Well, for the first time in a bunch of years it’s snowing, and snowing hard. It looks like nearly a foot so far and it’s still going strong. I guess I’ll be up early tomorrow running the Troy Built blower, but it’s not my Gravely.
It’d be nice to be home, but at the same time it’d be kind of scarry at the same time. I’ve been trying to locate a dog catcher blower for the Gravely, but they all seem to be up in PA, and that’s a ways to drive (not to mention the absolutely shitty experience driving in PA is on a good day). Sure, the plow blade probably does the job, but I wonder how big of a job a half a mile of driveway really is. Don’t think I’ll find out this time around though. I am kind of bummed about not getting to try the buggy in the snow, I was really looking forward to that.
Oh well. Maybe next time.
I just saw an interesting article on yahoo. Seems that a fellow returned a book that was 99 years overdue to the library. The title caught my eye, being it was kind of relevant to political turmoil today. So I googled it.
Here is the news article on yahoo.
“Facts I Ought to Know about the Government of My Country.” by William H. Bartlett circa 1894.
Guess what, google digitized it, and can be downloaded in it’s entirety HERE.
I think I’m going to give it a read, just to see what things were like back then, before things started going sideways.
Ok, this is pretty cool. Admit it.
And while we’re on the subject of carbon, I wonder what the carbon footprint on broods like this are:
Besides personal air breathing (turning O2 into CO2), transportation, heating and entertaining, cooking, and God knows what else, what would be this gaggle’s annual carbon production? Also take into account all the carbon produced in the production of consumables (food). Puppy mills like this make me sick. And to top it off, they’re “reality show stars”. Keep squeezing ‘em out baby! Millions of potatos need moar reality TV.
I just read a couple of articles that kind of made me pause. The first was on this whole global warming BS that’s going on over in europe. The next was a cheery article on CERN’s first recorded proton collision.
What got me about the CERN article was the statement that the experiment was run at a level of “1.18 trillion electron volts”. Wait, wut? 1.18 trillion electron volts? ONE POINT ONE EIGHT TRILLION ELECTRON VOLTS? I’ve seen pictures of the large hardon collider, and that thing doesn’t look like it takes 8 D cell batteries, so I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that 1.18 trillion electron volts would probably fry a small town.
How many tonnes of CO2 were produced to generate 1.18 trillion electron volts for this one experiment that produced “a handful of collisions”? Fuck the CO2, SCIENCE needs to know. Here’s the quote from Yahoo: “They recorded a handful of collisions, and one of them looks quite nice, so it’s on their Web site,” she [Christine Sutton of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN] said. I do so hope they’re pretty and wallpaper sized for my computer.
And the real kicker: “CERN then plans more collisions at 1.18 TeV to give all experiments the opportunity to record data at that level, but new scientific discoveries are not expected before next year when the beams are ramped up still higher, to 3.5 TeV.” So, nothing new until they push it to 3.5. Wow. All that CO2, and the possibility that the world may just implode. Go science.
Oh, and check out the first article (on the global warming bs). I didn’t know China was a “developing” country. (Shocker alert: they got nukes).
Sauces:
Update: Found some info:
This still means, however, that the project will have been responsible for releasing 616,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the world’s atmosphere in 2009 in the pursuit of science extremely unlikely to yield any solutions to climate change this century.
From HERE
I particularly like the first comment at the bottom, where the commenter is evidently a scientist at CERN, who states that the LHC has already benifited mankind by giving us the world wide web (yeah, the internet). I thought Al Gore invented that shit.
Alcohol does increase the ass to floor adhesion coefecient.
Today was absolutely beautiful. Not too hot, not too cold, no bugs or snakes. Kinsee loves to go for walks, but in town they get real boring, with the same old sidewalks. Out in the stick it’s completely different. We logged roughly two miles up in virgin old growth forest. To tell the truth, I saw things (and parts of the property) that I had never seen before.
There’s one ridge that is covered in Karst topography (sinkholes), with a couple that would swallow a basketball court. And tons of dolomite outcrops that I really want to run my Axial crawler on. We hiked that ridge all the way to one of the property lines, then headed back on the road from the gate. Kinsee was stoked all the way, but I could tell she was getting hot and tired. When we got to the creek, she just laid down in it and got cooled off enough to make it back tot he house.
After that, I cut and split some firewood and rode over to the neighbors’ to chat a while and see if hunting season was still in (which it isn’t for the most part).
Kinsee then decided that another walk was in order, so we walked the loop. Up to the cabin, barn, through the wood trail, to the old house and back to the main house. That was the second mile. I know she’s wrecked, she’s down stairs now nodding off. She should be good for the rest of the week.
Finding new ground won’t be hard, but what will be is the terrain. Most of the farm is on the side of a mountain. I guess it’ll be short jaunts till she (and I) get used to climbing mountains to get new ground to put boots on.
Ok, so living out in the sticks isn’t the most high tech, but I think I got a couple things worked out. Number 1 on the list, TV. I really hate paying for a ton of channels that I never watch, and well, I get all of two over the air, what’s a guy to do?
Leverage some damned tech, that’s what. I had a Vista media center PC (note the past tense, see previous post about WD drives). Well, it’s got some new drives and is sporting 7. In a nutshell, I like it. I put both of my USB tuners on it and it now records two channels at once (freakin spiffy). Ok, so now I have some bigassed .wtv files, wtf is a wtv file you ask. It’s a new flavor of the old dvr-ms format. There are tools on the market that convert the latter to other formats, but that’s pedestrian and very ‘hands on’. Remember that Archos pmp? It doesn’t play wtv or dvr-ms files. So…
I got this idea, yeah, dangerous at times. If’ I’m going to be DVRing TV at Mom’s, why not boost her tech level and redo the whole media thing for her. She recently remodeled a room upstairs into a den. I ended up donating a 26” LCD TV and two 360’s, as well as the DVR PC. Now she’s got media extenders in the den and down in the living room. I had to relocate the router to the basement so I could get ethernet to the living room, but that wasn’t a big issue. The den 360 is riding G wireless. Not the best for streaming video, but it does a good job at any rate. But what about those wtv files?
Well, it just so happens that MS put out a product that is kind of odd for them. It does a number of things amazingly well, but is relatively inexpensive (stupidly inexpensive is more like it). Windows Home Server. Yeah, a server OS that runs on old hardware (and screams on server hardware), that does workstation backups, web hosting, and media archiving. This is where it gets juicy. When you tell media center to archive recorded TV, you can also tell it to convert the wtv files directly to wmv for the Zune (yup, the Archos plays wmv files like a champ).
Now, every night my DVR PC gets backed up, and the recorded tv gets converted to a file type I can simply copy to my Archos, take home, dock with my TV and enjoy my fav shows out in the boonies. Problem freakin solved. Oh, WHS can be had for $85 from amazon. If you’re interested in WHS, google it. HP and Acer also sell out of the box WHServers. I put it on my Dell PowerEdge SC440. I’m going to get a non-eval copy next week.
Well, that’s about it for now. Have a great holiday season.