My Desultory Blog

Posted By RichC on March 22, 2007

Just when you thought ‘geeks’ couldn’t get any odder, they do. Computer users with a couple spare USB ports can now sit comfortably wearing “Heated Kneepads.” Yes, USB powered kneepads that can be warn to keep those cold knees warm on a winter day. How many people have you heard complaining about cold knees??? (but then I don’t wear a dress?)
🙂

This brings me to an issue I have with my new notebook … its hot even at the powersaver setting! I’m talking ‘knee burning’ or should I say ‘sterilizing‘ hot. (in more ways than just sanitary … if you get my drift) I thought all this talk about hot notebook computers was an over statement but that’s obviously not the case. Perhaps and experiment is in order … time to get out the thermometer.

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Posted By RichC on March 22, 2007

Unfortunately the Volkswagen Jetta TDI in the Speed World Challenge Touring Car championship this year had to drop out of the race after only two laps in its first race on Friday at Sebring. Press reports say the biodiesel-powered car, driven by Jim Osborn, suffered mechanical problems. Next race is May 17-19 in Utah.

Here’s a press comment (see previous post ) over at MotorSport.com mentioning that the VW Jetta TDI was running biodiesel (B50) as well as Chili Pepper Racings March 15th press release.

With the start of Round 1 SPEED World Challenge Touring Car Series Chili Pepper Racing became the first team to race a production based DIESEL powered car in US Touring car history. In addition, SCCA PRO Racing and Chili Pepper Racing made Motorsport history as the first to approve and race BIO-Diesel fuel in a production based Touring Car Series World Wide. The #24 Spice Red Volkswagen Jetta TDI was fueled with B50 blend Bio-diesel utilizing “food-grade” soy oil as it base. This falls on the heels of the Motorsports Industry Association International conference on Energy Efficient Motorsports and is part of global trend to develop and promote bio-fuel technologies.

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Posted By RichC on March 22, 2007

A company synonymous with American diesels, Cummins Inc, has give the nod to B 20 biodiesel this week. We Volkswagen TDI drivers can only hope that VWoA will follow suit and approve B20 for use in its small diesels. (currently they approve blends of up to 5% — B5)

Cummins Announces Approval of B20 Biodiesel Blends
LOUISVILLE, Ky.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Cummins Inc. (NYSE:CMI – News) today announced the approval of biodiesel B20 blends for use in its 2002 and later emissions-compliant ISX, ISM, ISL, ISC and ISB engines. This includes the recently released 2007 products.

Cummins is able to upgrade its previous position on the use of biodiesel fuel, which limited the use to B5 blends only, up to B20 for three key reasons. First, the American Society of Testing Materials specification ASTM D6751 now includes an important stability specification for B100 biodiesel. Second, the availability of quality fuels from BQ-9000 Certified Marketers and Accredited Producers is growing rapidly; and third, Cummins has completed the necessary testing and evaluations to ensure that customers can reliably operate their equipment with confidence using B20 fuel.

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Posted By RichC on March 21, 2007

There have been many moments in the last few days that I’ve wondered why I purchase a computer with Windows Vista installed as the operating system last week; it has not been easy nor will be for sometime I fear. From the simple task of getting programs and files transferred over from and XP machine, to getting simple things like USB flash drives or public WiFi locations to operate painlessly, its a challenge. Vista does its best to keep its guard up and prevent easy access. (for good and bad) I’m spending my lunch sharing a few thoughts below.

A few ‘first days’ with Vista post:
I do enjoy the Apple Macintosh like look and feel, and the cute little pop-ups showing the tiny window in the task bar (even flash video plays in miniature) or Win-Tab combination in bring a window/program to the front. Speed seems fine on my Gateway notebook with 2 GBs of RAM and most of the programs I need daily do seem to run well. I’ve installed the MS Office 2003 Office suite as well as Adobe CS 2 of which I use Photoshop and InDesign regularly. IE7 as expected seems clean and fast and has minimal issues with pages or plug-ins like Shockwave or Flash. I prefer Mozilla Firefox2 for browsing and with that I’ve seen a few glitches. The initial hassle was how to port over my existing backup from XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\’NAME’\Application Data\Mozilla …
Send these files to your new Vista computer using network, USB flash drive of CD and they go in a similar directory here:
C:\Users\’NAME’\AppData\Roaming …
It took me a little looking to figure this out even though I probably could have found something online? (I’ve got that ‘male’ problem when it comes to reading or asking for directions)
Anyway since I used Thunderbird, the transfer of info is about the same … directories that is. Even then, it seems that Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (20070221) still has a time out problem which has been noted on Dual Core processors. I’ve increased the ‘connection timeout’ setting to 120 although it still doesn’t seem to help. There must be a problem using the second Core? Anyway it only happens occasionally.

The Palm Desktop up and running although from what I’ve found, the desktop will no longer hotsync and install files? All else is working and I finally have my USB connection back. Yippee. PDAnet is also working with my Palm Treo 700p to connect to the internet. I’ve not tried the Bluetooth sync yet but then that’s been another questionable issue? My new computer has built in bluetooth (old one used a PC card) an I’ve appreciated having a wireless bluetooth Kensington mouse to use instead of the touch pad (occasionally) and to be able to use a Jabra JX10 bluetooth earpiece. Unfortunately using the two together is questionable as I get the feared ‘blue screen then die’ window when both are on and a Skype call is made. So much for using the two together?

As for a couple non-essential luxuries, my Slingplayer runs flawlessly and take full advantage of a good network connection and Ultrabright widescreen. (one beautiful improvement over my old notebook) The Capture Express product sadly doesn’t work well with Vista although Stan at Insight Software Solutions tells me an upgrade is being worked on. That said, I’ve found the Snipping Tool packaged with Vista is an acceptable substitute … I might even grow to like it?

Well enough for now, I’ve burned my lunch hour rattling with my first thought at a McDonald’s hotspot … and still have 50% battery life left! (although I did go with the optional oversized battery pack and have my ‘power plan’ set to ‘balanced.’) Sorry … no time to proofread.
😀

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Posted By RichC on March 20, 2007

Mapquest offers a fuel locating (and pricing) tool linked to their mapping site. Its easy to locate the kind of fuel you are looking for using pull down menus and plugging in locations. (ie. biodiesel) Although the maps are not as functional (IMHO) as those independent “mashups” using GoogleMaps they do offer the traditional maps that contain better overview city, highway and road indications.

The site also looks to be competing in the ‘watching fuel prices’ service by offering price updates … although they need to develop a consistent network of ‘watchers.’ Check it out if you are looking for station locations on your next trip or just around town. (add missing stations by clicking the ‘help’ link. I recently added the Lebanon, Ohio biodiesel location as well as my favorite Mt. Gilead I-71 exit 151 Sunoco — Googlemaps link.)

Clean Fuels Ohio maintains a good up-to-date list of stations in Ohio … it a good source to check and uses a Yahoo map link at the top of the page. (Ohio’s getting a few dots!)

Ohio Department of Development Map link

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Posted By RichC on March 19, 2007

First, I suspect most of you will need a definition? Hapaxes, (pl. hapax legomena) is a word that occurs only once in the written record of a language, in the works of an author, or in a single text. Is related to a geekish pasttime referred to as “Googlewhacking” — A Googlewhack is a Google search query consisting of two words–both of which must be in Google’s dictionary, and without quotation marks–that returns a single result. A successful Googlewhack returns ‘Results 1-1 of (any number)’.
Now comes the sort of part … while trying to find some information about my new computer, I googled what I thought was the model of my computer (NX470XL) and was shocked to only see one entry? Hmm … how could this be until I glanced at the model more carefully — whoops, my mistake.
🙂

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Posted By RichC on March 18, 2007

Although it would be better to celebrate “National Biodiesel Day” with good news from the Earthrace team, its not been a promising start for the biodiesel project. After significant hype, having prop problems followed by a cracked engine part are putting nails in the coffin for the crew attempting a world record biodiesel circumnavigation. The boat and crew are trying hard to get a replacement part so they can make reparis, but in reading the March 17th Captain’s (b)log and noting their ‘stalled position,’ the situation does not look good.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. My dreams are shattered by an engine alarm that we know is bad news. I scurry out of bed and look at the controls. It’s showing low oil pressure on the starboard engine. We shut her down and clamber down to have a look. To our horror, there’s oil all over the engine and bilge. “It’s the head gasket,” Anthony says. “Oil is leaking all around the block.” I’m not convinced, as it just seems there’s oil everywhere. We refill the engine with oil and start her up. Oil pisses out a bolthole on the side of the engine. “What does that do”, I ask Anthony, pointing to the square box that the oil is coming from. “Not sure bro”.

The manuals are out and it turns out to be a heat exchanger that cools engine oil. We start to remove it, but the job just snowballs. To get the device off, we must first remove lots of other parts. The engine room is hot and loud, and the engine we’re working on continues to burn our hands for hours as we remove parts bit by bit. We’re continuing on with one engine so as not to lose too much time, but the motion makes even small jobs a mission. Eventually the device is off. It must be a blown gasket, although they both look fine. “Lets just put a thin layer of silicone over the gaskets to ensure they all seal,” says Anthony.

Two hours later and its all back together. We start her up and to our horror, the oil leak remains, and now there’s a water leak as well. The oil leak is not from the bolthole at all, but rather a hairline crack right next to the bolt. We’re gutted. All that work and lost time and we haven’t even fixed the leak.

We start calling ground crew with our sat phone to get new parts underway. Meanwhile Anthony comes up with a cunning plan. “We can sand the housing back while its still on the engine, then seal the crack with some JB Weld.” Well this is not something I know much about, so I just agree to do the sanding. A short while later and the 2-part epoxy is applied over the culprit crack, and we wait for it to set. We drag ourselves into bed and crash.

A few hours later and we start the engine. Now there’s just a small leak through a hole, rather than the full crack. A second batch of JB weld is applied, and an hour later a third. As the engine cools, it sucks in just enough of the epoxy to open a tiny hole, although it seems we’ll close it up eventually. Just not sure how long it’ll take. Meanwhile groundcrew have lined up a replacement part for us in Mexico.

Captain Pete Bethune

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Posted By RichC on March 18, 2007

Rugby season is back in full swing and we’ve started the routine of ice packs and Advil. I recall post about my son’s first match last spring … and now a year ‘wiser’ I thought he would be playing the game a little bit more gently? I am wrong and have evidence to prove it.
😉
According to Taylor, the ‘head to the face’ bump he took looks worse than it feels (hard to believe), and although the black and blue eye looked painful, it was his finger and wrist that bothered him more.

He of course went out after the game (not too smart) before coming home, and after sleeping with a cold pack his eye looked even worse in the morning. I took him to the doctor ‘just in case’ since the bloody eye bothered me. (subconjunctival haematoma) Ice, Advil and time was the prescription and according to the doctor “it is somewhat common to have blood vessels in the eye rupture” — of course my son’s question was whether he would be okay to play on Friday!

Oh … and it looks like someone came by last night to cheer him up. (photo below) It was nice of them to leave a few unspoiled TP rolls too … I wonder if our dog sprinting around the corner had anything to do with that?
🙂

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Tags: injury, rugby, sports, taylor

Posted By RichC on March 17, 2007

Okay … so I just bought a new notebook computer online because my USB ports have gone kaput. BTW … thanks for the tip Nora. The new Gateway NX570XL arrived today and is pretty nice — BUT … what are these people thinking? Swapping the ‘Fn’ and ‘Ctrl’ key positions??? Perhaps others have experience this or read about it online, but I’ve obviously missed this change? I’ve glanced at every keyboard I have in my house whether Mac (yes they have other odd keys) or PC and they are all the small. ‘Ctrl’ key on the left bottom corner. Since I rotate between Mac, PC desktops and my notebook, this going to drive me crazy. Perhaps I should check to see if there is a remapping available. Thoughts anyone?
EDIT: Corrected my model number from NX470XL to NX570XL. Also … starting to remember where the Ctrl key is … but this notebook gets much ‘hotter’ than my old one … and I’m not found of that. I suppose that is why its called a ‘notebook’ and not a ‘laptop?’

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Tags: gateway, keyboard, laptop, notebook, nx570xl

Posted By RichC on March 16, 2007

For those of you keeping up with circumnavigating sailor Donna Lange (plots/log daily on right sidebar), she has had stronger than expected winds … along with larger seas. Her little 28 foot boat continues to pound it way along, logging well over 100 nautical miles each day. (116 nm yesterday) This speed puts her several days ahead of her April 21st homecoming in Bristol, Rhode Island and after a day of contemplation, she has decided to detour to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands where she has many friends and where her little boat “Inspired Insanity” is registered. Besides as she wants “summer warmth to last a bit longer before heading for the cold NE coast.” (earlier posts)

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