Solar Home Tour Comes to Amboy

Tomorrow we're going to be part of the solar home tour. Meanwhile the entire house is disheveled due to the ongoing tile flooring project. :|

There's probably a solar home tour near you (in North America).
solarwashington.org

North part of tour
5th location: Clark County Operations Center near St Johns and 78th St. This is a demonstration project similar to the PUD project only using Shell panels. Real Time data is available.
6th location: Zimmerman home. This is a passive solar, straw bale home.
7th location: Boehm home. This home utilizes passive solar design, solar hot water, geothermal heat pump, heat recovery ventilator and super insulation. This home is brand new and uses most of the state of the art green building and renewable energy technologies.

Fishing for Small Children

After a conversation this morning with Tom Buss, the redoubtable fly-fisherman, I've come to the conclusion that it isn't necessary to 'educate' young children on the killing, cleaning and eating of fish. A more valuable lesson, as Tom pointed out, is to teach them the conservation of fish until such time as you desperately need to eat them. Like the Apocalypse for instance.
Early in the Spring of this year, Heidi and I took Jamey and Arthur to a local pond where the catch is guaranteed. Though I tried to be discreet, Jamey observed me cutting his fish's head off and promptly exclaimed "Don't cut my head off!", which aroused some concern in my mind as to how secure he felt was his place in our family. Naturally I tried to fortify his sense of belonging and safety with reassuring words. However, my feeling is that words are weak when held next to the primal experience of seeing your (once trusted) father cut the head off of a small, defenseless creature.
As a result of that, as well as Tom's and my own experience as first-time fishermen, I now feel that is a mistake to assume kids must learn, on their first time out, what it fundamentally means to be an omnivore.
There will be time for that later.

Frost, Sun & Sunny Personalities

The weather this September has been just glorious. I have to remember that summer here is July-Sept. I don't know why I keep thinking it's June-Aug, but it's not.
Yesterday, I laid down on my hillside to read, and I just about cooked myself tender. I had to seek shade in the alders.

When I discovered frost on the car last week, I scraped some off to show Jamey. He looked at the ice on my fingertips for about 1 second. Then, whipping his head up to me, his mouth opened in an excited smile, eyebrows lifted, "That means my birthday is coming!!"
What a charmer.

My whole charming crew has been away to the beach for several days now, while the tilers lay the kitchen and bathroom.
I miss them.
They will be back today, soon.
Here are a few words I keep meaning to jot down:
Arthur:
lellow
biloculars
"I knoooww!" {index finger pointing straight up, mouth open, eyes looking sideways in thought}
"meooww"
"You mean 'Baby Kitty'"

Jamey:
"I have to tell you a question"
"Do you want to play the game where you be things?"
"Do you want to play Poof?"
pom pom blower
asthma gun
eggy spiders
(note: I've purchased him a more age-appropriate video game now, and he loves it. whew!)

Heidi, doesn't like me to share her cute idiosyncrasies publicly (or privately, for that matter), so I'll just report that I've missed her. Terribly. And that is in a sincere, earnest voice. Not the "can I have another bowl of white rice" voice.

Holy Bat, Human! 

Flashback Time

Guess what I found here:
http://www.freewebs.com/drussell/Download.htm

Well, I was going to put a picture of it, but for some reason I can't get it to upload.
Lief might be the only one who even slightly cares about this.
It's a video game from before one really needed video cards in one's PC to play video games. I'm not sure it's really even a video game, maybe just 'game' will suffice?

But hot-diggity-dog, what a fun game it is.
Yummy mango anyone?

101st Post!

I meant to mention that my last post was my 100th, but I forgot. So I'm mentioning that this one is the 101st. I'll let the reader determine which ones were 1-99.
Some links:
If you didn't already hear:
Opera becomes free at last.
Download it if you like. It has some nice features and is flying somewhat under the radar of hackers etc. A lot of stuff looks disjointed in it, since the vast majority of pages are developed for IE. But nothing too bad so far. I really like the notes feature; it's helpful for gathering topics and links that you might want to blog about later.

Rory Blyth's blog has some really funny moments. Example:

I spent my summer afternoons and evenings driving other people’s cars in and
out of the Marriott garage. It wasn’t very intellectually stimulating, but this
was offset by the perks of getting to breath exhaust for eight hours a day while
wearing a pseudo-naval uniform complete with ceremonious epaulets. What the job
lacked in pay, benefits, and prestige, it more than made up for in humiliation
and exposure to carcinogens. I also learned that most Mercedes from the mid 70s
smell like raisins on the inside. Don’t know why that is.

Red Sky at Night

Wow. Last night I saw the most intensely colored sunset in my memory. Did you ever see the movie "Hoffa", with Jack Nicholson? At the end, when he's threatening the mob boss with "I'm 'a do what I gotta do to get the union back!!", the sky behind the mob boss is so full of color it looks fake. Well, last night's sunset was MORE colorful that that!!

ASP.NET 2.0
Yesterday I went to a seminar on the upcoming ASP and Visual Studio 2005. It was pretty cool and got me pumped up (as usual) to try doing something with the new versions. Rory Blyth, who was extremely humorous and entertaining, was the presenter.
Some of the cool features I took notes on:

• With VS05, you don't need to set up a separate web server to test your ASP.NET apps, the test environment is included.


• Some cool controls are included, like the so-called breadcrumb control and log-in controls.


• SQL cache invalidation appears to give useful and granular information on data validity, which will help you present the most up-to-date data with very little effort.


• New project file-types called .masterpage and .skin are included, which provide a central place for structural template, and visual effects, respectively. The .skin file allows you to set the appearance of controls and is in addition to whatever .css design you've implemented.

A lot of the information that I saw presented live is contained in a series of pages with very simple links:
shrinkster.com/78r through 78z and 780, 781 and 782
One last cool thing in ASP.NET 2.0 is that you can deploy your application completely compiled, which means all of the asp pages are deployed as blank stubs. The source that is sent out to browsers is generated from your app completely. This prevents editing of the pages outside of the VS05 project.

Frost on the Punkin

For those of you not from Amboy, the English term for what is locally, and affectionately referred to as the 'punkin' is 'pumpkin'.
Yes, we had frost last night. As far as I know that is the first frost of fall. Though I don't pretend to be an authority since I rarely venture out until all the dew has dried. It confirms that my weather feed is dead wrong, as they are reporting lows in the 40's.
The house is and was perfectly toasty throughout the night.
It may be time to get a little more scientific in my observations, by getting a personal weather station and indoor thermometer to better analyze the performance of this house.

Color Schemes

Here's a cool tool for creating color schemes. It could really assist in designing a Web-site.
The super-cool bonus is that you may be able to use it to diagnose color-blindness. See the bottom right dropdown to render your color-scheme in the way that various color-blind persons would view it.
Color Scheme Generator

Tip of The Day

Should you decide to vacation in any part of the country subject to Atlantic or Gulf hurricanes, take your vacation during Winter or Spring. For heaven's sake, don't go during September!!
Hurricane Season is roughly June-November, with the worst being in the middle of that span.

Using Heat Yet?

This has been, perhaps, a freakishly warm September for us, but temperatures are now dipping into the 40's at night and we have yet to fire up any type of indoor heating.
Looks like we're expecting highs in the low 70's for the forseeable future (5-15 days). Given that we appear able to last nearly a week in cloudy and cold weather before the cold seeps into the house thoroughly, we appear set to cruise into October in comfortable warmth.

Microsoft Max - Waste of Time

I'm no Microsoft-hater. In general, I tend to think their approach must be the closest to being "right" if only because their success is undeniable.
However, I have to say today that I was suckered into trying Microsoft Max, because it was the first thing to come out of the PDC the day Scoble said something amazing was coming.

It's moves like this that earn MS the animosity of legions.
It's a photo-sharing software that is utterly dismal at loading and keeping track of where your pictures are. Each time I want to create a new "slideshow" I have to browse to the folder where I keep ALL of my photos, just because it isn't c:\documents and settings\my documents\my pictures, I have to *keep showing it over and over and over*. Actually that third 'over' is erroneous, because after two times, and finding no feature redeeming enough to justify this pain, I've quit bothering.
Who's in charge of deciding when software is good enough not to aggravate the users??
Summary: Microsoft Max = Sucktacular

New Blog Aggregation Site

Here's a new site that lists hot-topic headlines from the blog world. Choose either politics or tech. Refreshes every 5 minutes. There seem to be quite a lot of intelligent voices here.
Found it at Scobleizer, who, by the way has been promising some kind of huge, groundbreaking announcement from Microsoft at the Professional Developer's Conference today. He says to check memeorandum.com or google news after noon today (PDT) that's less than two hours from now.

Public Service Announcement

loose sounds like looss
lose sounds like looz

loose is the opposite of tight
lose is the opposite of find

Great Horned Owl Sighting

We had visitors this weekend. As such, we toured some local attractions; the Ape Cave and the Trail of Two forests. Both areas feature fascinating geologic features based on lava flows from Mt. St. Helens.
In the evening I was treated to views of some astral bodies documented by Messier. Globular clusters, a galaxy and more. All very beautiful, some like tiny puffs of white smoke and others like diamond-chips on impossibly smooth velvet.
Perhaps the most exciting, for me, was the sighting of a Great Horned owl, perched on top of a tree near the border of our property. With the telescope trained on it, we could watch it hoot and rotate it's head around. A few times I was able to make out, faintly, it's eyes as it looked my way. It appeared to be calling to another owl, as we heard a response after most of the hoots.
Monday, after such an eventful day of sights, we decided to venture out to the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge and were delighted by the landscape and the abundant wildlife. Perhaps most memorable were the Great White Egrets. Dazzlingly white, I remember seeing these in books as a child, but I'm not sure I've ever seen them live until yesterday. I counted 20.
We also saw numerous Great Blue Herons, some by the waters edge, others in the midst of large, dry fields. One was undoubtedly the least shy heron I've ever encountered. As we approached it in our car, (it was standing in the road) it slowly stalked across our path and into the grass on the other side. When we passed it, we couldn't have been more than 30 feet away, probably 20.

More to Come - NOAA

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2484.htm
NOAA RAISES THE 2005 ATLANTIC HURRICANE SEASON OUTLOOK
Bulk of This Season's Storms Still to Come
7-9 Hurricanes Predicted this year!

Floored By Europe's Generosity

I don't even know what to say about this:
http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=9546692&src=rss/topNews

"It's self-evident that we support the American bid," German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder told a news conference in Berlin.

He expected a massive two million barrels per day of oil to be shipped over the next month -- more or less offsetting lost output from the Gulf coast's battered refineries.
"We assume that would lead to there being sufficient energy reserves in the market and, second, we would wish the pressure on the prices of oil products to be lessened," Schroeder said.

Speaking at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Wales, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said: "Whatever the United States asks for they will be given."

New Orleans' Mayor Spittin' Mad

Quote from http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=9546874

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin blasted the federal government as emotions spilled
over in an angry radio interview, saying he was "pissed" at the lack of help the
historic city had received.

"I need reinforcements. I need troops, man.
I need 500 buses, man," he said. "Now get off your asses and fix this. Let's do
something and let's fix the biggest goddam crisis in the history of this
country."

"We authorized $8 billion to go to Iraq, lickety split. After
9/11 we gave the president unauthorized powers, lickety split to help New York
and other places," he said. "You mean to tell me that a place where most of your
oil is coming through ... that we can't figure out a way to authorize the
resources that we need," said Nagin.

Should I Buy This?

A solar-powered LED porch light.
http://store.yahoo.com/solardyne/sunraysolsec.html
This would save me from having to perform a seemingly difficult maneuver of running new wire through my straw wall.