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.
As a follow up to my previous posting, our dog, Devon is back to his old happy self. You wouldn’t know that he had his spleen removed except that his belly is missing some hair. It seems to be growing back. I doubt a human would have recovered from that procedure as well or as quickly.
He went in to the vet one day, stayed there over night for observation, and came home the next day. He never needed a collar to keep him from chewing on the staples they used to close him up. He had the staples removed the a week or so later.
Our dog, Devon, hasn’t been feeling well lately. He stopped eating, and wouldn’t do much other than just lay in his bed. Lisa took him to the vet, where they did an abdominal x-ray. Something looked amiss. His intestines were compressed by something. The vet suggested an ultrasound to determine the cause of the compression. It turns out, one ultrasound and a biopsy later that he has some benign tumors on his spleen. One of them is 6 cm x 6 cm. Since there didn’t seem to be any cancer associated with the tumors, the vet suggested that a splenectomy would help him with the issue, and that he didn’t really need a spleen to survive. At this point I asked myself: what does the spleen do? The answer, as always, is available at Wikipedia. It turns out, it is possible to survive without a spleen, gallbladder, or appendix. I’m sure some fiendish mind has considered this as another possible form of weight loss.
All of these procedures we have done may sound trivial, but they have been expensive: the xray visit was $450. The Ultrasound visit was $650. The splenectomy visit is set to cost $2000. I just hope that this solves his issues. He is a sweet dog, and we all want to see him back to his old friendly self. Note to self: look in to pet insurance before the pets get sick…
Earl Blumenauer chose to ignore the desires of his constituents and voted to table the discussion of the impeachment of Dick Cheney. He was the only Congressman from Oregon that did. I certainly won’t vote for him again. You can read Blumenauer’s contradictory opinion of impeachment here. He says he would do it in “a heartbeat, even if it is a longshot”, and won’t even vote to discuss it. That makes no sense.
In the video below, you can see Congressman Kucinich reading his resolution.
The Democrats missed a huge opportunity to begin the important discussion this nation must have regarding the conduct of this administration. The resolution was referred to committee, and I’m sure that’s the last we will see of it. At least Congressman Kucinich is willing to be a leader.
At least after reading this article it doesn’t seem to. For example:
Corn requires large doses of herbicide and nitrogen fertilizer and can cause more soil erosion than any other crop. And producing corn ethanol consumes just about as much fossil fuel as the ethanol itself replaces. Biodiesel from soybeans fares only slightly better.
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Much of what happens in its tanks and pipes is typical of any large distillery–after all, people have been turning grain into alcohol for eons. The corn is ground, mixed with water, and heated; added enzymes convert the starch into sugars. In a fermentation tank, yeast gradually turns the sugars into alcohol, which is sepa- rated from the water by distillation. The leftover, known as distillers’ grains, is fed to the cows, and some of the wastewater, high in nitrogen, is applied to fields as a fertilizer.
The process also gives off large amounts of carbon dioxide, and that’s where ethanol’s green label starts to brown. Most ethanol plants burn natural gas or, increasingly, coal to create the steam that drives the distillation, adding fossil- fuel emissions to the carbon dioxide emitted by the yeast. Growing the corn also requires nitrogen fertilizer, made with natural gas, and heavy use of diesel farm machinery. Some studies of the energy balance of corn ethanol–the amount of fossil energy needed to make ethanol versus the energy it produces–suggest that ethanol is a loser’s game, requiring more carbon-emitting fossil fuel than it displaces. Others give it a slight advantage. But however the accounting is done, corn ethanol is no greenhouse panacea.
