I’m reading a useful-looking article (free PDF) in the August/September 2005 issue of Home Power discussing passive cooling. The third page has a sidebar titled, “Bioclimatic Graph with Cooling Strategies”, which gives suggestions for which type(s) of passive cooling system is appropriate for a given climate. The sidebar looks very helpful, except that it requires that you know average monthly minimum and maximum temperature and relative humidity. The sidebar suggests, “You can find this information online at the National Climate Data Center.” But I’m not having any luck finding the humidity data, either via the NCDC or Google. 
I can get very cool graphs of recent climate info from the MESOWEST station interface for KSAC (Sacramento Executive Airport, a nearby weather station), but this doesn’t give me the monthly averages. (Yes, I could calculate the monthly averages based on data from 1997 to the present, but I won’t.)
I was one of the first people in the Pacific timezone to get a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (HBP), but I still have yet to finish it. Why? I’m reading it aloud to my family–not only is reading aloud slower than silent reading, but I can only read when all four of us are around. Note: reading a 652-page book aloud, including character voice changes, is very stressful for the larynx. (gasp, croak)
We’re down to the last 4 chapters, and we still haven’t found out who the “half-blood prince” is! In fact, there are a lot of unanswered questions at this point in the book–hopefully there are a lot of answers packed into the last ~70 pages; otherwise, it’s going to be a lonnnnng wait for book #7. (Okay, granted it will be a long wait anyway.) We should finish the book tonight, yea!
No spoilers here, yet. I’ll post my questions, theories, etc. after we finish the book (and I have some free time on my hands, which probably won’t be until late this week).
Peg Kerr has an interesting thread discussing HBP–I would love to add my two cents’ worth to it, but she’s only allowing LJ users to leave comments, and I’m not willing to register another blog account just for this. Doesn’t look like LJ supports trackbacks or pingbacks either, sigh.
