Category: life

where everything else happens

Sorry… been a bad few days.

Started mid-week… Got some bad news (I can’t really talk about.)

Then it started snowing. Never a good thing here in the Pacific Northwest.

Then my laptop died. The old G4 I’ve been driving for over 4 years. I installed the 10.5.6 update and it just rolled over and died. Kernel panic, SPOD, you name it. I tried restoring from backup. I tried re-installing. I even “nuked & paved”… SPOD & Kernel Panic. Sigh. It frustrated me so much that after the last failed re-install I applied some “percussive maintenance” and then tossed it across the room. As you can imagine, it did not take that very well.

I awoke this morning at 4, to over a foot of new snow. The Jetta spent the night in the front of the house, uncovered, as Sue’s CRD and the Jag are sleeping in the garage these days. The boys had a 12:40 flight to catch at Sea-Tac, 70 miles away. I started shovelling out the VW from the drift. I started right up despite the cold. I let it warm up while I got the Liberty CRD out and used it to clear a path down the 1/3rd of a mile down to the road for the Jetta. A couple of laps up and down the drive cleared the snow sufficiently. I packed a shovel, some gloves, and boots, along with the boys’ luggage into the car. The boys awakened and fed, we headed off towards the airport around 8. Once down off the hill and onto the freeway the roads were in much better shape. Still snow covered, but plowed, sanded, and well packed. We were able to move along at a good rate. The snow started again in earnest when we reached downtown Seattle. We arrived in a blizzard, with 2 hours to spare, got them checked in, and then I headed off to the Apple Store at Southcenter to pick up a new laptop.

The parking lot was empty, so I had a little fun doing handbrake turns and generally hooning about for a bit to improve my mood.

Grabbed a MacBook Pro. Most people would be thrilled about this. I was just grumpy.

Drove to my office through and around closed freeways, accidents, jack-knifed semis, and idiots.

Spent the rest of my day configuring a new machine and transferring my data to it. I have plenty of backups, and was able to restore an image of my previous laptop to an external hard drive yesterday. Moving to the new machine SHOULD be easy with Migration Assistant? Forget it. Failed twice.

Had to move everything over by hand. Still dealing with the fallout of that. iPhoto is the issue I’m dealing with at the moment. Sigh.

BastionHost Buys Nova Scotia Data Bunker « Data Center Knowledge

Future Home of a Colocation Facility?

BastionHost Buys Nova Scotia Data Bunker « Data Center Knowledge.

I always do a “rollseyes” when I see these “Datacenter in a Cold War Bunker” stories. One because they are just silly when they tout the “can survive a nuclear strike” capabilities… look, if ICBM’s are falling out of the sky, we’ve got much bigger problems than website uptime!

But wait... I need my email!!!

Second, the facilities in question were designed to house PEOPLE, not datacenters. The power & cooling infrastructure is designed to support something like 90 Watts per square foot at MOST. Datacenter these days wants 500 Watts per square foot minimum. Additionally, the infrastructure is all over FORTY YEARS OLD!

Dude, your draining the amps I need to run the cages next door, knock it off!

To relate it to something most of my readers can understand, that is like asking a early or mid-60s race car to be competitive today. First you have to completely restore it, rebuild it with all manner of modern upgrades, then watch as the new cars pass you like you are going backwards.

Sure the James Bond Supervillian image is cool for about 30 seconds. But after that, you have a facility that can never truly compete without dumping cubic tons of money into it.

This market can’t support the “bunker” model unless the grid power available to it is dirt cheap, and you’ve basically gutted the bunker and completely rebuilt it. At that point what do you have that is competitive?

Oh yeah, nuclear strike survival. When that becomes a selling point I’m getting out of this business.

Ronald Reagan on the Detroit Bailout.

A voice haunts Washington from the grave:

I love the imagery. I’ve always said that in the Bush II Era that we have become the Soviet Union:

* Toppling regimes and installing puppets? Check
* Suspension of Due Process & Habeas Corpus? Check.
* Surveillance of our own citizens? Check.
* Restrictions on Travel? (almost!)
* Gulags in hostile environments? Check.
* Party control of the media? Check Fox News!
* Rigged Elections? Check!
* Government control of the means of production? Coming soon!

And of course the clearest sign of all:

* Sending steroid-pumped Professional Athletes to the Olympics? CHECK!

Good thing Ronnie’s Alzheimer’s kept him happily ignorant in his declining
years, but I’m sure he started spinning once in the ground.

Speed in fact, does not kill.

No humans were killed or injured while making this photograph, while travelling in excess of the posted speed limit.

How often do you hear that old saw “speed kills” or “speed is the leading cause of car crashes” etc? The nannies all want us to slow down, “for our own safety.” As an example: about a year ago my home state of Washington lowered the speed limit on a long, straight section of I-5 I drive almost every day, from 70 down to 60 MPH. They did this in response to several horrific incidents where drivers crossed the median and went head-on into the opposite lanes. Every time one of these accidents happened there would be a State Patrol spokesperson on TV, or in the paper claiming that speed was the cause. So they added more speed patrols, handed out more speeding tickets, and eventually lowered the limit.

I never bought the idea that speed had ANYTHING to do with any of these accidents. Inattentive drivers was likely the cause in my mind. Inattentive, distracted, and poorly trained drivers. Talking on telephones. Watching DVDs(!) Talking on telephones. Spilling coffee. Talking on telephones. Did I mention talking on telephones? The State Patrolmen never did. All they ever talk about is speed.

Well, The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a comprehensive study, the first one in almost 30 years, seeking to understand the ACTUAL causes of car accidents. Guess what came out on top? Speeding? Nope. 41.3% of accidents are caused by driver errors which have nothing to do with speed. Not seeing hazards (20.9%), being distracted by something inside the car (10.6%), being distracted by something outside the car (3.7%), and just plain old inattention (3.6%), Unknown error being the remaining 2.5%)

So where did the KILLER SPEED end up?

Single digits: 8.4% were “too fast for conditions” which means that some percentage of those were UNDER the posted speed limit. Another 4.9% were “too fast for curve” which means that some percentage of those were UNDER the posted speed limit. By the way, the combination of falling asleep at the wheel and having a heart attack while driving added up to 5.5% so Speed seems pretty benign and remote compared to yakking on your cell phone, or just plain old not paying attention!

But of course lack of attention ads NO REVENUE to state and local coffers through fines.

At no point does this study heap any serious blame on speed, and speed alone. So next time some moron tells you that driving fast is dangerous, ask them to prove it.

You can read the whole study here.

Exhaustion & Energy.

Highway Hypnosis!

Last night I almost fell asleep at the wheel.

It is hard to believe because “endurance driving” is something I love… something of a hobby. Nothing to me is more pleasurable than hopping behind the wheel and reeling off 300-700 miles at a clip. Last night though, I started nodding off around 200 miles into the route. Thankfully I realized this, right as a sign loomed out of the darkness, as if speaking DIRECTLY to me: “Tired? Rest area ¾ mile.” I slapped myself on the left cheek (face you filthy-minded reader!) and made that short distance, pulled into a parking space, reclined my seat, and literally in an instant fell into a deep restful sleep lasting several hours.

Ironically I’ve been personally & professionally in something of a state of … well… not quite sleep but certainly in slumber. An event yesterday shook me awake from it and sent me on my way. What “my way” will be is uncertain actually, but is not relevant to this bit of story.

Stories. Stories are very important to our species. I found this quote while reading a bedtime story, Crow & Weasel by Barry Lopez to my sons when they were young; and it struck me as vitally important, lodging itself into my brain since that evening more than a decade ago…

“I would ask you to remember only this one thing, the stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other’s memory. This is how people care for themselves. One day you will be good storytellers. Never forget these obligations.” -Badger

Sometimes we do need stories more than food to stay alive. Last night however, I just needed a few hours rest to stay alive, and I found it at the Indian John Hill Rest Area on I-90. After I awoke and resumed my journey the events of the prior day exploded in my head. I realized that this is what caused my fatigue. My mind was reeling with galaxies of new information, new insight, new opportunities, and new ways of seeing things. I was thinking, NOT driving. Driving to me is a Zen-like activity. Complete concentration with minimal thought, only action. I become hyper-aware and my mind becomes blank… an input processor whose sole task is to absorb the environment around it – and my body becomes an output device at the whim of my mind. My drive last night was different because I could not empty my mind and drive. It was tumbling in somersaults through a new-found universe I had just discovered right under my nose, and applying all those thoughts and concepts to my future. It refilled my “gumption tank” but prevented me from performing the task at hand, namely safely driving home. My body surrendered to my brain there on Indian John Hill and I slept like a baby, despite the December chill.

Gumption Tank. That is a phrase I’m borrowing from another great story. Namely Robert Pirsig‘s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, one of the finest stories I have ever read. It is an honest inquiry into values, thought, and life. Pirsig’s story literally goes out beyond the edges, covering a lot of ground, some familiar enough to be mundane, other territory that lies beyond the edge of the map of our minds… where monsters lie. At several points in his story he speaks of motivation (gumption), and things that sap our motivations (gumption traps). As I drove across the dry scrublands of eastern Washington yesterday I recognized all the little gumption traps that I had fallen into, or attached themselves to me over the past few years… and when I awoke in the chill predawn on Indian Jim Hill I had climbed out of, or cast them all off. No matter what life has in store for me over the next few years, at least I have some gumption back.

Man, does it feel good.

Weekend Tinkering… with Chuck The Plumber!

I was never cited by any candidate in the recent presidential election, but I can use a pipe wrench.

In my quest for energy independence one of the skills I’ve picked up is plumbing, oddly enough.

I’ve plumbed up as much of my homebrew BioDiesel setup as possible. The reason being is that waste veggie oil is some seriously messy stuff. The less I have to touch it, the better. So I have created a system where once I have pre-filtered the waste oil from the restaurants into 5 gallon buckets and poured it into the settling tanks, I never touch the stuff again. It moves through pipes from tank to processor, from processor to wash, from wash to dry, from dry to upper settling, than upper settling to final storage tank, and finally from final storage into our cars. All this movement is motivated by pumps and controlled with ball-valves. It has a sort of Rube Goldberg look and feel, but it works. If I ever move house, I’ll put some serious thought into organizing it better and designing a more compact, logical placement of the various elements.

One limiter to my production capacity to date has been the size of my drying tank. It started life as a 30 gallon poly barrel I obtained from a car wash. This meant that 110 liters was about as large as I could go in a batch. I finally sourced a 55 Gallon poly barrel last week, so this weekend I’m preparing it for deployment. This means removing the plumbing from the old tank and installing it in the new one. One of the problems of my old tank was the standpipe was too high. This meant that I had to manually drain the last 15% or so from my dried BioDiesel. Since this sometimes has residual water in it, I would just dump it into the WVO settling tanks at the start of the process. I decided to cut down the standpipe at some point and now is as good a time as any. I clamped the pipe to my workbench and donning my fashionable Bill Nye The Science Guy protective eyewear along with ear protection, I fired up the Dremel with a cutting wheel and chopped that sucker in half! (have I ever mentioned how much I love the Dremel Tool? Man, what an awesome little thing!)

Not the prettiest cut in the world, but it doesn’t matter… it will be submerged in oil for most of it’s life.

Yes, I smoothed it out with a stone tip, and washed away any residual metal bits. The last thing I want in my injection pump is metal filings!

I also have built and am testing a Methanol Recovery processor. Frankly its scares the bejeezus out of me, but I need to render my glycerine byproduct inert and non-toxic prior to composting it. More news about that soon.

I also finally got around to a long-deferred task: Replacing the handle on my wood-splitting axe. Sounds odd, I know. We have 3 fireplaces and a big supply of firewood. Last winter was so mild that we barely burned anything.. well WINTER was mild but Spring was wild. Lots of snow, but it was never cold enough to really use the wood. The winter before last though? That was crazy. Late that winter I broke the handle of our axe. I found a replacement at our local hardware store, a nice stout hickory one. Seemed crazy to buy a whole new axe when I can just replace the handle. Since I had all the tools out I went after the remaining wood left in the axe head and eventually worked it out. The new handle went in very easy. All that Douglas Fir that has been sitting out in our wood pile for the past 2 years since the big windstorm brought down that tree should be about ready to split this year.