I’ve had a number of emails asking if I had stopped writing this blog. I really never meant to stop. It’s just that spring came and in addition to all the normal things to do like putting in a garden, everything around here started breaking. I mean my lawn mower, refrigerator, garage door, and computer just to name a few. Also, I’m getting a lot of web design work. Anyway, since people have been asking I thought I would say I’m still here but since the frost is coming, I have a lot of things I need to do before we squeeze a ton of houseplants in here. I’m probably not going to get back to writing at least for a few weeks yet. You might check back and hopefully see something then. I don’t know if I will get the chance but I was also hoping to do a site re-design based on some of the things I have learned or at least fix some of the things I have learned to fix which appear differently depending on your browser.

So, check back in a while and thanks for the nice emails and comments.

J

Amy 1991 - 2008

I know a lot of animal lovers read my blog. Among other things, I put up a lot of cute animal pictures and funny animal stories. I generally choose to try to write about positive things. However, the following story is a sad, sometimes graphic description of our recent loss of one of our cats. At the same time, it is a celebration of the joy and companionship living with an animal can bring to your life including the challenges. I just felt I should warn you.

If you don’t want to be sad, just look at the pictures.

Click here to go on.

“Is it a toy car?” he asked. It was a reasonable question. The guy responsible for selling us an extended warranty for our new car had just asked us how many miles a year we would be driving it. I told him probably less than 9000 miles a year. We just don’t drive much. So the idea of buying a brand new car was probably not practical. On a typical day it just sits in the driveway depreciating. How we got there was a long process.

It started when my wife was going to Denver for training. We owned two old Chevys. They were both 1991 models which had gotten to the point where they weren’t very dependable. I had discovered by accident one day the door keys would open either one of them. My van had over 235,000 miles on it. I wanted something dependable to drive while I went car shopping and decided to rent one. I called Enterprise and explained to Travis I needed something with a lot of legroom. I had met Travis before when my wife rented a car and I knew he was not as tall as I am but still a fairly tall guy. He set me up with a 2008 Chevy HHR.

It turns out my problem with cars is not so much legroom as it is the distance between my knee and the steering wheel when my foot is on the brake. Really, it’s when I move to the brake because if my knee hits the steering wheel on the way it could prevent me from stopping quickly. We were looking for a car I could fit in, we could afford, and something which got reasonable gas mileage.

I must have tried on 50 cars. The Scion, a really boxy looking vehicle, has a lot of leg room on paper but I only had to sit in one for a second to realize I couldn’t drive it. I even sat in a Pontiac with a telescoping steering wheel and adjustable pedals only to realize it was designed to accommodate shorter drivers not taller ones. Sometime in the last 17 years that extra couple inches I needed had been designed out of pretty much every vehicle out there. There was one exception. I fit quite comfortably in a Nissan Maxima that had a telescoping steering wheel which moved well away from my knee. The problem was it had a lot of miles on it and was expensive, about $20,000.

At that point, we began to focus on the Chevy HHR. We looked at a 2006 in a nearby town. The salesman offered us a good price on it. In hindsight, we probably should have just gone for it. It had a few dings and a rather strange orange stain on the carpet. 2006 was the first year the HHRs were manufactured. Starting the following year Chevrolet upped the drive train warranty from 60 thousand to 100 thousand miles. I had replaced the transmission on my van but it was well over 100 thousand miles so it really wasn’t much of a gamble for Chevy to do that.

One thing I was interested in was the enhanced safety package. HHRs come with just about everything standard. Air conditioning, power windows and locks, most of the things that used to be optional come with it. We drove a good distance to look at a 2007 which had the side and curtain air bags just to find out it had been sold the night before. I think the turning point came when we looked at a 2008 with 18,000 miles on it. After taking it for a test drive and waiting through the whole sales process the guy offered us $250 off the price listed on the internet about $18,000. At that point we decided to see how much a brand new one would cost.

It turns out because my wife works for a GM supplier, we get a discount. Currently GM is now offering everyone GM worker prices which would have been a little cheaper. One thing about it is it is like buying at Carmax where there is no negotiating. They just take the price of the car and knock it down a prescribed amount. HHRs are not very expensive to begin with.

Chevy HHR under $20,000

I thought because we were buying a new one, it would be relatively easy to get one with only the options we wanted. Not so, because it is the end of the model year there aren’t that many out there. You may have heard Chevy is having a hard time selling cars but it turns out this particular one is enormously popular. Chevy calls it an SUV but it gets pretty good mileage. The E.P.A. rates the car at 20 mpg in the city and 30 on the highway. I’ve been driving one for about two months now and my average mileage is 28 mpg but I tend to drive like a little old lady because I’m used to my van.

We went to a local dealership where we met a woman named Lane Kessel. Lane spent days trying to locate a HHR with the options we wanted. The HHR comes in a panel model, a turbo charged model, and an LS or LT trim. We had been looking at LTs. The main difference between an LT and LS is the power seat and the radio. There was some debate as to whether the manual seat might go back an extra inch or so due to the lack of a motor. I wanted the airbags. Actually because of my height, the airbags would probably injure me more than help me from what I have read but I wanted them for my wife.

The interior

One thing I liked about Lane besides the fact she spent so much time trying to find us the vehicle we wanted was she had a degree in chemical engineering. At my age, being stuck in the mid-west with a lot of technical college degrees, I probably should sell cars too. After about a week Lane found one 250 miles away which was close to the car we wanted.

One thing I found amusing was there is a salesman at that dealership named Max Price. The head of the repair department is named David Banner so even though I laughed, I refrained from making any Incredible Hulk jokes. I’m sure he has heard them all.

Most of you are probably driving cars built this century so a lot of the things I find odd about it you are probably used to. It locks and unlocks my doors for me and turns on the headlights. The radio stays on when you turn off the car and you can use the windows until you open the door. I guess the one thing I would really like it to do for me is drive.

The HHR we ended up buying had a number of options I probably wouldn’t have bothered with but the rebates pretty much covered the cost of them. It has the chrome trim package and running boards. They do enhance the look but I joked my van has the chrome trim, it wasn’t an option, that’s just the way they built them back then. The car has a retro look and I suppose the chrome and running boards go with that.

One of the things I do when people look at the car is start it with the remote. Chevy has really learned from competing with the Japanese to not offer too many variations on the cars to save cost. If you get an automatic transmission the remote start comes with it. Actually I did consider a Honda or a Toyota but aside from the fact I couldn’t fit in them, they are considerably more expensive. The HHR gets good mileage, offers more room, seems really solid, and doesn’t cost much. They also seem to hold their value as used ones were not that cheap.

OnStar built into the mirror

The car comes with OnStar so it has its own phone number. It Emails me once a month to tell me how it’s doing. One thing I don’t like about the OnStar is they put it at the bottom of the rear view mirror. I normally have raised the rear view mirror on my cars so it doesn’t block my view to the right. With the wiring for the compass and OnStar I can’t do this on this car. They could have put it on the top of the mirror and I don’t think it would have bothered shorter drivers. Using the phone is a little odd because you feel like you are talking to your radio. The car also has rather wide window pillars. They also block your view to the sides.

The HHR has wide window pillars

The information display in the car tells you the instantaneous mileage, average mileage, tire pressure, oil life, coolant temperature, outside temperature, and has a couple trip meters. I used to have a car with a trip computer and I get a kick when I’m coasting and it says I’m getting 99 mpg. That’s one thing about driving it I’m still getting used to. When you take your foot off the gas it just goes and goes. I have to learn to start coasting a lot farther back when I have to stop.

The storage space in the HHR

The car is somewhat versatile. You can fold down the back seats. We have taken it camping and after having a van it seems small. We got the roof rails so I need to get a car top carrier for it.

A strange icon

I found this icon in the back. Having designed a lot of icons in my time, I know it’s difficult but if this was on a boat, it would mean something completely different.

It’s a nice car and it’s nice to drive something new. I miss my old van though. I really thought it would make it to a quarter million miles.

Oh, and here is your funny cat picture. It’s my Maggie who passed away in the spring a year ago.

Life in the gutter isn't so bad

O.K. I’ve installed a tool which is designed to prevent automated spamming in my comments. I have re-enabled commenting on the blog. We shall see how it does. Some posts may still have commenting turned off because I did it on individual posts before it got so bad I had to do something more sophisticated.

Click on the ‘No Comments’ or ‘Comments’ link below any post to leave a comment.

Hope to hear from real people!

Hey, sorry I haven’t had time to post. I’m off to check out yet another car. Just thought I’d take a second to link you with to this little gem.

Lady spins on an escalator.

I can’t believe it never occurred to me to do that.

I started writing a post and then my wife called. She is out of town on business and happened to view my site using Internet Explorer. I normally use Firefox. I knew Explorer did not render my page exactly as I intended but when I had checked it, the differences were marginal. Now I find the links do not look any different than the regular text unless you mouse over them. My apologies to the readers who use that browser. I was about to post but I spent the day in the garden and I’m starving from the exercise.

I’m off to find some food and hopefully will get the problem fixed and write a post later on.

You can download Firefox for free by clicking HERE.

Gary Settles is a professor of mechanical engineering who studies gas dynamics. Here is a video where he uses both high speed photography and Schlieren photography to visualize shock waves, dogs breathing, and so on.

I read about the company EEStor some time ago. It’s one of those technological developments which sounds too good to be true but you hope it is. A capacitor stores charge directly, unlike a battery which uses chemistry to store energy. Unfortunately ordinary capacitors can’t store much and it leaks away quickly. An ultracapacitor is like a capacitor on steroids. They can not only hold a large amount of power but it leaks away slowly. One other difference between capacitors and batteries is capacitors can be charged quickly, and discharged very quickly as well. If EEstor’s technology pans out, it could mean the end of batteries as we know them. In this article EEStor claims;

This could translate into an electric vehicle capable of traveling up to 500 miles on a five minute charge, compared with current battery technology which offers an average 50-100 range on an overnight charge. As if that weren’t enough, the company claims they will be able to mass-produce the units at a fraction of the cost.

Strap-on helicopters don’t really exist but someone has designed one.

I’ve had the unfortunate experience of being stung over 100 times not once but twice, so the story; What is Causing Super-sized Yellow Jacket Nests? completely creeps me out.

Here is another cool optical illusion. It looks completely different if you add edges or remove them.

From this article it seems we in the U.S. pay more and get less than other countries when it comes to internet bandwidth.

Finally, here is a collection of photos that capture an instant in time.

This article in the New York Times; Duck and Cover: It’s the New Survivalism made me think about the end of the world as we know it. I tend to think about those types of survival scenarios as the stuff of science fiction. However, on September 11th when I saw Hoosiers lining up at gas stations in some kind of irrational gasoline buying frenzy, it sent a chill down my spine.

I had a funny thought; one thing you could do to survive is to have a still and know how to run it. Alcohol is pretty useful stuff; you can drink it, start a fire with it, use it as fuel, or sterilize a wound. But the real point would be when you showed up at some stockade looking for protection, knowing how to make booze could get you in the door. Note: distilling spirits in the U.S. is illegal.

I enjoy watching Survivorman and Man vs Wild. This article about Man vs Wild being somewhat staged didn’t surprise me. It was pretty inconceivable Bear Grylls was starving while his film crew were enjoying their morning coffee. I still enjoy the show and wouldn’t have the nerve to do a lot of the things he does. I guess I like Surviorman slightly better because I enjoy Les Stroud’s style of film making. Both shows make me hungry and often for strange things I’ve never eaten. Watching those two guys gobble up bugs makes you wonder if people in this country are going hungry simply because of the social stigma attached to Entomophagy. Here and here are a couple of sites devoted to eating insects.

I have no doubt; we wouldn’t be prepared in an apocalyptic situation. However, for short term situations we might be more prepared than most. While buying a cabin and stocking it with years of food is certainly outside the economic capability of most Americans, being prepared for some type of short term emergency isn’t really expensive. We live in the Midwest and big snow or ice storms are a real possibility. Here are some of the reasons we are somewhat prepared.

We Camp

While a lot of camping gear such as a tent and backpack are useless unless you are traveling, certain gadgets do come in handy. We have a compact white gas cooking stove plus a propane one for van camping. Our water purifier failed on our last canoe trip. I realized it was just the pump part and MacGyvered a gravity feed system by fitting a number of tubes together and hanging a jug in a tree. Water purifiers are not that expensive, however unless you camp you may not feel like spending the money. Here are several ways to sterilize water.

Our power goes out a lot.

Usually it’s for less than an hour, but it has lasted an evening or the better part of a day. I have one of those compressor/battery/inverter things which will run a small TV for a while, or a laptop/router/modem. I mostly use it to fill my tires or jump the car. We have lots of LED flashlights. They have really gotten inexpensive and last summer when the lights went out I got mad at myself for not having enough to light the house. My main concern though is heat. We had an old kerosene heater but the wick shaft got bent. Last winter I kept looking at one at Lowes for $180 but by the time I got around to buying it, spring was on the way and they had marked it down to $60. I have our phone plugged into the battery backup for my computer, but we have one of those old style phones that don’t need power in the attic.

I shop at Costco.

That means I have at least a 6 months supply of toilet paper on average. Not exactly a survival necessity but the point is, we started shopping there to save money. Because a lot of the stuff they sell comes by the case, since we started shopping there we really have a lot more food around the house.

A lot of my interest in green homes isn’t so much apocalyptic preparation or even the ecological aspects. It has a lot to do with the fact that our economic situation has fluctuated wildly over the years. Unfortunately our retirement planning consisted of growing whatever business we were in at the time. Now that we are serious about investing, the economy is in yet another meltdown. I guess the alternative is to try to come up with a cheaper way of living. Most of these houses are rather strange looking and as the site mentions local building codes might be a problem.

On to a totally different subject, I got a kick out of this guy’s idea. He tied a disposable camera to a bench with a note that said;

Good afternoon,
I attached this camera to the bench so you could take pictures. Seriously. So have fun. I’ll be back later this evening to pick it up.
Love, Jay / The Plug

Here is his site.

I sometimes wonder if genetic engineering is going to save us or kill us all. It is fascinating reading about how sophisticated it has become. In this article they describe the creation of corn containing three different enzymes by splicing in genes from a hot water microbe, a fungus, and a cow.

Finally, here’s a funny picture of someone using a rake to cook hot dogs.

We have been waiting for a joyous family event to occur any day now. So, when the phone rang this morning my momentary excitement quickly faded as a machine informed us our car warrantee was about to expire. The irony is, our cars are so old the warrantees expired many years ago. Someone typed in a wrong number and now a machine is nagging us.

As I cleaned up the spam on my blog this morning, my wife asked why anyone would bother to do it. The problem is, it’s not anyone, it’s probably a bot. The comments are moderated and any human would realize such efforts are futile. It reminded me I am paying a small monthly fee for call blocking because some Fax machine kept calling my voice line. I got the number and tried to reverse lookup the call with no luck. The phone company said I could contact the sheriff’s office and file a complaint but I signed up for the blocking service. I wonder if that Fax has given up.

If you are not familiar with bots; check out this article from USA Today. Also, here are two good free software tools to check your machine for spyware. One is called Adaware and the other one is Spybot.

My friend Matt sent me this link and comment on global warming;

Researcher: Basic Greenhouse Equations “Totally Wrong”
Very interesting. Politics is always involved in science.

Also I received this from my friend Dan;

Here are a couple of interesting articles you may want to discuss in your BLOG as a contrasting opinion:

washingtontimes

Weather Channel Founder Blasts Network; Claims It Is ‘Telling Us What to Think’

The Founder of The Weather Channel Says Global Warming Is The “Greatest Scam in History”

Also, I found those questions asked to park rangers hilarious!

I find it interesting when the Weather Channel guy says he is not opposed to environmentalism yet seems to be defending the ‘right’ to spew tons of CO2 into the air. As I have mentioned before, it is very clear and measurable CO2 is acidifying the oceans. There really isn’t a ‘debate’ about it. I think this guy has a problem with Al Gore. I also find it strange when people defend pollution. I mean it’s not like it’s good for anything. Hopefully those guys are right and global warming isn’t a problem, but it’s not like we aren’t impacting the oceans and the atmosphere. At best these guys are saying we are changing the atmosphere and the good news is it’s not going to kill us, so far. So who wants to see how far we can push it?

I still think solar energy is going to quickly become so much cheaper than other forms of power people will use it for that reason. It’s a blog for another day but sunlight really has a very high energy density. Also, there is no ‘bottom’ on how cheap solar can get. You can’t sell electricity from coal any cheaper than the coal costs, but sunlight is free. It’s possible you could pay one tenth or one hundredth what you are paying today.

Also, check out this article from Next Energy News on ethanol from non-food sources. Ethanol does give less mileage than gasoline but if it cost $1.20 at the pump and it has a relatively stable price, no one is going to buy it because it’s carbon neutral. They will buy it because it’s a $1.20 a gallon and that price could go down.

One thing organic chemistry taught me is oil is just too valuable to burn. Most of chemical solvents used in modern chemistry, plus pharmaceuticals, and plastics are made from oil. If we ever use it up, it will affect a lot more than just transportation.

According to this raw eggs are good to use on burns. We always have an aloe plant on hand, but I might try the an egg next time just to see if it works.

I ran across this article on foods that are poisonous unless they are prepared properly. I agree with the author; someone must of been awfully hungry or strangely curious to try various cooking methods on food to make it non-poisonous.

These are billed as pictures of frozen waves but in reality I believe they are pictures of a glacier. They are quite stunning none the less.

Arrrg, and shiver me timbers, I wasted a whole lot of time yesterday playing this Flash game where you control a pirate ship. It made me wonder how much Flash is optimized to use video hardware. The game got pretty slow with a lot of cannon balls in the air. I suppose it’s from tracking the particles more than running the graphics.

Also from Dan, this link on the origins of domestic cats, and this video where two guys build a record player out of a bicycle.

Finally, another silly video of a dog named Jerry and his robotic ball throwing playmate.

I read this article in the New York Times today where 1 in 100 U.S. adults are now in prison. Is this necessary or just insanely expensive? The article talks about how much it cost to keep them there but doesn’t mention the revenue lost to income taxes not collected and so on. Here is a chart of incarceration rates for other countries.

Not that we shouldn’t keep the bad ones locked up, but using jail for every punishment is silly. Anyone who has dealt with the IRS or the BMV knows the government is quite capable of making you miserable without sending you to jail.

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