Solar Power

Finally, residential solar power made easy. I can't wait to have a home off the grid. Someday.

Wired Reviews

Cool things to keep track of in issue 14.09: Oddly, nothing. Kind of a music heavy issue. Not my thing really.

How about issue 14.10? The Biofuels are coming! And so is the Petabyte Age where all info is stored somewhere on in the internet cloud.

That reminds me. I just signed up with Carbonite to backup home PCs. I've been waiting for the right product in this space to mature and this looks like it. Zero-maintenance, secure PC backup.

Lessee, issue 14.11: Very interesting piece on The New Atheism. This piece more than anything else has really convinced me that it's not only all right to be an atheist but to begin to be assertive about it. Notes: atheism may indeed be the last class of folk it's ok to be bigoted against. I've made a conscious choice though to no longer fret about religion as a personal belief system and to not raise my kids with any sort of religion. Of course, when they want to experiment with different belief systems I'll be supportive and answer their questions to the best of my ability. I think the most important thing I can teach them is to think critically about religion and all things.

Pneumonia

Where did December go? I spent all of December and the first half of January fighting off pneumonia. That was a new one for me. I don't recommend the disease. Generally unpleasant.

But the garlic continues to grow well. And my new employer decided to give raises and increased bonus percentages to most employees as part of salary survey they did to make sure they were competitive. I'd already been bumped quite well from my last job so I wasn't expecting anything more, but it's quite nice to get a raise after only 1 month on the job.

Christmas was very nice. We have scaled this holiday way back. By not setting expectations too high it's a much more relaxing experience. We had a turkey dinner (deep fried of course) with Dad and Marcia. Santa came and gave a few gifts to the kids only. Evan is very happy with is new bunny and gameboy. Chloe got Evan's old gameboy and new Care Bears. They both got Razor scooters from Aunt Sue and they were a big hit.

Following the theme of "scaling down", we had a simple birthday party for Evan this past Saturday which went really well. Evan loved his ice cream Bunny cake. Actually I think Evelyn liked it best since she ate most of it. :-) I led the kid in a bug making exercise that was really quite fun. Other kids worked at the perler bead station. The weather in January has been beautiful so the kids ran around and played and played outside. The grownups enjoyed watching them from the back porch. Very nice.

Finally, on the weather. It was mid 70s yesterday, so the neighbors got together for a barbecue. I got to watch a football game with "the guys". I realize this is actually the first time I've ever watched a football game end-to-end. I felt a bit like a fish out of water, but it was good exercise for my social skills. And the rum and cokes were free-flowing so I didn't mind not understanding some parts of the game.

Review: Into the Wild

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. I seldom do this with any book, but I'm going to give up on this one half way through. This was a tale of some deranged young man who wandered around the back country trying to... do what I'm not sure --- find himself? Eventually he hikes into the tundra of Alaska without so much as a good pair of boots and, surprise, winds up dead. This is a fine story and would've made a good magazine article. But it gets stretched out into this tedious affair of comparing this nut job to every other nut job who ever lived off the land. A history of every John Muir wannabee that wound up dead. Not terribly interesting actually.

A guy from my last job loaned me this book. I need to get it back to him somehow. Interoffice mail isn't going to work. :-)

First Day

Survived my first day at RHD with only a minor headache. I actually got to solve an interesting technical problem. A new OWA server wasn't behaving. I found the problem related to back-end servers having different Exchange version than the front ends. See this article for the geeky details. It's nice to see already that the technology here is familiar and yet just different enough to be challenging. One thing I have to give RHD props for is their documentation. Excellent. I built a new server today. While installing Exchange was no big deal, their antivirus product was unfamiliar to me. No problem following the well-illustrated step-by-step instructions my predecessor left behind.

Black Creek Greenway

Found this greenway trail and rode my bike the complete 14 miles. Starts in Cary, goes out to the RDU overlook in Umstead state park and then over the new pedestrian bridge over 440, ending at Meredith.

Garlic - 1 Month

1 month since I planted garlic. Seems to be doing well so far. I used wheat straw as mulch. Problem is the stuff keeps germinating so I've been spending a bit of time plucking wheat plants out. I think this will die off once the weather gets cold. But with it in the 70s this week it shows no signs of stopping soon.