Of course, the company frowns on gratuitous use of valuable pager message units, but it is sometimes useful to pass along part numbers, forward service calls, and tech tips.
An archaic device with the name Motorola with a tiny keyboard and a poorly lit LCD display that rules your life. Work poorly inside large buildings and in mountainous terrain. At our company they come in 2 flavors: WebLink and Arch Wireless. They can also be used to send amusing one liners to fellow cow-orkers when things are slow.
I know it is one of those trite cliches, but the better you do your job, the greater amount of work that comes your way, whether you want it or not. This phenomena is not unique to my line of work (field service) nor is it modern (my dad lived it too).
As people develop expertise in their field, their primary responsibilities take less and less effort than they did when they were new. Eventually things then tend to progress in the following manner:
1. Because of your good work, your accounts are happier with your company or run more profitably than they might otherwise be. They take on more business and buy more equipment from your company. Guess who gets to service it! Okay, you were getting bored anyway, and so you welcome the new toy.
2. The boss notices that you don't have to work very hard to keep up with your responsibilities, and knowing this, he asks you to "help out" the guys working on a difficult problem at another site.
2a. Once you establish a positive track record of fixing difficult problems, your name rises to the top of the list of who to call when there is trouble. You get an Attaboy, and wangle a free lunch or two out of the boss. That and your sense of accomplishment is your reward, but not much more money, except for the overtime.
2b. As your reputation spreads, your pager starts to go off at all hours, day and night. Blearily eyed, you trudge off into a snowstorm at 3 AM on Sunday Morning to drive the 50 miles to fix a half-million dollar machine with a turn of the screwdriver and a few taps on the keyboard. You get home at about 9 AM, just in time to get paged again by the same customer for another machine. After this debacle, you resolve to test and end up spending 3 hours doing preventative repairs to all of your company's equipment at the site before leaving. After putting in 14 hours, you arrive home. The following week, the regular tech has his easiest week in months, but you get mildly reprimanded for putting in too much overtime. Boss apologizes when you point out that the work was billable at off-hours rates.
3. For the reason above, the boss asks you to "cover" another tech's accounts while he is out sick, on vacation, or forgot to turn on his pager. Being the dedicated employee you are, you oblige, and fix a bunch of things the regular guy has neglected. The account now has higher expectations from the equipment, which means that the boss or the other tech will be calling on you frequently to maintain the performance of the equipment.
4. You are asked to help train new employees, and to work with "problem employees" to improve their skills. Training new guys with talent isn't too bad, though it is time-consuming. Trying to work with guys who have teflon-coated brain cells is ultimately futile and a waste of time.
5. You become the boss's confidant and right-hand man. He asks you to cover him on weekends, vacations, and golf outings, in addition to your expanding list of regular duties. Your cell phone rings on vacation. It's the boss pleading for help.
6. The boss eventually retires, gets promoted, or takes another job. You are now the new boss, and have to take responsibility for everything. First item on the agenda after buying a new suit for all of those client meetings: Finding a replacement for yourself in your old job. You no longer have time to do the tech work you love and were good at, instead you are buried under a mountain of paperwork, meetings, and reports. By the way, you are now on straight salary and are on call 24/7.
As a CW op on HF, abbreviationss are used reduce the number of characters sent. Example of a typical CW transmission:
FB Joe on ur HT-32 and SX-101. Had a 37 as my first rig. Ur RST is 5nn hr in Boring, MD. WX is cldy temp 39f. Rig is an IC730 running 100W a G5RV ant. pse QSY up 5 -- QRM. My YL is calling for dinner. BTU joe for a final W1AW de N3LSY
Translation into English: Fine business Joe on your old Hallicrafters HT-32 transmitter and SX-101 Receiver. My first shortwave transmitter was a Hallicrafters HT-37. I am receiving a strong pure and clear signal here in Boring, Maryland. Weather is cloudy, and the temperature is 39 degrees fahrenheit. My radio is an ICOM IC-730 transceiver transmitting 100 watts of power into a G5RV designed ladder-line fed dipole. Please retune your radio up 5 kilohertz because I am receiving man-made interference. Back to you Joe for a final word, my wife says supper is almost ready. W1AW from N3LSY
A turbine operates most efficiently when the load kept optimized to keep the speed of the turbine relative to the wind speed in a narrow optimum range. If the wind dies speed drops from 30 to 20 mph, a heavy flywheel will either overdrive the blades, which requires power, or if the blades freewheel, they will generate no power until the flywheel spins down to match the lower wind speed.
If the wind speed should suddenly pick up again, the effect will be somewhat like trying to tow a 15,000 pound trailer with a Toyota Corrola with an automatic transmission. When you step on the gas, most of the power generated by the engine will be lost in the torque converter, heating up the transmission fluid. It will strain the driveline parts, and transfer little useful energy to where it can do some good. If you do get it to move, it will take much longer to get it up to speed than it would using a suitable vehicle with more appropriate gearing, even working with the same amount of horsepower.
A well-engineered wind turbine would be made only as strong as necessary to survive the maximum expected winds in the area. Any thing more than that reduces the overall efficiency of the system. Sure, you could build a wind turbine with a massive flywheel, but during calm weather, if the flywheel had to to do work to generate electricity, it would soon spin down, unless it was hugely massive or geared up to increase its speed. This comes at a cost, of course. All that rotating mass would resist changes in rotational direction, and make it difficult to reorient the blades during times when the wind shifts direction. Large amounts of inertia in the blades would also complicate the job of adjusting the prop pitch to match the wind speed for maximum efficiency.
Using a flywheel for long-term energy storage is inefficient, it is better to have an efficient windmill generate electricity at whatever rate the wind will allow, and feed it directly into the grid, or store it in batteries, or generate Hydrogen, or use some other storage medium.
Flywheels have be used as experimental energy storage devices, using heavy flywheels travelling at fantastic speeds in a vacuum on magnetic bearings. They are extremely expensive, dangerous, and not really practical for long-term energy storage, when safer and less expensive energy storage devices exist.
My V-30 Magna (500cc) without a fairing and my fairly portly carcass in the seat does about 50mpg in typical backroads kind of riding. I notice when doing highway riding ~65mph or better, that wind resistance becomes a major impediment to going faster, even more so than weight. Riding at 50 into a 25 mph headwind, I need to roll on the throttle as much as if I were doing 70 in calm air. Unfaired motorcycles (my Magna and most cruiser bikes included) have lousy aerodynamics, and probably present nearly as much wind resistance at speed as a modern compact car, and probably more than some of the super aerodynamic things such as the Honda Insight.
I brought a personal shredder at Staples, and yes it Rocks! Tax Cut has the manufacturer's rebate that requires 3 different rebates to be sent in just to get your full rebate. They had a $5 rebate for the Federal, $25 for the State, and $15.95 for the E-filing fee. Took me longer to deal with the damn rebate stuff than it did to do my taxes. I cut it close on the deadline as well, (due to 12-14 hour days at work) so all of the BS I went through will probably be for naught.
The USPS does a pretty good job of delivering conforming mail to the high-volume incoming mail operations I work in, mostly remittance processors. Credit card and other bill issuers don't include an envelope just to be nice (just look how evil they can be in other aspects of their business), they include a return envelope to streamline processing. A good return envelope will be decently constructed, of a standard size, and include either a preprinted postnet bar code on the envelope, or on the part of the statement which shows through the window. The window itself is a feature which facilitates efficient handling once it reaches the incoming mail area, ensuring that the statement and enclosed checks, money orders, etc. are in a predictable position in the envelope. This facilitates processing by automated machinery such as this and eases manual processing on machines such as this.
Contrast this environment with my recent experience sending in 3 seperate rebates in order to reduce the cost of my Tax Cut program with the included E-filing fees from about $80 to $35 or so. I had to search over the whole pile of advertisements and coupons to find the necessary coupons, cut 2 coupons out of a booklet, and cut the UPC from the cardboard boxes which the programs were enclosed in. I also had to provide 3 of my own envelopes to send them in, each addressed to seperate P.O. boxes, all to the same Zip Code in El Paso TX.
Using my knowledge of remittance centers in general, my picture of this particular mailroom isn't very pretty. Receiving millions of rebate requests per month, from hundreds of constantly changing PO boxes, the incoming mail arrives as a jumble of random types of envelopes. The contents in these envelopes is a random combination of being taped, folded, stapled, and paperclipped together, and in random order in the envelopes. All of this work is processed by a small army of poorly paid processing clerks. Based on the location (El Paso, TX) many of these clerks probably have only a tenuous hold on the English language.
Under the current system, there is no hope of being able to process this work automatically, or even efficiently process it on semi-automated workstations. Errors will abound, lost and misrouted mail will be common, and stacked up all over the place. Rebate coupons expire in the waiting trays as indifferent and poorly trained clerks fumble to try to keep this mess under control. There is no urgency to process this work, as the company has no incentive to process it quickly or accurately, like bill payments are.
If the rebate processing business was like the payment processing centers of major banks, credit card agencies, etc. then the customer would merely have to include a coupon or two into the provided envelope. The work could be processed by automated equipment, imaged inline, then payments could be sent with 99.9 percent accuracy, and the customer would receive their check less than two weeks after they mailed it. On a per-transaction basis, it is much cheaper to have a process designed around automated processing than to do it the way they are probably doing it now. Either the processing center managers are ignorant of modern processing techniques, or they benefit by the current chaos within their walls.
Seriously, for most people this is overkill, but I had to start with a clean slate anyway. My old house, a 2 story 1,200 square foot bungalow was built on a shoestring immediately after WW2, mostly by my grandparents. Insulation wasn't much of a priority, about 2 inches in the attic, and nothing in the 4 inch walls. In the coldest months of the year, it used about 170 gallons of oil a month to keep it at a toasty 65 degrees. When oil was 80 cents a gallon, this wasn't too bad to take, especially coming from an electrically heated townhouse. At $1.75 a gallon, the cost of oil and electricity topped $400 a month last winter. The house set on part of the old family farm, which was sold. We kept a building lot though, and I got a chance to build a new house on it.
The new house sits on a piece of ground within sight of the old house and is even more exposed to the weather, (but the view is worth it). The new house is a single story house, about 1500 square feet (20 percent larger). Because of its sunbaked and windblown location, it was imperative to build in energy efficiency. Within my budget, I speced the house to be as energy efficient as possible, and as a result, the new house costs half as much to heat and cool as the old house, even though it is larger.
Here are some improvements I specified:
Insulation:
6 inch walls with R-19 Fiberglass insulation
10 inches in the attic, up to the tops of the joists, underneath OSB decking (the attic is currently used for storage)
4 foot wide R6 reflective blanket insulation around the inside foundation perimeter (a new code requirement around here) Keeps the basement at 55-60 degrees without additional heat, except for leakage and radiation from the HVAC ductwork.
There is some room for improvement, I might add R-19 insulation to the basement ceiling joists once I finish running additional electrial outlets downstairs. Upstairs is mostly heavy carpet, I am not sure if this is worthwhile or not.
Windows are Energy Star rated, with argon filled double panes of low-E glass.
Entire house is wrapped in Tyvek house wrap to reduce air infiltration. I also went with modular construction, rather than stick building.
HVAC:
I went with a high-efficiency heat pump with a propane backup. I seriously looked at doing a Geothermal heat pump, but the relatively long payback at then-current energy prices and a tightening construction budget prompted me to back off on this. I have been having second thoughts ever since, especially with deregulation of residential electric rates looming around here.
Other things I need to do:
Though I got a start last year, I need to add some additional landscaping. In particular, I need to plant some evergreens on the northwest side of the house to buffer it from the wintry blasts it currently gets. I have to carefully balance the buffering effects of landscaping against blocking my best view of the surrounding countryside though. I also need to plant some additional shade trees on the southeast side, to help keep it cool in summer. It will be a decade before the trees do much good, but the sooner I get started, the sooner they will help. Last year was the year of the cicada, and they attacked the Maples I did plant. I am keeping my fingers crossed that it survived the winter.
It is actually worth replacing the incadescents before they wear out. Assuming that for ease of calculation, a 100 watt incadescent bulb lasts 1000 hours, and electricity is $0.10/KWH. Over the life of the bulb, the incadescent bulb will use 100 KWH of electricity. At the going rate of 10 cents/kwh, which is actually on the low end of the scale in the northeast, the bulb will burn $10.00 worth of electricity during its life. A CFLB with the light output of a 100 watt bulb burns 25 watts, and can be purchased in multi-packs at Home Depot for about $3.00 each, or even less. I have brought 60 watt equivalents for 6 for $10.00.
If you junk an incadescent 100 watt bulb that is worth a buck when it is new halfway through its lifetime, you will forgo $0.50 worth of bulb life. In the 500 hours it would have burned, it would have used $5 worth of electricity, for a net cost of $4.50.
Replacing it with a $3 CFLB will use $1.25 worth of electricity during that 500 hours, assuming an equivalent CFLB uses 25 watts. Even if the CFLB lasts only 500 hours, you are no worse off than waiting for the incadescent bulb to burn out. Chances are, your CFLB will last several times as long as a regular bulb, so the cost of the bulbs themselves per hour of use is down into the same range as incadescents, and the cost of electricity is 75 percent less.
In warm weather, replacing incadescents with CFLBs provides an added bonus: CFLBs use not only use 75 percent less energy than incadescents, they also give off 75 percent less heat. This will reduce your air conditioning load, saving even more money!
The only time it might not make sense is if you are heating your home with straight electricity, in which case it does not really matter if you burn the lights, as resistance heating is resistance heating.
At work, I use a utility knife that deeply scores the disk on both sides, usually delaminating the reflective media, and I put a slight spiral in the radial cuts, and run in different directions. I do not have convenient access to a shredder ironically, though they do have an industrial-strength shredder on the premises.
I purchased a cheap crosscut shredder for home use (for all of those credit card statements/offers, etc) and tried it on a CD with a paper label attached. The shredder advertised that it could shred 6 sheets of paper at the same time, along with credit cards, but it made no claims about CDs or floppies. It ran through, though the motor was straining mightily. The end result was a complete delamination of the label and reflective layer, along with many broken pieces of plastic, though amazingly about 75 percent of the disk held together. I tried it on a CD-R with a white printable background, and an obsolete McAfee CD, and acheived nearly complete shredding of the disk itself, and complete delamination of the reflective material. Some disks seem to be tougher than others though.
If you live in a dorm, and don't have access to the required heat for the above method, or access to things as a gas or electric range, (just put the platters right on the heating element), then perhaps some physical means of disruption would suffice. A piece of 220 grit sandpaper costs less than a buck, and should easily suffice in making the hard drive platters unreadable with only a few minutes of engagement with the flat surface of the platter.
For CDs containing sensitive material at work, I would take a penknife and make multiple cuts radiating out from the center, with a few random crosscuts for good measure on both sides
I am surprised that they only are trenching down 5 feet, as deep as the frost line gets up there. 300 miles south down here near Baltimore, they wanted to go down 5 and 7 feet for the ground loop. What you will end up doing might also depend on the soil conditions, which in many areas of Upstate NY are very thin due to glaciation in the last ice age. It cost 5 grand to put in a 400 foot well for my residential water, but a well for heat exchange might be your only option if you hit bedrock at a couple of feet.
I explored the idea of cutting costs for the system by colocating the heat exchanger pipes with the septic system, but the contractor said that building codes would never allow it. Other than the "yuck factor", I saw no valid engineering reason why it wouldn't work, just the excuse that it would cause problems if the septic system needed to be moved someday. Perhaps another way of saving costs would be to recirculate my well water through the heat exchanger, and pump it back into the ground. With a house that has well/septic anyway, I am surprised that there has been no effort to integrate these systems to save costs.
I second the idea of an efficient heating system. I recently built a new house in Maryland, on the same windy hilltop as the old one, and speced it out to make it cheap to heat and cool. I went with modular construction, 6 inch walls, and a high SEER heat pump backed up by propane furnace that is 96 percent efficient. The house is 25 percent bigger, with double the roof area of my old house, which was built right after WWII and heated with oil. Last winter, it cost almost $400 a month combined for electricity and oil during the dead of winter. My base electric bill for lighting, hot water, computers, cooking, etc is about $60 or so. So far, the worst electric bill I have faced is about $140.00, and I have burned less than 50 gallons of Propane since the beginning of the heating season, and that will probably be about it as the temperatures trend up. I also keep the new house warmer than the old place, as I kept the heat down to 60-65 to save on oil, and keep the new one at 70. Summertime electric bills never exceeded $100. This is more of a testament to the inefficiency of the old house, with its leaky single pane windows, warped exterior doors, poor or nonexistent insulation, and an ailing 20 year old oil furnace.
One option for heating and cooling that I seriously looked at, but ended up rejecting due to the high initial cost was a Geothermal Heat Pump . At the then current prices for fuel and electricity, the payback time for the extra initial investment I estimated to be about 12 years or so. With a rapidly tightening construction budget, I decided to go with a more conventional system, but the concept was viable. Given about a 25 percent increase in the cost of electricity (very likely in the next few years), sharp increases in the price of Propane (already happened), or having to heat a larger space would have made a Geothermal system not only viable, but the smart move. Geothermal systems won't crap out like a conventional heat pump in very cold weather, necessitating the need to fall back on expensive backup heat, since the heat exchange medium is subsurface ground, which stays at a nearly constant temperature year-round. In the summertime, the energy requirements for air conditioning also favor the geothermal system, since the ground a few feet down is already as cool as, or cooler than the desired temperature of the house. I have heard anecdotal stories of 5,000 square foot houses in the Carolinas which cost less than $100 a month to cool with Geothermal systems in the heat of July, but I cannot verify this directly.
Nukes would be overkill, but perhaps a nice long range cruise missile would take out the Geek Compound without starting World War 3. Nukes would cripple the internet and cause a few more nasty side effects.
Perhaps complete destruction of the Geek Compound and the possible destruction of modern civilization can be averted by Slashdot implementing the cyberspace version of Abraham's Sacrifice in the spirit of the movie Fail Safe by publicly announcing and hosting a 1 minute high-resolution 10,000 FPS MPEG of a nuclear detonation. That should be sufficient to cause Slashdot's servers to go critical.
I'd like to see them get through the Great Lakes to bomb Michigan. Of course, they would have to go through the locks at Niagara to get into Lakes Michigan or Huron, which would require complicity on the part of the US and Canadian governments. The British Navy of course would also need to send icebreakers this time of year as well.
I have worked in a remittance processing environment for nearly 13 years. Payment processing of standard bill payments for large credit card issuers is more automated than you can imagine. Remittance envelopes and the statements inside are usually designed for quick efficient processing by automated equipment. Equipment such as this and this make quick work of most payments with minimal staff. Check 21 promises to streamline processing of paper checks even further.
Online payments often go through middlemen, who take a cut of the action, and whose payments are then processed manually by the bank. It can take longer to credit and clear an online payment than a standard payment.
I am in the same boat as you, but I'm 45, obese and dealing with sleep apnea, and doing shift work to boot. I have just come home tonight with a CPAP machine for the first time, after probably suffering with the problems since college. I am hopeful it will help, but I know its limitations. It takes almost all my energy to work, so little is left for the rest of what I like to do. In my case, while my blood chemistry is okay and my family history is full of heavy guys living well into their late 70s and beyond, carrying all that weight has pretty much wrecked my knees, feet, and started to work on my hips. Even if I shed much of my excess weight in the next year or so, I am probably facing a long round of surgeries and physical therapy in my 50's replacing worn out joints in my lower extemities, rather than riding my motorcycle or tending my garden.
At 32, you still have time to limit the damage to your joints, it will only get harder as you get older. I know the CPAP machine won't be a magic bullet anymore than Meridia, diets, or anything else I have tried, but if it helps keep me away from the vending machines and the drive through when I am in the middle of a 14 hour workathon, hopefully I can start to turn the tide.
I have worked with emergency generating equipment, both directly as a generator tech, and indirectly at facilities that use them. It would not be surprising that many typical standby generators would be able to operate more than a couple of weeks without some type of failure or need downtime for urgent maintenance. The problem isn't really with the engines or generator units themselves. The diesel engines and generator units on typical commercial backup generators are pretty durable, a diesel engine these days can usually go 10,000 hours or more between overhauls with proper maintenance, and the generator's electric ends are at least as durable. Even gasoline powered generators, which are pretty rare these days in the size that a hospital would need are good for 3,000 hours or so before the motors would wear out. Medium sized generators based on gasoline engines are often converted to run on natural gas, and are based on heavy duty truck engines. Running an engine on natural gas will typically double the life expectancy of the motor as well.
The problem with running a typical emergency generator is like owning a car for 10 or 20 years, just driving it to the grocery store once a week, then deciding to take a trip from Florida to Alaska and back. The car might have only 15,000 miles on it, but the belts, hoses, seals, tires and electrical wiring are all 20 years old, unless a lot of time and money has been spent to dilligently replace these types of parts as they deteriorate. 24/7 use after long periods of idleness, or perhaps only brief weekly or monthly excercise sessions will bring out many latent faults in the equipment. Rubber belts and hoses go bad, as do seals. Corrosion takes its toll on electical connections, cooling systems, and batteries as well. A generator in a hospital may run only briefly each week for a half hour, a couple of hours every few months for the typical thunderstorm type power failures, and perhaps a few hours a week in the summer to help with peak shaving, but after 20 years that same generator might suddenly be required to work at near capacity for days or weeks on end in a disaster. At the minimum it will need oil/air/filter changes on at least a biweekly basis. As with a car that sees little use, emergency equipment that might not ever get put into heavy-duty service often gets just prefunctory checkups, if any maintenance at all. Two weeks of 24/7 operation is the equivalent of driving a car 15,000 miles!
Fuel Storage is another issue: Running at 2/3 load, you can figure that a typical 300KW generator will burn about 20 gallons of diesel per hour. That is 480 gallons a day, about 3,400 gallons a week. 2 weeks of operation would require the equivalent of a full 7,000 gallon tractor-trailer sized tanker's worth of fuel to be stored on site (about the size of truck that delivers fuel to a gas station). Fuel that isn't used or stabilized goes sour (gasoline), or can develop slime from bacteria (diesel). I once had the experience of helping my dad nurse a diesel engined boat down the Cheasapeake Bay after buying a load of diesel fuel that had been stored all winter in a marina without being stabilized. We had to change the filter every 15 miles or so, and we were reduced to rinsing our last filter out in the bay just to make it to Annapolis to buy more filters (it was either that or sit dead in the water in the ship channel on a foggy day). If heavy infrastructure is out (roads, railroads, fuel terminals) it will be next to impossible to resupply, so a large tank is a must.
At most of my worksites (financial institution back offices) there are standby generators to keep the place going if the power fails, but they are only large enough to keep essential systems going. One of my prime sites has gone on "backup" twice in the last 10 years for several days to over a week during an extended period of bad weather, or when utility construction disrupted normal power. Outdoor lighting was extinguished, and interior lighting in all but critical areas was cut by about 2/3.
On a more basic level, even if Social Security taxes, 401K contributions and the like were increased to the level that retirement planners would like us, it wouldn't help much. If everyone started saving huge portions of their paychecks, the money not spent on current goods and services would reduce the demand for goods and services, causing economic contraction. This would cause many financial assets to whither away in real value. Money invested in companies to make things and provide services will have little return if there is no market for the goods and services they sell. Too much investment capital chasing too few profitable business opportunities was one of the reasons for the whole dot com mess.
Your point about the population of retirees causing the value of equities in capital markets to plummet is also well-taken, but there is a more basic problem that increased retirement saving won't ever fix. Many of the goods and services that retirees will want and need are the kind of things that can't be stockpiled in advance. As people get older and are less able to do things around the house for themselves, they will need more help with the basics: home maintenance and repairs, medical care, and so on. Older people who can afford it also want to travel, play golf, eat in restaurants, and be entertained. Most of the value of these services must be provided at the time they are made. An individual might be able to budget and plan in advance for the cost of say cleaning the gutters and cutting the grass and
save for it today, but as a group the demand for this type of service will exceed the supply of workers able and willing to provide it when it will be needed, if current demographic trends continue. The laws of supply and demand will take over, and only the very well off will be able to afford to get their lawn mowed or their gutters cleaned, as the price of this service will be bid up.
Short of large-scale immigration or automation of many routine jobs now performed by humans, there will be a huge shortage of people to do this kind of work. The elderly in a couple of decades will not only have to budget for fuel, food, and medicine, but also if to risk their arthritic joints, brittle bones, and weakened hearts to the hard physical tasks of maintaining their homes, in order to afford everything else they need.
It took a lot less than an earthquake to burn down the city of Baltimore on February 7,1904. Although the fire's exact origins are unknown, it is suspected that a dropped match or cigarette fell through a broken basement skylight window on a sidewalk adjoining the Hurst Building, located near the present First Mariner Arena. The fire probably smoldered for a while, then caught on some stored gasoline for a stationary engine in the Hurst Building. Within minutes of the initial alarm, the entire building was involved. Within an hour, the fire caused an explosion which caused the roof to blow off, spreading embers over adjoining and nearby buidings. A general alarm was sounded, and firefighters were dispatched from Washington DC to join the effort. When DC's firefighters arrived by express train at 1:30 PM, they discovered that their hose couplings didn't fit Baltimore's hydrants. Efforts to kludge connections with canvas were fruitless.
Fanned by 25 MPH winds from the southwest, the fire quickly spread North and east, reaching as far north as Lexington Street. It was decided to try to form a firebreak by dynamiting buildings along Charles Street. Buildings shook, windows blew out, and new fires were started, but most dynamited buildings stood. This only accelerated the spread of the fire.
At 8 PM, the winds shifted to and increased out of the southwest, causing the fire to spread South toward Pratt Street. Firefighters efforts and the shift in wind let City Hall and the Federal Courthouse narrowly escape the flames. The firefighters were able to keep the fire from spreading into Federal Hill and tried to save the Waterfront, but the piers in the inner harbor were lost at about 6 AM. Reinforcements arrived from as far away as New York City and Altoona, PA in the early morning hours.
With the docks lost and the fire threatening the densely populated Fells Point and Little Italy neighborhoods to the east, a fireline of 37 fire engines, assisted by the city's fireboat and tugs was established along a narrow waterway known as the Jones Falls. Some small fires started on the east side of the Jones Falls, but were quickly extinguished, and by 5 PM Monday, the fire was declared under control, though it smoldered for weeks.
In all, 140 acres of the downtown business district were burned to the ground, as well as all of the wharves along Pratt Street. Only 1 man was burned to death, but 5 firemen later died of pneumonia as a result of smoke and exposure. 35,000 people were thrown out of work in the dead of winter, and 2,500 businesses were burned out. Baltimore soon rebuilt and reshaped, but the fire's legacy remains to this day.
What might even be worse than premature death is all the damage that gets done along the way. Sure, if you drive to work everyday long enough, eventually some fatal combination of circumstances in traffic will do you in. If that doesn't get you, perhaps it will be a freak accident with a circus elephant, or a bolt of lightning that sends you to your great reward. That has been well established.
What is less talked about and more insidious is the damage and wear and tear on irreplaceable parts that takes place as part as a meaningful life. You may drive 700 years before having that freak head-on with a bus that does you in for good, but as an average driver, you will probably be involved in dozens of lesser accidents before that happens. Some of these accidents will probably be pretty serious, and result in things like concussions, busted jaws, torn cartilige and ligaments, burns, and so on. Add to this the hundreds of slips on ice and snow, a couple dozen times falling off the ladder, and the scars from the tens of thousands of paper cuts, insect bites, shaving cuts and so on that life dishes out. By the time that bus gets you, you will be a patched up mass of scar tissue anyway, unless you live like a monk.
Once young adults graduate from the school of hard knocks, most tend to make fairly rational decisions not only about their driving style, but about their career choices as well, based on their expected lifespan. Certain trades are notoriously dangerous, such as roofing, but things like concrete work, commercial fishing, mining, and transportation eventually maim or kill large percentages of the people who make it their life's work. When I was watching my new house going up about a year ago, I watched the roofers heft heavy bundles of shingles while they danced across a steeply pitched roof, their feet often slipping dangerously. I also noticed that of about 15 men doing concrete and roofing, only about 2 were over the age of 40, and none over 50. I thought about my own aching 45 year old joints, and understood immediately why these businesses are a young man's game. My own occupation as an electronic tech working in an office environment tends to attract quite a few grey heads, where physical prowess and bravery are less valued than responsibility, common sense, and the ability to draw from a broad base of knowledge.
Even with the current paradigm of an expected lifespan of about 80 years or so, most people abandon truly dangerous occupations by the time they are 40, unless they are extremely well-paid, have no other options, or are adrenaline junkies. People in slightly less dangerous occupations just hope they can hang in until they retire without catastrophe befalling them. Miners, cops, and long-haul truckers fall into this category, and are often physically or emotionally scarred for life from their time working. Most cops put in their 20 or 30 years, take their pension and a part-time job, and try to forget about all the crap they had to deal with. Many do okay, but some spend their final years divorced and staring into a glass.
This is where things get sticky. Although job safety improvements or phasing in robots to do really dangerous but necessary work might be possible in the future for some jobs, there will almost certainly be some types of hazardous work that only people can do. Who will take the chance of being a city cop or fireman if the liklihood is that he will live only 1/5 as long as his office worker classmates, or live as a psychological wreck after 50 years on the force for the rest of his life?
A few years ago, Dad was struggling with a nearly full 250MB hard drive on his old 486. My brother and I usually have a one-upsmanship rivalry when it comes to helping out the Parental Units with computer problems, which he usually wins. (Damn CMU Graduate) This particular year, I happened to have the ultimate trump card in my back seat, a nearly complete system that I was playing around with, including a 1.2 GB Hard Drive, which I loaned to the cause. Despite the howling cries of "what a geek!" from him, I was the one that got first choice of the drumsticks that year.
As far as making your own paper caps is concerned, I guess it is possible, but not as easy as you think. Yes, I have unrolled a few of the old caps. One problem would be to find the correct thickness and type of paper and foil, and to cut it accurately. They are much thinner in most cases than the stuff you have in your kitchen. Photographicly reproducing the external markings on the tube is doable by a person with a scanner. My guess is that the best compromise is to manufacture capacitors true to the original markings, and use modern materials inside. Still, a stickler for authenticity would pick this up.
Actually, one of the tricks that some restorers do is to save the old outer shells of the original paper caps, and find modern replacements that fit inside the outer shells of the old ones, then seal the ends with the original wax. Pretty slick if you can pull it off, and although it is technically not authentic, it preserves the spirit of authenticity. It is not really worth it for your average Emerson or Philco, but unique sets and high-value radios are worth the extra care in restoration.
Another way of going at it to preserve both authenticity and usability is to use parts from the same era that had better durability than paper caps. Often the manufacturers would multiple source parts of this type anyway, and you would see them in an authentic set from the era. Mica capacitors and ceramic disk capacitors were used in many '40s and '50s era sets, are electrically the same and look right at home under the chassis of sets from that era.
Some historical modifications actually add value to a radio. During World War II, some tube types were in very short supply due to war needs, but people needed to keep their radios alive. Many radio techs of the day devised makeshift socket adapters and circuit modifications to allow use of more plentiful tube types when a tube that was in short supply failed. It is considered very bad form to undo one of these WWII era modifications, much as it is bad form to scrape a gas rationing sticker off the windshield of a car from that era.
Just as with antique cars, it is more worthwhile to strive for authenticity with a '32 Packard or Dusenburg than a 1974 Impala. It is much easier to acheive the look of authenticity with a '57 Chevy or '65 Mustang, which have an extensive amount of aftermarket restoration products available than say, a 1962 Chrysler Imperial, which outside of drivetrain hardware, has almost no aftermarket support. You just do the best you can within the constraints of time, patience, and your budget.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the company frowns on gratuitous use of valuable pager message units, but it is sometimes useful to pass along part numbers, forward service calls, and tech tips.
An archaic device with the name Motorola with a tiny keyboard and a poorly lit LCD display that rules your life. Work poorly inside large buildings and in mountainous terrain. At our company they come in 2 flavors: WebLink and Arch Wireless. They can also be used to send amusing one liners to fellow cow-orkers when things are slow.
I know it is one of those trite cliches, but the better you do your job, the greater amount of work that comes your way, whether you want it or not. This phenomena is not unique to my line of work (field service) nor is it modern (my dad lived it too).
As people develop expertise in their field, their primary responsibilities take less and less effort than they did when they were new. Eventually things then tend to progress in the following manner:
1. Because of your good work, your accounts are happier with your company or run more profitably than they might otherwise be. They take on more business and buy more equipment from your company. Guess who gets to service it! Okay, you were getting bored anyway, and so you welcome the new toy.
2. The boss notices that you don't have to work very hard to keep up with your responsibilities, and knowing this, he asks you to "help out" the guys working on a difficult problem at another site.
2a. Once you establish a positive track record of fixing difficult problems, your name rises to the top of the list of who to call when there is trouble. You get an Attaboy, and wangle a free lunch or two out of the boss. That and your sense of accomplishment is your reward, but not much more money, except for the overtime.
2b. As your reputation spreads, your pager starts to go off at all hours, day and night. Blearily eyed, you trudge off into a snowstorm at 3 AM on Sunday Morning to drive the 50 miles to fix a half-million dollar machine with a turn of the screwdriver and a few taps on the keyboard. You get home at about 9 AM, just in time to get paged again by the same customer for another machine. After this debacle, you resolve to test and end up spending 3 hours doing preventative repairs to all of your company's equipment at the site before leaving. After putting in 14 hours, you arrive home. The following week, the regular tech has his easiest week in months, but you get mildly reprimanded for putting in too much overtime. Boss apologizes when you point out that the work was billable at off-hours rates.
3. For the reason above, the boss asks you to "cover" another tech's accounts while he is out sick, on vacation, or forgot to turn on his pager. Being the dedicated employee you are, you oblige, and fix a bunch of things the regular guy has neglected. The account now has higher expectations from the equipment, which means that the boss or the other tech will be calling on you frequently to maintain the performance of the equipment.
4. You are asked to help train new employees, and to work with "problem employees" to improve their skills. Training new guys with talent isn't too bad, though it is time-consuming. Trying to work with guys who have teflon-coated brain cells is ultimately futile and a waste of time.
5. You become the boss's confidant and right-hand man. He asks you to cover him on weekends, vacations, and golf outings, in addition to your expanding list of regular duties. Your cell phone rings on vacation. It's the boss pleading for help.
6. The boss eventually retires, gets promoted, or takes another job. You are now the new boss, and have to take responsibility for everything. First item on the agenda after buying a new suit for all of those client meetings: Finding a replacement for yourself in your old job. You no longer have time to do the tech work you love and were good at, instead you are buried under a mountain of paperwork, meetings, and reports. By the way, you are now on straight salary and are on call 24/7.
Welcome to the Corporate Ladder!
As a CW op on HF, abbreviationss are used reduce the number of characters sent. Example of a typical CW transmission:
FB Joe on ur HT-32 and SX-101. Had a 37 as my first rig. Ur RST is 5nn hr in Boring, MD. WX is cldy temp 39f. Rig is an IC730 running 100W a G5RV ant. pse QSY up 5 -- QRM. My YL is calling for dinner. BTU joe for a final W1AW de N3LSY
Translation into English: Fine business Joe on your old Hallicrafters HT-32 transmitter and SX-101 Receiver. My first shortwave transmitter was a Hallicrafters HT-37. I am receiving a strong pure and clear signal here in Boring, Maryland. Weather is cloudy, and the temperature is 39 degrees fahrenheit. My radio is an ICOM IC-730 transceiver transmitting 100 watts of power into a G5RV designed ladder-line fed dipole. Please retune your radio up 5 kilohertz because I am receiving man-made interference. Back to you Joe for a final word, my wife says supper is almost ready. W1AW from N3LSY
A turbine operates most efficiently when the load kept optimized to keep the speed of the turbine relative to the wind speed in a narrow optimum range. If the wind dies speed drops from 30 to 20 mph, a heavy flywheel will either overdrive the blades, which requires power, or if the blades freewheel, they will generate no power until the flywheel spins down to match the lower wind speed.
If the wind speed should suddenly pick up again, the effect will be somewhat like trying to tow a 15,000 pound trailer with a Toyota Corrola with an automatic transmission. When you step on the gas, most of the power generated by the engine will be lost in the torque converter, heating up the transmission fluid. It will strain the driveline parts, and transfer little useful energy to where it can do some good. If you do get it to move, it will take much longer to get it up to speed than it would using a suitable vehicle with more appropriate gearing, even working with the same amount of horsepower.
A well-engineered wind turbine would be made only as strong as necessary to survive the maximum expected winds in the area. Any thing more than that reduces the overall efficiency of the system. Sure, you could build a wind turbine with a massive flywheel, but during calm weather, if the flywheel had to to do work to generate electricity, it would soon spin down, unless it was hugely massive or geared up to increase its speed. This comes at a cost, of course. All that rotating mass would resist changes in rotational direction, and make it difficult to reorient the blades during times when the wind shifts direction. Large amounts of inertia in the blades would also complicate the job of adjusting the prop pitch to match the wind speed for maximum efficiency.
Using a flywheel for long-term energy storage is inefficient, it is better to have an efficient windmill generate electricity at whatever rate the wind will allow, and feed it directly into the grid, or store it in batteries, or generate Hydrogen, or use some other storage medium.
Flywheels have be used as experimental energy storage devices, using heavy flywheels travelling at fantastic speeds in a vacuum on magnetic bearings. They are extremely expensive, dangerous, and not really practical for long-term energy storage, when safer and less expensive energy storage devices exist.
My V-30 Magna (500cc) without a fairing and my fairly portly carcass in the seat does about 50mpg in typical backroads kind of riding. I notice when doing highway riding ~65mph or better, that wind resistance becomes a major impediment to going faster, even more so than weight. Riding at 50 into a 25 mph headwind, I need to roll on the throttle as much as if I were doing 70 in calm air. Unfaired motorcycles (my Magna and most cruiser bikes included) have lousy aerodynamics, and probably present nearly as much wind resistance at speed as a modern compact car, and probably more than some of the super aerodynamic things such as the Honda Insight.
I brought a personal shredder at Staples, and yes it Rocks! Tax Cut has the manufacturer's rebate that requires 3 different rebates to be sent in just to get your full rebate. They had a $5 rebate for the Federal, $25 for the State, and $15.95 for the E-filing fee. Took me longer to deal with the damn rebate stuff than it did to do my taxes. I cut it close on the deadline as well, (due to 12-14 hour days at work) so all of the BS I went through will probably be for naught.
The USPS does a pretty good job of delivering conforming mail to the high-volume incoming mail operations I work in, mostly remittance processors. Credit card and other bill issuers don't include an envelope just to be nice (just look how evil they can be in other aspects of their business), they include a return envelope to streamline processing. A good return envelope will be decently constructed, of a standard size, and include either a preprinted postnet bar code on the envelope, or on the part of the statement which shows through the window. The window itself is a feature which facilitates efficient handling once it reaches the incoming mail area, ensuring that the statement and enclosed checks, money orders, etc. are in a predictable position in the envelope. This facilitates processing by automated machinery such as this and eases manual processing on machines such as this.
Contrast this environment with my recent experience sending in 3 seperate rebates in order to reduce the cost of my Tax Cut program with the included E-filing fees from about $80 to $35 or so. I had to search over the whole pile of advertisements and coupons to find the necessary coupons, cut 2 coupons out of a booklet, and cut the UPC from the cardboard boxes which the programs were enclosed in. I also had to provide 3 of my own envelopes to send them in, each addressed to seperate P.O. boxes, all to the same Zip Code in El Paso TX.
Using my knowledge of remittance centers in general, my picture of this particular mailroom isn't very pretty. Receiving millions of rebate requests per month, from hundreds of constantly changing PO boxes, the incoming mail arrives as a jumble of random types of envelopes. The contents in these envelopes is a random combination of being taped, folded, stapled, and paperclipped together, and in random order in the envelopes. All of this work is processed by a small army of poorly paid processing clerks. Based on the location (El Paso, TX) many of these clerks probably have only a tenuous hold on the English language.
Under the current system, there is no hope of being able to process this work automatically, or even efficiently process it on semi-automated workstations. Errors will abound, lost and misrouted mail will be common, and stacked up all over the place. Rebate coupons expire in the waiting trays as indifferent and poorly trained clerks fumble to try to keep this mess under control. There is no urgency to process this work, as the company has no incentive to process it quickly or accurately, like bill payments are.
If the rebate processing business was like the payment processing centers of major banks, credit card agencies, etc. then the customer would merely have to include a coupon or two into the provided envelope. The work could be processed by automated equipment, imaged inline, then payments could be sent with 99.9 percent accuracy, and the customer would receive their check less than two weeks after they mailed it. On a per-transaction basis, it is much cheaper to have a process designed around automated processing than to do it the way they are probably doing it now. Either the processing center managers are ignorant of modern processing techniques, or they benefit by the current chaos within their walls.
Seriously, for most people this is overkill, but I had to start with a clean slate anyway. My old house, a 2 story 1,200 square foot bungalow was built on a shoestring immediately after WW2, mostly by my grandparents. Insulation wasn't much of a priority, about 2 inches in the attic, and nothing in the 4 inch walls. In the coldest months of the year, it used about 170 gallons of oil a month to keep it at a toasty 65 degrees. When oil was 80 cents a gallon, this wasn't too bad to take, especially coming from an electrically heated townhouse. At $1.75 a gallon, the cost of oil and electricity topped $400 a month last winter. The house set on part of the old family farm, which was sold. We kept a building lot though, and I got a chance to build a new house on it.
The new house sits on a piece of ground within sight of the old house and is even more exposed to the weather, (but the view is worth it). The new house is a single story house, about 1500 square feet (20 percent larger). Because of its sunbaked and windblown location, it was imperative to build in energy efficiency. Within my budget, I speced the house to be as energy efficient as possible, and as a result, the new house costs half as much to heat and cool as the old house, even though it is larger.
Here are some improvements I specified:
Insulation:
6 inch walls with R-19 Fiberglass insulation
10 inches in the attic, up to the tops of the joists, underneath OSB decking (the attic is currently used for storage)
4 foot wide R6 reflective blanket insulation around the inside foundation perimeter (a new code requirement around here) Keeps the basement at 55-60 degrees without additional heat, except for leakage and radiation from the HVAC ductwork.
There is some room for improvement, I might add R-19 insulation to the basement ceiling joists once I finish running additional electrial outlets downstairs. Upstairs is mostly heavy carpet, I am not sure if this is worthwhile or not.
Windows are Energy Star rated, with argon filled double panes of low-E glass.
Entire house is wrapped in Tyvek house wrap to reduce air infiltration. I also went with modular construction, rather than stick building.
HVAC:
I went with a high-efficiency heat pump with a propane backup. I seriously looked at doing a Geothermal heat pump, but the relatively long payback at then-current energy prices and a tightening construction budget prompted me to back off on this. I have been having second thoughts ever since, especially with deregulation of residential electric rates looming around here.
Other things I need to do:
Though I got a start last year, I need to add some additional landscaping. In particular, I need to plant some evergreens on the northwest side of the house to buffer it from the wintry blasts it currently gets. I have to carefully balance the buffering effects of landscaping against blocking my best view of the surrounding countryside though. I also need to plant some additional shade trees on the southeast side, to help keep it cool in summer. It will be a decade before the trees do much good, but the sooner I get started, the sooner they will help. Last year was the year of the cicada, and they attacked the Maples I did plant. I am keeping my fingers crossed that it survived the winter.
It is actually worth replacing the incadescents before they wear out. Assuming that for ease of calculation, a 100 watt incadescent bulb lasts 1000 hours, and electricity is $0.10/KWH. Over the life of the bulb, the incadescent bulb will use 100 KWH of electricity. At the going rate of 10 cents/kwh, which is actually on the low end of the scale in the northeast, the bulb will burn $10.00 worth of electricity during its life. A CFLB with the light output of a 100 watt bulb burns 25 watts, and can be purchased in multi-packs at Home Depot for about $3.00 each, or even less. I have brought 60 watt equivalents for 6 for $10.00.
If you junk an incadescent 100 watt bulb that is worth a buck when it is new halfway through its lifetime, you will forgo $0.50 worth of bulb life. In the 500 hours it would have burned, it would have used $5 worth of electricity, for a net cost of $4.50.
Replacing it with a $3 CFLB will use $1.25 worth of electricity during that 500 hours, assuming an equivalent CFLB uses 25 watts. Even if the CFLB lasts only 500 hours, you are no worse off than waiting for the incadescent bulb to burn out. Chances are, your CFLB will last several times as long as a regular bulb, so the cost of the bulbs themselves per hour of use is down into the same range as incadescents, and the cost of electricity is 75 percent less.
In warm weather, replacing incadescents with CFLBs provides an added bonus: CFLBs use not only use 75 percent less energy than incadescents, they also give off 75 percent less heat. This will reduce your air conditioning load, saving even more money!
The only time it might not make sense is if you are heating your home with straight electricity, in which case it does not really matter if you burn the lights, as resistance heating is resistance heating.
At work, I use a utility knife that deeply scores the disk on both sides, usually delaminating the reflective media, and I put a slight spiral in the radial cuts, and run in different directions. I do not have convenient access to a shredder ironically, though they do have an industrial-strength shredder on the premises.
I purchased a cheap crosscut shredder for home use (for all of those credit card statements/offers, etc) and tried it on a CD with a paper label attached. The shredder advertised that it could shred 6 sheets of paper at the same time, along with credit cards, but it made no claims about CDs or floppies. It ran through, though the motor was straining mightily. The end result was a complete delamination of the label and reflective layer, along with many broken pieces of plastic, though amazingly about 75 percent of the disk held together. I tried it on a CD-R with a white printable background, and an obsolete McAfee CD, and acheived nearly complete shredding of the disk itself, and complete delamination of the reflective material. Some disks seem to be tougher than others though.
If you live in a dorm, and don't have access to the required heat for the above method, or access to things as a gas or electric range, (just put the platters right on the heating element), then perhaps some physical means of disruption would suffice. A piece of 220 grit sandpaper costs less than a buck, and should easily suffice in making the hard drive platters unreadable with only a few minutes of engagement with the flat surface of the platter.
For CDs containing sensitive material at work, I would take a penknife and make multiple cuts radiating out from the center, with a few random crosscuts for good measure on both sides
I am surprised that they only are trenching down 5 feet, as deep as the frost line gets up there. 300 miles south down here near Baltimore, they wanted to go down 5 and 7 feet for the ground loop. What you will end up doing might also depend on the soil conditions, which in many areas of Upstate NY are very thin due to glaciation in the last ice age. It cost 5 grand to put in a 400 foot well for my residential water, but a well for heat exchange might be your only option if you hit bedrock at a couple of feet.
I explored the idea of cutting costs for the system by colocating the heat exchanger pipes with the septic system, but the contractor said that building codes would never allow it. Other than the "yuck factor", I saw no valid engineering reason why it wouldn't work, just the excuse that it would cause problems if the septic system needed to be moved someday. Perhaps another way of saving costs would be to recirculate my well water through the heat exchanger, and pump it back into the ground. With a house that has well/septic anyway, I am surprised that there has been no effort to integrate these systems to save costs.
I second the idea of an efficient heating system. I recently built a new house in Maryland, on the same windy hilltop as the old one, and speced it out to make it cheap to heat and cool. I went with modular construction, 6 inch walls, and a high SEER heat pump backed up by propane furnace that is 96 percent efficient. The house is 25 percent bigger, with double the roof area of my old house, which was built right after WWII and heated with oil. Last winter, it cost almost $400 a month combined for electricity and oil during the dead of winter. My base electric bill for lighting, hot water, computers, cooking, etc is about $60 or so. So far, the worst electric bill I have faced is about $140.00, and I have burned less than 50 gallons of Propane since the beginning of the heating season, and that will probably be about it as the temperatures trend up. I also keep the new house warmer than the old place, as I kept the heat down to 60-65 to save on oil, and keep the new one at 70. Summertime electric bills never exceeded $100. This is more of a testament to the inefficiency of the old house, with its leaky single pane windows, warped exterior doors, poor or nonexistent insulation, and an ailing 20 year old oil furnace.
One option for heating and cooling that I seriously looked at, but ended up rejecting due to the high initial cost was a Geothermal Heat Pump . At the then current prices for fuel and electricity, the payback time for the extra initial investment I estimated to be about 12 years or so. With a rapidly tightening construction budget, I decided to go with a more conventional system, but the concept was viable. Given about a 25 percent increase in the cost of electricity (very likely in the next few years), sharp increases in the price of Propane (already happened), or having to heat a larger space would have made a Geothermal system not only viable, but the smart move. Geothermal systems won't crap out like a conventional heat pump in very cold weather, necessitating the need to fall back on expensive backup heat, since the heat exchange medium is subsurface ground, which stays at a nearly constant temperature year-round. In the summertime, the energy requirements for air conditioning also favor the geothermal system, since the ground a few feet down is already as cool as, or cooler than the desired temperature of the house. I have heard anecdotal stories of 5,000 square foot houses in the Carolinas which cost less than $100 a month to cool with Geothermal systems in the heat of July, but I cannot verify this directly.
Nukes would be overkill, but perhaps a nice long range cruise missile would take out the Geek Compound without starting World War 3. Nukes would cripple the internet and cause a few more nasty side effects.
Perhaps complete destruction of the Geek Compound and the possible destruction of modern civilization can be averted by Slashdot implementing the cyberspace version of Abraham's Sacrifice in the spirit of the movie Fail Safe by publicly announcing and hosting a 1 minute high-resolution 10,000 FPS MPEG of a nuclear detonation. That should be sufficient to cause Slashdot's servers to go critical.
I'd like to see them get through the Great Lakes to bomb Michigan. Of course, they would have to go through the locks at Niagara to get into Lakes Michigan or Huron, which would require complicity on the part of the US and Canadian governments. The British Navy of course would also need to send icebreakers this time of year as well.
I have worked in a remittance processing environment for nearly 13 years. Payment processing of standard bill payments for large credit card issuers is more automated than you can imagine. Remittance envelopes and the statements inside are usually designed for quick efficient processing by automated equipment. Equipment such as this and this make quick work of most payments with minimal staff. Check 21 promises to streamline processing of paper checks even further.
Online payments often go through middlemen, who take a cut of the action, and whose payments are then processed manually by the bank. It can take longer to credit and clear an online payment than a standard payment.
I am in the same boat as you, but I'm 45, obese and dealing with sleep apnea, and doing shift work to boot. I have just come home tonight with a CPAP machine for the first time, after probably suffering with the problems since college. I am hopeful it will help, but I know its limitations. It takes almost all my energy to work, so little is left for the rest of what I like to do. In my case, while my blood chemistry is okay and my family history is full of heavy guys living well into their late 70s and beyond, carrying all that weight has pretty much wrecked my knees, feet, and started to work on my hips. Even if I shed much of my excess weight in the next year or so, I am probably facing a long round of surgeries and physical therapy in my 50's replacing worn out joints in my lower extemities, rather than riding my motorcycle or tending my garden.
At 32, you still have time to limit the damage to your joints, it will only get harder as you get older. I know the CPAP machine won't be a magic bullet anymore than Meridia, diets, or anything else I have tried, but if it helps keep me away from the vending machines and the drive through when I am in the middle of a 14 hour workathon, hopefully I can start to turn the tide.
I have worked with emergency generating equipment, both directly as a generator tech, and indirectly at facilities that use them. It would not be surprising that many typical standby generators would be able to operate more than a couple of weeks without some type of failure or need downtime for urgent maintenance. The problem isn't really with the engines or generator units themselves. The diesel engines and generator units on typical commercial backup generators are pretty durable, a diesel engine these days can usually go 10,000 hours or more between overhauls with proper maintenance, and the generator's electric ends are at least as durable. Even gasoline powered generators, which are pretty rare these days in the size that a hospital would need are good for 3,000 hours or so before the motors would wear out. Medium sized generators based on gasoline engines are often converted to run on natural gas, and are based on heavy duty truck engines. Running an engine on natural gas will typically double the life expectancy of the motor as well.
The problem with running a typical emergency generator is like owning a car for 10 or 20 years, just driving it to the grocery store once a week, then deciding to take a trip from Florida to Alaska and back. The car might have only 15,000 miles on it, but the belts, hoses, seals, tires and electrical wiring are all 20 years old, unless a lot of time and money has been spent to dilligently replace these types of parts as they deteriorate. 24/7 use after long periods of idleness, or perhaps only brief weekly or monthly excercise sessions will bring out many latent faults in the equipment. Rubber belts and hoses go bad, as do seals. Corrosion takes its toll on electical connections, cooling systems, and batteries as well. A generator in a hospital may run only briefly each week for a half hour, a couple of hours every few months for the typical thunderstorm type power failures, and perhaps a few hours a week in the summer to help with peak shaving, but after 20 years that same generator might suddenly be required to work at near capacity for days or weeks on end in a disaster. At the minimum it will need oil/air/filter changes on at least a biweekly basis. As with a car that sees little use, emergency equipment that might not ever get put into heavy-duty service often gets just prefunctory checkups, if any maintenance at all. Two weeks of 24/7 operation is the equivalent of driving a car 15,000 miles!
Fuel Storage is another issue: Running at 2/3 load, you can figure that a typical 300KW generator will burn about 20 gallons of diesel per hour. That is 480 gallons a day, about 3,400 gallons a week. 2 weeks of operation would require the equivalent of a full 7,000 gallon tractor-trailer sized tanker's worth of fuel to be stored on site (about the size of truck that delivers fuel to a gas station). Fuel that isn't used or stabilized goes sour (gasoline), or can develop slime from bacteria (diesel). I once had the experience of helping my dad nurse a diesel engined boat down the Cheasapeake Bay after buying a load of diesel fuel that had been stored all winter in a marina without being stabilized. We had to change the filter every 15 miles or so, and we were reduced to rinsing our last filter out in the bay just to make it to Annapolis to buy more filters (it was either that or sit dead in the water in the ship channel on a foggy day). If heavy infrastructure is out (roads, railroads, fuel terminals) it will be next to impossible to resupply, so a large tank is a must.
At most of my worksites (financial institution back offices) there are standby generators to keep the place going if the power fails, but they are only large enough to keep essential systems going. One of my prime sites has gone on "backup" twice in the last 10 years for several days to over a week during an extended period of bad weather, or when utility construction disrupted normal power. Outdoor lighting was extinguished, and interior lighting in all but critical areas was cut by about 2/3.
On a more basic level, even if Social Security taxes, 401K contributions and the like were increased to the level that retirement planners would like us, it wouldn't help much. If everyone started saving huge portions of their paychecks, the money not spent on current goods and services would reduce the demand for goods and services, causing economic contraction. This would cause many financial assets to whither away in real value. Money invested in companies to make things and provide services will have little return if there is no market for the goods and services they sell. Too much investment capital chasing too few profitable business opportunities was one of the reasons for the whole dot com mess.
Your point about the population of retirees causing the value of equities in capital markets to plummet is also well-taken, but there is a more basic problem that increased retirement saving won't ever fix. Many of the goods and services that retirees will want and need are the kind of things that can't be stockpiled in advance. As people get older and are less able to do things around the house for themselves, they will need more help with the basics: home maintenance and repairs, medical care, and so on. Older people who can afford it also want to travel, play golf, eat in restaurants, and be entertained. Most of the value of these services must be provided at the time they are made. An individual might be able to budget and plan in advance for the cost of say cleaning the gutters and cutting the grass and
save for it today, but as a group the demand for this type of service will exceed the supply of workers able and willing to provide it when it will be needed, if current demographic trends continue. The laws of supply and demand will take over, and only the very well off will be able to afford to get their lawn mowed or their gutters cleaned, as the price of this service will be bid up.
Short of large-scale immigration or automation of many routine jobs now performed by humans, there will be a huge shortage of people to do this kind of work. The elderly in a couple of decades will not only have to budget for fuel, food, and medicine, but also if to risk their arthritic joints, brittle bones, and weakened hearts to the hard physical tasks of maintaining their homes, in order to afford everything else they need.
It took a lot less than an earthquake to burn down the city of Baltimore on February 7,1904. Although the fire's exact origins are unknown, it is suspected that a dropped match or cigarette fell through a broken basement skylight window on a sidewalk adjoining the Hurst Building, located near the present First Mariner Arena. The fire probably smoldered for a while, then caught on some stored gasoline for a stationary engine in the Hurst Building. Within minutes of the initial alarm, the entire building was involved. Within an hour, the fire caused an explosion which caused the roof to blow off, spreading embers over adjoining and nearby buidings. A general alarm was sounded, and firefighters were dispatched from Washington DC to join the effort. When DC's firefighters arrived by express train at 1:30 PM, they discovered that their hose couplings didn't fit Baltimore's hydrants. Efforts to kludge connections with canvas were fruitless.
Fanned by 25 MPH winds from the southwest, the fire quickly spread North and east, reaching as far north as Lexington Street. It was decided to try to form a firebreak by dynamiting buildings along Charles Street. Buildings shook, windows blew out, and new fires were started, but most dynamited buildings stood. This only accelerated the spread of the fire.
At 8 PM, the winds shifted to and increased out of the southwest, causing the fire to spread South toward Pratt Street. Firefighters efforts and the shift in wind let City Hall and the Federal Courthouse narrowly escape the flames. The firefighters were able to keep the fire from spreading into Federal Hill and tried to save the Waterfront, but the piers in the inner harbor were lost at about 6 AM. Reinforcements arrived from as far away as New York City and Altoona, PA in the early morning hours.
With the docks lost and the fire threatening the densely populated Fells Point and Little Italy neighborhoods to the east, a fireline of 37 fire engines, assisted by the city's fireboat and tugs was established along a narrow waterway known as the Jones Falls. Some small fires started on the east side of the Jones Falls, but were quickly extinguished, and by 5 PM Monday, the fire was declared under control, though it smoldered for weeks.
In all, 140 acres of the downtown business district were burned to the ground, as well as all of the wharves along Pratt Street. Only 1 man was burned to death, but 5 firemen later died of pneumonia as a result of smoke and exposure. 35,000 people were thrown out of work in the dead of winter, and 2,500 businesses were burned out.
Baltimore soon rebuilt and reshaped, but the fire's legacy remains to this day.
What might even be worse than premature death is all the damage that gets done along the way. Sure, if you drive to work everyday long enough, eventually some fatal combination of circumstances in traffic will do you in. If that doesn't get you, perhaps it will be a freak accident with a circus elephant, or a bolt of lightning that sends you to your great reward. That has been well established.
What is less talked about and more insidious is the damage and wear and tear on irreplaceable parts that takes place as part as a meaningful life. You may drive 700 years before having that freak head-on with a bus that does you in for good, but as an average driver, you will probably be involved in dozens of lesser accidents before that happens. Some of these accidents will probably be pretty serious, and result in things like concussions, busted jaws, torn cartilige and ligaments, burns, and so on. Add to this the hundreds of slips on ice and snow, a couple dozen times falling off the ladder, and the scars from the tens of thousands of paper cuts, insect bites, shaving cuts and so on that life dishes out. By the time that bus gets you, you will be a patched up mass of scar tissue anyway, unless you live like a monk.
Once young adults graduate from the school of hard knocks, most tend to make fairly rational decisions not only about their driving style, but about their career choices as well, based on their expected lifespan. Certain trades are notoriously dangerous, such as roofing, but things like concrete work, commercial fishing, mining, and transportation eventually maim or kill large percentages of the people who make it their life's work. When I was watching my new house going up about a year ago, I watched the roofers heft heavy bundles of shingles while they danced across a steeply pitched roof, their feet often slipping dangerously. I also noticed that of about 15 men doing concrete and roofing, only about 2 were over the age of 40, and none over 50. I thought about my own aching 45 year old joints, and understood immediately why these businesses are a young man's game. My own occupation as an electronic tech working in an office environment tends to attract quite a few grey heads, where physical prowess and bravery are less valued than responsibility, common sense, and the ability to draw from a broad base of knowledge.
Even with the current paradigm of an expected lifespan of about 80 years or so, most people abandon truly dangerous occupations by the time they are 40, unless they are extremely well-paid, have no other options, or are adrenaline junkies. People in slightly less dangerous occupations just hope they can hang in until they retire without catastrophe befalling them. Miners, cops, and long-haul truckers fall into this category, and are often physically or emotionally scarred for life from their time working. Most cops put in their 20 or 30 years, take their pension and a part-time job, and try to forget about all the crap they had to deal with. Many do okay, but some spend their final years divorced and staring into a glass.
This is where things get sticky. Although job safety improvements or phasing in robots to do really dangerous but necessary work might be possible in the future for some jobs, there will almost certainly be some types of hazardous work that only people can do. Who will take the chance of being a city cop or fireman if the liklihood is that he will live only 1/5 as long as his office worker classmates, or live as a psychological wreck after 50 years on the force for the rest of his life?
A few years ago, Dad was struggling with a nearly full 250MB hard drive on his old 486. My brother and I usually have a one-upsmanship rivalry when it comes to helping out the Parental Units with computer problems, which he usually wins. (Damn CMU Graduate) This particular year, I happened to have the ultimate trump card in my back seat, a nearly complete system that I was playing around with, including a 1.2 GB Hard Drive, which I loaned to the cause. Despite the howling cries of "what a geek!" from him, I was the one that got first choice of the drumsticks that year.
As far as making your own paper caps is concerned, I guess it is possible, but not as easy as you think. Yes, I have unrolled a few of the old caps. One problem would be to find the correct thickness and type of paper and foil, and to cut it accurately. They are much thinner in most cases than the stuff you have in your kitchen. Photographicly reproducing the external markings on the tube is doable by a person with a scanner. My guess is that the best compromise is to manufacture capacitors true to the original markings, and use modern materials inside. Still, a stickler for authenticity would pick this up.
Actually, one of the tricks that some restorers do is to save the old outer shells of the original paper caps, and find modern replacements that fit inside the outer shells of the old ones, then seal the ends with the original wax. Pretty slick if you can pull it off, and although it is technically not authentic, it preserves the spirit of authenticity. It is not really worth it for your average Emerson or Philco, but unique sets and high-value radios are worth the extra care in restoration.
Another way of going at it to preserve both authenticity and usability is to use parts from the same era that had better durability than paper caps. Often the manufacturers would multiple source parts of this type anyway, and you would see them in an authentic set from the era. Mica capacitors and ceramic disk capacitors were used in many '40s and '50s era sets, are electrically the same and look right at home under the chassis of sets from that era.
Some historical modifications actually add value to a radio. During World War II, some tube types were in very short supply due to war needs, but people needed to keep their radios alive. Many radio techs of the day devised makeshift socket adapters and circuit modifications to allow use of more plentiful tube types when a tube that was in short supply failed. It is considered very bad form to undo one of these WWII era modifications, much as it is bad form to scrape a gas rationing sticker off the windshield of a car from that era.
Just as with antique cars, it is more worthwhile to strive for authenticity with a '32 Packard or Dusenburg than a 1974 Impala. It is much easier to acheive the look of authenticity with a '57 Chevy or '65 Mustang, which have an extensive amount of aftermarket restoration products available than say, a 1962 Chrysler Imperial, which outside of drivetrain hardware, has almost no aftermarket support. You just do the best you can within the constraints of time, patience, and your budget.