I am cleaning out my grandmother's old house which I am getting ready to move from, and I found a set of encyclopedias from the year 1955. I am holding onto them, for they are a time capsule of facts and opinions from that point in time nearly 50 years ago. For knowledge of the way the world is today, they are pretty useless, but for knowledge of the way things were, and to get a sense on how the world has changed... or stayed the same. For a student of History, Economics, Technology, or even Medicine, the old books can be a valuable reference in their own right, and can be entertaining and enlightening for others as well.
Historical references online tend to be fragmented, of uneven quality, and sometimes less than comprehensive as well. Another problem is that online resources are often ephemeral, while the books will quietly sit on my shelf until my nieces, nephews, their kids, or my own possible descendents clean out my house when my time on this rock is through. Perhaps they will get a kick out of reading the old books too, and decide to make a spot for them as well.
The 2nd and the 4th are pretty good as well. I live in the 6th, a Republican Ghetto. We also had quite an interesting Governor's race a few years back in 94, where it seemed the dead came back to life and voted for our former governor Glendenning in huge numbers from a precinct that reported in 3 hours late.
I got started with an old Hallicrafters HT-37/SX-111 setup, and I agree that they are a handful to work, generate a lot of heat, and take up a lot of space. That being said, there are still plenty of '80s and '90s used solid state HF rigs out there for less than $500 USD. A Kenwood TS-440 has automatic antenna tuning, a decent front end, and digital display, and can be had for less than $500.00. Other candidates in this class are Icom 725/735, Drake TR-7, and Kenwood TS-120/130/430.
If you are willing to peak the finals on a hybrid rig, the list extends to the Kenwood TS-520/530 or TS-820/830 series, which can be picked up for as little as $250 in good shape.
Many of the older rigs are actually more repairable than the rigs brought out in the last few years. The older rigs were more ruggedly built, used mostly discrete components and small generic IC's. They lack the fancy spectral displays and other bells the newer ones do, but often perform as well or better than the newer lower end rigs these days. The newer rigs also have all the stuff that makes most other consumer electronics virtually unrepairable these days, such as integrated switchblocks, surface mounted components, custom ICs, and power output modules.
The antenna problem is real, most new housing developments proscribe large outdoor antennas in their CCRs and Deed Restrictions. This is usually a larger hurtle than buying the rig itself, though many hams will sneak a wire antenna from a window to a nearby tree in order to operate, though it is far from ideal, and there is still the risk that one of the local suburbanazis will rat you out.
I live in an agricultural area about 15 miles from the Baltimore Beltway where the farmland is rapidly disappearing. I am also currently building a nice, but fairly modest house on a 5 acre piece of land that used to be part of my grandfather's dairy farm, which I plan to keep mostly agricultural. The county I live in is trying to preserve the remaining farmland around here by a combination of an (inadequately funded) program of buying development rights, and draconian zoning laws which restrict the ability to subdivide land parcels and require huge lot sizes in order to build anything at all.
Despite these restrictions, the "invisible hand" has been hard at work converting unprofitable farm land into green lawns for oversized McMansions. When houses with any substantial amount of land around them become available on the market, no matter how rundown or small they command a premium price. The real value of a farm is how many building lots can be carved off of it, rather than how fertile the farmland is or how nice the farmhouse. The price for a couple of acres is approaching the price of a modest house on a city lot. The clientele for these large building lots are not farmers, but people who can afford to build a 6,000 square foot house, have multiple SUVs in the 4 car garage, and maintain a 5 acre lawn. 30 years ago, a person moving out here would build a 1500 - 2000 square foot house, and take only an acre or so for their lawn.
This has changed the character of the area noticeably. The old timers would help each other with chores, repairs, and so on, and ignore minor trangressions of zoning laws, such as junked vehicles or unpermitted sheds. The new breed forms homeowners associations to oppose these people, and pressures the remaining old timers to sell out. One of the new breed is a developer who owns a neighboring parcel to mine, which was also once part of the farm. He witheld a simple easement for tapping electical service from a pole which sat on the edge of his property, unless I paid him a substantial "ransom". I love it around here, but if the people who move into the houses he will build are like him, I may sell out too.
I graduated college in 1981, and in the preface to one of my freshman textbooks the author wrote " while the reasons for the new edition are more economic than pedagogic.... when the sale of used textbooks starts cutting into the sale of new...", I decided that textbooks in general were one big racket, and that was over 25 years ago.
It was stated in the article that there was about 1.1 million tons of He3 on the moon, to a depth of several meters, half of it in about 20 percent of the moon's surface. Now lets get out our calculators kiddies:
Surface Area of Moon = 4*pi*r**2 where r is about equal to 1,100 miles is about 14,000,000 square miles, give or take.
Mineable surface of moon = 20 percent of 14,000,000 square miles, or about 2.8 million square miles. This is only slightly less than the area of the Continental United States.
Mine Depth: for sake of arguement, lets just say 10 feet, or about 1/500 of a mile, which is slightly more than 3 meters.
Total volume of moon to be mined =.002 * 2.8 million = 5,600 cubic miles of moondust, to recover about 500,000 tons of He3. This much liquified He3 could be contained in only a few supertankers, but the amout of material to be moved would be enormous, and would fill a quarry the size of Connecticut nearly a mile deep. I worked out a similar problem trying to estimate the cost of building A Bridge to Hawaii. Assuming a specific gravity of about 3, this would require processing a staggering 84 Trillion Tons of material. Of course, 1/6 of the gravity would make it easier to lift, but the costs of getting the heavy equipment to move all of this moondust would be truly enormous.
I have only been riding a few years having taken up the hobby right after turning 40, but I cycled extensively in my youth, and have had many friends over the years that have ridden.
A couple of experiences in my youth convinced me to wear a helmet, even when on a muscle powered cycle. The first was an accident I had while riding with my brother and a couple of friends when I was about 13. We were riding on a backroad closely grouped, and I was having trouble with the front derrailier on my bike. I looked down and swerved into my brother's rear wheel. He went down hard and hit his head on the macadem. He came up with a face covered with blood, and ended up with stitches and a mild concussion. The doctor's instructions when he left the emergency room were that he needed to be watched carefully for signs of life threatening brain swelling. Everything turned out okay, but I felt responsible for the accident, and the weight I felt on my shoulders that day stuck with me to this day.
The second experience was a few years later. A close friend's parents took a ride on their Honda CB 450, blew a rear tire, and weren't quite able to keep it from crashing. They were both hospitalized for a few days, but came out of it okay. I saw their helmets, and wondered if my friend would have been orphaned if they hadn't been wearing them.
None of this stopped my brother from buying a Triumph Bonneville in college, which he rode for several years without serious incident before selling it in a moment of weakness. I stuck with human powered cycles but 20 years later, desire and opportunity overcame fear, anxiety, and perhaps good sense in the form of an old V-30 Magna for $500.
I took and passed the MSF course, and promptly had a low speed crash on my first street ride. Neither me or the bike was hurt much, save for my pride and a bent handlebar. After more practice in the yard, I got back out there a couple of weeks later, and have had 4 pretty good years on my old Magna (knock on wood).
I wear a 3/4 helmet (a HJC FG-23) with a flip down face shield whenever I ride, along with a leather jacket, sturdy boots, and heavy jeans. While my gear isn't perfect, it is probably better than what 2/3 of the riders out there are wearing. I have found that most full face helmets fit me too tight in the cheek and chin, due to a larger than average sized head and full cheekbones. I also have a problem with a face shield that can't be flipped up and away if it starts fogging up, say in cool weather or during an unexpected rain shower.
That being said, I won't be without a face shield, as it protects against the stones, bugs, and occasional UFO impact when I ride. It also helps keep my eyes from drying out. Since my peripheral vision is compromised anyway due to strong glasses for farsightedness, I don't even notice the slight restriction on the edges of my vision. Forget HUDs though cool they are, just give me a faceshield that effectively deals with sun glare, and resists fogging up!
I work in the payment processing industry, and here is the real reason: Internet bill pay is still often done through a middleman, who takes a cut to set up an electronic transfer through the customer's checking account, then issues a paper check to the payment processors, even with large credit card companies. This was the case a couple of years ago when I investigated doing this for my MBNA Account. The kicker was that the internet bill pay option required more time for the payment to clear than simply sending in a check directly to the processing center. In the business, these are called Pay By Phones, and are processed manually. Ordinary payments in high volume shops are processed on sophisticated high speed equipment such as this beast.
This is beginning to change, I know that Verizon and a few other companies are starting to do this on their own, but the vast majority of payments are still the ubiquitous paper checks, or electronic and automatic payments are made by debiting a customer's credit card.
Re:Sad state of affairs... Payment Processing
on
Stealth Inflation
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· Score: 1
I happen to work on these machines, and I can definitely say that staples, folded checks, and extra slips of paper will not generally stop one of these machines, but the machine will sort it into a bin for manual processing. It cuts the throughput of the high speed equipment a bit, but it means that generally an overworked, underpaid drone will have to destaple the check manually.
Often though, payments are not processed by the company on the stub, but rather they are sent to a lockbox operation, such as a large bank, or a company that specializes in payment processing such as Regulus . Unless you have inside information about the PO box that shows through the window on the return envelope, it is hard to know who actually processes a particular payment.
In general, if you want your payment processed as quickly, accurately, and uneventfully as possible, it is best to bow to the machine's desires. The preprinted postnets on the statements or envelopes will speed your payment quickly through the postal service's high speed sorters, and they win the race to reach the processing floor at the bank or lockbox. White mail and damaged mail gets sorted last, and generally gets processed last when it gets to the bank. The high speed work is always the first priority, outsorts and white mail usually wait.
Only part of the reason for the Iraqi stripping of cables was economic, as intact wire probably has value as intact wire in third world countries. Also, if someone can make even a couple of bucks over there for a couple of hours work, it is probably more profitable than the alternativess.
Electrical wire is really the only common type of cabling that would be worthwhile by any stretch of the imagination that would be worth tearing out of a building. Also remember, that much of the looting was vandalism pure and simple done by people caught up in a fever of lawlessness.
I had a reasonable quantity of old pitch and fabric covered #8 electrical wire, about 500 feet or so of the stuff that ran out to a barn here. I took it to the local recycler, who offered 3 cents a pound for it. 60 pounds of the stuff yielded a mere 2 bucks, which didn't even cover my gasoline to drive to the recycling center. I suspected there was at least 30 pounds of copper in there, which is worth about $25. but didn't want to go to the trouble and mess of burning the old insulation away. Proportionately, Cat 5 would be an even worse proposition, as there are probably mere grams of copper per foot of this cable. The heat of burning the plastic off of the cable would probably oxidize the little bit of copper it contains anyway.
Some of the older 10 base 5 cables might have a second life for us ham radio operators, as it is equivalent to RG-8, a very common coaxial cable used in 2 way radio systems. Anybody who's got a few decent length runs (100 foot or so) of this stuff could get a few bucks for it at a hamfest. Don't bother with any oddball stuff, as it has little value for secondary uses.
As a ham who works satellites I would not just casually give away the 1.2 Ghz band. Rather, I would like to see WiFi move up to the 5 Ghz band rather than 1.2 Ghz. While I sort of agree that 1.2 Ghz is underutilized, 2.4 Ghz is where the primary downlink for AO-40 is located, and used worldwide. The 2.4 Ghz downlink suffers from interference by microwave ovens, and increasingly WiFi appliances, as well as other services near the band. 1.2 Ghz is a good frequency to uplink to the bird, if you have the equipment, though I agree with you that that 1.2 Ghz stations are hard to find and not easy or cheap to set up properly, due to high feedline losses, and lack of commercial equipment easily modifiable to work in the band.
On the other hand, the technology to clean up signals on microwave ovens could be a bonanza for those hams crazy enough to bounce signals off of the moon in the form of a cheap 500 watt transmitter on 2.4 Ghz. Finally moonbouncers will be able to get armchair copy of EME signals without having to visit Areceibo. I don't want to be in the line of fire of that signal though.
What happens to mail when it arrives
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Snail Mail Tech
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· Score: 1
Most people use the mail system to send their bill payments for everything from internet service to septic bills, and of course credit card payments. The processing centers that receive these payments often process millions of payments every month. Processing all this mail has become as high tech as the post office high speed sorters, a far cry from the armies of billing clerks that processed the credit cards and utility bills a generation ago. This link to the company I work for provides a good window into the technology used to process all of this mail.
As you indicated, there is more to building a house than framing, roofing, and siding. Most stick-built houses around here seem to go up and are closed in pretty quick, then seem to take months to complete. For that matter, some owner done additions around here have been under construction for 5 years or more. As you know, there is a lot of interior work that needs to be done to make that shell into a house ready to move into.
The interior part is where a Modular can be a real time-saver. I visited a modular - a 5 box semicustom 2 story Colonial with a 400K budget, about 2 weeks after the set. Outside, the house was partially sided and completely roofed, and the windows trimmed. There was custom brickwork being installed on the front porch, facade, and foundation. Inside, many rooms were substantially completed at the factory. Doors were hung, closet shelves installed, interior walls painted and trimmed, and floor coverings installed all at the factory.
Downstairs, the major projects that remained were a custom built grand staircase, drywall work where the modules mated, and a custom bumpout which the customer changed their mind about after the house was delivered, requiring additional foundation work and custom carpentry. Otherwise the kitchen was substantially complete, the floors were down, except near the mating seam. I was impressed with the work, and moved the builder to the top of my short list of contractors.
At the time of the visit, I was awaiting final approval of the subdivision of my lot (any day now... for 3 months!), so the builder and I checked in with each other to check on each other's progress. About a month after the visit, I asked him about the big house, and he told me it was done, and the family had moved in.
Last week they poured the foundation, and the house is scheduled to be set the week before Christmas. After that, the builder expected that the house would be ready to move into by mid to late January. Hopefully the weather will hold well enough to complete the necessary work outside.
Costwise a well built modular compares favorably against an equivalent stick built house. The cost differential isn't enough to put the stick builders out of business yet, but it has allowed me to build a higher quality house for the money than I would have gotten with a stick built. On the downside, buying a modular means having less flexibility of design and materials. Unless you are going the full custom built route anyway, your choices will be limited by tract builders, who pick out all of the carpets, colors, and fixtures, then sell it after it is built.
The key is planning
on
Pre-Fab Homes?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I am currently in the process of building a prefab (modular) home, and while it is too early to say if I made the best decision possible, here are a few impressions I have of the business, . While my housing needs and budget are fairly basic, I wanted to try to make the most of a very nice piece of land that my Dad subdivided for me when he sold the old family dairy farm. Most comparable lots in the area would be sporting half million dollar McMansions, while the realities of my budget were more in line with a tract house in an older Baltimore suburb. The challenge was to build a nice, but modest house for my use and budget, but build in quality and expandability for when the day came to sell.
I had several meetings/phone conversations with each of the 3 builders I interviewed before I made a decision. All three seemed competent and had at least several dozen modulars under their belts. All had some pretty good ideas to build in some expandability, usually by selecting a model, or modifiying an existing one to have buildable space in the attic. Each represented a different manufacturer, and I speced out houses as close to each other as I could to make my decision based on who I thought would do the best work, at the fairest price. I priced the basic houses out when fitted with basic options, then set up a spread sheet to compare items line by line or items on allowances, as well as "wish list" items.
Builder one was very knowledgeable, had been doing modulars for 10 years and the base price of the house was attractive. Unfortunately, the house that was shown in the brochure was not the house that I would get without spending an extra 10 grand for the overbuilt roof. I would be a plain box house. Every little upgrade, such as mouldings, deluxe cabinets, and so on was priced as if the builder was tearing out the cheap stuff , throwing it away and installing the good stuff himself. The manufacturer he admitted was difficult to work with, and between the lines he was telling me that for more than a bare basic house he could do better by me by doing a stick built. I agreed with his assesment, and looked for a second opinion.
The second builder represented one of the largest manufacturers of Modulars in the region, and had at least as much time in the business as the first. The second manufacturer offered more attractive exteriors and floorplans than the first, and the builder seemed much more enthusiastic than the first about the company he represented. The price was somewhat higher for the basic house, but at least some of the increased cost was justified. He shared the same affliction as the first builder by pricing upgrades very aggresively. Another thing that unsettled me a little was his reticence at me doing either a site visit or to contact the owner of a completed house.
While the subdivision process for the lot dragged on and stalled, I took a break from the process for a while. When the wheels of bureaocracy started to grind again, I decided to widen my search for a manufacturer and builder, and found my third prospective builder, who represented a manufacturer in Central PA which offered a more upscale product in the square foot range I was looking for. He also had a nearby project, a modular addition to an older house, which was literally right under my nose, and I got a chance to tour a more upscale project he was in the middle of and I was impressed. In the end I ended up going with him, as the upgrades that I wanted in the other houses were either included, or priced more reasonably in his quote. The manufacturer is also able to do more in-factory customization, and in fact my house will be a hybrid of one exterior, with the floorplan based on a somewhat different model.
So far things seem to be going very well, and the foundation work went very smoothly. For now there are some minor foundation jobs to complete, but the next big event is the delivery and set of the house itself in about a month. My main concern there is the weather, which can turn ugly that time of year, but as long as he gets a decent dry day for the set, most of the rest of the work can be done inside in heated comfort the builder assured me.
Re:Fire and steel...
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Pre-Fab Homes?
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· Score: 3, Informative
The fact that the framing of a house is steel probably makes little difference in the combustibility of the house as a whole. The framing is only a fraction of the contents of the house, and you have to consider the furniture, flooring, wall materials, and stored materials (paints, varnishes, solvents,etc) that are also in a house. A steel framed house also has the potential drawback of conducting electricity, and could be a hazard, particularly when using Romex cable, unless the edges are properly protected. Wood framing is less likely to have sharp edges, and does not conduct electricity to any great degree unless it is soaking wet. Of course, you could use BX Cable or conduit, but that adds to the cost of wiring the house over Romex.
I have noticed though that steel roofing is making a comeback around here. Most of the older houses >50 yrs old have tin roofs, most of which still serve their purposes, though they need repainting every few years. After WW2, most houses were built with the familiar asphalt shingles we see today, and those roofs need to be replaced every 20 to 30 years.
Prefinished metal roofing is becoming the standard for most agricultural type structures and outbuildings, but I have also seen it being used on several houses around here as well.
About 15 years ago, Maryland experimented on a large scale with hundreds of lane miles of permeable base asphalt. With an open and porous texture it was great at draining off runoff from summer storms and spring showers. In the winter, water that penetrated the asphalt had a nasty tendancy to freeze, and as we all know, water expands when it freezes. To make a long story short, the asphalt started to break up within a couple of years. Thousands of windshields were cracked by the flying gravel, and the State Highway administration spent millions repaving the crumbling road surfaces.
A way to watch this is to buy a cheap $30 humidity meter at Radio Shack. It won't be terribly accurate, but probably good enough. I wouldn't get terribly concerned until the humidity reaches 80 to 85 percent or so. If the humidity gets too high, shut down the swamp cooler and increase the ventilation. Since computer cases are usually warmer than their surrounding environment, the heat from the CPUs, drives, etc will help keep condensation from many of the more critical parts. If humidity reaches dangerous levels, I would keep the hardware powered up and take active steps to reduce the humidity. Actually, some humdity is beneficial, as it keeps the static electricity at bay, but when moisture starts condensing on tables this is a bad thing. I actually sometime have the problem of trying to get enough moisture into the room during the winter.
During the day, as the sun heats things up, the air can absorb moisture better, and this is the time when you need the help the most. At night, when the temperature drops or on rainy days, moisture already in the air will interfere with operation of the swamp coolers, or their improvised equivalents due to the increase in Relative Humidity. At night, it is probably best to substitute increased ventilation for use of any kind of improvised swamp coolers, but it will be cooler anyway. Experiment, and see what gives the best results. After all, life is just one big self-perpetuating experiment.
About 12 years ago, I worked for a company that could provide trailer mounted diesel generators in sizes from 7.5 KW up to over 1,000 KW (that's 1 MW folks. Along with the generators, we could supply just about anything else everything else you would need to do the job, such as cabling, distribution panels, and so on. Many of these rentals were for construction sites and special events, but I remember one time we set up a huge 800 KW set for the switching station at a major long distance company, which had lost one of their 3 backup generators. The generators were typically tied in to the main panel, or whatever circuits needed to be tied into, and could be wired for just about any combination of 208/240/277/440 in either single phase or three phase current you could need.
Swamp coolers and portable air conditioning units could also be rented from us. It ain't cheap, rental of a large (300KW) generator, plus the chillers and related cabling could run up to several thousand dollars per month, plus the cost of fuel (figure roughly 1 gallon/hr per 10KW), but companies that work in this business can quickly and effectively solve your power problems until things get better again.
Once the immediate crisis has passed, you might want to at least look into a permanent emergency generator large enough to keep your servers powered and cooled. I currently work in a payment processing center for a large financial institution, and it has a fairly large (200-300 KW) emergency generator, along with a UPS which is mainly intended to hold the power until the generator kicks in, but I personally saw it run the building which is full of power hungry servers and mail sorting and extraction equipment for nearly 2 hours when the generator overheated and shut down.
If you go the generator route, either contract out or have someone on staff which will periodically do maintenance and exercise the generator, or else it is liable not to work when you need it the most. A generator can sometimes also help pay for itself by "peak shaving". Large users of power are often billed by their peak use, or otherwise based on how much power they use during times of peak demand. Electricity from a diesel generator will normally be more expensive per KWH than commercial power, but during times of peak demand, it can be cheaper to run the generator than pay extortionate rates for power on a hot summer afternoon.
After suffering with ADHD for most of my life, and spending about half of it on Ritalin or Concerta, one important aspect of dealing with ADHD is to find employment that complements your distractability. Avoid jobs that have a high degree of monotony, such as assembly line jobs, jobs in call centers, security, data entry and so on, but you don't have to be told that these jobs tend to suck. Totally unstructured work environments, such as some outside sales jobs can provide too much temptation to goof off rather than focus on the job at hand. Jobs that require constant attention to detail, or require intricate planning abilities, such as being an architect can be problematic as well.
So, what does this leave?
Look for a job that provides a fast and varied workload, and gives you the opportunity to creatively solve a wide variety of problems and to think on your feet. Technical support, field service, traffic management, or restaurant management can be a good choice. Every day these people are confronted with dozens of miniature crises that need to be dealt with efficiently. The good thing about these kinds of jobs is that once you fix one problem, you get to move on to the next thing, rather than process yet another 1,000 pieces of mail before lunch, and another 2000 after lunch.
No job is perfect, they all have a certain amount of drudgery, whether it be filling out service reports, cleaning filters, or ordering parts. One way to reduce the onerousness of that part of the job is figure out ways to reduce the burden, or to make the "paperwork" part of the job more relevant by figuring ways to reduce redundant information, while providing information that can actually be of use to management. It always apalls me how many forms are poorly designed, or how often you have to provide the same information to the same group of people on 3 or more different forms, when one good one would do, for instance. If the job becomes more about the paperwork than the real work that you do, it is time to start looking for another job.
As a child diagnosed as "hyperactive" at the age of 9, long before it was fashionable (1969 IIRC), I was placed on Ritalin, and stayed on it through college. Ritalin acts to help you focus your concentration, not so much to calm you down. Otherwise, my brain was pretty much stuck in channel surfing mode under normal circumstances. I was still fairly distractable, but Ritalin did give me the focus to suceed academically, finish college, and lead a reasonably fulfilling social life, at least by nerd standards.
At the time, the thinking was that you were supposed to "outgrow" your need for Ritalin, and I felt none too subtle pressure to give it up. I know now why I had 3 car accidents in two years after I gave it up. I was driven to distraction! I ended up drinking massive amounts of coffee, soda, and chocolate to fill the gap, but it just wasn't the same. Without my favorite stimulant, I was not only distractable, but became depressive as well.
Fast Forward 15 years. I explained this to my doctor a few years ago, and guess what? He listened patiently, and asked if I thought I could benefit from Ritalin again. To make a long story short, I walked out the office with a prescription for Ritalin. A couple of years later, I was switched to Concerta, a time release form of Methylphendiate (Ritalin), and it serves me well. One problem I had with Ritalin was that I would forget to take it sometimes, but I would forget whether I took it or not.
I will probably be on it in some form or another the rest of my life, but I can live with that.
Re:available bandwidth?
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Hamvention
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The VHF and UHF amateur bands can get a little crowded with all of those HTs walking around, plus the communications by the event organizers. There is more room on UHF (420-450 Mhz) than on VHF (144-148 Mhz). Also add in all the traffic for cell phones and demonstrations of different modes and it is sometimes hard to find a quiet frequency, based on my observations at the Timmonium, Maryland hamfest. Patience is sometimes needed, but there is usually enough bandwidth that a frequency opens up. Usually groups of hams will work on a pre-agreed frequency, and there are only so many simplex channels and repeaters within HT range to go around, so patience and courtesy goes a long way. Perhaps a few experiments with trunking on the amateur bands could extend the limited bandwidth, but since large hamfests are local and infrequent events, there seems fairly little incentive to push the technology, and get the rules changed to allow it.
In the very long term, the durability of the building materials might have less to do with the viability of a particular house than the real estate it sets on. Most of Andrew Lloyd Wright's homes have survived quite nicely despite the fact that many of them are maintenance nightmares due to their specicial design qualities, much as there are a lot more 1957 Chevies at a car show than 1958 models. The mechanicals were mostly the same, but the styling of the '57s stayed more desireable over time than the '58s. A solid, well built house is no guarantee that it will last for the ages. A section of Fifth Avenue in New York was known over a century ago was known as Millionaires Row. Each new house was larger and more ostentatious as the last, and they were the homes of the Gate's and the Waltons of their era. This period lasted for less than 30 years, and with the exception of a couple of houses converted into museums, most of these homes are long gone, These houses would cost millions, if not tens of millions of dollars to recreate today, but the invisible hand of rising real estate values turned these palaces into rubble upon which was built. commercial enterprises which supported the price the land they sat on commanded. Their former owners took the huge wad of cash their palaces commanded and moved to even swankier digs up the Hudson and out in the Hamptons.
Once nobody cares about a structure for a while, it will inevitably start falling down. A window breaks and lets the rain in, and after a while even oak and cedar starts to rot. Even slate roofs crack and leak after a while. After a few decades of this, reconstruction becomes as expensive as building new. Once a building reaches this point, the only thing that can really save it is that someone (with deep pockets) perceives something architecturaly or historicaly valuable to make it worth the trouble to rebuild. Otherwise, that fine old Victorian gets leveled to make way for a 7-11, a strip mall, or an apartment complex. Happens all the time!
If you want to build so that the building remains pretty much the same over the decades and centuries, use of good materials is important to help keep the building desireable, and hopefully able to survive periods of abandonment and neglect. What can be done? Building well with good materials with a unique and well-thought out design may help give the building some special appeal which will survive rennovations, disasters, and so on. The community is important is well. I would build in a stable community that has a diverse and stable employment base, and a sense of its own history, and some surrounding natural beauty. A decaying industrial town will probably continue to deteriorate, and the home may eventually face abandonment. A rapidly growing community will probably put irresistable pressures on the real estate the land sits on, either through tax assesments or property values to force or entice the owners to sell out to someone who has other ideas for the land. A good infrastructure in the community may hold off the highway builders from taking the property, which nearly happened to a fine stone colonial my uncle owned and meticulously maintained. Nothing can guarantee survival over the long term, but a close look at the community can improve the odds.
As a verteran of a half-dozen or more Grateful Dead concerts, and owner of perhaps a dozen or so "Locally produced" concert tapes, mostly produced by microphones held up on crutches, the quality does leave something to be desired for instant recordings. It was also well known that "insiders" could get access to the soundboard, and often would daisy chain the feed from that. Soundboard recordings were better, but not quite up to the standards of the Europe '72 recordings.
With modern digital recording techniques and an experienced sound crew, it is probable that a crew could be editing tracks of the CD while the concert was still going on, and at least trim off some of the rough edges of a live performance. such as long intervals between songs, the drummer knocking over a mic stand, and so on. That and some basic equalization and balancing would be pretty much all that would be possible given the tight time constraints of a concert. A skilled soundcrew would have to consider the effects of their actions not only on the audience, but on the recordings as well. I suspect that the sound engineers would use a seperate set of inputs to their own recording equipment from the instruments and vocalists, as opposed to the equipment used to amplify the music for the auditorium. This would give them more flexibility to deal with the varibles of a live performance in near-real time.
I suspect that in the end, the recordings will be of fairly good quality, but will still have quite a few rough edges that will be present in the final recording. From the concertgoer's point of view, this is not necessarily a bad thing, since anomalies such as when the lead guitarist breaks 2 strings on his guitar and keeps on going are the things that make a live performance unique and memorable anyway.
My first Sony TV was a KV 1913 I got in 1982 when I got my first job. It was barebones but had a better picture than anything else out there. I paid over $400 for it back then, which was a floor model at that. It had served me well for over 15 years when the HV module blew, I replaced it with a Sony 27 inch Trinitron in 98, which cost about $400, again because it had about the best picture out there and because of the experience with the old 19 inch Trinitron. I hoped to ride this set into the HDTV era but it was not to be. Because of my good experience with the old TV, I also did not buy the extended warranty and lived to regret it. Nevertheless, I still felt it might be worth spending $150 to repair it.
Well, three repair attempts did not repair the intermittent shutdown problem I was having, and the first repair attempt actually damaged the CRT, the shadow mask was actually bent. My only compensation: $50 off on a new set. Yep, I brought another Sony (this time a 27 inch WEGA) because it had the best picture, or the picture was pretty much competitive with other premium TV sets of similar price by Toshiba, and better than the $250 RCA/Zenith/Philco/Magnavox junk. My experience with the cheap junk is that they tend to bloom on bright text, and the picture has a lower signal to noise ratio (more smeared and not as sharp) as the better sets by Toshiba or Sony, and that they tend to self destruct after three or four years on a more or less consistent basis.
One thing that I have noticed about TV construction in general is that the amount of bulk that goes into components that handle real power (Horizontal output, power supplies, and HV modules) seems to have decreased considerably over the last 20 years or so. The small signal stuff and control electronics rarely cause problems despite their miniaturization, most problems seem to be HV or power supply related. The miniaturization and cheapening of these components seems to be the main culprit, and unfortunately, almost all of the major TV makers have decided to go this route.
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I am cleaning out my grandmother's old house which I am getting ready to move from, and I found a set of encyclopedias from the year 1955. I am holding onto them, for they are a time capsule of facts and opinions from that point in time nearly 50 years ago. For knowledge of the way the world is today, they are pretty useless, but for knowledge of the way things were, and to get a sense on how the world has changed ... or stayed the same. For a student of History, Economics, Technology, or even Medicine, the old books can be a valuable reference in their own right, and can be entertaining and enlightening for others as well.
Historical references online tend to be fragmented, of uneven quality, and sometimes less than comprehensive as well. Another problem is that online resources are often ephemeral, while the books will quietly sit on my shelf until my nieces, nephews, their kids, or my own possible descendents clean out my house when my time on this rock is through. Perhaps they will get a kick out of reading the old books too, and decide to make a spot for them as well.
The 2nd and the 4th are pretty good as well. I live in the 6th, a Republican Ghetto. We also had quite an interesting Governor's race a few years back in 94, where it seemed the dead came back to life and voted for our former governor Glendenning in huge numbers from a precinct that reported in 3 hours late.
I got started with an old Hallicrafters HT-37/SX-111 setup, and I agree that they are a handful to work, generate a lot of heat, and take up a lot of space. That being said, there are still plenty of '80s and '90s used solid state HF rigs out there for less than $500 USD. A Kenwood TS-440 has automatic antenna tuning, a decent front end, and digital display, and can be had for less than $500.00. Other candidates in this class are Icom 725/735, Drake TR-7, and Kenwood TS-120/130/430.
If you are willing to peak the finals on a hybrid rig, the list extends to the Kenwood TS-520/530 or TS-820/830 series, which can be picked up for as little as $250 in good shape.
Many of the older rigs are actually more repairable than the rigs brought out in the last few years. The older rigs were more ruggedly built, used mostly discrete components and small generic IC's. They lack the fancy spectral displays and other bells the newer ones do, but often perform as well or better than the newer lower end rigs these days. The newer rigs also have all the stuff that makes most other consumer electronics virtually unrepairable these days, such as integrated switchblocks, surface mounted components, custom ICs, and power output modules.
The antenna problem is real, most new housing developments proscribe large outdoor antennas in their CCRs and Deed Restrictions. This is usually a larger hurtle than buying the rig itself, though many hams will sneak a wire antenna from a window to a nearby tree in order to operate, though it is far from ideal, and there is still the risk that one of the local suburbanazis will rat you out.
I live in an agricultural area about 15 miles from the Baltimore Beltway where the farmland is rapidly disappearing. I am also currently building a nice, but fairly modest house on a 5 acre piece of land that used to be part of my grandfather's dairy farm, which I plan to keep mostly agricultural. The county I live in is trying to preserve the remaining farmland around here by a combination of an (inadequately funded) program of buying development rights, and draconian zoning laws which restrict the ability to subdivide land parcels and require huge lot sizes in order to build anything at all.
Despite these restrictions, the "invisible hand" has been hard at work converting unprofitable farm land into green lawns for oversized McMansions. When houses with any substantial amount of land around them become available on the market, no matter how rundown or small they command a premium price. The real value of a farm is how many building lots can be carved off of it, rather than how fertile the farmland is or how nice the farmhouse. The price for a couple of acres is approaching the price of a modest house on a city lot. The clientele for these large building lots are not farmers, but people who can afford to build a 6,000 square foot house, have multiple SUVs in the 4 car garage, and maintain a 5 acre lawn. 30 years ago, a person moving out here would build a 1500 - 2000 square foot house, and take only an acre or so for their lawn.
This has changed the character of the area noticeably. The old timers would help each other with chores, repairs, and so on, and ignore minor trangressions of zoning laws, such as junked vehicles or unpermitted sheds. The new breed forms homeowners associations to oppose these people, and pressures the remaining old timers to sell out. One of the new breed is a developer who owns a neighboring parcel to mine, which was also once part of the farm. He witheld a simple easement for tapping electical service from a pole which sat on the edge of his property, unless I paid him a substantial "ransom". I love it around here, but if the people who move into the houses he will build are like him, I may sell out too.
I graduated college in 1981, and in the preface to one of my freshman textbooks the author wrote " while the reasons for the new edition are more economic than pedagogic .... when the sale of used textbooks starts cutting into the sale of new ...", I decided that textbooks in general were one big racket, and that was over 25 years ago.
It was stated in the article that there was about 1.1 million tons of He3 on the moon, to a depth of several meters, half of it in about 20 percent of the moon's surface. Now lets get out our calculators kiddies:
.002 * 2.8 million = 5,600 cubic miles of moondust, to recover about 500,000 tons of He3. This much liquified He3 could be contained in only a few supertankers, but the amout of material to be moved would be enormous, and would fill a quarry the size of Connecticut nearly a mile deep. I worked out a similar problem trying to estimate the cost of building A Bridge to Hawaii. Assuming a specific gravity of about 3, this would require processing a staggering 84 Trillion Tons of material. Of course, 1/6 of the gravity would make it easier to lift, but the costs of getting the heavy equipment to move all of this moondust would be truly enormous.
Surface Area of Moon = 4*pi*r**2 where r is about equal to 1,100 miles is about 14,000,000 square miles, give or take.
Mineable surface of moon = 20 percent of 14,000,000 square miles, or about 2.8 million square miles. This is only slightly less than the area of the Continental United States.
Mine Depth: for sake of arguement, lets just say 10 feet, or about 1/500 of a mile, which is slightly more than 3 meters.
Total volume of moon to be mined =
I have only been riding a few years having taken up the hobby right after turning 40, but I cycled extensively in my youth, and have had many friends over the years that have ridden.
A couple of experiences in my youth convinced me to wear a helmet, even when on a muscle powered cycle. The first was an accident I had while riding with my brother and a couple of friends when I was about 13. We were riding on a backroad closely grouped, and I was having trouble with the front derrailier on my bike. I looked down and swerved into my brother's rear wheel. He went down hard and hit his head on the macadem. He came up with a face covered with blood, and ended up with stitches and a mild concussion. The doctor's instructions when he left the emergency room were that he needed to be watched carefully for signs of life threatening brain swelling. Everything turned out okay, but I felt responsible for the accident, and the weight I felt on my shoulders that day stuck with me to this day.
The second experience was a few years later. A close friend's parents took a ride on their Honda CB 450, blew a rear tire, and weren't quite able to keep it from crashing. They were both hospitalized for a few days, but came out of it okay. I saw their helmets, and wondered if my friend would have been orphaned if they hadn't been wearing them.
None of this stopped my brother from buying a Triumph Bonneville in college, which he rode for several years without serious incident before selling it in a moment of weakness. I stuck with human powered cycles but 20 years later, desire and opportunity overcame fear, anxiety, and perhaps good sense in the form of an old V-30 Magna for $500.
I took and passed the MSF course, and promptly had a low speed crash on my first street ride. Neither me or the bike was hurt much, save for my pride and a bent handlebar. After more practice in the yard, I got back out there a couple of weeks later, and have had 4 pretty good years on my old Magna (knock on wood).
I wear a 3/4 helmet (a HJC FG-23) with a flip down face shield whenever I ride, along with a leather jacket, sturdy boots, and heavy jeans. While my gear isn't perfect, it is probably better than what 2/3 of the riders out there are wearing. I have found that most full face helmets fit me too tight in the cheek and chin, due to a larger than average sized head and full cheekbones. I also have a problem with a face shield that can't be flipped up and away if it starts fogging up, say in cool weather or during an unexpected rain shower.
That being said, I won't be without a face shield, as it protects against the stones, bugs, and occasional UFO impact when I ride. It also helps keep my eyes from drying out. Since my peripheral vision is compromised anyway due to strong glasses for farsightedness, I don't even notice the slight restriction on the edges of my vision. Forget HUDs though cool they are, just give me a faceshield that effectively deals with sun glare, and resists fogging up!
I work in the payment processing industry, and here is the real reason: Internet bill pay is still often done through a middleman, who takes a cut to set up an electronic transfer through the customer's checking account, then issues a paper check to the payment processors, even with large credit card companies. This was the case a couple of years ago when I investigated doing this for my MBNA Account. The kicker was that the internet bill pay option required more time for the payment to clear than simply sending in a check directly to the processing center. In the business, these are called Pay By Phones, and are processed manually. Ordinary payments in high volume shops are processed on sophisticated high speed equipment such as this beast.
This is beginning to change, I know that Verizon and a few other companies are starting to do this on their own, but the vast majority of payments are still the ubiquitous paper checks, or electronic and automatic payments are made by debiting a customer's credit card.
I happen to work on these machines, and I can definitely say that staples, folded checks, and extra slips of paper will not generally stop one of these machines, but the machine will sort it into a bin for manual processing. It cuts the throughput of the high speed equipment a bit, but it means that generally an overworked, underpaid drone will have to destaple the check manually.
Often though, payments are not processed by the company on the stub, but rather they are sent to a lockbox operation, such as a large bank, or a company that specializes in payment processing such as Regulus . Unless you have inside information about the PO box that shows through the window on the return envelope, it is hard to know who actually processes a particular payment.
In general, if you want your payment processed as quickly, accurately, and uneventfully as possible, it is best to bow to the machine's desires. The preprinted postnets on the statements or envelopes will speed your payment quickly through the postal service's high speed sorters, and they win the race to reach the processing floor at the bank or lockbox. White mail and damaged mail gets sorted last, and generally gets processed last when it gets to the bank. The high speed work is always the first priority, outsorts and white mail usually wait.
The old thicknet (10 base 5) is equivalent to RG-8, and is even more useful for hams than RG-58.
Only part of the reason for the Iraqi stripping of cables was economic, as intact wire probably has value as intact wire in third world countries. Also, if someone can make even a couple of bucks over there for a couple of hours work, it is probably more profitable than the alternativess.
Electrical wire is really the only common type of cabling that would be worthwhile by any stretch of the imagination that would be worth tearing out of a building. Also remember, that much of the looting was vandalism pure and simple done by people caught up in a fever of lawlessness.
I had a reasonable quantity of old pitch and fabric covered #8 electrical wire, about 500 feet or so of the stuff that ran out to a barn here. I took it to the local recycler, who offered 3 cents a pound for it. 60 pounds of the stuff yielded a mere 2 bucks, which didn't even cover my gasoline to drive to the recycling center. I suspected there was at least 30 pounds of copper in there, which is worth about $25. but didn't want to go to the trouble and mess of burning the old insulation away. Proportionately, Cat 5 would be an even worse proposition, as there are probably mere grams of copper per foot of this cable. The heat of burning the plastic off of the cable would probably oxidize the little bit of copper it contains anyway.
Some of the older 10 base 5 cables might have a second life for us ham radio operators, as it is equivalent to RG-8, a very common coaxial cable used in 2 way radio systems. Anybody who's got a few decent length runs (100 foot or so) of this stuff could get a few bucks for it at a hamfest. Don't bother with any oddball stuff, as it has little value for secondary uses.
As a ham who works satellites I would not just casually give away the 1.2 Ghz band. Rather, I would like to see WiFi move up to the 5 Ghz band rather than 1.2 Ghz. While I sort of agree that 1.2 Ghz is underutilized, 2.4 Ghz is where the primary downlink for AO-40 is located, and used worldwide. The 2.4 Ghz downlink suffers from interference by microwave ovens, and increasingly WiFi appliances, as well as other services near the band. 1.2 Ghz is a good frequency to uplink to the bird, if you have the equipment, though I agree with you that that 1.2 Ghz stations are hard to find and not easy or cheap to set up properly, due to high feedline losses, and lack of commercial equipment easily modifiable to work in the band.
On the other hand, the technology to clean up signals on microwave ovens could be a bonanza for those hams crazy enough to bounce signals off of the moon in the form of a cheap 500 watt transmitter on 2.4 Ghz. Finally moonbouncers will be able to get armchair copy of EME signals without having to visit Areceibo. I don't want to be in the line of fire of that signal though.
Most people use the mail system to send their bill payments for everything from internet service to septic bills, and of course credit card payments. The processing centers that receive these payments often process millions of payments every month. Processing all this mail has become as high tech as the post office high speed sorters, a far cry from the armies of billing clerks that processed the credit cards and utility bills a generation ago. This link to the company I work for provides a good window into the technology used to process all of this mail.
As you indicated, there is more to building a house than framing, roofing, and siding. Most stick-built houses around here seem to go up and are closed in pretty quick, then seem to take months to complete. For that matter, some owner done additions around here have been under construction for 5 years or more. As you know, there is a lot of interior work that needs to be done to make that shell into a house ready to move into.
The interior part is where a Modular can be a real time-saver. I visited a modular - a 5 box semicustom 2 story Colonial with a 400K budget, about 2 weeks after the set. Outside, the house was partially sided and completely roofed, and the windows trimmed. There was custom brickwork being installed on the front porch, facade, and foundation. Inside, many rooms were substantially completed at the factory. Doors were hung, closet shelves installed, interior walls painted and trimmed, and floor coverings installed all at the factory.
Downstairs, the major projects that remained were a custom built grand staircase, drywall work where the modules mated, and a custom bumpout which the customer changed their mind about after the house was delivered, requiring additional foundation work and custom carpentry. Otherwise the kitchen was substantially complete, the floors were down, except near the mating seam. I was impressed with the work, and moved the builder to the top of my short list of contractors.
At the time of the visit, I was awaiting final approval of the subdivision of my lot (any day now... for 3 months!), so the builder and I checked in with each other to check on each other's progress. About a month after the visit, I asked him about the big house, and he told me it was done, and the family had moved in.
Last week they poured the foundation, and the house is scheduled to be set the week before Christmas. After that, the builder expected that the house would be ready to move into by mid to late January. Hopefully the weather will hold well enough to complete the necessary work outside.
Costwise a well built modular compares favorably against an equivalent stick built house. The cost differential isn't enough to put the stick builders out of business yet, but it has allowed me to build a higher quality house for the money than I would have gotten with a stick built. On the downside, buying a modular means having less flexibility of design and materials. Unless you are going the full custom built route anyway, your choices will be limited by tract builders, who pick out all of the carpets, colors, and fixtures, then sell it after it is built.
I am currently in the process of building a prefab (modular) home, and while it is too early to say if I made the best decision possible, here are a few impressions I have of the business, . While my housing needs and budget are fairly basic, I wanted to try to make the most of a very nice piece of land that my Dad subdivided for me when he sold the old family dairy farm. Most comparable lots in the area would be sporting half million dollar McMansions, while the realities of my budget were more in line with a tract house in an older Baltimore suburb. The challenge was to build a nice, but modest house for my use and budget, but build in quality and expandability for when the day came to sell.
I had several meetings/phone conversations with each of the 3 builders I interviewed before I made a decision. All three seemed competent and had at least several dozen modulars under their belts. All had some pretty good ideas to build in some expandability, usually by selecting a model, or modifiying an existing one to have buildable space in the attic. Each represented a different manufacturer, and I speced out houses as close to each other as I could to make my decision based on who I thought would do the best work, at the fairest price. I priced the basic houses out when fitted with basic options, then set up a spread sheet to compare items line by line or items on allowances, as well as "wish list" items.
Builder one was very knowledgeable, had been doing modulars for 10 years and the base price of the house was attractive. Unfortunately, the house that was shown in the brochure was not the house that I would get without spending an extra 10 grand for the overbuilt roof. I would be a plain box house. Every little upgrade, such as mouldings, deluxe cabinets, and so on was priced as if the builder was tearing out the cheap stuff , throwing it away and installing the good stuff himself. The manufacturer he admitted was difficult to work with, and between the lines he was telling me that for more than a bare basic house he could do better by me by doing a stick built. I agreed with his assesment, and looked for a second opinion.
The second builder represented one of the largest manufacturers of Modulars in the region, and had at least as much time in the business as the first. The second manufacturer offered more attractive exteriors and floorplans than the first, and the builder seemed much more enthusiastic than the first about the company he represented. The price was somewhat higher for the basic house, but at least some of the increased cost was justified. He shared the same affliction as the first builder by pricing upgrades very aggresively. Another thing that unsettled me a little was his reticence at me doing either a site visit or to contact the owner of a completed house.
While the subdivision process for the lot dragged on and stalled, I took a break from the process for a while. When the wheels of bureaocracy started to grind again, I decided to widen my search for a manufacturer and builder, and found my third prospective builder, who represented a manufacturer in Central PA which offered a more upscale product in the square foot range I was looking for. He also had a nearby project, a modular addition to an older house, which was literally right under my nose, and I got a chance to tour a more upscale project he was in the middle of and I was impressed. In the end I ended up going with him, as the upgrades that I wanted in the other houses were either included, or priced more reasonably in his quote. The manufacturer is also able to do more in-factory customization, and in fact my house will be a hybrid of one exterior, with the floorplan based on a somewhat different model.
So far things seem to be going very well, and the foundation work went very smoothly. For now there are some minor foundation jobs to complete, but the next big event is the delivery and set of the house itself in about a month. My main concern there is the weather, which can turn ugly that time of year, but as long as he gets a decent dry day for the set, most of the rest of the work can be done inside in heated comfort the builder assured me.
The fact that the framing of a house is steel probably makes little difference in the combustibility of the house as a whole. The framing is only a fraction of the contents of the house, and you have to consider the furniture, flooring, wall materials, and stored materials (paints, varnishes, solvents,etc) that are also in a house. A steel framed house also has the potential drawback of conducting electricity, and could be a hazard, particularly when using Romex cable, unless the edges are properly protected. Wood framing is less likely to have sharp edges, and does not conduct electricity to any great degree unless it is soaking wet. Of course, you could use BX Cable or conduit, but that adds to the cost of wiring the house over Romex.
I have noticed though that steel roofing is making a comeback around here. Most of the older houses >50 yrs old have tin roofs, most of which still serve their purposes, though they need repainting every few years. After WW2, most houses were built with the familiar asphalt shingles we see today, and those roofs need to be replaced every 20 to 30 years.
Prefinished metal roofing is becoming the standard for most agricultural type structures and outbuildings, but I have also seen it being used on several houses around here as well.
About 15 years ago, Maryland experimented on a large scale with hundreds of lane miles of permeable base asphalt. With an open and porous texture it was great at draining off runoff from summer storms and spring showers. In the winter, water that penetrated the asphalt had a nasty tendancy to freeze, and as we all know, water expands when it freezes. To make a long story short, the asphalt started to break up within a couple of years. Thousands of windshields were cracked by the flying gravel, and the State Highway administration spent millions repaving the crumbling road surfaces.
A way to watch this is to buy a cheap $30 humidity meter at Radio Shack. It won't be terribly accurate, but probably good enough. I wouldn't get terribly concerned until the humidity reaches 80 to 85 percent or so. If the humidity gets too high, shut down the swamp cooler and increase the ventilation. Since computer cases are usually warmer than their surrounding environment, the heat from the CPUs, drives, etc will help keep condensation from many of the more critical parts. If humidity reaches dangerous levels, I would keep the hardware powered up and take active steps to reduce the humidity. Actually, some humdity is beneficial, as it keeps the static electricity at bay, but when moisture starts condensing on tables this is a bad thing. I actually sometime have the problem of trying to get enough moisture into the room during the winter.
During the day, as the sun heats things up, the air can absorb moisture better, and this is the time when you need the help the most. At night, when the temperature drops or on rainy days, moisture already in the air will interfere with operation of the swamp coolers, or their improvised equivalents due to the increase in Relative Humidity. At night, it is probably best to substitute increased ventilation for use of any kind of improvised swamp coolers, but it will be cooler anyway. Experiment, and see what gives the best results. After all, life is just one big self-perpetuating experiment.
About 12 years ago, I worked for a company that could provide trailer mounted diesel generators in sizes from 7.5 KW up to over 1,000 KW (that's 1 MW folks. Along with the generators, we could supply just about anything else everything else you would need to do the job, such as cabling, distribution panels, and so on. Many of these rentals were for construction sites and special events, but I remember one time we set up a huge 800 KW set for the switching station at a major long distance company, which had lost one of their 3 backup generators. The generators were typically tied in to the main panel, or whatever circuits needed to be tied into, and could be wired for just about any combination of 208/240/277/440 in either single phase or three phase current you could need.
Swamp coolers and portable air conditioning units could also be rented from us. It ain't cheap, rental of a large (300KW) generator, plus the chillers and related cabling could run up to several thousand dollars per month, plus the cost of fuel (figure roughly 1 gallon/hr per 10KW), but companies that work in this business can quickly and effectively solve your power problems until things get better again.
Once the immediate crisis has passed, you might want to at least look into a permanent emergency generator large enough to keep your servers powered and cooled. I currently work in a payment processing center for a large financial institution, and it has a fairly large (200-300 KW) emergency generator, along with a UPS which is mainly intended to hold the power until the generator kicks in, but I personally saw it run the building which is full of power hungry servers and mail sorting and extraction equipment for nearly 2 hours when the generator overheated and shut down.
If you go the generator route, either contract out or have someone on staff which will periodically do maintenance and exercise the generator, or else it is liable not to work when you need it the most. A generator can sometimes also help pay for itself by "peak shaving". Large users of power are often billed by their peak use, or otherwise based on how much power they use during times of peak demand. Electricity from a diesel generator will normally be more expensive per KWH than commercial power, but during times of peak demand, it can be cheaper to run the generator than pay extortionate rates for power on a hot summer afternoon.
After suffering with ADHD for most of my life, and spending about half of it on Ritalin or Concerta, one important aspect of dealing with ADHD is to find employment that complements your distractability. Avoid jobs that have a high degree of monotony, such as assembly line jobs, jobs in call centers, security, data entry and so on, but you don't have to be told that these jobs tend to suck. Totally unstructured work environments, such as some outside sales jobs can provide too much temptation to goof off rather than focus on the job at hand. Jobs that require constant attention to detail, or require intricate planning abilities, such as being an architect can be problematic as well.
So, what does this leave?
Look for a job that provides a fast and varied workload, and gives you the opportunity to creatively solve a wide variety of problems and to think on your feet. Technical support, field service, traffic management, or restaurant management can be a good choice. Every day these people are confronted with dozens of miniature crises that need to be dealt with efficiently. The good thing about these kinds of jobs is that once you fix one problem, you get to move on to the next thing, rather than process yet another 1,000 pieces of mail before lunch, and another 2000 after lunch.
No job is perfect, they all have a certain amount of drudgery, whether it be filling out service reports, cleaning filters, or ordering parts. One way to reduce the onerousness of that part of the job is figure out ways to reduce the burden, or to make the "paperwork" part of the job more relevant by figuring ways to reduce redundant information, while providing information that can actually be of use to management. It always apalls me how many forms are poorly designed, or how often you have to provide the same information to the same group of people on 3 or more different forms, when one good one would do, for instance. If the job becomes more about the paperwork than the real work that you do, it is time to start looking for another job.
As a child diagnosed as "hyperactive" at the age of 9, long before it was fashionable (1969 IIRC), I was placed on Ritalin, and stayed on it through college. Ritalin acts to help you focus your concentration, not so much to calm you down. Otherwise, my brain was pretty much stuck in channel surfing mode under normal circumstances. I was still fairly distractable, but Ritalin did give me the focus to suceed academically, finish college, and lead a reasonably fulfilling social life, at least by nerd standards.
At the time, the thinking was that you were supposed to "outgrow" your need for Ritalin, and I felt none too subtle pressure to give it up. I know now why I had 3 car accidents in two years after I gave it up. I was driven to distraction! I ended up drinking massive amounts of coffee, soda, and chocolate to fill the gap, but it just wasn't the same. Without my favorite stimulant, I was not only distractable, but became depressive as well.
Fast Forward 15 years. I explained this to my doctor a few years ago, and guess what? He listened patiently, and asked if I thought I could benefit from Ritalin again. To make a long story short, I walked out the office with a prescription for Ritalin. A couple of years later, I was switched to Concerta, a time release form of Methylphendiate (Ritalin), and it serves me well. One problem I had with Ritalin was that I would forget to take it sometimes, but I would forget whether I took it or not.
I will probably be on it in some form or another the rest of my life, but I can live with that.
The VHF and UHF amateur bands can get a little crowded with all of those HTs walking around, plus the communications by the event organizers. There is more room on UHF (420-450 Mhz) than on VHF (144-148 Mhz). Also add in all the traffic for cell phones and demonstrations of different modes and it is sometimes hard to find a quiet frequency, based on my observations at the Timmonium, Maryland hamfest. Patience is sometimes needed, but there is usually enough bandwidth that a frequency opens up. Usually groups of hams will work on a pre-agreed frequency, and there are only so many simplex channels and repeaters within HT range to go around, so patience and courtesy goes a long way. Perhaps a few experiments with trunking on the amateur bands could extend the limited bandwidth, but since large hamfests are local and infrequent events, there seems fairly little incentive to push the technology, and get the rules changed to allow it.
In the very long term, the durability of the building materials might have less to do with the viability of a particular house than the real estate it sets on. Most of Andrew Lloyd Wright's homes have survived quite nicely despite the fact that many of them are maintenance nightmares due to their specicial design qualities, much as there are a lot more 1957 Chevies at a car show than 1958 models. The mechanicals were mostly the same, but the styling of the '57s stayed more desireable over time than the '58s. A solid, well built house is no guarantee that it will last for the ages. A section of Fifth Avenue in New York was known over a century ago was known as Millionaires Row. Each new house was larger and more ostentatious as the last, and they were the homes of the Gate's and the Waltons of their era. This period lasted for less than 30 years, and with the exception of a couple of houses converted into museums, most of these homes are long gone, These houses would cost millions, if not tens of millions of dollars to recreate today, but the invisible hand of rising real estate values turned these palaces into rubble upon which was built. commercial enterprises which supported the price the land they sat on commanded. Their former owners took the huge wad of cash their palaces commanded and moved to even swankier digs up the Hudson and out in the Hamptons.
Once nobody cares about a structure for a while, it will inevitably start falling down. A window breaks and lets the rain in, and after a while even oak and cedar starts to rot. Even slate roofs crack and leak after a while. After a few decades of this, reconstruction becomes as expensive as building new. Once a building reaches this point, the only thing that can really save it is that someone (with deep pockets) perceives something architecturaly or historicaly valuable to make it worth the trouble to rebuild. Otherwise, that fine old Victorian gets leveled to make way for a 7-11, a strip mall, or an apartment complex. Happens all the time!
If you want to build so that the building remains pretty much the same over the decades and centuries, use of good materials is important to help keep the building desireable, and hopefully able to survive periods of abandonment and neglect. What can be done? Building well with good materials with a unique and well-thought out design may help give the building some special appeal which will survive rennovations, disasters, and so on. The community is important is well. I would build in a stable community that has a diverse and stable employment base, and a sense of its own history, and some surrounding natural beauty. A decaying industrial town will probably continue to deteriorate, and the home may eventually face abandonment. A rapidly growing community will probably put irresistable pressures on the real estate the land sits on, either through tax assesments or property values to force or entice the owners to sell out to someone who has other ideas for the land. A good infrastructure in the community may hold off the highway builders from taking the property, which nearly happened to a fine stone colonial my uncle owned and meticulously maintained. Nothing can guarantee survival over the long term, but a close look at the community can improve the odds.
As a verteran of a half-dozen or more Grateful Dead concerts, and owner of perhaps a dozen or so "Locally produced" concert tapes, mostly produced by microphones held up on crutches, the quality does leave something to be desired for instant recordings. It was also well known that "insiders" could get access to the soundboard, and often would daisy chain the feed from that. Soundboard recordings were better, but not quite up to the standards of the Europe '72 recordings.
With modern digital recording techniques and an experienced sound crew, it is probable that a crew could be editing tracks of the CD while the concert was still going on, and at least trim off some of the rough edges of a live performance. such as long intervals between songs, the drummer knocking over a mic stand, and so on. That and some basic equalization and balancing would be pretty much all that would be possible given the tight time constraints of a concert. A skilled soundcrew would have to consider the effects of their actions not only on the audience, but on the recordings as well. I suspect that the sound engineers would use a seperate set of inputs to their own recording equipment from the instruments and vocalists, as opposed to the equipment used to amplify the music for the auditorium. This would give them more flexibility to deal with the varibles of a live performance in near-real time.
I suspect that in the end, the recordings will be of fairly good quality, but will still have quite a few rough edges that will be present in the final recording. From the concertgoer's point of view, this is not necessarily a bad thing, since anomalies such as when the lead guitarist breaks 2 strings on his guitar and keeps on going are the things that make a live performance unique and memorable anyway.
My first Sony TV was a KV 1913 I got in 1982 when I got my first job. It was barebones but had a better picture than anything else out there. I paid over $400 for it back then, which was a floor model at that. It had served me well for over 15 years when the HV module blew, I replaced it with a Sony 27 inch Trinitron in 98, which cost about $400, again because it had about the best picture out there and because of the experience with the old 19 inch Trinitron. I hoped to ride this set into the HDTV era but it was not to be. Because of my good experience with the old TV, I also did not buy the extended warranty and lived to regret it. Nevertheless, I still felt it might be worth spending $150 to repair it.
Well, three repair attempts did not repair the intermittent shutdown problem I was having, and the first repair attempt actually damaged the CRT, the shadow mask was actually bent. My only compensation: $50 off on a new set. Yep, I brought another Sony (this time a 27 inch WEGA) because it had the best picture, or the picture was pretty much competitive with other premium TV sets of similar price by Toshiba, and better than the $250 RCA/Zenith/Philco/Magnavox junk. My experience with the cheap junk is that they tend to bloom on bright text, and the picture has a lower signal to noise ratio (more smeared and not as sharp) as the better sets by Toshiba or Sony, and that they tend to self destruct after three or four years on a more or less consistent basis.
One thing that I have noticed about TV construction in general is that the amount of bulk that goes into components that handle real power (Horizontal output, power supplies, and HV modules) seems to have decreased considerably over the last 20 years or so. The small signal stuff and control electronics rarely cause problems despite their miniaturization, most problems seem to be HV or power supply related. The miniaturization and cheapening of these components seems to be the main culprit, and unfortunately, almost all of the major TV makers have decided to go this route.