Sean’s Mental Walkabout

NBC Edits SNL Bailout Skit Following Legal Concerns Over “People Who Should Be Shot” Chyron
Interesting. This is one of the reasons you should be watching SNL live, because the archives have this editted out. Revisionist history wins the day.

Dynamic Periodic Table
Just because it’s awesome.

Dutchess Wine Trail - Discover the Premium Wineries of the Hudson Valley
Our local wine trail

Storm King Art Center
Giant Art on 1000 acres of beautiful land

Viscount Wines & Liquor
Wine tastings every saturday. It’s like an amusement park for adults.

Dutchess County Tourism
dutchess county tourism page

Stanford CS Ed Library
If you or a friend are trying to cut or re-cut your teeth on basic C stuff, I found this site years ago that’s actually quite good. Especially as they don’t seem to teach pointers in college any more.

Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool: Table of Contents
For whatever reason the GNU.org docs here suck, and this has always been my reference page for this.

Quick Reference Cards
A bunch of great quick reference cards for various technical tasks.

Advanced Search—The Tree Guide at Arborday.org
In case you are looking to plant a tree, and want to find the right one for your area

Giles Bowkett: Lightbulb Joke: Bad Ruby Programmers
If you follow things in the community, it’s pretty funny. It doesn’t change that I love ruby and ruby on rails, but it’s still funny.

Popularity: unranked [?]

I’ve been talking about it for years, and spending the last 2 weekends staring up at the stars with binoculars on our deck made me realize that I now had a place to use this that was only 25′ from hot coffee. Not so important now, but that will be clutch in the winter.

Popularity: 25% [?]

So, it’s now been confirmed. We had a lightning strike on the dish at the house. That piece of cable was found by the tech while fixing our dish. He took the original home with him for an office souvenir, as I don’t think he really believed me that the house got hit by lightning when I first told him.

Popularity: 16% [?]

A friend of mine pointed me at Live Maps last night, which is basically microsoft’s google maps. It looks basically exactly like google maps, so I wasn’t sure why he sent me there.

Then he said “Find your house, and click Bird’s Eye view.”

Ok. The results are impressive. It’s a lot higher res than the aerial, and more current. I wish they told you the date o nthis things, as I’d find it facinating. I have some ideas by what’s laying around in our yard that this is late March / Early April last year.

Popularity: 11% [?]

When I got home tonight, things seemed a bit off, and I couldn’t figure it out to begin with. Pretty soon I realized that a lot of electronics were acting up. While a hard power reset fixed some of them, others (like our satellite receiver) didn’t recover so well. Given the storm we’d had, I decided to have a look around for a tree that had been struck. While I was out there, I noticed that one of our satellite dishes seemed to have bits hanging off of it. I know there was hail around here today so it could have been that instead.

After some resets, and digging, the comprehensive list of broken items in the house is listed below:

• Dish Network Receiver - HDMI is toast, and even over the RF to the TV downstairs it appears that it’s getting no satellite signals
• 5 port gigE switch - plug it in and no lights come on and it just gets hot
• 2 ports in the other 5 port gigE switch - 1 port that is now dead was the Dish Receiver port
• the WAN port on my FIOS router
• the gigE port on my desktop

I had another 10/100 card to throw in the desktop, and it’s back up now. Playing port plugging got enough bits working downstairs. My openwrt router came up like a champ and got me back on the internet. So the damage amounts to about $100 worth of stuff I need to replace, plus whatever the story turns out to be with Dish (who is coming out of Thursday to do the service call). I’ll try to get some pictures up on the damage, and I really should get up on the roof to see if there is any other damage up there, but that’s going to require a day of not rain.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I found myself surprised to realize that we’d been doing our memorial day sunday party What started as our house warming party 4 years ago, has now turned into our big annual event. We had another good turn out year, with ~ 35 folks, good beer, and great food. Ladder Ball was definitely the hit of the year.

Adrianne posted pictures on smugmug, check them out if you are interested.

Popularity: 17% [?]

The house monitoring project has made a little bit of progress, as I’ve now got data being collected into a rails app using backgroundrb, and can get that data back out into very pretty graphs with gruff.  (I also looked a little bit a sparklines, but that’s specifically for graphs without labels.)
 

We’re running above target temp as it’s the weekend, so the wood stove is on.  As is the furnace fan to spread the heat through the house.  I’m overloading the values for heat on an fan on to be either the bottom of the graph or a specific small value.  I need to sort out a better way to put that into the graph, which may require some hacking on gruff itself.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I definitely don’t have this anywhere near I like it, but I did manage to just dump out a bunch of info from my thermostat and turn off the fan with this script:

I need some nicer symbolic constants for state setting, and pull together a rails site just to keep track of thermostat data over the course of the day.  All this code is going on my newly registered rubyforge project.

Popularity: 17% [?]

John came over prior to the game bringing his HD-DVD Video Essentials, and given that we had some time prior to the game, we spent some time tuning the set.  Honestly, most things were pretty good, though we had to tune down the color and up the brightness just a bit.  There was one adjustment we made that I can tell immediately made a difference, which was tuning the sharpness down to nothing.  One thing that had always bothered me was how Jack’s beard in lost seemed to shimmer in odd ways, though I was never really sure what caused it.  It turns out that sharpness on digital TVs pretty much just takes the digital artifacting and makes it 10 times worse.  The image looks a little softer now, but there are no annoying random artifacts on thin lines throughout the picture.

Thanks to John for bringing that over.  I still have the kit as I’m going to do audio balancing this week (as we didn’t quite have the time to do it before people showed up).  While my living room is only so tunable, I’m still looking forward to actually trying to balance in the sub woofer in a reasonable way.  I think it will be amusing to see how off my course grained adjustments are.

Popularity: 16% [?]

While our new woodstove insert is really great, and is definitely reducing our oil usage, it causes a bit of an issue when it comes to distributing the heat through the house.  When running on wood heat we get warmth right up the center of the house.  The office at the end of the upstairs hallway ends up being the warmest room in the house.  It is far too easy to make the upstairs unlivably warm, while the rest of the house is quite cool still.

Fortunately, we have a central air HVAC system, so the solution is to just turn on the furnace fan to redistribute the heat through the house.  This works pretty well, and at least mellows out the hot spots.  Ideally we wouldn’t run the fan all the time, but would duty cycle it on for some portion of an hour.  Honeywell makes a thermostat that has a cyrc fan mode, which runs the fan 35% of each hour, which was an option, but something else caught my eye.

The Proliphix Internet Thermostat NT20e is quite a nifty device.  It has a bit more programing than our current thermostat and has the advantage of having a web interface.  You plug the device into your ethernet network and get a web interface for all the controls and programming for the device.  What’s even better is that Proliphix designed this with further customization in mind by publishing an HTTP API to the device as well.  This makes is very easy to have a computer create further logic for the device, like forcing the fan on for certain hours of the day, while leaving the defaults for programming in the device itself.

I’ve now ordered mine, and it is on it’s way.  I can’t wait to get this thing hooked up.

Popularity: 11% [?]