Jan 4th, 2009 by bwann
Things about CHiPs that highly amuse me:
Jan 3rd, 2009 by bwann
Wee 2009! It’s been a slow couple of weeks and I’ve been glad. I spent Christmas in Oklahoma. I spent the most of that crashed on the couch like a king! I wound up working Friday, fortunately it was a pretty quiet day.
I got two seasons of CHiPs, been watching that here and there. The women in that series are much more attractive than in Dallas. I remember some of these, so I think I’ve seen part of the first season recently somewhere. I’m highly amused by how quickly and tidily the stories are wrapped up. No dramatics, the criminal just gives up. Also, regular (not even unleaded) gasoline for 60 cents per gallon!
AT&T finally ported my number to my iPhone. This means I am finally back to carrying one phone. Last night it felt weird not hooking my Nokia to the charger on my night stand. I’ve been doing this action right at 10 years; it’s quite the habit.
This weekend I was browsing through textbooks at UT’s school of business. One that was required for a supply chain management degree was called The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. Apparently quite the classic business book. It’s basically about operations management, written in novel form. A lot of the story hit home (“everthing is either hot, very hot, do it now!”) and I couldn’t stop reading it. In retrospect, some of the things about constraint management they discuss seems like it should be common sense. Things such as gathering data, identifying a bottleneck, preventing the bottleneck from going idle. After they save the plant the thrill stops, but I think that’s because it’s where the meat of theory of constraint is brought in.
Dec 15th, 2008 by bwann
It was quite stuffy in my apartment last night, I turned on the AC and went to bed. This morning I wake up to a frosty 33 F day; it was quite chilly in the apartment.
This of course is only second in comparison to it being 81 F at noon last Tuesday then plunging into the 30s with snow. That’s more impressive than the usual 70s -> snow we had in Oklahoma. I blame the global recession for the weird weather, “global warming” or “global climate change” is so old and busted.
Nov 30th, 2008 by bwann
The past few days were spent in Oklahoma visiting the family. I left Austin at 3 AM on Thursday morning and made it up in record time. Very little traffic, and that was the point.
Despite repeated pleas to “eat more” by my grandma, I managed to put on four pounds between all the turkey and drinking of tea to stay awake.
Friday night I ventured up to Tulsa to visit friends, but it turned out to be a complete waste of time as I couldn’t sync up with anybody. I did wind up doing a good amount of driving around to see what had changed. Many of the businesses and restaurants I used to frequent were gone. Fortunately First Watch and Full Moon were still there.
The city has apparently put a considerable amount of effort into fixing up downtown. All new city feature signs, not to mention the new hugeass BOK Center. Last time I was up, that hadn’t even been started. I saw several bike paths had been placed, new bike/pedestrian bridges in place. Half of Riverside park was torn up, looks like they’re putting in dual bike and pedestrian paths. I guess bike traffic has really picked up, or they’re at least planning on it.
Nevertheless t’s still dead on the weekends, not a lot happening. I don’t think they’ll ever come up with a unified entertainment district that gains critical mass. There’s the whole warehouse district, Cherry Street, 2nd street, and some stuff elsewhere. I just don’t see it as a place people will want to spend a lot of time at yet.
Seeing the old office building at 8th and Cincinnati really kicked me in the gut though. So many good, bad, and stressful memories of winding down the old company. It was really a culmination of memories of living there and all the good friends I lost contact with as we all grew up, moved off, and went our seperate ways.
I discovered the “small wind” industry tonight. One piece of this is the Air Breeze Land wind turbine. For $600 I think it’s worth playing with at Burning Man. Southwest Windpower makes a pretty neat telescoping pole mount which has a base that’s designed to be parked on by a RV or vehicle to hold it stationary. It’s a neat idea, but I’d like to see how practical it is in the field. Then I saw the price, $799, which is more than the turbine itself. This is what leads me to think “I could build this thing myself.”
Southwest Windpower also produces the Skystream 3.7, a much larger unit. I question its advertisement showing the rancher+hippy promoting the 3.7 for “grid-connected homes”. It claims “Skystream can … reduce your dependence on foreign oil.” Last time I checked, we don’t use oil for electricity generation in the US. We certainly use a lot of natural gas, and the vast majority of that is domestic. The only way I can see this holding true is if you were using a gasoline or diesel powered generator, or using your new found source to power an electric car. I digress, this sort of thing is what causes people to accuse me of being too literal.
Nov 23rd, 2008 by bwann
It’s animal kingdom around here. When I first moved in, I had three squirrels munching on the oak tree just off my balcony. Then the deer roaming about. Last month there was a pair of bucks walking down by the mail center. This month while walking out to my truck there were four raccoon crossing the parking lot. Earlier this week as I drove up the hill there was a group of six raccoons on the road. Last night as I walked down the hill from doing laundry, I looked over in the brush and there was a deer walking down with me no less than 30 feet away. Tonight there was a deer walking around the Walgreens parking lot on Mesa.
This is absolutely brilliant: Denny’s Introduces ‘Just a Humongous Bucket Of Eggs And Meat’
Nov 18th, 2008 by bwann
After one of my tires gave up life, I went to NTB at 7:30 on Saturday morning to buy new tires without waiting forever. $762 later I have new rubber. Now my truck must last another 70,000 miles so I can get my money’s worth out of them.
The upshot of falling crude prices is that airfare has gotten cheap once again. I bought a ticket to Boston for the first week of December for a little under $300. I need to buy a ticket for Christmas in Oklahoma before it’s too late.
I picked up Boone Picken’s newest book this weekend and finished it Sunday. I didn’t know much about him until I saw an article in the WSJ about his wind plans. He sounds like quite a character and he’s still going at it. I’m interested in his Clean Energy Fuels company, how they provide natural gas service stations.
I was eyeing Guitar Hero: World Tour at Fry’s on Sunday. I was still feeling my wallet burn after buying tires, so I passed it up. I somehow found myself at Half-Price Books buying an old “Fundamentals of Corporate Finance” textbook instead. It seems way more interesting, but you can’t exactly share that experience with your friends.
Nov 9th, 2008 by bwann
I finally got around to watching Cool Hand Luke. Great movie. Watched part of Giant, couldn’t stick with it. Didn’t go anywhere this weekend, stayed around home doing utterly nothing.
So I need to find somebody to teach me horseback riding. Somehow it got in my head this weekend. It sounds far, far more interesting than IT work.
Nov 2nd, 2008 by bwann
Discovery has a new show called Time Warp that is exceedingly interesting. I’ve spent hours watching slow motion videos on YouTube and looked forward to seeing new material. One thing they showed was a hot blonde pole vaulter doing her thing. Tangentally I went looking for pole vaulting photos on flickr and found a very lovely girl named Melanie Adams. Apparently she’s not some random girl, but an Aussie girl with modeling aspirations. Hopefully we’ll see more of her!
I’ve been kicking myself for not going anywhere on the weekends lately. Saturday afternoon I set off for Midland. My GPS was on CST, so it wound up being an hour longer drive than I had planned. It was very dark when I arrived and it was interesting seeing all the lit up rigs on the horizon. It reminded me of a bunch of Burning Man men all spread out. One of the first things I saw was a hugeass fire. At first I thought it was a rig burning off gas, but after I found it, it turned out to be some sort of tank farm burning off something. The smell of H2S was in the air, which smells like money being made!
At first glance, both Midland and Odessa around I-20 looked pretty old and run down. This morning when I went out to forage for breakfast I headed up to northern Midland. Much better area, clearly where all the new development and suburbia area. I also got a good luck at how utterly flat and open the Permian Basin is. Which makes sense, since it was an ancient sea bed.
I did quite a bit of driving around the oilpatch this morning. I drove down to Crane where some of the original fields were and it was quite dense with pumping jacks. Unfortunately all the roads were blocked so wandering on country roads was as close as I could get. The rigs were considerably harder to find compared to being lit up at night, not to mention being very spread out. I found one with a backdrop of wind turbines on a mesa I wanted a photo of, but it was deep in the middle of a lease I couldn’t get to.
I thought it was interesting that gasoline in San Angelo was $1.91, yet in the Permian Basin it was over $2.50. I thought there was a couple of refineries in M/O, but may be other things at play.
I left Midland around 2 to head home. This time I headed back to Crane and onward to I-10. Got home around 7:30, wee!
Oct 30th, 2008 by bwann
Took the truck to the shop and let my mechanic dink at it. Between an exhaust gas test and pressure test, no leak was found. When I first dropped it off, they suspected a head gasket leak but later couldn’t determine if that’s what caused it. While I was waiting, I called another recommended shop to get an estimate on a head gasket replacement. 12 hours labor, $1,100. Expensive, but surely it’d fix it.
Also had them check my O2 sensor. They cleared the code again ($80 for that privilege), by the time I got home it was back on. This sounds like a problem with cabling. In the end they recommended bringing it back so they could change the oil and carefully look for signs of coolant, and track down the wiring fault. I trust their work but need to try a friend’s outfit; I won’t have to travel across town to get there.
Each turkey sandwich I make costs $2.68 and provides about 340 calories. By the time I eat two of those and a taco in the morning, that’s about half the calories needed for my basal metabolic rate. I’ve added streching and strength training over the past few weeks to stave off muscle loss. Thus far regularlly I’m down to 168. I can’t remember the last time I was in the 160s.
Friday begins now.
