The problem with wireless HDMI is that it's purely line-of-sight, or at best limited to the same room. I looked at a few of them and wondered whether it might be possible to tweak the design to drop the frequency down to UHF and distribute it via RG59 to multiple receivers, but I believe they ALSO require two-way handshaking and other HDCP-centric issues that would still torpedo it for whole-house non-homerun video distribution. You could possibly move the two-way communication out of band and use wi-fi (either piggybacking on the house's existing network, or creating a dedicated adhoc network on a different wifi channel), but ultimately, it's still going to be an expensive bitch to implement... with lots of failure points where things can go wrong and fail to work reliably just by virtue of the way HDCP works.
You know what I want to see from Heathkit? A wideband-FM component video modulator (and companion demodulator) for cheap whole-house HD video distribution. Instead of screwing around with HDCP, or getting tangled up with Hollywood, DRM, and $200 worth of DSP hardware to try and transform 720p60 and 1080i60 into realtime MPEG-2/4, just leave them as analog signals. Take the "Y"(luminance) baseband signal, and modulate it onto a wideband FM carrier somewhere around 200MHz. Then do the same with the "Pb" and "Pr" signals, on wideband FM carriers of their own. Then take the analog stereo input, and run it through a commodity FM stereo modulator chip at something like 88MHz. Feed the signal into a dedicated 75-ohm cable (like the slightly ratty coax buried inside the walls that was put there when the house got built during the 70s or 80s, and hasn't been used since the 90s because it's only RG-59 and falls off rapidly above 500MHz), and use an equally cheap tuner box at each TV throughout the house to tune the modulated wideband FM Y, Pb, and Pr signals back down to component video, tune the FM stereo signal and output analog left and right, and connect it to the TV of interest.
I'm guessing that a kit project for something like this could profitably sell for around $50 for the transmitter (about $20 worth of parts), and around $40-50 per demodulator box. Not trivially cheap, but if you've ever seen the price of anything intended for transmission of whole-house HD video via HDMI... well, something like this is utterly dirt cheap by comparison.
It blows my mind that nobody has ever seriously considered making something like this (unless, of course, there's something unusually hard about throwing a ~50MHz baseband signal onto a wideband FM carrier that I'm not aware of). Everybody thinks transmission of uncompressed analog HD video is impossible just because it would take too much bandwidth to do for BROADCAST video. In this case, it's closed circuit, using a dedicated coax cable that's currently buried in the walls doing nothing besides oxidize. It doesn't *matter* if it takes as much bandwidth as the entire broadcast UHF band to send a single channel, because that's all that NEEDS to fit through that one cable.
There are plenty of expensive ways to distribute HD video to other TVs in the house. There are a few decent ways to do it via cat5 if you can pull new cable. There's basically no way at all to do it cheaply (as HD video) if the only cable that's conveniently at your disposal is an old, abandoned 75-ohm RG59 coax buried inside the walls.
It depends what you mean by "compatible". Able to make basic voice calls and use data at speeds that would make users jealous of somebody with a 56k modem? Yeah. Able to use the fastest 3G data? No. Able to use 4G speeds? Not even close. In terms of high-speed data, T-Mobile's network is no more compatible with AT&T than it is with Verizon or Sprint. T-Mobile uses HSPA+ on 1700/2100MHz for high-speed data. AT&T and Verizon use mutually-incompatible implementations of a subset of LTE, and Sprint uses Wimax (soon to be augmented by another flavor of LTE that's equally incompatible with everyone else).
It's pretty sad, really. 5 years from now, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint (if not T-Mobile) will all technically have LTE data capabilities that are nominally using an international standard, but will be more mutually incompatible with each other than they are now. From what I've read, the situation is so bad, 5 years from now people visiting the US from Europe might not even be able to meaningfully use high-speed data in the US without bending over backwards to buy a phone that's explicitly compatible with the LTE variant used by one of the three carriers. What's even more sad is that in terms of real-world usability, in the places where it actually exists, T-mobile's "fake" 4G works better than both WiMax AND LTE, because it doesn't force you to do hard hand-offs and change IP addresses when switching to and from 4G (just try using a corporate VPN via Sprint WiMax in a moving vehicle sometime. It doesn't work, because your IP address changes every time your nearest tower does... and that's when you're staying in 4G mode. Move between 4G and 3G, and your entire IP subnet changes too).
>99% of the rest of the world uses GSM. That means if you want to keep you phone, and go to another coutry, you will HAVE to use ATT.
Or a Sprint MoPho (Motorola Photon). It can roam on GSM & UMTS worldwide. The only catch is that it apparently refuses to use GSM if it sniffs any hint of local CDMA service in the air, which annoys people who travel to countries where there's a local CDMA network that only has 1xRTT data & the phone refuses to use the faster UMTS provider's network instead.
Truth be told, if Sprint were to merge with T-Mobile, here's basically what would happen:
* New high-end T-mobile phones would come with Wimax radios tacked on, just like the Evo & other Sprint Android phones. T-Mobile would instantly acquire a nationwide 4G network in relatively urban areas, though people who currently enjoy 4G Tmobile would probably feel like it was a step down because it's not a seamless experience the way T-Mobile's current 4G is.
* New high-end Sprint phones would all be like the MoPho -- CDMA + wimax out of the box, but capable of doing UMTS as well.
~2 years later, when Sprint decided enough of their phones were UMTS-capable, they'd start repurposing 1900MHz EVDO spectrum to UMTS, and pair it with 2100MHz spectrum repurposed from T-Mobile's 1700/2100 network to create 1900/2100 uplink/downlink pairs. Nobody at T-Mobile would really notice, because every T-Mobile phone is perfectly capable of 1900/2100MHz operation as well (they HAVE to be; if they weren't, they couldn't roam in Europe). As the shift continued, Sprint's phones would recognize areas with more UMTS bandwidth than EVDO bandwidth, and would automatically switch to UMTS for data instead of EVDO.
Where Sprint went beyond that point is anybody's guess. Probably, Sprint would end up looking like Telus in Canada: new phones capable of voice and data via UMTS, but able to fall back to circuit-switched CDMA where UMTS isn't viable. At some point, the distinction between "T-Mobile" and "Sprint" would become academic, because "Sprint" phones would be capable of operating from either network, and most/all new T-Mobile phones would be capable of it as well. GSM-only phones would work on the combined network, because by that point Sprint would be using UMTS for the bulk of its 3G data anyway, and ancient CDMA-only phones would work (albeit possibly only with 1xRTT data at that point) as well.
10 years ago, a merger between a "GSM" and "CDMA" network would have been as disastrous as the merger between Sprint and Nextel was. Now, it's largely academic, because UMTS *is* CDMA, just wider channels and a few protocol-level refinements. Making a phone that can do CDMA+UMTS isn't rocket science, or even terribly hard.
In all likelihood, for most companies it's cheaper to just have a bright staff member recognize the risk and register the.xxx domain than to have the legal department go through the expense of filing a UDRP and dealing with the follow-up work.
It's been done for years. The catch is that it's only really practical for bored tunnels (cut & cover tunnels would require too much deep excavation), and the point that's optimal from an energy standpoint would be unacceptable to passengers (think: roller coaster, literally.) Remember, subway cars depend upon having a certain percentage of passengers standing up and walking around while the train is in motion, so G-forces that would be fine in a jet that's taking off (or in a private car with one passenger who's wearing a seat belt) would be completely unacceptable in a subway car.
It's the same reason why passenger trains aren't equipped with the same technology as antilock brakes to enable them to quickly stop on a dime to avoid crossing accidents. In the US, at least, a speeding train will generally slice through any car or truck (besides maybe a gas truck) that's stopped across the tracks, and the passengers on board will barely notice anything besides the noise and subsequent delay. On the other hand, if the engineer actually tried to STOP a speeding passenger train within a few hundred feet, anybody standing in the aisle would end up getting hurled against the car's interior, and everything not literally screwed down (laptops, drinks, purses, small infants) would turn into missiles. You'd save the life of 1-6 people in a trapped car stopped across the tracks, and kill or injure several hundred passengers on the train in the process.
I don't think vacuum-evacuated tubes are really practical for a subway environment, where you have stations every mile or less. They're really more practical for long-distance trains.
Also, you wouldn't necessarily run them as a complete vacuum. I believe most proposals involve a partial vacuum with increased oxygen concentration. The idea is that you're removing most of the air resistance, but putting enough pure oxygen into what remains to enable people to breathe and survive, and keeping enough pressure to keep passengers who evacuate a train from getting the bends. You'd have emergency systems in place to flood the tunnel with atmospheric air if passengers had to evacuate a train (so they wouldn't spend extended amounts of time at low air pressure), and have maintenance crews depressurize before going in for extended time (kind of like deep sea diving in reverse).
I believe the best-researched proposal to date is probably the one for SwissMetro, because its backers actually HAVE done a fair amount of work so far to balance commercial viability against risks & benefits.
Sounds like the peoplemover at Atlanta International Airport years ago. From what I remember, a red light flashed, a robotic voice said, "Stop boarding ! Stop boarding! Stop boarding!", and on the third "Stop boarding," the doors would slam shut like they really, really *meant* it. I suspect the system has been mellowed out a bit over the past 10-20 years, but I remember being somewhat amused at the time by its cold determination to slam the doors shut (in contrast to the wimpy, uber-cautious creepingly-slow doors found on peoplemovers at most airports at the time).
The biggest problem isn't engineering, it's regulatory. About 15 or 20 years ago, Deutschebahn came up with a similar idea for its (then new) ICE trains -- for certain stops with asymmetric passenger traffic (lots more passengers getting off than getting on), they could have extra trains that served only arriving passengers, put them all in the last few cars of the train, then uncouple it before arriving in the station and use automatic train control (or a cross-trained conductor) to bring it into the station while the rest of the train continued without stopping. I'm not sure whether the scheme involved coasting an unpowered tail section into the station, or whether it involved EMUs that could power themselves the last kilometer or two.
Either way, the regulators *freaked*. On so many levels, DB just decided it was a completely hopeless lost cause and gave up. Railroad laws going back to the 19th century regulate everything from how braking systems work to the exact procedures that have to be followed for coupling and uncoupling them. Union agreements govern minutiae of their actual operation, in ways that would have basically required a full staff of engineers, conductors, and support personnel for that tail segment from the moment it broke away until the moment it arrived in the station. And if that doesn't kill it, you still have actual passengers who are in the wrong place at the wrong time & end up missing their station or getting off by mistake. And this is a "moving platform" type solution that's relatively STRAIGHTFORWARD, engineering-wise. God help anyone who tries to implement anything that additionally requires precise alignment of parallel tracks, precision speed control, and countless safety mechanisms to ensure that the trains can never, ever break apart and shear a passenger in half as he or she changes trains. I can't even fathom how the parallel-train idea could work with track that isn't dead straight.
For what it's worth, other countries looked at DB's idea, because it's sensible and cool. Even Amtrak looked at it. They all came to the same conclusion -- the same regulatory problems that "derailed" it in Germany would be as bad, if not worse, in their own countries. I believe the closest it came to fruition anywhere in the world was Israel (a small country starting out with no real rail network to speak of, and thus no bureaucratic legacy the way you'd have in Germany or the US), but I'm not sure what happened to stop in in Israel (I think it just never got funded).
The one thing Sprint could possibly bring to the table in a merger with T-Mobile if they didn't completely botch it is (theoretical) compatibility with international UMTS frequencies.
International UMTS uses 1900MHz for uplink, and 2100MHz for downlink (give or take a few MHz)
T-Mobile bought 1700 & 2100Mhz licenses during the AWS auction. They have very little 1900MHz spectrum, and it's all used by GSM voice and 2/2.5G data.
With a little creativity, Sprint could start repurposing 1900MHz spectrum currently used for EVDO to UMTS uplinks, and start shipping phones like the ones used in Canada that use CDMA for voice, but UMTS for 3G data. There wouldn't be any compatibility problem with pre-existing T-Mobile UMTS phones, because AFAIK, every UMTS phone ever sold by T-Mobile can do 1900/2100 UMTS in addition to 1700/2100 UMTS. There might be some temporary bandwidth crunches for EVDO, but if they got their act together quickly and shifted all new Android phones to 1900/2100 UMTS (falling back to 1900MHz EVDO only where 1900/2100 UMTS didn't exist), and simultaneously improved their 4G network options, the problem would largely solve itself within a year or two as heavy data users dumped their old phones and bought new ones within a year or two anyway.
The problem is, Sprint completely fucked up the merger with Nextel, which kind of casts doubt on their ability to merge a 1900MHz CDMA2000 network with a 1900MHz legacy GSM network, a 1700/2100MHz UMTS network, and a 2.6GHz WiMax (soon to be LTE) network. If they could manage to avoid completely screwing up T-Mobile's existing network in the process, it would put SprinT-mobile in a unique position among American carriers -- they'd be the one carrier capable of providing UMTS on international frequencies within the United States. For that reason, I'd prefer they both remain separate. But if anyone has to merge, Sprint and T-Mobile would probably be the least of all evils. Especially if Google ended up buying both of them to keep Sprint from physically screwing up T-mobile's network along the way.
Well... there IS one practical real-world problem it would solve -- limits due to split phase and load asymmetry. I can't run an air conditioner on the "2kW" generator now, because it can really only output about 800-900 watts (RMS) per outlet. Combining both with an inverter that grabbed the power from each of the two phases would smooth over that detail, and being able to draw extra surge current from a battery when necessary (to start up the air conditioner when the compressor cycles on) would mean I could get away with a MUCH smaller generator than I'd have to otherwise have. Basically, instead of having a generator that changes its output to be efficient, I'd have a generator that's slightly undersized with respect to its peak needs, but relies on a battery for those peak needs & has more or less 100% of its output fully utilized the remainder of the time.
An air conditioner load might not literally be 100% constant, but in Florida during the summer, it comes pretty close to it. When my central AC broke 2 years ago & I had to live with the window unit for 2 weeks waiting for the city to issue the building permit for the new unit, it ran more or less nonstop from about 7am until 2am... and cycled off for maybe 10 minutes per hour during the remaining hours.
Hmmm. I wonder about the viability of just sticking a ~2 farad supercapacitor between the transformer and inverter for smoothing over surge current needs instead of a battery. I know supercapacitors have gotten dirt cheap, but I'm pretty sure that assumption goes flying out the window the moment you start talking about dozens and hundreds of amperes instead of something like a few thousand milliamperes.
I'm sure nobody will ever read this since it's an old thread by now, but I actually spent Sunday researching inverter-type generators.
I was shocked. They're actually semi-affordable now. Back in 2004, you couldn't even *fantasize* about buying an inverter-type generator big enough to run an air conditioner, let alone other stuff at the same time. Now, you can buy one like the Ramsond Sinemate 2500 for a hair under $600. If I were doing it again today, that's almost certainly the one I'd buy instead knowing what I now know about how much it costs to run a 5.6kW generator that gulps 10-15 gallons of near-$4 gas per day.
It's too bad nobody makes a 2000-watt (RMS) inverter that can be powered by a pair of 110v outlets from a single small generator (one from each phase). If I could buy something like that for a hundred bucks or so, that would be an awesome compromise. I could combine the two wimpy outputs of my small generator into a single clean 1800-watt power source that could run my air conditioner, and power my laptop, a second monitor, and some lights. It wouldn't have the variable-speed capabilities of a real inverter generator, but I'd be using nearly 100% of its RMS output with almost no waste anyway... and it would be sipping a gallon of gas every 5-6 hours instead of gulping 5 gallons every 8-10 hours. If it had terminals to attach a deep-cycle 12v battery that it could use to compensate for surges and recharge when the air conditioner is cycled off, it would be almost perfect.
Honestly, JVM hell is caused more by Sun's shitty documentation on how to properly specify JVM versions in a manifest or applet CLSID. Sun historically did a crap job of explaining how to specify things like, "Use the newest version of Java installed on this machine, as long as it's 1.6 (or 1.5, or 1.4) or newer", and instead gave examples that induced people to create needless dependencies on old versions of Java for no real reason besides lack of proper documentation. The fact that Oracle now owns Java makes things worse, because Oracle software was historically the worst of all about creating stupid dependencies on old versions of Java for no real reason (or because for political reasons, they wanted you to use the "thick" OCI drivers that tied you down to a specific runtime environment instead of the "thin" type 4 drivers that would "just work" on anything with a JVM).
The truth is, as long as an Oracle native-code database driver isn't involved and the developer doesn't go out of his or her way to needlessly specify some specific, arbitrary version of Java, 99.999% of anything you write in Java will work on any JVM that's as least as new as the one you compiled it under. I have 9 year old jarfiles built with pre-alpha 1.4 JDKs that still work fine under 1.6.0.${whatever}.
True story: at work, we had a notorious internal application whose development team bent over backwards to make users with newer JDKs and JREs installed miserable. Basically, it used the CLSID that told the JPI, "ignore the user's Java control panel settings, and always use the latest version of Java installed on this machine". Then, a few HTML lines later, used Javascript to commit suicide if that version of Java happened to be newer than 1.6.0.18. Sigh.
Yawn. Nothing new to see here. 36 hours before Andrew's landfall, the official party line was that Miami Beach was facing lethal danger, and the safest place to go was southern and western Dade County. The people who stayed on the beach had a bad rainstorm. The people who evacuated south and west had the worst 18+ hours of their lives. The REAL shitstorm came a few months later, when it was confirmed that the local authorities knew beyond doubt ~12-18 hours before landfall that Andrew was going to miss South Beach by at least 10 miles and plow straight into South Dade... and nevertheless kept repeating the official message that it was the safest place to go. They knowingly sent people into danger, and we've never forgotten or forgiven them for doing it to us.
OK, now can they combine the data with the data from Trapster so you can know when it's worthwhile to EXCEED the speed limit in order to break out of a holding pattern where you're driving against the timing-optimized direction of traffic and would otherwise end up hitting every single red light? When I drive to work in the morning, about 3 miles of my trip goes against the direction FDOT optimized the timing. If I follow the speed limit, I'll hit every light, every inch of the way, every time, guaranteed. But... if I can make it through light #1 a fraction of a second before it turns red, and keep going 60mph instead of 45mph, I can make it through the next light with ~3 seconds to spare, then the next with 5-7 seconds to spare, and so on. Once I'm comfortably making it through lights before the crosswalk countdowns begin (which, if you're watching for them, is a dead giveaway that the light's going to turn yellow in 10... 9... 8... seconds), I can drop down to 55, then 50, and make it through the remainder of the lights. The key is making it through that first light... once you're stuck at it, the only way to break out of the holding pattern is to aggressively fight your way to the front of the pack and try to make it through the NEXT light a fraction of a second before it turns red.
You didn't read the entire paragraph. In Florida, clotheslines basically don't work because it's too rainy, too humid, and the actual temperature isn't high enough to overcome the humidity and meaningfully dry out the clothes. If you did nothing besides dedicate a week of your life to managing clothes on a clothesline, you might be able to get them to the point where they were only slightly (but perceptibly) damp, but that's kind of hard to do when you ALSO have to be at work at 9am the next morning, and won't be home until 7pm if you're lucky.
Leave the clothes hanging in your absence, and they'll get rained on during the afternoon. Put a tarp over the clothes to keep the rain off, and they'll now be in a shadow and won't get hot enough to remotely overcome the 99% humidity. Try leaving them out overnight, and the dew will make them wet again. And when you finally get them to "kind of" dry out by taking them into an air-conditioned room to finish drying, they'll be so stiff, you'll feel like your T-shirt is going to crack when you try and unfold it.
The problem is that without the Soyuz, there's no official way to get astronauts home during the winter. The Dragon isn't officially man-rated yet. That doesn't mean it probably wouldn't work anyway, but nobody at NASA is going to jeopardize his career by officially relying upon a Dragon to safely get astronauts home until someone higher up has given it the official stamp of approval.
Of course, if the necessary training could be completed in time, Elon could probably solve that problem by announcing that he's personally going to be the Dragon's first passenger, camp out as a guest at the ISS for a couple of months, and ride it home if it ends up being unneeded for a return trip. However, IMHO it would be reckless and irresponsible for Elon to do that. God forbid, if the Dragon burned up on re-entry and killed him, it would basically be the end of American spaceflight for the rest of our lives. SpaceX wouldn't just lose its visionary leader... it would probably lose all of its orders and money, and rapidly go bankrupt. If an unmanned Dragon fails during COTS 2 or COTS 3 it will be bad, but it won't be the end of the program if they can figure out exactly what went wrong and take steps to prevent it from happening again. It would be the difference between a setback of a few years, and the end of it all.
My own prediction: the Dragon will go up well-stocked with Vodka, caviar, and borscht, NASA will bring home the Americans on the Soyuz lifeboat this fall, and the Russians will enjoy a relaxed, Mir-like atmosphere on the ISS all winter and secretly dread the return of NASA and its rules next year & look forward to the day when they can afford to to things their own way again.
^^^ Just to add to that... here are some pics of a hurricane-proof house in Hawaii being constructed with a reinforced-concrete hip roof (12-in-4 pitch, just like most wood roofs in Florida). Totally and completely normal-looking, but nothing short of a nuclear bomb is going to make a dent in it:
At the more affordable end of the spectrum, if you want the benefits of a concrete roof, but can't afford to go all the way, as long as you can keep the spans between loadbearing walls down to something sane & reasonable (say, around 18-24 feet), it's fairly affordable to build the house with a cast in place reinforced concrete attic floor, then simply build a conventional wood roof atop the parapet wall surrounding it (the same way you'd build it atop the tie beams in conventional Florida construction). The wood roof might get shredded by a hurricane, but the concrete deck below will keep the rest of your house intact.
Frankly, I don't care whether or not DST saves or increases the use of energy. I just want to be in it, permanently, all year. The day DST ends, evening-commute traffic in South Florida gets several orders of magnitude worse literally overnight. A drive home that takes 40 minutes on Friday *instantly* becomes an hour+ ordeal the following Monday.
The problem? During the summer, people straggle home from work starting around 4, gradually peaking around 6 or 6:30. The moment the clock moves back, people run for the door at 5 in a desperate attempt to get home before it's totally dark outside. Same total number of people trying to get home, but now 90% of them are hitting the road between 4:30 and 5:30, instead of spread out over a much longer interval. The outcome? Gridlock everywhere, every inch of the way home.
Yes. Build the walls and roof from reinforced concrete using ICF, use impact-glass windows rated for large missiles, then put shutters over the windows anyway. Put concrete walls between the garage and interior of your house, and isolate the attic space above the garage from the rest of your house. The idea is to ensure that if/when the garage door gets blown in, the wind can't get to the rest of your house.
LOL. A direct hit by a category 1 hurricane in South Florida is like a snow day in upstate New York. We get up, look outside, and agonize about whether we're going to look silly for staying home from work if it doesn't get at least a little bit worse.
The biggest problem with "Tornado Alley" is the fact that houses there are built like shit. They're hot-glued matchsticks with stapled-on waferboard. I think Florida *trailers* have more stringent building standards than most of the midwest. If Kansas adopted Dade County building codes, people there would barely notice F1 and F2 tornadoes anymore. If you want proof, look at Florida. We have more tornadoes per square mile per year than any state in the country. The difference is, a F1 or F2 tornado that strikes HERE makes a bigger impact on Youtube & Twitter than it does to actual buildings, because a small tornado is basically 10 seconds of a real hurricane hitting a building that by law has to be designed to survive a direct hit by a category 3 hurricane without major damage to its interior.
A F5 tornado is nothing to sneer at, ever... but if a F5 tornado hit a neighborhood built to post-Andrew "Florida" standards, you'd have lots of badly-damaged homes. If the same tornado hit a neighborhood built to "Kansas" standards, you'd be left with a grassy field and holes where the basements used to be.
Honestly, unless you have a junkyard in your back yard, you'll probably spend the same amount of money and end up with a better solution by buying a $200 4-cycle generator from China at Amazon & having it overnighted with Prime shipping for $3.99 more. At least the cheap generator will run for 4-8 hours on a single tank of gas, and it's almost inconceivable that anything you could cobble together for less money could possibly be better, safer, or "not profoundly worse in every meaningful and conceivable way". If you're truly handy with mechanical engine repairs, buy a used generator from a suburbanite on Craigslist for a hundred bucks that probably needs little more than cleaning and oil.
>AC and your computer, those are the reasons you have a generator? I would think that your refrigerator > would be the highest priority. Is there a reason you don't mention that?
My refrigerator's current contents: an open pack of pre-cooked microwaveable bacon, 4 slices of pizza in a ziploc bag, an open quart of milk of unknown expiration date, a tub of margarine, about a dozen 2-liter bottles of diet Mountain Dew, a few dozen cans of diet Mountain Dew, and my kitty's Prednisolone suspension. My freezer has an open box of Eggo waffles, a few frozen fettucine alfredo dinners, a box with frozen hamburgers of which I've actually eaten 2 or 3 out of 8, and a frozen unopened tub of Chi-Chi's taco meat I bought on sale 2-for-1 and froze.
Had this been a real hurricane, my "refrigerator" would have been a 5-gallon Igloo cooler 2/3 filled with ice that has a bucket-tray that can rest on top on the inside (away from the contents). My kitty's prednisolone and an 8-oz box of milk (for tomorrow's breakfast) goes in the tray, his water comes out the spigot from the melted ice, and ice for (now warm) diet Mountain Dew comes from the top. Maybe a couple of frozen (now thawing) hamburgers for the grill if Taco Bell, BK, and/or Wendys haven't re-opened yet.
Post-Wilma, I just ate out for every meal. The *last* thing I was going to do after coming home from work tired, sleep-deprived, stressed out, and grumpy was spend an hour cooking food with camping equipment when there were perfectly good operating restaurants a few miles away. It's obviously prudent to have enough food on hand for a few days, but let's be real... even after fsck'ing *Andrew*, there were open restaurants (or further south, guys selling food from trucks) within a few days. In fact, after Andrew, I developed an active aversion to cooking, because going to Publix (in Florida, all grocery stores are "Publix") was absolute *hell*, with lines stretching from the cash registers to the rear of the store. I finally got to the point where I just drove 10-20 miles north to do my grocery shopping, because it was less frustrating than dealing with the local zoo in my own neighborhood. Ditto, for Wilma. My own neighborhood was a mess, but my office (in Doral) was at the edge of sanity, and semi-normalcy was just 10 minutes and 2 exits down the Turnpike from there.
As for A/C, hell fsck'in YEAH. This is SOUTH FLORIDA we're talking about. Without air conditioning, this state would be uninhabitable by civilized people who have to be at the office at 9am, work productively all day, and do it again tomorrow. It's impossible to function in an environment where it's 90+ degrees at 100% humidity and you can't sleep at night due to the heat & noise from 20 lawnmower-loud generators running within a half-block radius. This isn't the old south where people could get away with spending summer afternoons sipping lemonade on the verandah and swimming in the watering hole. Take a heaping mound of New York, stir in a pound of Los Angeles, jack up the humidity to 100%, then make it rain all day. That's South Florida in the summer.
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The problem with wireless HDMI is that it's purely line-of-sight, or at best limited to the same room. I looked at a few of them and wondered whether it might be possible to tweak the design to drop the frequency down to UHF and distribute it via RG59 to multiple receivers, but I believe they ALSO require two-way handshaking and other HDCP-centric issues that would still torpedo it for whole-house non-homerun video distribution. You could possibly move the two-way communication out of band and use wi-fi (either piggybacking on the house's existing network, or creating a dedicated adhoc network on a different wifi channel), but ultimately, it's still going to be an expensive bitch to implement... with lots of failure points where things can go wrong and fail to work reliably just by virtue of the way HDCP works.
You know what I want to see from Heathkit? A wideband-FM component video modulator (and companion demodulator) for cheap whole-house HD video distribution. Instead of screwing around with HDCP, or getting tangled up with Hollywood, DRM, and $200 worth of DSP hardware to try and transform 720p60 and 1080i60 into realtime MPEG-2/4, just leave them as analog signals. Take the "Y"(luminance) baseband signal, and modulate it onto a wideband FM carrier somewhere around 200MHz. Then do the same with the "Pb" and "Pr" signals, on wideband FM carriers of their own. Then take the analog stereo input, and run it through a commodity FM stereo modulator chip at something like 88MHz. Feed the signal into a dedicated 75-ohm cable (like the slightly ratty coax buried inside the walls that was put there when the house got built during the 70s or 80s, and hasn't been used since the 90s because it's only RG-59 and falls off rapidly above 500MHz), and use an equally cheap tuner box at each TV throughout the house to tune the modulated wideband FM Y, Pb, and Pr signals back down to component video, tune the FM stereo signal and output analog left and right, and connect it to the TV of interest.
I'm guessing that a kit project for something like this could profitably sell for around $50 for the transmitter (about $20 worth of parts), and around $40-50 per demodulator box. Not trivially cheap, but if you've ever seen the price of anything intended for transmission of whole-house HD video via HDMI... well, something like this is utterly dirt cheap by comparison.
It blows my mind that nobody has ever seriously considered making something like this (unless, of course, there's something unusually hard about throwing a ~50MHz baseband signal onto a wideband FM carrier that I'm not aware of). Everybody thinks transmission of uncompressed analog HD video is impossible just because it would take too much bandwidth to do for BROADCAST video. In this case, it's closed circuit, using a dedicated coax cable that's currently buried in the walls doing nothing besides oxidize. It doesn't *matter* if it takes as much bandwidth as the entire broadcast UHF band to send a single channel, because that's all that NEEDS to fit through that one cable.
There are plenty of expensive ways to distribute HD video to other TVs in the house. There are a few decent ways to do it via cat5 if you can pull new cable. There's basically no way at all to do it cheaply (as HD video) if the only cable that's conveniently at your disposal is an old, abandoned 75-ohm RG59 coax buried inside the walls.
It depends what you mean by "compatible". Able to make basic voice calls and use data at speeds that would make users jealous of somebody with a 56k modem? Yeah. Able to use the fastest 3G data? No. Able to use 4G speeds? Not even close. In terms of high-speed data, T-Mobile's network is no more compatible with AT&T than it is with Verizon or Sprint. T-Mobile uses HSPA+ on 1700/2100MHz for high-speed data. AT&T and Verizon use mutually-incompatible implementations of a subset of LTE, and Sprint uses Wimax (soon to be augmented by another flavor of LTE that's equally incompatible with everyone else).
It's pretty sad, really. 5 years from now, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint (if not T-Mobile) will all technically have LTE data capabilities that are nominally using an international standard, but will be more mutually incompatible with each other than they are now. From what I've read, the situation is so bad, 5 years from now people visiting the US from Europe might not even be able to meaningfully use high-speed data in the US without bending over backwards to buy a phone that's explicitly compatible with the LTE variant used by one of the three carriers. What's even more sad is that in terms of real-world usability, in the places where it actually exists, T-mobile's "fake" 4G works better than both WiMax AND LTE, because it doesn't force you to do hard hand-offs and change IP addresses when switching to and from 4G (just try using a corporate VPN via Sprint WiMax in a moving vehicle sometime. It doesn't work, because your IP address changes every time your nearest tower does... and that's when you're staying in 4G mode. Move between 4G and 3G, and your entire IP subnet changes too).
>99% of the rest of the world uses GSM. That means if you want to keep you phone, and go to another coutry, you will HAVE to use ATT.
Or a Sprint MoPho (Motorola Photon). It can roam on GSM & UMTS worldwide. The only catch is that it apparently refuses to use GSM if it sniffs any hint of local CDMA service in the air, which annoys people who travel to countries where there's a local CDMA network that only has 1xRTT data & the phone refuses to use the faster UMTS provider's network instead.
Truth be told, if Sprint were to merge with T-Mobile, here's basically what would happen:
* New high-end T-mobile phones would come with Wimax radios tacked on, just like the Evo & other Sprint Android phones. T-Mobile would instantly acquire a nationwide 4G network in relatively urban areas, though people who currently enjoy 4G Tmobile would probably feel like it was a step down because it's not a seamless experience the way T-Mobile's current 4G is.
* New high-end Sprint phones would all be like the MoPho -- CDMA + wimax out of the box, but capable of doing UMTS as well.
~2 years later, when Sprint decided enough of their phones were UMTS-capable, they'd start repurposing 1900MHz EVDO spectrum to UMTS, and pair it with 2100MHz spectrum repurposed from T-Mobile's 1700/2100 network to create 1900/2100 uplink/downlink pairs. Nobody at T-Mobile would really notice, because every T-Mobile phone is perfectly capable of 1900/2100MHz operation as well (they HAVE to be; if they weren't, they couldn't roam in Europe). As the shift continued, Sprint's phones would recognize areas with more UMTS bandwidth than EVDO bandwidth, and would automatically switch to UMTS for data instead of EVDO.
Where Sprint went beyond that point is anybody's guess. Probably, Sprint would end up looking like Telus in Canada: new phones capable of voice and data via UMTS, but able to fall back to circuit-switched CDMA where UMTS isn't viable. At some point, the distinction between "T-Mobile" and "Sprint" would become academic, because "Sprint" phones would be capable of operating from either network, and most/all new T-Mobile phones would be capable of it as well. GSM-only phones would work on the combined network, because by that point Sprint would be using UMTS for the bulk of its 3G data anyway, and ancient CDMA-only phones would work (albeit possibly only with 1xRTT data at that point) as well.
10 years ago, a merger between a "GSM" and "CDMA" network would have been as disastrous as the merger between Sprint and Nextel was. Now, it's largely academic, because UMTS *is* CDMA, just wider channels and a few protocol-level refinements. Making a phone that can do CDMA+UMTS isn't rocket science, or even terribly hard.
In all likelihood, for most companies it's cheaper to just have a bright staff member recognize the risk and register the .xxx domain than to have the legal department go through the expense of filing a UDRP and dealing with the follow-up work.
It's been done for years. The catch is that it's only really practical for bored tunnels (cut & cover tunnels would require too much deep excavation), and the point that's optimal from an energy standpoint would be unacceptable to passengers (think: roller coaster, literally.) Remember, subway cars depend upon having a certain percentage of passengers standing up and walking around while the train is in motion, so G-forces that would be fine in a jet that's taking off (or in a private car with one passenger who's wearing a seat belt) would be completely unacceptable in a subway car.
It's the same reason why passenger trains aren't equipped with the same technology as antilock brakes to enable them to quickly stop on a dime to avoid crossing accidents. In the US, at least, a speeding train will generally slice through any car or truck (besides maybe a gas truck) that's stopped across the tracks, and the passengers on board will barely notice anything besides the noise and subsequent delay. On the other hand, if the engineer actually tried to STOP a speeding passenger train within a few hundred feet, anybody standing in the aisle would end up getting hurled against the car's interior, and everything not literally screwed down (laptops, drinks, purses, small infants) would turn into missiles. You'd save the life of 1-6 people in a trapped car stopped across the tracks, and kill or injure several hundred passengers on the train in the process.
I don't think vacuum-evacuated tubes are really practical for a subway environment, where you have stations every mile or less. They're really more practical for long-distance trains.
Also, you wouldn't necessarily run them as a complete vacuum. I believe most proposals involve a partial vacuum with increased oxygen concentration. The idea is that you're removing most of the air resistance, but putting enough pure oxygen into what remains to enable people to breathe and survive, and keeping enough pressure to keep passengers who evacuate a train from getting the bends. You'd have emergency systems in place to flood the tunnel with atmospheric air if passengers had to evacuate a train (so they wouldn't spend extended amounts of time at low air pressure), and have maintenance crews depressurize before going in for extended time (kind of like deep sea diving in reverse).
I believe the best-researched proposal to date is probably the one for SwissMetro, because its backers actually HAVE done a fair amount of work so far to balance commercial viability against risks & benefits.
Sounds like the peoplemover at Atlanta International Airport years ago. From what I remember, a red light flashed, a robotic voice said, "Stop boarding ! Stop boarding! Stop boarding!", and on the third "Stop boarding," the doors would slam shut like they really, really *meant* it. I suspect the system has been mellowed out a bit over the past 10-20 years, but I remember being somewhat amused at the time by its cold determination to slam the doors shut (in contrast to the wimpy, uber-cautious creepingly-slow doors found on peoplemovers at most airports at the time).
The biggest problem isn't engineering, it's regulatory. About 15 or 20 years ago, Deutschebahn came up with a similar idea for its (then new) ICE trains -- for certain stops with asymmetric passenger traffic (lots more passengers getting off than getting on), they could have extra trains that served only arriving passengers, put them all in the last few cars of the train, then uncouple it before arriving in the station and use automatic train control (or a cross-trained conductor) to bring it into the station while the rest of the train continued without stopping. I'm not sure whether the scheme involved coasting an unpowered tail section into the station, or whether it involved EMUs that could power themselves the last kilometer or two.
Either way, the regulators *freaked*. On so many levels, DB just decided it was a completely hopeless lost cause and gave up. Railroad laws going back to the 19th century regulate everything from how braking systems work to the exact procedures that have to be followed for coupling and uncoupling them. Union agreements govern minutiae of their actual operation, in ways that would have basically required a full staff of engineers, conductors, and support personnel for that tail segment from the moment it broke away until the moment it arrived in the station. And if that doesn't kill it, you still have actual passengers who are in the wrong place at the wrong time & end up missing their station or getting off by mistake. And this is a "moving platform" type solution that's relatively STRAIGHTFORWARD, engineering-wise. God help anyone who tries to implement anything that additionally requires precise alignment of parallel tracks, precision speed control, and countless safety mechanisms to ensure that the trains can never, ever break apart and shear a passenger in half as he or she changes trains. I can't even fathom how the parallel-train idea could work with track that isn't dead straight.
For what it's worth, other countries looked at DB's idea, because it's sensible and cool. Even Amtrak looked at it. They all came to the same conclusion -- the same regulatory problems that "derailed" it in Germany would be as bad, if not worse, in their own countries. I believe the closest it came to fruition anywhere in the world was Israel (a small country starting out with no real rail network to speak of, and thus no bureaucratic legacy the way you'd have in Germany or the US), but I'm not sure what happened to stop in in Israel (I think it just never got funded).
The one thing Sprint could possibly bring to the table in a merger with T-Mobile if they didn't completely botch it is (theoretical) compatibility with international UMTS frequencies.
International UMTS uses 1900MHz for uplink, and 2100MHz for downlink (give or take a few MHz)
T-Mobile bought 1700 & 2100Mhz licenses during the AWS auction. They have very little 1900MHz spectrum, and it's all used by GSM voice and 2/2.5G data.
With a little creativity, Sprint could start repurposing 1900MHz spectrum currently used for EVDO to UMTS uplinks, and start shipping phones like the ones used in Canada that use CDMA for voice, but UMTS for 3G data. There wouldn't be any compatibility problem with pre-existing T-Mobile UMTS phones, because AFAIK, every UMTS phone ever sold by T-Mobile can do 1900/2100 UMTS in addition to 1700/2100 UMTS. There might be some temporary bandwidth crunches for EVDO, but if they got their act together quickly and shifted all new Android phones to 1900/2100 UMTS (falling back to 1900MHz EVDO only where 1900/2100 UMTS didn't exist), and simultaneously improved their 4G network options, the problem would largely solve itself within a year or two as heavy data users dumped their old phones and bought new ones within a year or two anyway.
The problem is, Sprint completely fucked up the merger with Nextel, which kind of casts doubt on their ability to merge a 1900MHz CDMA2000 network with a 1900MHz legacy GSM network, a 1700/2100MHz UMTS network, and a 2.6GHz WiMax (soon to be LTE) network. If they could manage to avoid completely screwing up T-Mobile's existing network in the process, it would put SprinT-mobile in a unique position among American carriers -- they'd be the one carrier capable of providing UMTS on international frequencies within the United States. For that reason, I'd prefer they both remain separate. But if anyone has to merge, Sprint and T-Mobile would probably be the least of all evils. Especially if Google ended up buying both of them to keep Sprint from physically screwing up T-mobile's network along the way.
Well... there IS one practical real-world problem it would solve -- limits due to split phase and load asymmetry. I can't run an air conditioner on the "2kW" generator now, because it can really only output about 800-900 watts (RMS) per outlet. Combining both with an inverter that grabbed the power from each of the two phases would smooth over that detail, and being able to draw extra surge current from a battery when necessary (to start up the air conditioner when the compressor cycles on) would mean I could get away with a MUCH smaller generator than I'd have to otherwise have. Basically, instead of having a generator that changes its output to be efficient, I'd have a generator that's slightly undersized with respect to its peak needs, but relies on a battery for those peak needs & has more or less 100% of its output fully utilized the remainder of the time.
An air conditioner load might not literally be 100% constant, but in Florida during the summer, it comes pretty close to it. When my central AC broke 2 years ago & I had to live with the window unit for 2 weeks waiting for the city to issue the building permit for the new unit, it ran more or less nonstop from about 7am until 2am... and cycled off for maybe 10 minutes per hour during the remaining hours.
Hmmm. I wonder about the viability of just sticking a ~2 farad supercapacitor between the transformer and inverter for smoothing over surge current needs instead of a battery. I know supercapacitors have gotten dirt cheap, but I'm pretty sure that assumption goes flying out the window the moment you start talking about dozens and hundreds of amperes instead of something like a few thousand milliamperes.
Holy shit. There IS a ${deity}, after all.
(looks out the window)... wow, it's snowing outside (in South Florida), too!
I'm sure nobody will ever read this since it's an old thread by now, but I actually spent Sunday researching inverter-type generators.
I was shocked. They're actually semi-affordable now. Back in 2004, you couldn't even *fantasize* about buying an inverter-type generator big enough to run an air conditioner, let alone other stuff at the same time. Now, you can buy one like the Ramsond Sinemate 2500 for a hair under $600. If I were doing it again today, that's almost certainly the one I'd buy instead knowing what I now know about how much it costs to run a 5.6kW generator that gulps 10-15 gallons of near-$4 gas per day.
It's too bad nobody makes a 2000-watt (RMS) inverter that can be powered by a pair of 110v outlets from a single small generator (one from each phase). If I could buy something like that for a hundred bucks or so, that would be an awesome compromise. I could combine the two wimpy outputs of my small generator into a single clean 1800-watt power source that could run my air conditioner, and power my laptop, a second monitor, and some lights. It wouldn't have the variable-speed capabilities of a real inverter generator, but I'd be using nearly 100% of its RMS output with almost no waste anyway... and it would be sipping a gallon of gas every 5-6 hours instead of gulping 5 gallons every 8-10 hours. If it had terminals to attach a deep-cycle 12v battery that it could use to compensate for surges and recharge when the air conditioner is cycled off, it would be almost perfect.
Honestly, JVM hell is caused more by Sun's shitty documentation on how to properly specify JVM versions in a manifest or applet CLSID. Sun historically did a crap job of explaining how to specify things like, "Use the newest version of Java installed on this machine, as long as it's 1.6 (or 1.5, or 1.4) or newer", and instead gave examples that induced people to create needless dependencies on old versions of Java for no real reason besides lack of proper documentation. The fact that Oracle now owns Java makes things worse, because Oracle software was historically the worst of all about creating stupid dependencies on old versions of Java for no real reason (or because for political reasons, they wanted you to use the "thick" OCI drivers that tied you down to a specific runtime environment instead of the "thin" type 4 drivers that would "just work" on anything with a JVM).
The truth is, as long as an Oracle native-code database driver isn't involved and the developer doesn't go out of his or her way to needlessly specify some specific, arbitrary version of Java, 99.999% of anything you write in Java will work on any JVM that's as least as new as the one you compiled it under. I have 9 year old jarfiles built with pre-alpha 1.4 JDKs that still work fine under 1.6.0.${whatever}.
True story: at work, we had a notorious internal application whose development team bent over backwards to make users with newer JDKs and JREs installed miserable. Basically, it used the CLSID that told the JPI, "ignore the user's Java control panel settings, and always use the latest version of Java installed on this machine". Then, a few HTML lines later, used Javascript to commit suicide if that version of Java happened to be newer than 1.6.0.18. Sigh.
Yawn. Nothing new to see here. 36 hours before Andrew's landfall, the official party line was that Miami Beach was facing lethal danger, and the safest place to go was southern and western Dade County. The people who stayed on the beach had a bad rainstorm. The people who evacuated south and west had the worst 18+ hours of their lives. The REAL shitstorm came a few months later, when it was confirmed that the local authorities knew beyond doubt ~12-18 hours before landfall that Andrew was going to miss South Beach by at least 10 miles and plow straight into South Dade... and nevertheless kept repeating the official message that it was the safest place to go. They knowingly sent people into danger, and we've never forgotten or forgiven them for doing it to us.
OK, now can they combine the data with the data from Trapster so you can know when it's worthwhile to EXCEED the speed limit in order to break out of a holding pattern where you're driving against the timing-optimized direction of traffic and would otherwise end up hitting every single red light? When I drive to work in the morning, about 3 miles of my trip goes against the direction FDOT optimized the timing. If I follow the speed limit, I'll hit every light, every inch of the way, every time, guaranteed. But... if I can make it through light #1 a fraction of a second before it turns red, and keep going 60mph instead of 45mph, I can make it through the next light with ~3 seconds to spare, then the next with 5-7 seconds to spare, and so on. Once I'm comfortably making it through lights before the crosswalk countdowns begin (which, if you're watching for them, is a dead giveaway that the light's going to turn yellow in 10... 9... 8... seconds), I can drop down to 55, then 50, and make it through the remainder of the lights. The key is making it through that first light... once you're stuck at it, the only way to break out of the holding pattern is to aggressively fight your way to the front of the pack and try to make it through the NEXT light a fraction of a second before it turns red.
> and hang it up to dry
You didn't read the entire paragraph. In Florida, clotheslines basically don't work because it's too rainy, too humid, and the actual temperature isn't high enough to overcome the humidity and meaningfully dry out the clothes. If you did nothing besides dedicate a week of your life to managing clothes on a clothesline, you might be able to get them to the point where they were only slightly (but perceptibly) damp, but that's kind of hard to do when you ALSO have to be at work at 9am the next morning, and won't be home until 7pm if you're lucky.
Leave the clothes hanging in your absence, and they'll get rained on during the afternoon. Put a tarp over the clothes to keep the rain off, and they'll now be in a shadow and won't get hot enough to remotely overcome the 99% humidity. Try leaving them out overnight, and the dew will make them wet again. And when you finally get them to "kind of" dry out by taking them into an air-conditioned room to finish drying, they'll be so stiff, you'll feel like your T-shirt is going to crack when you try and unfold it.
The problem is that without the Soyuz, there's no official way to get astronauts home during the winter. The Dragon isn't officially man-rated yet. That doesn't mean it probably wouldn't work anyway, but nobody at NASA is going to jeopardize his career by officially relying upon a Dragon to safely get astronauts home until someone higher up has given it the official stamp of approval.
Of course, if the necessary training could be completed in time, Elon could probably solve that problem by announcing that he's personally going to be the Dragon's first passenger, camp out as a guest at the ISS for a couple of months, and ride it home if it ends up being unneeded for a return trip. However, IMHO it would be reckless and irresponsible for Elon to do that. God forbid, if the Dragon burned up on re-entry and killed him, it would basically be the end of American spaceflight for the rest of our lives. SpaceX wouldn't just lose its visionary leader... it would probably lose all of its orders and money, and rapidly go bankrupt. If an unmanned Dragon fails during COTS 2 or COTS 3 it will be bad, but it won't be the end of the program if they can figure out exactly what went wrong and take steps to prevent it from happening again. It would be the difference between a setback of a few years, and the end of it all.
My own prediction: the Dragon will go up well-stocked with Vodka, caviar, and borscht, NASA will bring home the Americans on the Soyuz lifeboat this fall, and the Russians will enjoy a relaxed, Mir-like atmosphere on the ISS all winter and secretly dread the return of NASA and its rules next year & look forward to the day when they can afford to to things their own way again.
> What's to stop the Chinese from boarding and effectively taking over an unmanned ISS? What could we do about it?
Refuse to give them the login password to the life support system?
^^^ Just to add to that... here are some pics of a hurricane-proof house in Hawaii being constructed with a reinforced-concrete hip roof (12-in-4 pitch, just like most wood roofs in Florida). Totally and completely normal-looking, but nothing short of a nuclear bomb is going to make a dent in it:
http://www.wdcicf.com/Makiki-Home/Makiki-Home15.htm
Another reinforced concrete hip roof (3 pics -- ICF foam, rebar placed, concrete poured):
http://www.quadlock.com/images/decking/Pitched_ICF_Roof_01.jpg
http://www.quadlock.com/images/decking/Pitched_ICF_Roof_02.jpg
http://www.quadlock.com/images/decking/Pitched_ICF_Roof_03.jpg
At the more affordable end of the spectrum, if you want the benefits of a concrete roof, but can't afford to go all the way, as long as you can keep the spans between loadbearing walls down to something sane & reasonable (say, around 18-24 feet), it's fairly affordable to build the house with a cast in place reinforced concrete attic floor, then simply build a conventional wood roof atop the parapet wall surrounding it (the same way you'd build it atop the tie beams in conventional Florida construction). The wood roof might get shredded by a hurricane, but the concrete deck below will keep the rest of your house intact.
Frankly, I don't care whether or not DST saves or increases the use of energy. I just want to be in it, permanently, all year. The day DST ends, evening-commute traffic in South Florida gets several orders of magnitude worse literally overnight. A drive home that takes 40 minutes on Friday *instantly* becomes an hour+ ordeal the following Monday.
The problem? During the summer, people straggle home from work starting around 4, gradually peaking around 6 or 6:30. The moment the clock moves back, people run for the door at 5 in a desperate attempt to get home before it's totally dark outside. Same total number of people trying to get home, but now 90% of them are hitting the road between 4:30 and 5:30, instead of spread out over a much longer interval. The outcome? Gridlock everywhere, every inch of the way home.
> Can you build a hurricane proof home?
Yes. Build the walls and roof from reinforced concrete using ICF, use impact-glass windows rated for large missiles, then put shutters over the windows anyway. Put concrete walls between the garage and interior of your house, and isolate the attic space above the garage from the rest of your house. The idea is to ensure that if/when the garage door gets blown in, the wind can't get to the rest of your house.
LOL. A direct hit by a category 1 hurricane in South Florida is like a snow day in upstate New York. We get up, look outside, and agonize about whether we're going to look silly for staying home from work if it doesn't get at least a little bit worse.
The biggest problem with "Tornado Alley" is the fact that houses there are built like shit. They're hot-glued matchsticks with stapled-on waferboard. I think Florida *trailers* have more stringent building standards than most of the midwest. If Kansas adopted Dade County building codes, people there would barely notice F1 and F2 tornadoes anymore. If you want proof, look at Florida. We have more tornadoes per square mile per year than any state in the country. The difference is, a F1 or F2 tornado that strikes HERE makes a bigger impact on Youtube & Twitter than it does to actual buildings, because a small tornado is basically 10 seconds of a real hurricane hitting a building that by law has to be designed to survive a direct hit by a category 3 hurricane without major damage to its interior.
A F5 tornado is nothing to sneer at, ever... but if a F5 tornado hit a neighborhood built to post-Andrew "Florida" standards, you'd have lots of badly-damaged homes. If the same tornado hit a neighborhood built to "Kansas" standards, you'd be left with a grassy field and holes where the basements used to be.
Honestly, unless you have a junkyard in your back yard, you'll probably spend the same amount of money and end up with a better solution by buying a $200 4-cycle generator from China at Amazon & having it overnighted with Prime shipping for $3.99 more. At least the cheap generator will run for 4-8 hours on a single tank of gas, and it's almost inconceivable that anything you could cobble together for less money could possibly be better, safer, or "not profoundly worse in every meaningful and conceivable way". If you're truly handy with mechanical engine repairs, buy a used generator from a suburbanite on Craigslist for a hundred bucks that probably needs little more than cleaning and oil.
>AC and your computer, those are the reasons you have a generator? I would think that your refrigerator
> would be the highest priority. Is there a reason you don't mention that?
My refrigerator's current contents: an open pack of pre-cooked microwaveable bacon, 4 slices of pizza in a ziploc bag, an open quart of milk of unknown expiration date, a tub of margarine, about a dozen 2-liter bottles of diet Mountain Dew, a few dozen cans of diet Mountain Dew, and my kitty's Prednisolone suspension. My freezer has an open box of Eggo waffles, a few frozen fettucine alfredo dinners, a box with frozen hamburgers of which I've actually eaten 2 or 3 out of 8, and a frozen unopened tub of Chi-Chi's taco meat I bought on sale 2-for-1 and froze.
Had this been a real hurricane, my "refrigerator" would have been a 5-gallon Igloo cooler 2/3 filled with ice that has a bucket-tray that can rest on top on the inside (away from the contents). My kitty's prednisolone and an 8-oz box of milk (for tomorrow's breakfast) goes in the tray, his water comes out the spigot from the melted ice, and ice for (now warm) diet Mountain Dew comes from the top. Maybe a couple of frozen (now thawing) hamburgers for the grill if Taco Bell, BK, and/or Wendys haven't re-opened yet.
Post-Wilma, I just ate out for every meal. The *last* thing I was going to do after coming home from work tired, sleep-deprived, stressed out, and grumpy was spend an hour cooking food with camping equipment when there were perfectly good operating restaurants a few miles away. It's obviously prudent to have enough food on hand for a few days, but let's be real... even after fsck'ing *Andrew*, there were open restaurants (or further south, guys selling food from trucks) within a few days. In fact, after Andrew, I developed an active aversion to cooking, because going to Publix (in Florida, all grocery stores are "Publix") was absolute *hell*, with lines stretching from the cash registers to the rear of the store. I finally got to the point where I just drove 10-20 miles north to do my grocery shopping, because it was less frustrating than dealing with the local zoo in my own neighborhood. Ditto, for Wilma. My own neighborhood was a mess, but my office (in Doral) was at the edge of sanity, and semi-normalcy was just 10 minutes and 2 exits down the Turnpike from there.
As for A/C, hell fsck'in YEAH. This is SOUTH FLORIDA we're talking about. Without air conditioning, this state would be uninhabitable by civilized people who have to be at the office at 9am, work productively all day, and do it again tomorrow. It's impossible to function in an environment where it's 90+ degrees at 100% humidity and you can't sleep at night due to the heat & noise from 20 lawnmower-loud generators running within a half-block radius. This isn't the old south where people could get away with spending summer afternoons sipping lemonade on the verandah and swimming in the watering hole. Take a heaping mound of New York, stir in a pound of Los Angeles, jack up the humidity to 100%, then make it rain all day. That's South Florida in the summer.