I have been suspecting for a while now we've been having a lot of days of inversion layer here in Ashland WI. This is because right around Christmas the wood boiler started to get very difficult to use because smoke would rush the wrong way out the wood loading door whenever I opened it. I remembered this happening this same time last year too and, unlike problems caused by creosote buildup or whatever, that resolved itself within a couple months.

Well, today I finally had proof of my suspicions. I noticed that the NWS was predicting freezing rain for us despite a high of 17 degrees. When I went outside I could see that the smoke was clustering around the chimney top, then falling to one side instead of rising away. D'oh!

(crossposted to weathernerds).

I often notice the weather at night when I am doing outdoors chores or walking the dog. Sometimes there are truly amazing sights like double-rainbows around moons, or vast cloud formations lit up all silver. Frustratingly my limited photography skills are not up to capturing anything in the sky at night, even with modern day cameras-for-dummies. So, I have often been unable to share these experiences or articulate them verbally later. I'm hoping that this Blog medium will be a happy alternative. Here's giving it a try!

We've had between a foot and two feet of snow on the ground in Ashland for a while now. Yesterday a little bit more dusted the top of it, big fluffy flakes that never amounted to a serious accumulation. But early this morning at 3AM I went outside to put out the recycling and made an astonishing discovery! Apparently this new thin layer of snow had very different visual properties when it came to reflecting light.

It was bitterly cold and the sky very clear, with a large waning moon. The first thing I noticed was that the huge bare swath of snow in our backyard was literally sparkling brightly in the moonlight. The closest thing I could compare it to is sparkly sidewalks I've seen in front of some buildings in California. Every step I took as I trekked back and forth carrying recycling containers to the alley, the sparkles were constantly shifting. Wow!

But the craziest thing was my deep path of footprints. Instead of sparkling, they glowed! The moon was as overhead as I've ever seen it, and shining straight down to illuminate the bottom of each print. The sides were shadowy and dark and the bottoms smooth and reflecting a solid glow upward that made the prints stand out from the rest of the yard light-wise. I have never seen anything like that before. All I can say (again) is, wow!

(crossposted to weathernerds)

Here's a cool picture of a frost line receding across the roof as the sun moves onto this side of the house. Fun!



It's been pretty cold here, all week, never passing above about 35 degrees during the day. Winter is definitely breathing down our necks, though I suppose it's "late fall" until November ends.

We have had a few days of really odd weather with dark looming skies but enough sun peeking out to light up the trees. Here are a couple pictures of one of these evenings, not very good photography wise (and I had to cut a glaring window reflection out of one).





These are bigger than my usual pictures so definitely click on them to see the full size versions.

Here we are, an example of a daytime shot. It looks like it is not focusing too close, but rather far away based on how the farthest trees and rooftops look. Maybe there is no way to have everything in focus at once with a little cheap cam like this. Hey the price was right!

Hey! I managed to trick the software into putting the web cam image on the page. LOL. The web cam updates every 15 minutes and so does the web site, but the camera 3 minutes before so it's always relatively recent compared to the page.



This particular capture isn't particularly exciting because it's at night. The faint striping and yellowness you see is just reflections of the venetian blinds on the glass. But looking at the image during daytime should hopefully be a bit more interesting.. I'm looking forward to it!

Today I made excellent progress on the webserver front, getting the content of both Re and Garlen transfered over from the old system to the new. I asked my mother to go ahead and shut down garlen, and will probably do the same for re tomorrow. I still need to do a bunch of little tests and adjustments on all the websites in their new locations though.

I am thinking I will just let Newar and Narvoon run as-is until I go to Minneapolis, then bring them back and change their names here. They still need to get re-done, but I'm not sure that it has to be before the trip at this point.

That means my next task before I can go is to clean out the storage locker and get all the computer-recycling loaded into the truck to bring down to St. Paul. That will probably take a few days by itself. I'm still waiting for the components of my brother's birthday present to trickle in sluggishly as well. (Oh dear... now that is an image.)

The weather web page software is really clumsy and hard to use, with about a million conflicting features that affect one another, so it will probably be a while until I have it the way I want it. However, you can see a primitive start by clicking here. This software is also the source of a weather "gizmo" I can include at the bottom of each of my posts to show my weather at the time... fun ;-) Here's the first one now; I will probably change the color and so forth for future ones. There is a weather cam too which I have to figure out how to get onto the same page as the rest of the weather.



Today I mowed much of the lawn, go me!



I also planted some bulbs in the small round garden at the base of a carriage-light that is on our front lawn. I had been transplanting indoor geraniums there each summer but I am trying to phase in as many perennials as possible. They are "rock star" irises which should come out burgundy with yellow, and will hopefully bloom twice!



I had to smile when I took the packing slip out of the box and realized from the address on it that Dutch Gardens where I bought the bulbs is part of (or at least very near to) the Intervale cooperative farming effort in Vermont, which McKibben talked about in Chapter 2 in his book. It's on Intervale Road in VT lol!  Here's their photo of the iris on their site:



And here's the link to Dutch Gardens' Rock Star Reblooming German Iris page if you want to see if they still have any in stock.

I brought inside the dug-up Geraniums and took down the erstwhile hanging plant from the porch (well, it was still hanging, but was an erstwhile plant) and hung the bamboo wind chime there instead. I got the chime when visiting my Spouse in Honolulu last year. It is shaped like a turtle and has pleasant low notes. It's looking a bit weathered after its year outside. (It was hanging over by the garage for summer.)

(waves)

For the past few days I've been working on various projects.

One of the Compaq Proliants is now partially set up as lmao.kfap.net, the PhP and MySQL enabled Apache webserver. LMAO is a nice single-processor PIII with a raid array. Unfortunately, although stuff works well enough to be used for now I am not satisfied with the raid array's setup and I think that machine will need to be redone completely. I think it will be fine barring any emergencies, and I can re-do it once the other system has been shut down and I've gotten to the other higher priority issues. In addition to PhP, Perl and C this machine will also allow Ruby and Python scripting. Fun!

Once LMAO is ready for action I will be transferring some of the existing client and personal sites from the old network (where they are spread out on 3-4 different machines) to there. Then I will get started on the other webserver that will have the Java and Tcl capabilities as well as high-speed CGI.

I got the Webcam working on ORLY. It is supposed to be mounted in the window of the server room to look up at the sky for weather reporting. However it also was instantly and automatically integrated into the Skype internet telephone capabilities of that machine as well. Surprise!! One of my odd quirks if you will, is that I do not trust webcams. I treat them like loaded guns. I don't point them at myself even when they are not powered up. So the camera is currently pointed at some stuffed animals and a blank wall. Snicker.

I also got Weather Display installed, which is a 3rd party weather reporting software package that I am going to try out instead of the WeatherLink II software sold by my equipment's manufacturer. As soon as I have a webserver running here so that I can start it auto-posting weather web pages for Ashland, I'll supply the URL here. There'll be a little picture from the weather cam integrated into the site too. I thought it would be funny to post it at the bottom of each entry here too if I can figure out how. Just basic "my weather" with a tiny picture of the sky.

I had my 2nd meeting of the study group for "Deep Economy" by Bill McKibben today. By now I have read the introduction and chapters 1 and 2. It's interesting that Chapters 1 and 2 are so different they could almost have been written by 2 different people.

I really did not like chapter 1 at all, but I was not required to read that one technically, had only been told to skim it. If I had to quantify what I didn't like about it is, it did not have good citations and had a visible bias in areas I knew enough about to realize what was going on. For example, it claimed that all the economic (dot.com) boom in the 90's did was increase misery all around, not make people happier. I beg to differ! I was there for the 90's and we were very happy indeed while the going was still good. Not only that but I distinctly remember that crime, especially violent crime, statistics shot way down during that time. So while I don't disagree with his basic points, I don't like having my intelligence insulted either.

Additionally it was just a bit heavy-handed overall. I felt a bit defensive even though the people it was talking about didn't really include me. I think what felt like "accusatory" to me was actually simple clumsiness and overdoing the message a bit. I've never been a big fan of the point being hammered home again and again and again and again, as at least one person near and dear to me can attest to.

However, Chapter 2 was a refreshing surprise. While Chapter 1 had been focused on the problems of today and the roots of their beginnings, Chapter 2 was about Local Foods, the concept, examples, and the benefits. Very nice! Citations were thorough and most times I thought "wait a minute..." an explanation arrived not long after. Excellent work and it makes me wonder if the 2 parts of the book were either written by 2 different people, or if the editors requested Chapter 1 cobbled on to give the book a beginning, or what.

For the meeting itself we discussed Chapter 2 and then did some brainstorming on what-all would be required to do the local food thing for a given locality, all the different angles and ideas for implementation. One thing that was kind of odd about this part was the other 2 guys at the meeting were both students and transient to the Ashland area. So every time I'd say something that was from the perspective of someone thinking in terms of implementing it right HERE, they would give me an odd look like... well it wouldn't be HERE. LOL

I will post the final drawing from the whiteboard when I can figure out how to transfer it off my cell phone to my art machine.

I will report on the later chapters as I can get to them, and subsequent meetings. I can't make it to next week's as I will be going to a Candidate Forum in town here which is, alas, at exactly the same time on the other side of town. But there should be at least 2 more meetings after that.

P.S. I almost forgot to mention that on my way to the meeting on college campus, I passed a house that had unfortunately placed their McCain/Palin campaign sign right next to a Slow Children at Play sign. I must go back today with my camera! :D

Last night at around 4:30AM I was awakened by what sounded like a tiny phone ringing. I perplexedly picked up first the Skype phone, then the landline phone, verifying they were not the culprits. Then I started walking through the house trying to find what was making the noise. I was a bit creeped out because I was completely mystified as to how a phone could get in that was not brought there by me, and not liking many of the possibilities.

Well, it turns out that the culprit was our Davis weather station's indoor terminal, which is mounted in the living room. My Spouse had thoughtfully set it up to make an alarm if the outdoors temperature dropped below 32°F, and sure enough it had for the first time this year. The reason I hadn't recognized the sound is because though we've had the station for several years now, that is the first time the alarm ever worked properly! So the next problem was, how do I turn off the alarm? It was dark. It was 4:30AM. My brain was in it's-dark-and-it's-4:30-AM-and-I-never-used-this-feature-before mode. Thoughts of trying to sleep with the thing going off for hours and hours spurred me to experiment recklessly and I discovered quite by accident that the same 2-key combination that will turn off the backlight will also turn off the alarm. Who knew? Note to self: Look up correct way to turn off alarm before bed tonight.



It's been getting dark much sooner lately. Right now it's pitch black outside and I was surprised to find it was only 7:30PM. In the deep of winter it'll be pitch black at 4:30 or even 4... crazy hehe. When I first moved to Ashland I never saw stuff like the the grocery store and hardware store in daylight. Then when the first summer came I'd be perplexed when I'd go to the hardware store during broad daylight and it'd already be closed. Doh! Speaking of that, I need to go see if it's closed for good now or if they just had an emergency closing the other day.

I got half the remaining wood stacked on pallets today. Here's how I laid it out to begin with. The pallets are parallel to the house, leaving a corridor between them and the rear of the house itself. The pallets were ones that had been lying around in the far back of our lot since we bought the house nearly 2 years ago. They had been in close contact with the ground and were therefore covered in slugs when I pulled them up. After placing them in the new location I had to spend about 5 minutes rescuing slugs before I could start stacking wood. LOL



Here's the same scene from the other angle, looking back toward the house. You can see what the wood (coal) hole looks like with its metal cover closed. Actually now that I look at it, it's very much camouflaged by a tree shadow that's right there. But it's right next to the edge of the deck, at ground level. The shiny copper color of the electric meter to the right of it is how I hope to paint the wood door and all the pipes there too. Unfortunately my outdoor painting projects got a very late start this year. Fall kind of jumped up and bit me this time around. Oops!



Here's as far as I got today. I only made it halfway through the wood so I will likely need to add a 3rd pallet tomorrow.



I covered both heaps carefully with tarps even though the forecast says no rain at all for the next week. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me! ;-)



I plan on working on the servers from now until bedtime. If I can think of anything interesting to say about that I will be sure to post again. Snicker.