Month: June 2009

Chicago 2009

Well, back in my favorite Big City (well, favorite enough), Chicago. Flew from Columbus to Midway today and arrived in time for a late lunch with judiang. We originally headed for Howies, a hamburger joint near her place, but when we got there, the place was closed. A handwritten sign said that the owners had vacated the premises and wouldn’t be reopening. I’m sure the story behind that is interesting, whatever it is. We headed across the street to Zapatista instead.

Since it was late for lunch, we decided to split a lunch. We got enchiladas suisa with chicken. It came with refried beans and rice. Tasty tasty. Judi had a virgin margarita that wound up being more foam than beverage. We headed for Judi’s apartment to await elsaf‘s arrival. She was driving in from Michigan.

We watched several episodes of Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBCA while I got online with her wireless network. Elsa arrived shortly before 6pm, which was within her predicted window. After she rested up a bit from the long drive, we walked to Ma & I, a Thai and sushi place a couple of blocks from Judi’s place. I ordered pad thai with a starter of California roll. Yummy!

Across the street from Ma & I is an ice cream place, Marble Slab. So of course we had to go there for some ice cream. I had a waffle cone with Swiss chocolate ice cream and birthday cake batter ice cream. Very yummy.

Now we’re vegging out in Judi’s den. We watched the end of Aliens and will soon be watching the first two eps of Supersizers for this season (once Judi gets the DVD burned). Tomorrow should be a fun day – we may head to Taste of Chicago. More yummy food!

B-WISER 2009

I have been tweeting my camp experiences this year. I went ahead and paid for a month of unlimited texting since it’s B-WISER camp this week and Chicago next. What with the guest ‘net account not working until after classes begin, I got behind on LJ and Twitter. Finally caught up.

Writing this on my phone at the college bowling alley. Abba playing on the juke box. Heh.

Camp has been fun this year. I think the energy course is going well. (Amy, the song YMCA is playing now. We of course sang “It’s fun to be at the B-WISER camp!”) Got some ideas to improve it in future. Might remove radiation – for time – content was good tho.

Tomorrow is the last day of classes. Man, the week flies!

B-WISER About Energy

Last summer during B-WISER we decided to remove the computer class (7th grade girls are pretty much on top of computers these days) and replace it with a course on energy and environmentalism. One reason was that we could get more grant money, but another, more important reason, is that we felt it was a useful subject to teach the girls about. As I was the one teaching computers and was one of the proponents for the new class, I got to be the teacher. Lucky me!

Actually, I think I’ve come up with a good set of experiments and demonstrations for the course. Thanks to one grant we received, I have a $500 budget for the class. This is good – I’ve managed to get compact fluorescent light bulbs for each girl to take home as well as some solar-powered flashlights. (No, you don’t have to run them in the sun. When the battery dies, charge it up & it works in the dark again.) One of my co-workers at the camp works with the Ohio Energy Project and she’s got some other goodies for me to give the girls.

With the labs written now (finished ’em yesterday) and most of the supplies purchased (got all the different fuels today), it’s just a matter of getting the experimental apparatuses built and tested. And tonight, father and I (well, mostly dad) built the prototype for the solar panel apparatus we’ll be using. We had a few problems due to the solar panel wiring (well, more of a metal foil strip than wire) breaking on one side of the panel. I actually managed to figure out how to know if we soldered it correctly (hooking it up to the voltage probe and moving the copper wire until the voltage changed – then we knew we had the right spot). Hopefully I can avoid breaking the foil off of the others.

Tomorrow I’ve got more work to do on ’em, as well as buy more hinges for the rest of the solar panel apparatuses since we know now they work for my needs. I also will have some soldering to do – need to make some alligator clip wires since 6 of my voltage probes have a funny way of connecting. But having a working prototype makes me feel good. Of course, camp starts Sunday… Heh.

You know, over the years I managed to reduce the amount of stuff I had to bring to B-WISER down to a minimum. But now with this new class, I’ve got a carload of stuff I’ll be bringing. (And one idea was getting an energy bike to the camp. I don’t think so….) But as I’ve designed the class to use my Vernier LabQuests as much as possible, I’m really excited.

trinalinux

Well, my new PC can now dual boot either Ubuntu 9.04 or Windows 7 release candidate. Been working on getting software updated on both of ’em. Winders is my gaming system (with some video editing as well). Linux is for everything else.

So one of my concerns was syncing my phone with my PC. Thanks to synCE and some faffing about (and plenty of googling), I got my phone to sync with Evolution e-mail. I even created a batch file to do the sync whenever I want. ActiveSync can kiss my behind! 😉

I installed CoH & WoW onto the Winders partition and much of the day was spent with those two programs updating themselves. So during the wait times, I worked on getting my old PC ready for my Aunt Becky. (Would be further along if I hadn’t accidentally changed the resolution to something beyond the ability of the 15″ LCD monitor I’ve got attached to it. Whoops! Only took me more faffing about to figure that bit out. Oh, and the idea of moving my 17″ monitor over to the PC and then switching resolution? Only just occured to me. STUPID!

Anyhoo, I’m delighted to find out that converting my Thunderbird mail to Evolution is easy peasy. I’ve got a 500+GB partition just of the data files which WInders & Linux will share (docs, music, that sort of thing). It’s permamounted to Linux and both OSes know that Documents means the folder in that partition labeled “Documents,” etc. 🙂

As promised, here’s the specs on the new PC:

SAMSUNG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model SH-S223Q

COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW Black Aluminum Bezel , SECC Chassis ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600 ATSC/ClearQAM/NTSC TV Tuner PCI w/Remote 1199 PCI Interface

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor Model BX80570E8400

GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3R LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK

EVGA 01G-P3-N959-TR GeForce 9500 GT 1GB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

Antec earthwatts EA500 500W Continuous Power ATX12V v2.0 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply

ETA: Total cost? $736. 🙂

New PC – Yay!

I am writing this LJ post from my new PC. I ordered all the pieces over the weekend and they showed up today. NewEgg, you rock!

I’ll put the specs up later, once I’ve gotten my old data onto this new PC. But I got it built (first time in years that I’ve built a PC from scratch) and Ubuntu 9.04 (64-bit) installed. Now to repartition the drive for a Winders install and a data directory (so Winders & Linux can share my files). Alas, due to my gaming addiction, I still need Winders. Going to try Winders 7 RC1 to see if that will work. 🙂

Strawberry Festival 2009

On Friday, I had checked the times for the Strawberry Festival and for Sat & Sun, the booths were to open at 10am. So the folks and I decided that we’d go on Sunday when many folks would be in church. The plan, take one of the shuttle buses from the Meijer parking lot to the festival. The reality? Although the booths opened at 10am, the shuttle service didn’t start until 11am. Whoops! No matter, I drove us toward the festival and found parking at the old Hobart offices – just a short walk across the bridge to the levy where the festival is held. Though dad was a little disappointed he didn’t get to ride a school bus (that’s what they use for the shuttles), the convenience of the parking was worth it.

We got to the levy shortly before 10am, but many booths were already opened. We perused the various crafts and when we got to a booth selling strawberry smoothies, mom & I bought one to share. A few booths down, Panera was selling strawberry danishes (basically cheese danish with sliced strawberries on). A nice breakfast, IMO.

Once we’d been most of the way through the festival, we went down to the lower levy to buy the (now rather over-priced at $8 a dozen) strawberry donuts sold by the Troy Music Boosters. So I only bought a dozen donuts. My favorite lemon/strawberry shake up booth is on the lower levy, so I bought my shake up and we perused the booths there before heading back up.

Deciding what to have for lunch wasn’t easy – lost of wonderful choices. But the booth selling crawfish etouffee won my heart, stomach, and money. I also had to get the strawberry sushi. It was basically strawberry sashimi sliced onto sushi rice. 😉 Very tasty, actually. The folks got lunch as well and let me try their roasted corn on the cob & sammiches (grilled chicken for mom, BBQ beef for dad). Tasty.

I actually bought a few items – unsurprisingly foodstuff. I got some fudge-caramel sauce (for ice cream, etc) that was tasty, some jalapeño jelly (which wasn’t nearly as hot as the habeñero jelly they were also selling), and a huge bag of kettle corn. I’ve eaten about a third of the bag so far. Heh.

We got back to the car at noon, so it was a pretty successful day. We avoided most of the crowd by going early, had decent parking, and got out before it got too warm. We rock at Festivalling!

Freedom! It smells yummy!

Today was the last day of school for both students and teachers. (Well, for today to be the last day for teachers, we had to work until 7pm. But it’s worth it. Heh.)

One of the neat things we did today was get to take a tour of the building site for the new school building. I took lots of photos. Dunno when I’ll download ’em, but hey, photos!

This weekend is the Troy Strawberry Festival – I’ll be going with the folks on Sunday during the Heathen Hours – that is, when other folks are in church. (You meet the nicest people during the Heathen Hours. Heh.)