Saw Orion for the first time this season.  It’s my “ski constellation” because it’s most easily seen during the winter months. 

Around 11pm I went out to check the cloud cover and visibility in anticipation of the Leonid meteor shower.  Leo rises in the east (actually, everything rises in the east) and while looking that way I spotted my old friend Orion.

Most years I spot it first during early October, but this year it’s halfway through November before I saw it.  Not sure why this year was so late and am hoping it’s not because I spend less time looking at the stars – but I think it is.

Got up at 3am to go looking for Leonids.  Sky was perfectly clear and I stood there tired and cold for about 5min and spotted 2 Leonids.  I told the kids about it in the morning, and they asked why I didn’t wake them up – and I reminded them that there we’re only 2 in 5 min and that if it was more I would have got everyone up.

My daughter asked me what I wished for – and I admitted I totally forgot.  That gave me the idea that the next time there’s a meteor shower to wake them up for, I’ll remind them of all the wishes they get to make – which is a part of a meteor shower I never thought about until now.

I’ve been encouraging the boy to understand how things work – and decided a fun way to do that would be to take things apart, after all that’s what I did at his age.  So we headed to the Flea at MIT on a hunch they might have some fun stuff to take apart.

Turns out it was the perfect place to find exactly what I had in mind.  The place is a geeks dream come true.  So much old technology I didn’t know where to start.  I was tempted to buy an old oscilloscope, as their were at least a hundred of them in different stalls. 

I ended up finding a reel-to-reel tape recorder a guy was selling for $50.  I started talking him down on price and asked, “Does it still work?”

He replied, “Perfectly.”

I told him the plan was for me and my son to take it apart, and that I didn’t want to ruin something that still worked well.  He agreed and told me to take the reel-to-reel recorder sitting next to it for free.  It weighed 30pounds easy and I had to carry it all over the place.

Nick really enjoyed it – although maybe next time I’ll get something that we can see working first and maybe keep plugged in (low volt DC something) to watch it work.

Anna was along for the whole ride – and I had a screw driver ready for her.  Instead she played repoter with the stuffed weasel beanie baby she got at the Flea at MIT.

They really don’t make things like this any more – hardly any plastic.

The kewlest part of this device in my mind was that it had vacuum tubes.  I was tempted to try to get the amplifier part of the thing working and maybe build a small guitar amp or something… but my ambition escaped me.

Here’s a pretty kewl shot with the tubes visible:

We got it apart as much as we good – with a ton of screws and bolts lying around.  The carcase sat on the table for a week or so – hard to dispose of that much metal.

All in all the project was a complete success.  Quality dad-kids time and maybe a little education.

Just in time for the family ski-vaca I finally got around to crafting some lanyards for the safety whistles I bought a few months ago.  The kids are under 10 and we’ll be skiing in bounds the whole time – but it was a fun project and if I get them to wear them every time they ski and hike it might make a difference some day.

Materials:
Wind Storm Whistle, purchased from Campmore
2 meters of Cord per Lanyard: MINOR Cord, 3mm I bought a 15M roll from EMS

The Knots:
Sizeable Necklace Knot

Boatswains Knot

The boatswains knot is purely decorative. I suppose it holds the whistle at the midway point which might be handy, but the main reason I use it is because it’s exactly what the knot was designed for.

The sizeable necklace knots work pretty well, and allowed me to make 4 identical lanyards that’ll fit both the wife and I as well as the kids.  I’m not sure what the name of this knot is though.  I think it’s fashioned after a noose – which is not a good image to have making something that’s going around your neck.  If anyone has any advice on a better knot or technique to use here I’d love to hear it.

Oh yeah – pix:

A completed whistle and lanyard

The sizeable knots

 
The Boatswains decorative knot

Here’s my journey through the storm.  I want to write it all down before I start forgetting it, and so I can point people who’ve been asking to a central place.

2008-12-11: Thursday night I was walking a Netflix movie to the mailbox during the beginning of the ice storm.  I heard several branches fall in the woods – and since our driveway goes under many trees I turned around.  I worked on the computer until around 11:30pm and went to bed with the power still working.

2008-12-12: Friday morning we awoke to no electricity and rainy weather.  We could see some big branches down on the lawn, but the house seemed intact.  Everything was encrusted in inch-thick ice.  You could stand on the front porch and listen to trees falling – sometimes seeing them but mostly not.  The house was cold, but not too bad yet.  The kids made snowflakes and I started making some calls.

Talking to my sister in Amherst, I discovered her grid power was off but their generator was running and they were inviting those in need to come stay with them.  I told her to hold us a spot, and that I’d call her back later after some surveying.

The sun came out around noon, and I headed out to see what I could see. 

My first concern was the driveway.  There were a few birches down blocking the first half – pretty sure I could just bend those over and drive around them.  I didn’t want to cut them because I was pretty sure they would recover completely.

The real driveway problems were at the end.  A couple large pine branches had fallen.  That’s the mail box at the end there – the one I decided not to walk to the night before.  Through out the day I was exposed to falling ice in this area.  I had bought a very nice hand saw just a few days before.  It came in very handy cleaning up this mess.

At the end of the driveway I discovered a larger problem.  One of the pine branches had fallen on the top of the utility pole where our power comes from.  I learned how this worked a few months ago when a squirrel short circuited our transformer and tripped this line, so I knew once the main power lines were fixed, it might be a while before we got our power back.

We took a few pictures of various things covered in ice.  There are a ton more of these kinda shots.  They’ll be in a Picassa album eventually.

Having made the driveway passable – and doing some research on the internets via the iPhone (which proved to be a powerful tool during the whole ordeal), I came to the conclusion that our power wasn’t coming back any time soon, and it was going to be getting very cold in the next couple of days.  So we packed up and headed to Amherst for the shelter called Valvanostan (aka My Sister’s House).  We ended up taking a bit of a tour of Bow and surrounding areas as the main roads had several blockages.  We were one of three families staying there. 

They’re at the end of a dirt road, so they got a generator several years ago.  It’s an 8000W model, so it powers pretty much everything in the house except the hot-tub.  Thus begins my rapid education of generators – something I was mildly interested in before, and now know far more than I wish I did.  The house had a gas stovetop, so it was a very comfortable evening spent talking about other family’s situations and the fact that it was going to be impossible to buy a generator for a few days at least. 

We celebrated my niece’s birthday with a larger crowd than expected.

2008-12-13: Saturday started sunny and warm at my sister’s house.  Here is where I ran smack into the biggest inconvenience of all. 

At 10am Red Sox tickets went on sale – and it has been my yearly ritual to purchase most of the tickets I use through out the year on this day.  The real prize here is “Opening Day” – and I had 3 iphones trying to get passed the virtual waiting room, but never got a chance to buy a single ticket.  Typically I open hundreds of browser windows and usually end up with a few good games – but this year I totally struck out.

We packed the family back into the van to go and check on the house and basically get out of everyone’s way for a spell.  (It’s the living without electricity that makes me use spell as a noun).

We were only able to make it a little ways down our driveway, and found everything pretty much as we had left it.  I bought some anti-freeze at the Home Depot in Merrimack and poured it into every drain in the house.  We opened the cupboards with pipes behind them, and I drained as much water as I could from the system.  Headed out to lunch in Goffstown and then back to my sister’s for a 2nd night.  We were able to pay back a little by babysitting all the children in the house while their parents went to an office xmas party.  I taught the two older girls to play chess while the rest of the kids watched a DVD.

2008-12-14: On Sunday I awoke to the gental hum of the generator once again and began a day of board games.  We discovered that my sister’s internet connection was back – but all it really told us was that it might be a while before we got our powerback.  My sister in law called me and bought me a couple red Sox tickets for Sept games, but opening day tickets were long gone.

I spent some time shopping on line for generators, selecting stores as far south as Baltimore – only to find them all unavailable.  I was considering it – and at my brother-in-laws suggestion, I tried craigslist and found excatly what I was hoping for – someone who bought a generator then got their power back and wanted to unload it.  He’d posted it on the NH craigslist – and sold it to me for $100 less than he’d bought it the day before.  There were issues about getting cash from an ATM and writing a check for the remainder.  My brother-in-law dutifully drove me down to Andover, MA and then back to my house and we installed the generator in about an hour.  It had 20hrs on the hobbs-type meter.  We wired it directly to the dryer jumper on the circuit breaker (with phone assistance from an electrician)- which meant the generator was in the garage – and the 20ft cord it came with wasn’t long enough to get it outside and close the garage door.  I sealed the inner door as well as I could – and drove to Lowe’s to buy a couple carbon monoxide detectors.  We now had the house powered, and the family returned.

We’d received news that there would be no school on Monday.

The kids in bed – we started watching a movie in the room above the garage – we had a CO detector at our feet, and one at the top of the stairs.  After about 2 hrs the CO detector went off – so we ended the movie and put the detector at the bottom of the stairs.

2008-12-15: At 1 AM Monday morning the Carbon Monoxide detector at the base of the stairs started going off.  The one at the top of the stairs hadn’t gone off, but I knew I had to fix things.  I opened doors at the front and back of the house and started planning the generator move.  I didn’t have any wire that would handle the load – so my options were to drill a large hole beside the circuit breaker – or feed the wire through the dryer vent and wire it directly to the dryer outlet.  I opted for the latter.

I woke Suzy up to help and together we got the generator wired such that it was completely outside the house.  I reset the CO detectors and went back to bed.

Awoke the next day to a warm house and Suzy headed off to work.  The girl was complaining of a stomach ache which sounded a lot like what the boy had the previous day – so we had a slow morning watching DVD’s.  We had a bunch of stuff on the Comcast DVR – but you can’t access it when the cable is down, which I don’t understand.

A little before noon the girl was really complaining – and I was also feeling pretty sick – so I looked up carbon monoxide poisoning symptoms and the margin of error was too small.  We packed into the Jeep and headed to the ER.

We signed into the ER about noon – and at 12:15 we were being screened.  They used a new device that can measure carbon monoxide in the blood with out taking blood, they just put a little thing with a light on your finger – so they measured both children and they both came up with zero.  Three hours later, and moments before they were going to draw blood, the doctor came in – verified the gizmo’s CO reading and told us we could go home.

We got notice that once again, there would be no school the following day so we watched Wizard of OZ on the projector screen after I drove into Concord to get gas for our generator and chicken soup.

2008-12-16: Tuesday morning Suzy went off to work again while I kept the home fire burning.  All sick people were better, and we had hot chocolate for breakfast.

The kids and I cleared the driveway and some of the branches on the lawn.  I shut the generator off and we headed to the store.  At the end of the driveway there was a crew working on the lines.  We hoped maybe by the time we returned we’d have power.  There was a detour at the other end of our road – but once you got into Concord, it was as if nothing had happened.  The ice damage seemed to follow an elevation pattern.  We still had plenty of ice on the trees.  Donuts purchased, and gas can filled, we returned home to find the power still out.

At around 7pm I noticed another line crew at the end of our driveway so I whipped up a couple hot chocolates and went out to see what was going on. 

They were fixing the problem on top of our utility pole and said we’d probably be back up in a few hours.  The two utility workers were glad to get some hot chocolate, and soon two more people arrived – one to direct traffic and the other a supervisor.  I went back in and made a couple more hot chocolates for them- and it was here that the draw on the generator got too high – the heating system, the fridge and the microwave all at the same time tripped it.  For a second I was worried I’d left the main breaker on and was sending power to the pole and something horrible had happened – but it was just the breaker on the generator tripping due to too much load. 

Got the hot Chocolate delivered and thanked them for the days they’d all been up working on the problems.  One of the workers gave me an email address to send the pictures to him.

2008-12-17: Late Tuesday, technically Wednesday morning – I was watching a DVD.  The DVR box normally shows the time on its front display – but since the power went out it had been showing an “805″ meaning it was trying to get a channel to resolve. I glanced down and noticed it said ‘12:53′ – and jumped up.  The cable modem was now showing a connection and sure enough we had power back.  I shut down the generator, unwired all the changes I’d made and tried to buy Red Sox tickets.  I failed.

Awoke to 3 inches of snow and both the snow blower and the tractor mounted snow thrower failed.  It feels very much like a Monday as I type this.

Lately I’ve been asking various service provider’s and friends if they have a web site.  Most don’t – and the reason is there isn’t a really easy and wicked cheap solution.  So I say to these people that I do web sites… sometimes it leads to something, sometimes it doesn’t.

Lately my favorite way of building these things is using GoDaddy as a registrar and Google Sites as the source for the webpage.  A few times I’ve just purchased a domain and pointed it at an exsisting site, and for a couple I’ve helped them get a blog up and running. 

Some recent additions to the portfolio:

Leigh’s Barber Shop : A most excellent Barber Shop in Shelburne, VT  – This is a whole google site, with google analytics and multi-user content management.  Still need to add some content to this really simple site.

ReJardin.Com : I secured a domain and redirected it to an existing site.  The real goal here was that the user had a unique domain name that wasn’t claimed yet – so I grabbed it and redirected it.

ToddAubertin.Com : I found a wooden flute maker/ furniture maker up the road and saw his web site needed a lot of work.  I set him up on wordpress in barter for a custom flute.  Did some picture editing/ content creation as well.  We’ve got some plans for more stuff on the site, and I have some plans for some custom furniture for our home.

Manny500Photo.com : I try to make it to Baltimore to see the Red Sox play at Camden Yard once a year.  This year while I was there with the girl: Manny Rameriz hit his 500th home run – and it was a baseball moment we will remember sharing forever.  A fraternity brother of mine was there as well, and took a photo he wanted help selling online.  So we put this site together.  Then the stupid looser Manny had to go and get himself traded to the Dodgers.  A kewl part of this project was tapping the photo editing talents of our friend Jean Wozniak.

There are a couple more not quite ready to mention – but my favorite part of the process is that I haven’t exchanged money for any of them.  A couple cost me about $10 and time – but it was time spent not just building the collateral, but learning the process and being better prepared for the next one.

Ran in the Harpoon Octoberfest Road Race this weekend – and they had a German Costume Contest as part of the race.  I couldn’t resist, so I rented some Lederhosen and my sister-in-law and I took 1st place Male and 1st Place Female in the costume contest.  The prize was a backpack, a 6-pack and eternal fame.  There were awards for running the race fast as well – but it’s far easier to rent lederhosen than to run a 5k in under 20min.  The weather was perfect and the Octoberfestivities following the race were very fun.  The kids were having fun almost the whole time – especially dancing to the German Polka Band.

I got a free bumper sticker and brautwerst just for “looking the part” as well.

Got tired of writing out random math problems for the Girl to practice, so I made a webApp to do it for me. Had some fun with it – and the big thing I learned was that it’s possible to deploy flex app’s on the Google Pages framework.

Check out Anna’s Math Quiz and lemme know how to make it better.

I’ve had a hard time keeping the skis organized over the years – and it’s only getting worse with the kids acquiring equipment now.  My friend Bob had this rack setup, and it looked like it worked well.

This is the 2nd attempt – the first try I had bought a pretty crappy 2×10 and it was split pretty much down the middle so it fell apart as I made the cuts.

On the 2nd try I was able to build the whole thing in under 2 hours.  The real key was some clever geometry that made the measuring go fast.

In it’s current configuration it holds 8 pairs of skis and 8 sets of poles, only a couple of the slots are holding more than a single pair of anything.

The wood from the first attempt was used for the cross members.

I did some measuring of our skis to see how tall the bindings were and the smallest skis (from where they’d be resting in the slots)  and the largest bindings to determine the dimensions.  Because of this I won’t even post the measurements as you should repeat the exercise for your gear.

Here’s a Sketch-Up 3D model of the rack.

We went to the Boys & Girls Clubs Day for Kids in Manchester today.  We got stuck in some police guided traffic as the Obama Cavalcade drove by us.  We waved.  The event itself was very crowded, very loud and anything the kids wanted to do involved waiting in various long lines.  We got some comic books that entertained them for a bit, but all in all it was a bit of a bust.  I was pretty happy to leave.

I saw this map on a wall at a friends house, in his office, and was impressed.  I decided I must posses it, so I ordered it, and yesterday I glued it to the wall.

The wall I put it on was a little short, so it wraps around the corner, but I don’t think that takes away too much from the effect.  Other options discussed were centering the map on the corner, wrapping it around the left edge of the wall or putting it in a different room.

The track lights do a great job illuminating it – you can stand right up against it and not cast any shadow while your reading the map.

One challenge was the double light switch on part of the wall the map covers.  I did some measuring to find our what part of the map it was going to be under, and scanned the map.  A long USB cable was necessary, and I was happy the top came completely off the scanner.

The next tricky part was printing that scan at the right size.  First time it was too small – but I’m pretty proud of the 2nd attempt and how it came out.  I came to realize the paper we have in the printer is cheap – and once it got glue on it would tear inconsistently.  A sharp blade is the key – waiting for the glue to dry would have helped, but I have no patience.

There’s a plug on the lower part of the map, but it doesn’t cover any detail.  I covered it but I haven’t poked the holes through to plug anything in, as I may never use that outlet.

It’s a very detailed map – a real triumph in cartography.  I’ve already learned a TON of geography from it, and we’re making the kids find different countries.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do when things in the world change – probably nothing.

The colors of the map are going to dictate how we decorate the office.