Let there be Light

Since the day I bought my house, there has aways been this funny rattle every time you open or close my front door. The rattle was quickly diagnosed as coming from the light fixture on the exterior wall outside the door. The light fixture had taken years of abuse, been heavily weathered, and painted by the lazy last owner. it also had a tendency to flicker from time to time, which makes the house seem really ghetto.

I decided it was time to replace the fixture, so I went out and bought a new one, which only cost around $30.00 at home depot. While I was there, I also bought a new fixture for the back porch for $15. The back porch was mounted fine, but had stopped working a month ago, and you could get it to work for a little bit by un-mounting it and shaking it. I had verified that the wiring coming from the house was fine, so decided that I would just try replacing the fixture there too.

I got home and replace the back porch fixture very quickly and painlessly. It looked great. When I unmounted the front fixture, it was a different story. It had been poorly installed years ago because the box was too close to some of the trim on the house, and the fixture wouldn't fit over it. So instead of fixing the problem, they mounted it to the siding with a short wood screw. If you've ever played with the sidin on these houses, you know it's like thick cardboard, and that was all that was holding this thing up. (well that and the wiring :-p ) This resulted in a very poor mount, that allowed the fixture to rattle when there was the slightest vibration in the wall. It also allowed for pests to move into the electrical box. I had to remove their nests before I installed the new stuff :-/

To achieve the desired mount, I decided to remove a small section of the trim, using a dremel, so that the fixture would fit on the box correctly. It took a little extra time, but the fixture is mounted very solid, and it no longer rattles when you open and close the door.

If you look at the brown paint, that's where the old fixture was. The new brass that you see is a mount that I'm using with the new fixture. you can see where I cut out a round section of the trim to fit the fixture better.

If you look closely, you can see one old hole where the screw ripped out of the siding, and one newer hole where they repeated the same mistake a second time :)... ERRR

Here is the final result... all I have to do is touch up the paint, which will happen in the fall:

Suicide Lane Junkies

Perhaps it is the nature of my drive home, or maybe the conditions I observe exist everywhere, but the drivers that I observe day in and day out seem notoriously bad.

I take the surface streets home because I work less than six miles from home, but because of the mountainous terrain, the traffic conditions are always crowded, and usually people get antsy when they are stuck in one place for too long. To make matters worse, the neighborhoods that I drive through are largely populated with people of bellow average income. Which, regardless of it's merit, I associate with wreckless driving.

Every day, I would wait patiently in traffic, as I watched hundreds of my fellow drivers breaking the law, and using the suicide lane in a manner that helps justify it's nick name. instead of waiting in traffic, until it was legal to enter a left turn lane, they would just drive 50mph down the suicide lane. This always made me cringe, especially when you would see others doing it, because they felt justified after seeing their peers doing it.

I was overjoyed when I saw that they had added some barricades to the suicide lane to prevent this. So much so, that I took my camera out to take a picture of it for the blog. But I had a hard time getting a shot of it, because so many people were driving around it, into oncoming traffic, to try to get home quicker. I switched to video mode for your entertainment.

Drive safe, And remember that you are accountable for your actions, not the idiots that you imitate.

Pine trees in the desert

Before I start, let me mention that I am guilty of what I'm about to rant about. I'm not trying to be a hypocrite, I'm just ranting :-p

So here it is: What's the deal with people trying to maintain mid-west yards in the desert? We should be afraid of running out of water, and we should stop dumping it on plants that shouldn't naturally live here anyway.

I have large trees, lush bushes, and a green grass in my yard, so I should be the last one to talk. When I was young, and slightly more ignorant, I thought it was great. It was so green. But over the years, I've been becoming more of a naturalist, and I'm starting to feel really guilty about it. A few months ago, I had some issues with my irrigation system, so I turned it off, and would only water manually, and that month, I used 19,000 gallons less water than most months! That is so much water.

We waste all this water on these plants, that grow like crazy, then we collect their droppings, and we trim them, and fill our landfills (or if we're lucky compost them) and the water just goes into the air as they decompose.

But worse than all other plants, (and here's where I really rant) is the PINE TREE.

My neighbor has pine trees in his back yard, and all year long, they shed needles. Pine needles are pretty unique. They are highly acidic, so they take really long to decompose, and they actually prevent other leaves from decomposing. They are also really thin, but quite strong, so they will fit perfectly through the baskets in your pool system, and proceed right into the pump where they, being as strong as they are, jam it up great.

Pine trees also drop pine cones. Pine cones are pretty, but they are also light enough to get sucked into my leaf hog, and strong enough to shred the fan that causes the suction :) So when I try to suck up the pine needles, I tend to wreck my leaf hog.

Last weekend, I decided that I had had just about enough of all these pine tree droppings, so I racked them all up, and sorted them out from all the rocks, that I wanted to keep in my rock garden, and filled the trash. Then I put the rest of them in a pile so I could throw them away after the trash was collected. Here is a quick photo of the second trash bin full of pine needles. Keep in mind that this is the second bin full of them, and this bin was completely empty when I started:



So if you are building, and you have the opportunity to make this choice without spending a ton of money, please consider keeping it natural. Plant plants that are native to the region, and avoid throwing away our water.

youtube.com vs brightcove.com

Ben recently pointed out that the quality of the video on youtube was less than ideal. I totally agree after watching them again.

When I watch them locally, the videos look pretty good. Especially when you consider they were taken from my point and shoot camera. So in the interest of a blog post, I thought I'd compare what I upload to youtube.com, with brightcove.com (a slower, less popular video service)

Here are the results:

Youtube.com (link)


Brightcove.com (link)

I think that there is actually quite a big difference in quality. The other thing that's worth noting is that with both of these services, there is a delay after you upload before you can view. And when I uploaded to birghtcove, it said:

We've got your video and are processing it to make it look great.
This might take a few hours, but we'll let you know by email when it's ready.

This was shocking. It didn't really take hours... but it did take a little longer than youtube (to the naked eye)

The other thing is that youtube seems to serve up their content faster. I guess you win some you loose some :-p

Enjoy!

**ALSO! the brightcove code doesn't render right in my firefox! WOW... They need to fix that ASAP, or they will fail big time :-p

***Thanks to Mikey from the Brightcove Team for noticing what was broken, and telling me how to fix it. This problem was more of my fault (or maybe bloggers fault: I'm not sure), and less of brightcove's.
Also, I did modify the code a little bit to make this window fit better in the blog...

Some Colorado Videos

I'm trying out You Tube to host some videos. from the recent Colorado hike. I'm not sure how much I like it, and it takes FOREVER to upload, but I think it's pretty decent.

Check this one out:

In this video, I am making my way along the ridgeline of Mt Yale as it starts to hail on us above 14,000 ft. I had to put my camera away pretty quick because it's not waterproof, but you get the idea. This ridgeline is literally a straight drop on both sides, and though it's pretty timid here, you have to use all 4 limbs at times to stay on the face of the mountain, and the wet rocks don't help :)

I know that a friend had a water proof camera, I can't wait to see what he was able to record.

In this video, i just do a quick 360 from the top of Mt Huron, another 14ner in Colorado.

More videos on my youtube account.