Passive cooling strategies

Posted on 2005-07-20 by Jim Vanderveen

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.)

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Finishing “Harry Potter #6” tonight

Posted on 2005-07-20 by Jim Vanderveen

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.

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I’m #1! I’m #1!

Posted on 2005-07-15 by Jim Vanderveen

Ticket #0001 for \"Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince\"
I managed to be first in line for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at Borders in Sacramento this morning. It was a close race–I got there at about 05:00, only two hours ahead of the second person in line, and four hours ahead of the third! Before anybody asks: No, I was not planning on getting in line at 05:00! I woke up at about 03:00 and couldn’t get back to sleep. At about 04:00, I gave up and got out of bed, and I figured I could kill time either at home or sitting in the parking lot. I decided on the parking lot, just in case a horde of people were also itching to be one of the first on the west coast to get a copy.

Now I just need to wait for midnight…

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“Harry Potter 6” comes out tomorrow night!

Posted on 2005-07-15 by Jim Vanderveen

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince comes out tomorrow night/Saturday morning at midnight! I ordered a copy from Borders, same as last time. Unlike last time, they are not going to make people wait in line all day–they’ll be handing out numbers to pre-order customers when they open at 10:00 tomorrow, then selling them “by the numbers” starting at 00:01 on Saturday morning. I’ll show up a little early and hopefully grab a low number. My neighbor is also getting a copy, and she may be joining me in line.

My family has been trying to figure out who the “half-blood prince” might be, but we’ve never come up with a satisfactory guess. Now I suppose it’s getting to be too late for speculation–time to read the book and just find out!

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Game night at Arden-Dimick library

Posted on 2005-07-14 by Jim Vanderveen

I’ve got the community room at the Arden-Dimick branch of the Sacramento Library reserved for boardgaming this coming Wednesday, July 20th from 19:30 until 21:30 (7:30 pm to 9:30 pm for those stuck on 12-hour clocks). I’m posting this event on the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup, and I’ll also be putting up flyers at Viking Hobby and possibly other appropriate locations. (I should probably post something at the library itself!)

I don’t know what games I’ll be bringing yet. As soon as I know, I’ll post an update here.

This will probably become a regularly scheduled event for the 3rd Wednesday of each month. I hope to move the start time up to 19:00 for subsequent meetings.

Update: I spelled “Dimick” wrong–doh! (I doubled the M)

Update #2: This event is now posted on Sacramento Boardgames Meetup.

Update #3: Changed the end time to 9:30 pm.

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My eighth anniversary at OWP

Posted on 2005-07-14 by Jim Vanderveen

Today is my 8th anniversary with OWP, although I think my CalPERS anniversary is not until sometime in October. I moved to OWP on 14 Jul 1997, when Alphatec Electronics laid off about 90% of their workforce, including all of the IT staff.

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Sacramento boardgaming

Posted on 2005-07-12 by Jim Vanderveen

Nicholas is setting up a new boardgames site for Sacramento-area gamers. (I’m kibbitzing providing helpful advice.) The new site will be based on WordPress, of course. This whole thing was brought about by Meetup’s recent decision to start charging fees for their groups. 🙁

As soon as the site is ready, we’ll be promoting it on the Sacramento Boardgames Meetup, where I’m the so-called “Organizer”. (People who know me well may commence laughing now.)

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Blueberry bars

Posted on 2005-07-10 by Jim Vanderveen

My wife and daughter just made this recipe from “Sacramento Magazine”, July 2005 issue. It was excellent, especially as it was still warm from the oven!

Ingredients:
– 1/2 c butter, softened
– 2 c sugar
– 4 eggs
– 1 tsp almond or vanilla extract (we used vanilla)
– 2 c flour
– 3 c fresh blueberries

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 9″ x 13″ baking pan. Using an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugar until creamy. With the mixer running, add the eggs, one at a time. Mix in the extract and the flour. Finally, gently stir in the blueberries by hand.

Spread the mixture into the prepared pan. Bake for 45 to 55 minutes, until top is a light-golden brown. Cool and slice. Yields 24 small bars.

Thoughts and suggestions: we got 15 dessert-sized pieces out of this. They’re on the big side, but so good that you’ll find room for them. I found this recipe to be a little too sweet, so maybe a bit less sugar next time? The dough seemed a little “heavy” also, perhaps once the sugar is adjusted we can try adding some baking soda and salt.

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Adding statcounter to WordPress

Posted on 2005-07-08 by Jim Vanderveen

I’m thinking about using the free statcounter service on my site, but it requires that I add a little bit of javascript to each page. If I was running a single theme, I could probably find all the appropriate </body> tags and just paste in the statcounter code. But I’m trying to support multiple themes; besides, where’s the fun in cutting and pasting a bunch of code? Also, what if I need to change the statcounter code for some reason? So I think the Right Thing to do here is come up with a plugin for the wp_footer action which will insert some user-specified code, (in this case, my statcounter javascript). I haven’t found a plugin for statcounter, so I’ll be searching for a generic footer plugin. If I can’t find anything, I guess I’ll have to roll my own.

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Awesome “cheat sheets” for web authors

Posted on 2005-07-08 by Jim Vanderveen

Joseph found a bunch of handy reference sheets on Dave Child’s blog, I love Jack Daniels.

The most useful (for WordPress developers, anyway) will probably be the PHP and CSS pages. Dave has also provided web-safe colors, mod_rewrite, and MySQL reference sheets. Thanks, Dave!

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