Jon’s Corner of the Whirled

As I was loading Georgia in the car the other day, a woman, mid twenties, bent down and picked one of our tulips growing along side the sidewalk. I figured it must have been bent over or broken, or something. She walked down the sidewalk a little further and picked one of our daffodils. That was just too much.

Me: “Do you always pick people’s flowers?”
Her: “No, just today.”
Me: “That is pretty darn rude.”
Her: “Oh, sorry”

And she left with a smile. I wasn’t smiling.

It seems that our yard has been turned into a prison for gnomes. It made my day!

The weather station software stopped working a couple of times in the past 24 hours, so I tried another Serial to USB converter I had available. I’m pretty sure the converter that shipped with the La Crosse WS-2316 was the culprit because I could get things working by stopping the software, removing the USB device, reinsert it, and reenabling the software. The symptoms seem likely to be a driver issue with the original adapter. I guess I’ll know if that is true after this new adapter runs for a while.

I wonder if the protocol for the WS-2316 is published anywhere… It would be interesting to see what it provides and perhaps create some different software to process the data. After a bit of searching, it appears there is a little information on the protocol here and here. Maybe if I can find some free time, I’ll try to put together an application to get the data from the unit. I’m using the WUHU software right now, and it works ok, but I’d like to optimize the data I collect for what I am interested in.

Yesterday was another adventure with the aluminum extension ladder. Normally, it comes out when I need to clean the gutters, put up the Christmas lights, and remove the lights again. Occasionally, I use it to retrieve a stuck rocket, ball or airplane that somehow “accidentally” gets launched up on the roof. Yesterday was an all together different beast. This year, I got a weather station as a gift. Installing the rain gauge and sending unit was a piece of cake. The anemometer, and wind vane was a little more work. The manual suggested that it should be located three to four feet above the peak of the roof. It came with a 30 foot cord to connect to the sending unit, which made the whole configuration a little tricky. I decided the best thing to do was mount it on a mast on the chimney. This is where the adventure begins. I found the parts I needed on the Radio Shack website: the mast, and a mounting kit. The mounting kit comes with two stainless steel straps. Or should I say eighteen foot razor blades. Those things are sharp. I ended up working with gloves on to get them in place. The straps also have a lot of memory, which makes some things easier and some things more difficult. The difficult part is that our chimney is on one side of the house, so wrapping the straps around it involves spanning the area that you can’t stand next to. My wife is uncomfortable with heights, so I ended up having to do most of it by myself. The ratchets were not the best. The metal they are made of it quite soft, which makes them a little hard to get tight. Creative use of duct tape to hold the strapping in place temporarily, and a few choice swear words later, and the mast is mounted on our roof.

I’ve been having a problem with the USB->Serial adapter that came with the unit, as it seems stop responding occasionally, and I have to reboot the host computer. I’m guessing the Vista driver isn’t all that great. When it is working, you can see what the data looks like here. I added a Weather Underground widget on the right that displays information from it. If I can’t get the USB->Serial connection working consistently, I may have to make a host computer out of a machine with a dedicated serial port. It sounds like I could make the host machine Linux based too. That’s an adventure for another day.

Our cat, Benson, has this less than charming behavior he adopted this summer. Usually at three or four in the morning, he begins howling outside the hallway door. I’m convinced his howling could wake the dead. It usually means he wants to go outside. Lisa says it is a trait of Siamese to howl like that. He is more of a mutt than anything. In any regard, he woke my up yesterday at 3 AM, but I’m glad he did.

He wanted to go out as usual. When I was heading back to bed after letting him out, I heard an odd dripping sound coming from the bathroom. I thought maybe the shower had been left on, so I looked around. I realized the sound was coming from the basement. Our basement is finished, with a second bathroom. After poking around downstairs for about an hour, I finally isolated the problem to a section of one wall — there was a leak somewhere in there, and it had made the floor wet. I turned off the water to the house (something I need to add to our “going out of town” to do list) and started looking for a plumber. I came up with a list of five, and set up the list for Lisa to call when she was up and about.

We settled on Bruner Plumbing, and I’m glad we did. They had the leak fixed in a little over an hour. The charges were reasonable.

The odd thing about the leak was that it was in a copper pipe. Dean, the guy from Bruner who came out, had a theory that the pipe was under some stress that eventually lead to the failure. Some of the plumbing done by a previous owner was less than ideal, and this particular pipe seems to have been forced to pass through some holes in studs that weren’t on the level, and maybe a little tight. Looks like we will have to plan to redo the plumbing downstairs eventually.