Winter Mountian

Sunset

Bread!

I made bread. It was the best bread I have ever had. Hot out of the oven with a bit of real butter. Mmm. It is amazing how easy, inexpensive, filling and tasty it is.

Snow Around These Parts

One of the surprising things about Colorado is that there usually is no snow on the ground. That changed yesterday.
There was some in snow on the foothills too.

Weather Station

I figured with the new job and all I should start paying attention to the weather. Ended up picking up a top of the line (Oregon Scientific Weather 500, $41 at Target) consumer model. I don't have anywhere to put a rain or wind guage so no need to go for the professional version.

Once setup it operates very well. The setup is a pain in the hind end as the documentation is not very complete. One of my largest problems is that neighbors already had sensors and I needed to set mine to use the third frequency channel. That took a good 20 minutes to figure out. Really very easy. Just hold the up arrow and mode button to get it to detect the remote sensor and then hit the up or down arrows to change which frequency it should be sensing on.

For the outside sensor I needed to be a bit creative to be able to keep it dry. This setup is going to be modified by cutting the ends of the lid off and then putting the cover on as normal.

Rusted Spark Plug

This is what happens when you don't change your spark plugs as often as you should. Then you have to get luckey to get the threads out, or take the entire engine apart.

Fire

As the fire was sweeping towards my apartment and the fire department was reverse 911 calling people to tell them to evacuate, I took a second to notice the small flame in my fireplace safely burning.

It is good to be reminded every once in a while who is really in charge.

Several Observations

I have an internet connection!

Chairs are the foundation of living a comfortable life. Don’t believe me? Just try to go through a day without a chair, couch or bed (sleeping bag + mat are OK).

When constructing a house, make the switches and dials that people interact with on a frequent basis the same level.

A corollary to the previous, make light switches that are on the wall when you enter a room, the same distance away from the doorway.

It is strange being “young” and feeling like I have to go to bed at 6pm because I am so exhausted. Granted the day started at 6:30am and I was moving household items all over the apartment all day long. And I am sick.

I am now a card carry Libertarian.

Valkyrie Chronicles

I purchased Valkyrie Chronicles (video game for the PS3) when it came out. Ever since I have been busy with school or sick. Now I come to a point in my life where I can procrastinate for a few days and relax a little bit, so I started playing.

The game is explicitly a story, the way you advance is by interacting with a book. This is one type of game that I really like, there is a strong story that you can connect with. The writing is fairly good. It is a fantasy world and there are some unlikely situations, and some lea way is need for that, but the suspension of disbelief isn’t as difficult as for watching a modern block buster movie. Heck it is actually worth it.

There are several main characters. There is a male who would rather be peaceful, but since violence is thrust upon him, he is going to defend his family and country. His adopted sister is a racial minority who stands up to murders to defend a pregnant woman, then saves her brother with some quick thinking. There is another female lead who is the love interest. Unlike every other love interest or woman character that I have seen of late this one is strong, defends her people and country. Yes she is good looking but she dresses fairly modestly.

There is some outright racism against the sister at one point. This isn’t adequately dealt with. She goes on to show that so is not only willing to help the team but does some major good.

Moving onto how the game works there are two things that really stood out to me. One is that they slowly introducing features. This keeps you from having to learn everything about the game all at once. This works well from keep you from getting over loaded and either giving up or simply ignoring some parts of the game.

The graphics are very interesting. A cell shading effect is employed to very good effect.

Pancake

That was one big tasty pancake. It took two people to flip it.

Cold and Wet

Not fine art, but it sure does make me thankful to be living inside and have warm food to eat.

Engineering

Engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand, into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess, in such a way that the public has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance.
- Dr AR Dykes
British Institution of Structural Engineers, 1976.

Navy Shower

So yesterday around 8pm I was going to take a shower. The dish washer was running but I just needed to get clean so just needed a bit of warm warm. I couldn't get the warm enough that I wanted stand under it, even for a short period of time so I went and did a bit of homework. Came back at 10pm when the washer was done and tried again. No luck. In the morning I find out that we can't get a new one installed until four days from now. Hmm. I still need a shower.

So I spent the day thinking about how to get clean with the situation. One could warm up some water and wipe down with a towel, or boil a bunch of water and dump it into the tub with some cold water to even it out a bit. All of this seem like a pain in the butt so I opted for a Navy shower:

1. turn on the water
2. immediately wet the body
3. turn off the water
4. soap up and scrub
5. turn the water back on and rinse off the soap

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navy_shower

It isn't the greatest thing in the world but you end up clean and not too cold if the air temp isn't too bad. Hey and it saves on water. Apparently a lot of the Earth hugger people and people who are trying to save money do this quite a bit because you can easily save 50 gallons for each shower.

Class II Oven Mitt

That is one serious oven mitt.

Summer photos

Sometimes you can give more then 100%

If you are sober enough to open Matlab or Mathmatica and type that in, you are sober enough to do just about anything.

Image found from XKCD

Tomatoes

Two weeks ago it was going to start freezing here in MN. So my Mother and I went out and picked all of the green tomatoes to bring them in before they froze. The cherry tomatoes we threw in a box and covered the whole lot with newspaper. The larger ones we wrapped individually. After a week we started checking them and a few had turned. You have to be careful because once they have a little bit of color they really finish changing quickly. This bounty is after the full two weeks. The larger tomatoes were boiled, peeled and frozen. Them makes *great* spaghetti sauce in the winter. As we would not be able to eat all of the cherry tomatoes, many were packed into zip lock bags and set to work with my Dad.

Night Visitors

So last night I was playing video games (was kicking peoples hind ends from around the world). At some point I went to do some read. About this time I figured out that it was 2:30 in the morning. Whoops. Then I heard someone stomping around on the deck. I knew who this was. Walked over and flipped on the light. Nope I was wrong. It was mother raccoon with her 5 babies. I opened the door a bit and was yelling at them to leave. They just looked at me. When I stuck a food out and started stomping on the deck mother decided to leave and sit at the base of the tree and hiss. The babies scattered a bit. Three climbed the railing and went a little ways up the tree. The other two huddled in the corner of the deck. At this point I shut the door and found my camera. As I was getting setup one of the babies decided that it liked the corner of the deck better. So it walked over that way. Mother was still hissing up a storm, and as she was pretty big so I decided to not go too far out on the deck.

Hutchenson CMP Range

See the little red box for the target area. It sure looked a long ways away.