drain and fill the bike up with oil, when I found out that the drain plug was stripped out. So I had to cancel the plans, take the drain pan off, and went to my parents’ to hopefully use my dad’s tap & die set to thread a new hole in the pan. Alas, he doesn’t have one big enough (it’s a pretty big hole), so we scraped the gasket off instead.
The bummer is that I was planning on taking my bike to the mechanic that got me the tires (and I’m going to be trading web design work for parts and labor.. how cool is that?!?), so I could swap them out. 14,400 miles on the same tires is a long, long time for a bike. Anyway, so instead I have to go get a gasket from Tousley, then go to my dad’s and pick up the drain pan which he is so kindly going to tap for me, and install it again, and fill with oil. Then I’ll regap my plugs again, since I didn’t have the service manual yet (have it now), and installed them anyway.
Time to go to bed; a new week starts in 18 minutes.
Okay, I’m (almost) as big of a fan of Firefox as the next person, but the memory leak is getting ridiculous. Let me qualify that statement by saying that I do have three plugins installed, and it may be one of those that is leaking — I need to remove them and double-check, but I just needed to vent first (of course).
Click the link below to check out just how many resources one instance of Firefox I had was using; obviously my relatively decent laptop was quite bogged down…
Read the rest of this entry »
Okay, so I’m going to chronolog the maintenance I did on our vehicles in the past week… I’ve been meaning to create a spreadsheet that lists the date, miles, and maintenance that I did for each vehicle so I can keep track, and I think I’ll do that tonight. Anyway, here goes:
(Italics means I still need to do this)
Honda Magna
Honda Accord
Nissan Sentra
It’s a great sense of accomplishment to take care of these babies.. and a bunch cheaper.
As a follow up to my post about needing to recover the motorcycle, it turns out it was just a bad battery. It’s been run down twice in its life (that I know of), so it was probably toward the end of its life anyway. One of my coworkers knows a great bike shop near where we work, and the owner is possibly willing to trade IT help for bike repair, so that might be a cool option. It’d be nice not to hassle with replacing the tires and things like that.
Anyway, the guy also has a battery tester, so I’ll be checking that out soon, and if the battery doesn’t hold up I’ll have to get a new one. They run about 60 bucks, which makes you think, “ugh, that really stinks”, but I calculated it out, and by riding my motorcycle instead of driving our car round trip to the office, I save $30 in gas alone each week! Crazy stuff, and another reason to love my bike.
Time to go to bed.. gotta get up in 5 hours… 
That title sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? No, I’m not in the hospital — I mean the bike had to be recovered. Mateo and I rode to Rosedale mall to pick up a chess set on Wednesday night, and when we got back out to our bikes, mine wouldn’t start. There’s a small block of harnesses and circuits that come straight off of the positive terminal on the battery, and when you try to start it, it clicks really fast. The battery is sending plenty of charge because the headlight is on bright as ever.
There are two fuses in that block, and both are fine — same with the other fuses (to the starter, etc). The harness looks fine — my Dad thinks it may be a broken wire in the harness, so I need to check that out this weekend. I also got 4 new spark plugs and 2 K&N air filters to put in the bike this weekend as well.
In case you couldn’t tell, Saturday morning is going to be a bigtime maintenance-fest for our vehicles… changing oil in every one, air filters, the stuff I said above on the bike, brakes & rotors on the Accord, putting our Nissan back together (the blower switch relay went bad, so the blower only worked on high). I think Mateo will be coming over to change the oil on his vehicles as well.