Regime change
I guess we are 1.5 days into regime change in DC.
Im doing a quick post over my lunch, then back to coding.
I think it was Tuesday when we had heavy offshore winds.
The warm weather went Mon-Wed, its cooling off again now.
It was interesting seeing temps in the mid 50s at 1 am.
The 48in portable box fans were deployes at Amazon.
On Tuesday, the max in the bay area was 97mph.
I came home Tuesday, early morning, stop just shy of the driveway,
pulled the 20 some off foot redwood limb out of the way before parking in the driveway.
Then i pulled the lim into the driveway next to the car.
It came from the redwood out in front.
There was a bunch of other wind damage too.
We had a short power fail on Monday night that I slept through.
We had a 3-4 hr outage while I was at work and Dad slept through early Turesday.
Over the day Tuesdaay, we had many very small outages, often only a minute each,
which kept the internet connection goofed up.
When we work on the 100 side of the building, we are now required to wear face shields.
Right now, i wear a regular surgical mask, a cloth mask over that, and the face shield over that.
It sounds like a good idea to me, but Im wondering why the 200 side is exempt.
I have my suspicions, however.
All this PPE, I get so warm, I dont need my watch cap anymore.
I hauled out the tape measure this morning.
I have gone from a 34in waist to 30in. Chest has gone from 43in to 36in (Maybe 35in)
This tells me that my shrinking includes a decline in skeletal mass.
Correcting my previous post, Ive lost 10lbs since starting at Amazon.
Amazon has really been good to me.
They own Zappos, so we got a huge credit toward purchase of work shoes and a 10% discount from Zappos on top of that.
I got a VERY NICE set of $200 Merril Work boots, and by the time the smoke cleared, Amazon picked up close to 70% of it.
Its a new year, so the anual work shoe deal is on AGAIN!
This time, Im looking at getting a set of hard toe sneakers.
I told you, they are good to me.
Steve Savitzky commented on car boosters.
The standard car boosters are usually a 20 amp hr 12v battery,
which gives a marginal battery just enough help that it will start the car.
Lithium cells are able to burp out the current faster than lead-acid can.
As a result, the lithium boosters work better than the lead-acid ones (and they are smaller too)
A lithium starter will fit in your hand, not so with lead-acid.
When one thinks about backup power, there is homework to do.
Priorities are fridge, microwave, outdoor security lighting, internet & phone charging,
and an outlet for a tv or radio for news.
After that, see if you can heat the place without electricity.
Even with gas heat, you often need power for a blower.
If you can heat with a fireplace, you are in decent shape.
The easy way to do it is to just power the whole house off the generator, but this is very expensive.
Another way is to re route the fridge & microwave circuits to a separate and smaller electrical panel.
Re route your external security lighting and maybe the outlet for your internet and UPS to this
"Preferred Load" panel.
Next put in a simple transfer switch to power the Preferred pannel either from generator or a large
breaker in the original panel.
Its a LOT cheaper to do it this way.
When I was in Santa Clara, I had a cable out the window to the balcony and a generator out there.
I had an electrical box on the end of the cable with a male plug and a female plug.
Male plug went to the wall and female plug went to the fridge.
There was a relay in the box, so if the generator put out power,
it would switch the plug with the fridge on it from being fed by the wall plug to the cable from the generator.
The way the relay was wired, it was impossible to cross the 2 circuits together,
and impossible to accidentally put power out on the grid.
It also had a power strip on it so I could plug in internet, a radio, microwave.
The only thing that switched automatically was the fridge, everything else,
I had to move the plugs, but it was cheap and it worked well, the few times I needed it.
The plugs, relay and box probably cost me less than $30.
Because it plugged into the wall and was not permanently installed,
it was exempt from building inspectors and didnt violate my lease.
I think the worse power failure, the generator started, the fridge was good,
I just zonked out and slept through the power failure.
The weather here is about to turn cold again.
Some time back, I was given one of those seat covers with heat wires in it and a lighter plug.
I dug it out of storage and put it in the car.
I LOVE electric butt warmers.
When I get the motorcycle back, I need to have the seat redone.
When that happens, I will have electric seat heat retrofitted into the seat then.
Im scrambling to get up to speed with Git, Bitbucket, MS Azure, MS Visual Studio, relearning PERL, and a few other things.
Im teetering on being in over my head.
If I can manage to hold on, this is the first step to moving from Ops to SW engineering.
Im doing a quick post over my lunch, then back to coding.
I think it was Tuesday when we had heavy offshore winds.
The warm weather went Mon-Wed, its cooling off again now.
It was interesting seeing temps in the mid 50s at 1 am.
The 48in portable box fans were deployes at Amazon.
On Tuesday, the max in the bay area was 97mph.
I came home Tuesday, early morning, stop just shy of the driveway,
pulled the 20 some off foot redwood limb out of the way before parking in the driveway.
Then i pulled the lim into the driveway next to the car.
It came from the redwood out in front.
There was a bunch of other wind damage too.
We had a short power fail on Monday night that I slept through.
We had a 3-4 hr outage while I was at work and Dad slept through early Turesday.
Over the day Tuesdaay, we had many very small outages, often only a minute each,
which kept the internet connection goofed up.
When we work on the 100 side of the building, we are now required to wear face shields.
Right now, i wear a regular surgical mask, a cloth mask over that, and the face shield over that.
It sounds like a good idea to me, but Im wondering why the 200 side is exempt.
I have my suspicions, however.
All this PPE, I get so warm, I dont need my watch cap anymore.
I hauled out the tape measure this morning.
I have gone from a 34in waist to 30in. Chest has gone from 43in to 36in (Maybe 35in)
This tells me that my shrinking includes a decline in skeletal mass.
Correcting my previous post, Ive lost 10lbs since starting at Amazon.
Amazon has really been good to me.
They own Zappos, so we got a huge credit toward purchase of work shoes and a 10% discount from Zappos on top of that.
I got a VERY NICE set of $200 Merril Work boots, and by the time the smoke cleared, Amazon picked up close to 70% of it.
Its a new year, so the anual work shoe deal is on AGAIN!
This time, Im looking at getting a set of hard toe sneakers.
I told you, they are good to me.
Steve Savitzky commented on car boosters.
The standard car boosters are usually a 20 amp hr 12v battery,
which gives a marginal battery just enough help that it will start the car.
Lithium cells are able to burp out the current faster than lead-acid can.
As a result, the lithium boosters work better than the lead-acid ones (and they are smaller too)
A lithium starter will fit in your hand, not so with lead-acid.
When one thinks about backup power, there is homework to do.
Priorities are fridge, microwave, outdoor security lighting, internet & phone charging,
and an outlet for a tv or radio for news.
After that, see if you can heat the place without electricity.
Even with gas heat, you often need power for a blower.
If you can heat with a fireplace, you are in decent shape.
The easy way to do it is to just power the whole house off the generator, but this is very expensive.
Another way is to re route the fridge & microwave circuits to a separate and smaller electrical panel.
Re route your external security lighting and maybe the outlet for your internet and UPS to this
"Preferred Load" panel.
Next put in a simple transfer switch to power the Preferred pannel either from generator or a large
breaker in the original panel.
Its a LOT cheaper to do it this way.
When I was in Santa Clara, I had a cable out the window to the balcony and a generator out there.
I had an electrical box on the end of the cable with a male plug and a female plug.
Male plug went to the wall and female plug went to the fridge.
There was a relay in the box, so if the generator put out power,
it would switch the plug with the fridge on it from being fed by the wall plug to the cable from the generator.
The way the relay was wired, it was impossible to cross the 2 circuits together,
and impossible to accidentally put power out on the grid.
It also had a power strip on it so I could plug in internet, a radio, microwave.
The only thing that switched automatically was the fridge, everything else,
I had to move the plugs, but it was cheap and it worked well, the few times I needed it.
The plugs, relay and box probably cost me less than $30.
Because it plugged into the wall and was not permanently installed,
it was exempt from building inspectors and didnt violate my lease.
I think the worse power failure, the generator started, the fridge was good,
I just zonked out and slept through the power failure.
The weather here is about to turn cold again.
Some time back, I was given one of those seat covers with heat wires in it and a lighter plug.
I dug it out of storage and put it in the car.
I LOVE electric butt warmers.
When I get the motorcycle back, I need to have the seat redone.
When that happens, I will have electric seat heat retrofitted into the seat then.
Im scrambling to get up to speed with Git, Bitbucket, MS Azure, MS Visual Studio, relearning PERL, and a few other things.
Im teetering on being in over my head.
If I can manage to hold on, this is the first step to moving from Ops to SW engineering.