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WEEK 30 2014

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Oxnard Weather Underground

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Saturday 26 July 2014

Saturday - Hot again, 102F by the afternoon.

I spent the morning doing yard work, mowing-edging-weedwhacking-sweeping the front, and mowing the back. I ran out of time to finish the back - I wanted to run the sprinklers and the rules say you can't do that after 10am. And it's a good thing - I found a bad sprinkler head in the front that needed replacing right away, and another that needs some work - the grass has forced it to take on an angle and it isn't covering correctly. I also trimmed away some suckers on the trees in he back and generally cleaned things up - including another broken bottle, this one across the street in front of the mail box:-( By 11am I'd put in a solid four hours and called it quits in the yard and went inside and did some chores there. Sigh.

Nothing on the garage shelving.

Lunch was at a new Thai place down in Palmdale. It wasn't bad, but I'm not sure it's worth 20 miles of gas to get there...

In the afternoon I did a small amount of work on the app, updated the blog, and napped. I don't usually nap, and if I do it's for 20 minutes or so, but I sacked out for over an hour.

In the evening it was over to R&S's for some home-made pizza and movies.

I'm not sure I mentioned this, but early in the week I was doing graphics for the app: black and white masks for the tiles. When done I went to save them in a folder on Dropbox and discovered that I'd already done this, before the beach holiday, and done it better! A day and a half of work wasted....

It's that time again (week# modulo 10 = 0), to list books. I seem to missed noting Book #22.

I believe it was an iOS ebook bought in April, so I just added it in here. I'm far too lazy to go back and renumber eight other books on their individual pages.

Book #22 was, therefore, iPhone iOS6 Development Essentials, by Neil Smyth. Update 7/29: Nope. It was listed last year.

#1 A Talent For War (Alex Benedict #1) #2 iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, 3rd Edition #3 The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce #1) #4 The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce #2) #5 A Red Herring without Mustard (Flavia de Luce #3)	#6 I am Half-Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce #4) #7 The Dead in their Vaulted Arches (Flavia de Luce #5) #8, The Judge of Ages (Hermetic Millenia #3) #9 Rising Tides (Destroyermen #5) #10 Firestorm (Destroyermen #6)
#11 Iron Gray Sea (Destroyermen #7) #12 Broken Homes (Rivers of London #4) #13 Existence #14 Storm Surge (Destroyermen #8) #15 The Lure of the Basilisk (Lords of Dus #1)	#16 The Seven Altars of Dusarra (Lords of Dus #2) #17 The Sword of Bheleu (Lords of Dus #3) #18 The Book of Silence (Lords of Dus #4) #19 Like a Mighty Army #20 iOS Drawing: Practical UIKit Solutions
#21 How to Massage Your Cat #22 #23 The Unwilling Warlord #24 The Wizard and the War Machine #25 The Martian	#26 Hyperbole and a Half #27 Rex Regis: The Eighth book of the Imager Portfolio, #28 Ark Royal #29 The Nelson Touch, #30 The Tralfalgar Gambit
#31 Mobile Learning For All, Supporting Accessibility for the iPad #32 A Sword Into Darkness,

Rather surprisingly there are several books not yet finished, a new Flavia de Luce, a new Niven & Benford novel, a new Expanse novel, and a pile of other stuff, that I actually meant to read over summer vacation at the beach but never got around to.

Friday 25 July 2014

Friday - Warm out - around 100F, which feels 'cool-ish' after the toasty temperatures of earlier in the week.

Various household chores in the morning, then working in the office until early evening, not a very eventful day.

I did a bit of research on the radial arm saw. It's a Wards 'Powr Kraft 2610B 10" Radial Arm Saw' model, built in the late 1960's or1970's. Wards - boy, that takes me back. Not as upscale as Sears, you could find all sorts of interesting things (to a young boy) there.

It's solidly built: the only bits of plastic on it are a couple of small covers on the auxiliary spindles. It's a 'B' model, and I found a free online manual for it at vintagemachinery.org. As well as the main cutting head it also has 3750rpm and 20,000rpm takeoff spindles on it, so you can use it for rips, cuts, dado's, bevel cuts, mitering, grinding and various other things. I'd like to realign the blade, it was trucked 400 miles incorrectly tied down, and then sat for years, so it's probably out of adjustment. The table top is wood, and I need to figure out how to set it up. My Dad did it, and the manual shows the procedure.

Not that I have any big plans, I just wanted to cut grooves for some boards, but it's nice to have it set up again.

I also re-ordered the dryer thermostat. As I discovered last year, one could pay $7 for Amazon Prime, or $3.50 plus $3.50 shipping and handling from a non-Prime place. Heh.

Thursday 24 July 2014

Thursday - It was very hot - they were predicting 104F and we got there, and a little more, 106F at the peak. Hot as it was I didn't even have to turn the swamp a/c to high - the humidity was in the single digits!

It finally maxed out at 106F, but at 4% humidity the house stayed nice and cool.

I did a bit more on the garage, but haven't actually started constructing shelves yet. Once I do I can really get it organized I think.

The radial arm saw is missing its elevation crank handle. When I brought it down to Lancaster from Martinez I foolishly tied it off using the handle as something to pass a line around and stabilize the unit. Naturally it just popped the handle off somewhere on the I-5. I didn't notice until I arrived in Lancaster - hopefully no-one was injured when it came off. Anyway, it's not a big deal, but I guess I'll see if there is a serial number and/or model number on it somewhere - it's an old Skill Craft that (I think) my dad bought used. In the meantime I can use some 'vise grips' to turn it if I have too.

Wednesday afternoon I decided that I'd use the 'Photographers Ephemeris' app on the iPad, one of the few apps I've bought, and get a shot of the sun setting behind the control tower at William J. Fox Field. I'd been thinking about it for a few days and the wind was just a breeze, not the gale we'd been having in the late afternoons recently. I settled the target pin on the control tower in the map, and the line of site crossed 45th street west, just about 100' north of Avenue G. I had the time, and the place, so I set out.

Of course I forgot that the AV isn't actually flat to the horizon. It actually goes uphill to the west, and ends at the Tehachapi Mountains/Angeles Mountains merge. As a result a couple of things happened

The sun "set" early, by 10 or 15 minutes
The sun "set" high, higher than the control tower from 45th street

And, just to make things extra special, in their careful custodianship of the taxpayers dollars the city council has put curbs and 'no parking' signs along Avenue G. There are any number of streets in town itself that lack curbs, paving, or any other improvement, but out there in the middle of frikkin' nowhere...

So, no shot of the sun setting behind Fox Field tower. I'd need to be closer, and earlier, and that's doable I guess. I'm not really upset - landscape photographer's are always at the mercy of the elements, no matter how they plan I guess.

Wednesday 23 July 2014

Wednesday - Bagel & coffee for breakfast, out with the cats on the patio.

Jimmy is getting brave, and is considering climbing up into the tree's after those all-too-evasive birds. Suzy has not ventured more than 3' from the patio. Both have started to eat grass like little cows - and then upchuck it later in the house.

Back to working in the garage. I started clearing off the metal shelf where I want to put the built-in shelving. Kind of a big task as there were a lot of things on and around the shelves, and I made a point of doing a preliminary sort as I worked. Yard poisons, yard food, household poisons and cleansers, automotive cleansers, soaps, fluids, and a bunch of assorted things.

I discovered that something had actually leaked and dissolved its way through the top shelf, and left a sticky layer of gunk on that shelf and the shelf below it. When emptied I took the shelf outside and tried to clean it, with limited success. There is a tar like residue that resists being removed, but is still liquid enough to stick to and stain anything you put on it. I have some "Goop" cleanser, I'll try that next - standard soap and even Formula-409 had little effect on it.

Because of the way the house was constructed it turns out that there isn't a stud at 48" from the east wall, but rather at 60". Which is too far, it overlaps the area needed for the washer and dryer. So there can't be any vertical attachment plate at 48". Which is fine, I can work around it using the studs at the intermediate points, but it means my first conceptual design is kaput.

"No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy."

I need to get my Dad's old radial arm saw out, it has been sitting idle now for nearly five years, and is ideal for this sort of woodworking project.

I went and looked at pre-made shelfing at Home Depot, but it was too expensive. Even the brackets have become amazingly expensive - $3.50 for a bracket. Let's see, eight feet tall, seven needed, assuming the top and bottom are fixed, and three brackets per shelf: 21x$3.50 = $73.50. Plus tracks, so maybe $100. I have lots of scrap 2x2 around, and particle board, and even pine planks, so I think I'll just do it my way.

Some say "cheap", I say "custom" ;-)

While I had decades of cruft cleared away I decided to check the dryer for lint and any other issues. After a bit of research (Maytag doesn't make their repair manuals available to the general public, so it took a bit of searching and reading of generic disassembly descriptions) I removed the front and checked - and there is no appreciable amount of lint in the open areas of the dryer, in the exhaust tube or vent line. It should be trivial to fix the thermostat sensor, once I get one. The drum is remarkably hard to turn however, so maybe it's time for a new bearing kit. Like I need another project.

Anyway, this all took until about 3:00, when I knocked off for the day.

A small victory was finding a business card from someone I had worked with back in April. Tim had called me with a request for a password to a database they'd created. He's down in San Diego, I'm up here in Lancaster, and the CD with the password written on it was in between in the Ventura office. After a bunch of searching for the working files here (still not found!) here I did find a business card tucked away in a 'junk drawer'. Yay.

Tuesday 22 July June 2014

Tuesday - I woke up before 6am to the sound of my neighbor trundling his trash cans out to the curb, and got up to do the same. Then I realized that it was street cleaning day as well, and pulled the Explorer up into the drive.

Then it was time for breakfast and my morning ablutions. After which I started emptying stuff from the garage into the trash can. Which, since my hands weren't hurting (yet), naturally led to assembling the new shelf unit, and unloading the junk on the temporary shelves that are now in the way of it. About 11am I knocked off - four hours of bending and lifting is enough to let my back start complaining these days.

What I would like to do is create a permanent shelf near the side door. I've an old metal 4-shelf unit there, 30"w and 70"h, that I've been storing various yard elixirs on for the last couple of decades, but the actual opening is quite a big bigger and taller, so it's a waste of good storage space. I've a lot of scrap wood about, so it'd be an easy and cheap improvement. I sort of want to put a water line and spigot in the east side wall, tapped off from the washer cold water line in the wall, I'd be putting the built in shelf on, but it's not an urgent project, and it's easy enough to disassemble shelving at any time in the future.

The top shelf of the old unit has poisonous stuff on it, to keep it out of the reach of small curious fingers. Among those was a bottle of drain cleaner, that apparently had a hole in it - and which at some point in the past proceeded to eat a hole right through the metal shelf!

After sitting for a bit, doing a bit of measuring in the garage, and popping some Ibuprofen, I did some dishes and housework, and made a topless quesadilla for lunch.

Then it was upstairs to work on the app. Such an exciting day. When up there I eventually realized, late afternoon, that I was duplicating some work I'd done already in June. Sigh..

Monday 21 July 2014

Monday - Not much to say, warm out but not amazingly so. Did some shopping in the morning and picked up some fruit and veggies, soy sauce, that sort of thing.

This weekend when we went to lunch I picked up a couple of boxes of assorted cables and cruft from R&S's place. Their son was cleaning out his room and had two boxes of this sort of stuff. I'll go through it for anything useful (USB cables, etc.) and toss the useless (old style phone cords & such).

He also cleaned out a bunch of childhood stuff. You could tell that his mom was a bit sad about it, but she gleaned some treasures that she thought he might want someday and tucked them away somewhere safe. He'll be an adult in a couple of months and (for example) the Harry Potter posters are a bit juvenile. He also had an assortment of Lord of the Rings (audio) and some Harry Potter (audio) that he wanted to get rid of. Maybe I'll see if the local veteran's place would like them.

The swamp cooler is using about 3.4KWH a day. Add the 1.7KWH from the fridge and we have 5.1KWH. Now to track down the rest... Tim sent me his spreadsheet that he downloaded from his electric company, I'll have to see if I can get the same thing from SCE.

I did a bit of programming - mostly graphics creation - but my hands weren't really feeling right. So I didn't do too much.

I didn't assemble the other garage shelf either. These are nice Edsal units, similar but not quite identical to one I already had.

Netflix is working again, and Hulu wasn't quite as annoying as this weekend, so that's good.

Sunday 20 July 2014

Sunday - Enjoying a relaxing day, didn't do much.

I did assemble one of the shelving units I bought about a month ago at Walmart. The assembly went quickly, the only tool needed was a hammer to tap things into place here and there.

It was hot and humid and my hands hurt so I didn't assemble the 2nd unit yet. Once it's together I can disassemble the home-made temporary shelf and then be able to get my dryer out for servicing the thermostat.

Early this week they were predicting extremely high temperatures for the middle of next week, 109F for Wednesday next at one point, but those numbers are declining, now I'm seeing 105F and 104F. These are essentially for stations away from town and its associated heat island, so it'll still be toasty.

Hmmm. I finally took the refrigerator power usage ratings, over the last four days (96 hours and change) it's averaged 1.7KWH per day, which is very reasonable, much less than the 5KWH I had estimated. Soooooo.......

I stuck the meter on the swamp cooler, which runs nearly twelve hours a day, so I'll get an exact reading from that. It should be on the order of 3-4 KWH for a day.

The remaining big items would be, in probably decreasing order, the washer, the dryer, the TV, the coffee pot and the microwave. I find it hard to believe that I average 5 or 6 KWH a day from these, but I guess I'll find out.

Hulu is getting annoying. The number of commercials has increased, and now they want me to interact with them, to tell me which commercials I like. That isn't going to happen and if the annoying 15 second prompts continue I'll just cancel my subscription.

Netflix now claims my TV isn't registered, when it was working as of Wednesday, so I need to look into that. I know they are battling with Verizon, but I'm on Time-Warner so I don't see why that should affect me. I don't have much patience for nonsense these days.

I watch too much TV, maybe I'll cancel them both...

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: The old USN DSRV-2 Avalon, on the beach in Morro Bay,, 2014.

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