Rusty’s Blog

Minor setup stuff. I use a G1 phone from T-Mobile and have very much enjoyed the experience. One of the things that I’ve been looing for since I started using it has been a way to post microblogs to http://identi.ca. There are a couple of apps out there for twitter users, and while I do use twitter, it’s had a few problems that make it unsutible in my view for ongoing use.

There really are several different ways of getting content out of identi.ca onto my phone. sms messages, e-mail, web browser, gtalk/xmpp, etc. However I really didn’t want to be reading messages from identi.ca, I’m a bit more interested in sending messages to there.

For me a critical point is that I have a jabber/xmpp server running on one of my own servers. As a matter of fact I had already linked my jabber account there. If you have a gmail account, you might prefer to use that. However a pointer there is that any time you receive an IM at your gmail gtalk account, it very well may be using an sms message to talk to your phone. That can get expensive. I recommend using a server of your own, or getting an account on jabber.org or a public server and use that resource for sending and receiving jabber to identi.ca messages.

Now getting a jabber message from a phone to a jabber server is not really difficult. I suspect that I could install a development package on my desktop, write a bit of code for the android environment, compile a package, put it on a server I have access to, install the package to my phone, test, and repeat the steps from write a bit of code on, until testing gives me the results I expect.

An alternative that has just recently shown up is the Android Scripting Environment. http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

With the Android Scripting Environment (ASE) you can write scripts in Bean Shell, Lua, or Python. By default Bean Shell is installed, but you will need to install the interpreters for Lua and Python. The Environment is a .8 code base, which means it is very functional, but may not be complete from the perspective of a general user.

I’ve personally never done well in Java, and Bean Shell really is a scripting environment for Java. If you happen to like Java, it may be all you need. I’ve also never worked with Lua, but from what I see in the collection of scripts that are available as examples, it appears to be a reasonable language as well. I have played around a bit with Python, and while the environment is hardly complete, it seems to be sufficient for what I need. For android, it does include xmpp support, as well as support for pulling down URLs, interpreting html, and a few other elements as well. All I needed this time was the Android support and the xmpp support.

I’ve liberally copied code from a couple of different resources. For an example of how to send a message to a jabber server, (which was not written for the android platform, but it’s python and all the referenced libraries are included in ASE) I used the tutorial at http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/618

Here’s the sample:

import android
import xmpp

droid = android.Android()

# User interaction stuff
message = droid.getInput('identi.ca update', "What's Up?")['result']
tag = droid.getInput('tags?','What tags? (Prepend w/#)')['result']

# Varios Variables we will use
_SERER = 'jabber.server.you.use', 5223   # put in your own jabber server name and appropriate port
username = 'your.user.name'              # give it the user name you want to use
password = 'your.password'               # until I figure out how to store these credentials securely
fullmessage = tag + message              # build the message we're going to send. (could use improvement)
destid = 'somename@jabber.server'        # for identi.ca use 'update@identi.ca'

# send the message
cnx = xmpp.Client('jabber.server.you.use') # don't need the port so don't use when creating a connection instance to use
cnx.connect( server=(_SERVER) )          # establish a connection
cnx.auth(username,password, 'G1')        # authenticate yourself, and give a 'presence' (G1 in this case)
cnx.send( xmpp.Message( destid, fullmessage ) ) # Send the message

# exit 'cleanly'
quit = droid.exit()                      # we're done, time to go

And that pretty much summs it up. There are a few things I will be investigating over time. I suspect that using a dictionary, I can create a set of ‘tags’ that I want to use regularly (#cvg2009, #c25k, etc.) then feed that to some sort of a pick list, and hopefully I could enter the update and select the appropriate tag all in one dialog. Worst case, 2 dialogs sort of like what I’m doing now. This currently has a bit more flexibility, but in the end I would also like to be able to identify if this is to be a message to update, or to some other specific user.

What am I doing with this? Well, as a department co-head for the 2009 CONvergence convention, I wanted a way to update my facebook, twitter, identi.ca and planet pages with what I’m doing, and what’s happening now. I’m pretty sure that I can update twitter directly, and possibly through that facebook, and it looks like I could import from there to identi.ca, which also would propogate to my world page, but after seeing the problems that twitter has been going through with it’s growing pains, I didn’t think that was the best route. If it works for you, ok. The facebook app for Android has been having problems since facebook changed something recently, so that was out. And it’s been a while since I wrote anything I considered interesting like this, so here it is.

How things work from here. My jabber server accepts a connection and forwards the message to update@identi.ca, which then places the update in my stream. Through the facebook interface it posts an update to facebook. I also have my account configured so that all events are posted to twitter as well. My planet page pulls any updates I’ve made in the past couple of hourse every 2 hours from twitter and identi.ca. Hey it pulls an update that I’ve posted a blog as well. Handy little page at times.

I always seem to discover ‘issues’ that need to be corrected that have almost nothing to do with the specific project at hand, except that they got in the way. Today I discovered I had not punched a hole for tcp through my firewall for jabber clients. I had punched one for UDP, but since nothing is listening for that…

Have fun. If you find the app useful, and want to let me know about updates, I would appreciate hearing about them.

Well, it turns out it was not 60 messages to send, but only about 50. Less really at least four people were ones that I could easily group with someone else, or in one case I’m hoping I grouped them correctly. I also had five or six that I was unable to find e-mail addresses for, so those will have to wait a bit. Hopefully I’ll be able to send those out this afternoon.

Time wise, I think I actually spent a bit over 4 hours assembling what I did, and sending it off, so my estimate was not too far off. It may have been 5 hours though, if so, off by 25% which is a bit more than I like. Fortunately I was able to generate a template of an e-mail and then I pretty much copied in an e-mail address, and a schedule entry, and could hit send. I did add notes to a few messages, primarily to well known friends, but also to some of those where I was pretty sure I could get a 2 for 1 result.

Of course the sun is about to rise, I need to get some sleep, but first I think I’ll go for a run, then walk the pooches. I think they would appreciate getting outside in the cool morning air.

…assuming I can figure out who all to write too.

We had a rather large number of people sign up for various volunteer shifts this last weekend. I can tell exactly how many shifts were signed up for, though it will take a bit of time to identify each person by the name they signed up under, and pull up an e-mail address, and get an e-mail sent off for them. It might be easier if I were to script it, but at the moment I don’t have a system I can send scripted e-mail messages from. Fortunately I should be able to get everything out of the web pages I need to identify what shifts people signed up for, and from there I can attach names, so then I just need to sort by name, then add e-mail addresses, and I should be able to mostly cut and paste into e-mail messages to each person.

Well, I can hope anyway. I just spent something like 2 hours formatting the web pages, and adding the requests. So another 4 hours sounds about right for pulling everything back to a point where I can send e-mail.

Then comes the sending e-mail.

I think I’m going to go get some sleep. Good night everyone.

First of all, I don’t think my c25k program should be considered entirely successful. First of all while I did my final ‘run’ tonight, I didn’t run 30 min, and wasn’t really expecting to. In a way this is really a new program that I started, though I doubt that I am the only one to have done something like this.

My short term objective is to run a 5K a week from Saturday. I’ve got just under 2 weeks to do this. I actually have a 5k ‘course’ in my neighborhood that I am going to be ‘training’ on. It’s actually just barely short of a 5k loop, but I will be able to use it, and the walk in/out for the loop will take care of the rest I’m pretty sure.

Tonight I walked and ran the course in about 40 min. My immediate goal is to bring the time down from 40 min to under 30 min. As the final run of week 8 shows, I can run 28 min straight on a flat surface, and I suspect that with little effort I can turn that into 30 min as part of my current program. However I’m pretty sure that I’m not running a mile and a half out, and a mile and a half back as part of that 30 min, which means I need to deal with the distance as well in the next two weeks.

I wrote once a wile back of my running when I was stationed overseas. The compound we were stationed on had a perimiter of about a mile, give or take a bit. And I had a lot of spare time. My unit was scheduled to redeploy back to the US a couple of months after we got to the compound. Some of the people I was stationed there with spent their time on the roof of our building, developing a tan, and in some cases working out with weights, either improvised, or purchased on the local market. I was never really a weight training sort of a guy, so I didn’t get involved in that, and as a geek, a tan has never really been something I’ve chased after. The last time I ‘tanned’ I turned orange. I’m pretty sure I can explain the story somewhere along the line, if people show a serious interest in it, but it’s really a different story.

In any case I, as well as a few other somewhat independent types, took to walking and running around the compund. Walk for a bit, run for a while, walk a block, run for a while, etc. After a wek or so of this, you realize you are running the entire distance around the compound, a couple of weeks later, you’re doing laps. If you’re really dedicated, or just don’t have anything better to do, you run in the morning and the evening.

Of course the army being what it is, can’t quite leave well enough alone. 4 or 5 weeks into people doing this, some 1LT gets the bright idea to hold a ‘race.’ Invitations are posted all over the compound. Oddly enough about 3 days before the event, I spraign an ankle. I’m in a walking splint the day of the race, so I didn’t get to participate. Funny how some things work out that way.

I really didn’t want to race anyway. I think I had taken up the running to try to impress someone, and after a while I realized I wasn’t going to impress them, but I was gaining secondary advantages.

When I was called up for deployment, I think I weighed in at 210. They needed me, and I was able to complete the PT requirements (which I don’t think I could right now) and I lost the 10 or 11 lb they needed me to in order to pass the required limits for my age and height. (They may have done a basic body fat analys as well, I don’t remember.)

When I returned to the US, I weighed in at 180, and people who looked at my ID from when I was deployed generally agreed that I didn’t look like that any more.

Fast forward to today. I weigh more than I did when I was deployed. Actually I weigh more than I did when I started the c25k program. Part of that is the fact that I haven’t really changed my dietary habits much over the past 2 months, so I am probably eating more callories than I need to. Of course part of the weight gain is probably just the normal fluctuations in body weight from day to day, and I think the variation may also be the selection of clothing I wore to the doctor’s office. (not the lightest weight materials, since I rode the motorcycle over.)

That said, my endurance is up segnificantly. So the current program is to take a known distance, one of a few, and start working on improving my run for both distance, and time.

Tonight I walked and ran a 3 mile loop in about 40 min. I’ll do the same loop first thing in the morning, and again tomorrow evening (or night) and I’m aiming for completing the loop in about 38 min or less. I think I can easily cut 2 min off the time overnight. Over the next week I am going to continue doing this and I’m aiming to get down to under 30 min for the loop by the end of the week. That’s a tougher goal, and might not be feasable. We’ll see. I’m then going to add half a mile to the timed distance, which I’m hoping that by Thursday morning of next week I’ll have in under 35 min. At that point I’m going to take a break for a day to prepare for the run on Saturday morning. I may walk Friday night, just to keep my circulation up, but it will be a much shorter distance.

One of the reasons I’m taking this route is that the run I did for 28 min was almost entirely on a flat surface. I did add a short (2 blocks) hilll at the end of the run, but I have no confidence that where the 5k will be run at the end of next week, will be on a level route. Minniapolis has many places where you can run on a level surface for miles if you wish, but in most cases just feet to your left or right you can find a route that is either one long slow rise, or one short steep hill. I don’t know that the route that I am working myself through now demonstrates all of those features, but there are hills, as well as some long flat areas. I can easily come up with alternate routes that have steeper hills, as well as some routes that have long shallow rises.

By the end of the summer, I’m hoping to build my endurance up to run about 5 miles. Who knows, I may hit that objective by the end of July, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I don’t know what my next objective will be. I”ve never been interested in running a marathon, and I don’t think I will take up that challenge. I think it would be a lot better to start with the plan of running 5 miles a day 3 days a week as a long term objective, with 2 or 3 days a week also visiting the Gym. If I get to the point of running 3 hours a week, and working out in the gym 2 or 3 hours a week, I think I’ll be more than happy.

As bad weather kicks in this fall, I will probably be migrating my runs to the gym on a treadmill. My life at the moment is no where near as dull as sitting on a compund in the desert. for 3 months. But I strongly suspect that the health benifits of the routine will be worth it.

C25K is a great program. the ‘Frist day to 5K’ podcasts are a great way to give yourself targets to stick with and a interval training routine to work within. Feel freeto use it, but remember to talk with your doctor before you start any workout routine. I would also advise talking to him or her before you do any significant modification to your workout regine. Rembember that the real reason to do this stuff is to be in better shape, have more fun, and be able to meet and handle chalenges that come your way. It’s work, but you’ll find it’s worth it.

I want a network aware userspace.

“What,” you ask, “is a network aware userspace?”

Starting point. I’ve used computers that have virtual desktops for over 10 years now. BeOS and Linux have both had them, and it’s been available for a lot longer. A Virtual Desktop is something different from a Virtual Machine. Virtual Machines have been all the rage for a few years, so I won’t get too involved in describing them, beyond noting that depending on the type of virtual machine, you can have multiple operating systems running on a computer, and even multiple instances of the same operating system doing the same thing. But going much further than that would be getting off track, so I’ll leave investigating virtual machines to you and your liesure.

A virtual desktop is fundamentally taking everthing you have running on your computer’s desktop and allowing you to get it out of the way for now. You are not closing the applications, it’s just that they no longer appear on the desktop you are using. If you go to the virtual destop manager, and select a different destop, you end up hiding what you were just doing, and seeing what is on that desktop.

How is that useful? Well, let’s say you are writing a paper on video editing. And you are doing it while actually editing a video, getting screen shots of how the application appears at various stages of the process, menu selections, splitting and merging video segments, etc., etc. Well, when grabbing those screen shots, you don’t want to be trying to remember to hide the word processor, and you probably want to be working with an image editor to be able to highlight the important part of your video editor, but you probably don’t want to have to edit out the image editor itself.

Now you could run through editing a video, and take screen shots every 10th of a second, then go through the screen grabs for the important bits, without the video editor running. Then after you have selected the images you want to use, take them into your image editor to make the images useful, then write up your article and insert the images you selecetd and edited. However that implies that you already know what the document is going to contain when you are editing the video first, rather than after the fact. It’s also a bit painful to have to go back into the video editor to capture that variation that you realized as you were writing that you missed.

With a virtual destop, you can take 3 desktops and set things up so that your word processor is on one desktop, your video editor is on a second, and your image editor is on the third. You might also have some other desktops available so that you can have a web browser going, or perhaps a video game, without disturbing your other virtual windows.

While I can say that ‘the sky is the limit’ there really are some limits that should be considered. First up, is the virtual desktop manager. If it gives you a menu of desktops reading ‘Desktop 1′, ‘Desktop 2′… you probably don’t want to have all that many because who can remember what was on desktop 45, or 52? Most Linux distributions have some variety of a matrix of desktops, so you can say set up a desktop of 2 rows of 2 desktops. Your limit here is how much you want to fight with the mouse over whid desktop to select. I’ve found some systems work well up to 3 rows of 4 columns of desktops, others work well as 2 rows of 3 columns.I’ll state that the selection is fairly individualistic, I know people who are comfortable with 2 desktops, and others who want even more than the 12 that I suggest as a reasonable maximum.

And some work best with 1, which is fine. For you, the rest of this may not make much sense.

I use several computers at home, and at work. Ok, 2 at work, but you get the idea.

There may be some debate as to whether I ‘need’ to use ‘multiple’ computers, or whether I use 1 computer at a time, and could be covered by a suffficently fast computer. I won’t get into that. It is an argument that I don’t think has the merit that the people suggesting it are really interested in arguing about. As a worst case example, businesses regularly use multiple computers, usually in on the order of 11 computers per 10 people, simply because on average, having a server for every 10 people seems to make some sort of sense. give people a common place to store files so that they all get backed up to tape. use multiple e-mail servers to reduce the load on any one server. etc.

However since I do use let’s take a sample use case. Let’s say I have a meeting in 2 hours that I need to call into. I can set an alarm on the phone, or perhaps pop up an alert on the computer, but 2 hours from now I may not be in the same room anymore. As I was writing this blog I started sitting in the living room, and after a while moved to a more comfortable chair in a different room. I could drag a lap top around, but I already have computers in both rooms. Why should I haul a laptop around to work in the different areas. Use ‘dragging the laptop around’ for going someplace where you arenot going to be plugged into the home network.

Because I am writing this on a web based system, all I had to do was save the state of my writing on the computer I was woking on in the living room, then pick up the draft on a different computer in the other room. For the meeting in 2 hours, I’m going to be considering the possiblity that I’m going to go and watch some TV. Considering that what I consider a TV is actually a collection of computers that display through a video projector, there really is no reason that I couldn’t have alerts displayed as on screen messages there. Well with some stipulations. I would need some way to acknowledge the alert, and better yet the acknowledging of that alert should clear the alert anywhere else. Also I don’t want it dissrupting certain systems at certain times. There really is no reason for a twitter message on my desktop to present itself as an OSD on the TV, especially if there is someone else watching TV. Right?

Well, that is really only ‘part’ of the issue. Another area that I am intereste in is having the ability to actually move an application from one computer’s display to another. In theory I could have an array of computers that I am logged into, showing the virtual desktops of each of them. I grab the window on the desktop I am currently in, and drag it to the desktop of the system I am going to move to, or better yet when I am at the system I am going to continue working at, I can pull up a display of the virtual desktop for the computer I was working at, and drag the application to my current desktop.

Cinerella is an application that is used widwly on the Linux platform. It’s primary use from my experience is to span a desktop across multiple displays. While I have no qualms with doing that, it’s only a close approximation of what I’m looking for. Another useful app is Synaptic. This allows you to plug in a keyboard and mouse in one computer, and it will reach across to another computer so you can do things on both computers without having to switch back and forth between multiple mice and keyboards. Oh, you still need the multiple keyboards, or possibly a kv switch to go between computers for logging in, but it still doesn’t allow you to say drag an application running on one computer over onto another computer.

Long term the solution, whatever it is, should be OS agnostic. If I am editing a document in Open Office Writer, either the application should be able to move it’s display to another computer, ne X11, or if the application is already available on the other computer, it should launch the application on that computer and provide a means for that application to access the file for editing. Maybe that involves syncing the app up to a server and down to the destination computer. Or something else. What it shouldn’t involve is the requirement for a virtual machine to be running on one computer or the other and a citrix, terminal server or rdp session be established to view the application. Those are all wonderful applications and interfaces,but they are not a multi-system spanning interface. Sorry.

What will it take to get such a UI built? I don’t know. It may never get built. After all the vast majority of computer users live with one computer at home, (if they have one at home) and a separate computer at work.

Not an exercise posting.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a ham. Might be considered an understatement there, but anyway. I was assembling a power adapter for one of my radio’s today, and went to test it. I tested it ‘wrong’ this time.

The correct method of testing a power cable is to take a multimeter, put it in ohm or short test, and make three or six tests, depending on whether it is a 2 conductor, or 3 conductor power cord. The first test is obvious, make sure you have connectivity from one end of the cord to the other, on the expected lead. In the process, you may also test to make sure that you are not providing a short between any two conductors.

What did I do? Plugged it in. Twice. The first time I wasn’t really expecting much, simply because the battery in question was dead. I kind of thought it was, but that’s a different matter.

The second time I was ticked. Then burned. Ticked first. I had plugged a radio into the cable, then plugged the cable into a battery. I was expecting the radio to power on. So when it didn’t, I was ticked. Then I realized that the wire was getting a bit warm. Well, ok, hot. No, HOT!

Can’t hold onto it long enough to separate it, but the wire attached directly to the battery is cool enough, so I ripped it off there. After the wire cooled off enough to handle, I separated the power poles, and have discarded the remains. the insulation melted, and smoked. As I say I had attempted to grab the wire to separate it ther, and ended up burning a thumb and finger.

Yes, smoke. Wire got hot enough that it melted. When that happens, unless you have some very special insulating material, it’s going to go up in smoke. Or at least melt significantly, and part of it will go up in smoke. But the important part here is that wire that’s hot enough to melt, will burn you, and most of the things you have in your house right now.

Getting back to a multi-meter, they do pass some voltage down the line. However the current involved is very small. If you have a short in the line, the meter pegs to zero ohms, or if the meter has a continuity tester, it will beep or emit a tone. There is a current limiting resistor in the path, so you won’t have the experience I ran into when plugging into a 7.5 amp hour battery.

“7.5 amp hour battery?” you ask. Ok, batteries are rated in ‘amp hour’ or in some cases ‘cold crank amps’ I won’t go into what cold crank amps is, it’s pretty specific to car starting batteries, and if you want to know more, I’d suggest looking to your auto mechanic. When batteries are rated in ‘amp hours’ though, or ‘milliamp hours’ it means that if you have a load that draws 1 amp, the battery should last this that many hours. In theory this is somewhat linear, in that if you have a 5 amp hour battery, that giving it a load of 5 amps will provide a useful life of 1 hour. It’s a nice theory, but the reality is that as the amperage load goes up, the battery life drops at a rate that is not linear. Take that same 5 amp hour battery and give it a 10 amp load, it will die in a bit less than half an hour. Give it a 20 amp load, and you’re probably going to be lucky to get 10 minutes out of the battery, much less 15 min.

So what sort of lifetime will a dead short give you? That’s an interesting question. In this case there was a stretch of wire, an estimate being about 12 inches, or about 2 feet of wire, that was actually producing a very low but existing resistance. I’m sure it was less than an ohm, but there was some resistance. More resistance than the leads that were directly attached to the battery. It was enough resistance that the flow of electrons generated heat. As noted above.

So approximately how many ohms of resistance? Or how many amps was the circuit drawing? Well, given that the resistance of the wire was less than an ohm, we can do some rough back of the envelope calculations. According to Ohms law, Voltage is the product of resistance and amperage. (Product means you multiply the other two elements.) In this case I happen to know that the voltage of the battery is 12, because that’s the variety of battery I was using.

So to get amperage, or resistance, I need to take what I ‘know’ and divide 12 by that to get the other. Since resistance can’t therefore be zero, or we would have a divide by zero problem, let’s use some sample loads and see what happens. Let’s say we have a 1 amp fuse in the circuit, and we turn a variable resistor until the 1 amp fuse blows. What is the resistance on the variable resistor? Presuming that the actual load that the fuse blows at is 1 amp, to determine the resistance, we divide the voltage, 12 by the amperage, 1 and we end up with a resistance of 12 ohms. If we get a 12 amp fuse, and adjust the resistor until it blows the fuse again, what do we get? Well, 12 volts divided by 12 amps, gives us 1 ohm. If you cause a 60 amp fuse to blow, the resistance has to be about 0.2 ohms.

If you want, you can use the power law now to determine how many watts are being generated. Power in Watts is equivalent to voltage times amperage. So the 60 amp draw on a 12 volt battery gives you a power draw of 720 watt load. Considering that a light bulb that draws 200 watts is hot enough to melt and ignite nylon that is not in contact with the light bulb, that’s theoretically close enough to what I saw for the purpose of this blog. If you want to try the experiment, might I suggest doing so at a good electronics and electrical bench, on isolated circuits. So let’s say that 2 feet of this wire adds approximately .2 ohms of resistance to the load.

Be careful doing this stuff. I actually had fomal training in soldering, and electronics. If you’ve followed the entire blog to this point, you’re well on your way to being a geek. You will probably do the same thing that I just demonstrated that someone with formal training in this stuff, should have known not to do. I had the fortune of doing it with something that theoretically should not cause a problem. However 60 amps is nothing to play around with. For that matter it takes less than .2 amps to stop your heart. I would certainly much rather not have your doing something like that on my conscience. So let your Power Shorts be the ones that leave you feeling you can run 10 miles without breaking a sweat. Not leaving you concerned about the safety of your home.

I seem to forget each week that the reason I am doing this is to get better. This week the ‘improvement’ to meet was simply 3 more minutes than I ran last week. This next week it’s just running 2 more minutes. While I won’t call today’s run ‘easy’ by any means, it definately was doable. I might even have been able to complete it yesteday, though I got several other things done yesterday, so I shan’t complain.

Walking out to gegin the run is a bit interesting these days. It’s almost as if a part of me doesn’t want to do this. Oh, I’m not talking about the psychological battle looking at running 28 min, or 30, or trying to complete a 5k run. What I’m talking about is things like as I’m walking out, feeling like something is in my shoe, or in my sock. Maybe some sand, or smething. That said, once I start the music for the run, I don’t have that difficulty.

Since it has been a couple of days since I last ran, Friday evening in fact, I could feel the tightness of my legs as I started. Oh, not the same tightness as not having stretched, more along the lines of muscles realizing that they are going to have to do some work now.

The watch I regularly wear these days has a stopwatch function, though it can be difficult to use at times. Amoung the anoyances are the start/stop button does have a tendency to not start, or stop the stopwatch. The minute display is small and difficult to read, (is that 7, or 8?) but it’s on the watch, so it’s generally available. I chose not to take either a GPS, or a phone with me today, I went back to my simple MP3 Player, loaded up with the one track for week 8, and along with my keys that’s about all I took with me today. It’s not a mater of running light, just that today I decided that I didn’t really need to carry all that much that could confuse what I am doing. After all I’m going out to run, not really test new geek toys.

I had initially picked a turn around point that was about where I turned around last Friday. It’s a good point to turn around once I have my time up to where I want it and can start working on my speed a bit more. But as I was running I had a cood couple of minutes before I would have gotten there, and I looked at my watch and realized that not only did I not need to go that far, but that I was already close to my turnaround time. So where a fork in the trail existed, I turned around and started heading back.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I hate hills. Well, I realize that inthe long term I’m going to have to deal with them, and occasionally running up, and down them is going to happen. I got to about 2 minutes from the end of my run and off to my right was a long gentle sloap. I decided that rather thna run along the flat, and since I was that close to the end of my run, that I could probably handle running up that slope. Adn when I got to the top I realized I still had some time left, and off to my left was even more up-hill, if not nearly as steep. So I went that way till the end of run indicator came up. And my run was done.

Oh, my day is far from over. I’ll be heading to the gym this afternoon for another hour of workout, but I met the objective for this morning, and this week, even if it was longer than I like, so Onward.

Have fun, go run!

And I’ve determined at least part of what’s wrong with my APRS stuff in my car.

No, I won’t go into what APRS is, beyond saying it’s part of the amateur radio hobby. If you have found my blog, and you have questions, there are loads of resources that will tell you more than I am about to say. So go search and find. As some might say, the truth is out there.

In my car there’s a link from under my dash, to the trunk that provides a power conduit for my APRS tracker, gps and radio. A couple of months ago, the fuse blew. I replaced it, and it blew again. That can only mean a couple of things, neither of them really good.. Either something in my dash was blowing the fuse, or something in the  trunk, or on the way to the trunk. Sinc that was easier to ‘fix’, by clipping the lead to the trunk, I did that, replaced the fuse again, and happy dash. So something on the way to, or in the trunk is being a problem.

On rading how to get my position to show up for SkyWarn this week, and noticing the interest in possible watcher’s for this evening, I decided that today was the day to find and fix whatever is wrong with the APRS stuff in my trunk. And I may yet get something ‘working,’ though at the apparent expense of a radio that I wasn’t planning on replacing. Well, that’s why you make plans, so that life can alter them. Right?

Troubleshooting. Check the wire to the trunk. Not shorted between the leads. good conductivity end to end. Check.

APRS tracker? Check that’s working.

Spare battery from the trunk to power up the radio?  Well, not the best, but we’ve got something to work with. Check.

Plug the battery into the distribution system, Dead battery. Hmm. Ok, only thing I haven’t checked here separately was the radio. Pop the power cable for that off the distribution block. check draw across the leads, Short. Ok, that looks like where my problem is. What am I going to have to do to solve? Well, quick solution would be to hang the connector off a different radio, except that the connection for the APRS tracker to the radio was a custom job. I’ll just have to creat another custom I guess. So what radio? Well, the Quick and dirty solution is to use another radio already mounted in the trunk. It has the advantage of being right there. The disadvantage is that the wiring for the mike is diferent. And from a quick look at the drawings of the two connectors, while I could probably cobble together a quick sollution, that’s not the ‘right’ thing to do.

Why not? Well, that radio is in the trunk for a specific reason. That reason has nothingto do with APRS, and I don’t want to break things that way. So, using that radio is ‘out.’ Even if it is possible.

Long term I want a different radio in there any way, and now is the time to build that up. Of course now I have to dig up the specs for setting that radio up for APRS. That’s not particularly difficult, as I have already done some stuff like that, it’s just going to take a bit of soldering, and waiting until I have a connector of the appropriate type for that radio. There is one already here some place, and I’ll spend a bit of time looking yet tonight, but I suspect that I will have to wait till I can gt to the hardware store tomorrow for the final solution. We’ll see.

More to follow.

You wouldn’t travel across town to save $.05 per gallon for a 15 gallon fill would you? Well, perhaps if ‘Across town’ matched ‘Across the street.’ But if you are talking about a 5 mile trip through traffic, probably not.

I’ve been hearing some ‘interesting’ arguments for, or rather against, some people’s pet peeves. Don’t like the idea that perhaps humans are contributing to something called ‘Global Warming’? Well, then it’s probably in your interest to publicly declare that you don’t listen to any scientist who notes that carbon dioxide is a green house gas, or that from the looks of things, just might believe that global warming is a problem. And while you’re at it, note that glaciers are growing, we don’t seem to be seeing an increase in temperatures over the past decade, and well, these things all go in cycles anyway.

I’m reminded of the guy who won’t get the dripping faucet in the kitchen fixed because the amount of water being lost in a year is less than the amount of rain that falls on his yard in an hour during a single rain storm. The loss is just not worth the effort to fix what he doesn’t think is broken.

The reality is that yes there are issues with what is being reported as global warming. Glaciers may be moving faster, but I have not seen any evidence that they are growing. If all that were affecting the size of glaciers were the amount of light and heat being radiated by the sun, then right now the glaciers should be growing. Our recent sunspot numbers have been going down, not just due to the fact that we are at a very low spot in the solar cycle, but also because the trend in the solar cycles has been lower as well.

One of the other things that strongly affects the global temperature, is the atmospheric albedo. That’s the indicator of how much light is reflected off of our atmosphere rather than passed through it to reach the ground. That indicator is very much affected by the atmospheric pollutants that are the result of burning various fuels and chemicals. Smoke is one word for it, but it’s also recognized as ‘particulate’ in that very often it is very small particles that are being carried into the upper atmosphere by updrafts and such.

But we put almost nothing in the air compared to a single volcanic eruption. Well, that’s true, but something else that’s true is that with the exception of shield volcanoes such as the Hawaiian Islands, nearly every volcanic eruption is a series of brief violent eruptions followed by long periods of idle time. We have college graduates this year who’s sole remembrance of Mt. St. Helens is the video footage and textbook material they may have seen in high school or on the History Channel. In another couple of years the same will be true for Mt Pinatubo.

Why do I bring up Pinatubo? Well, it’s an example of the type of effect you might see from a single volcano compared to the results of man made pollution. Pinatubo went off about the same time as the first gulf war was going on. If you were watching the oil well fires from the Kuwait Oil Fields at the end of the first Gulf War, you recall the plums of black smoke trailing off to the east. Within days of Pinatubo’s eruption you could actually watch the effect of amount of material being put into the stratosphere because it could be seen masking the plums from the oil well fires.

So, yes a volcano does put out significantly more material into the atmosphere than humans are.

The thing is, humans are doing two things that volcanoes don’t. We are putting pollutants and burning fossil fuels all the time, not just in brief eruptions every so often. And we are increasing our emissions every year, as opposed to volcanoes which generally put about the same amount of material out over time.

We also have another issue that will be cropping up shortly. While the US does burn more fossil fuels per person than any other country, we put less in the way of particulate matter than most other countries do. This has nothing to do with an interest in reducing green house gasses, or changing our atmospheric albedo. It has to do with the fact that this particulate matter tends to be bad for the health of the people around those places that could be putting it into the atmosphere. So our coal powered electric plants and our Iron foundries use ’scrubbers’ in their smoke stacks to pull that material out of the exhaust. As a result we see less Acid Rain and the like polluting our streams and rivers, and tearing down our infrastructure. We are not perfect by any means, but what we are doing is the result of social pressure on those businesses to help look after the health of the community.

Many ‘developing’ nations have not done that yet. So what will happen in when they do? I’m not sure. Perhaps the ‘problem children’ creating the pollution will be many other smaller countries. Or perhaps we will finally see the result of the increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, as sunlight does interact with it.

Is carbon dioxide a green house gas? Well, an easy place to check would be to see what planets with higher concentrations of carbon dioxide experience. Any candidates? Well there’s Venus. It’s got loads of carbon dioxide in it’s atmosphere. Since it’s got lots of sunlight available, and all that carbon dioxide, it’s a prime place for plant life. Right? Well, not so much. Turns out plant life as we know it doesn’t much like temperatures hot enough to melt solder. Mostly because water does not work out very well at those temperatures, but that’s a different matter.

The math is out there. If the only thing that was ‘keeping us warm’ was the sun, then the temperature of the planet earth would be pretty much like the temperature experienced on the Moon. Averaging 107 C during the day, and -153 C at night, or -45 C over all. Two factors are at work helping the temperature on earth. First is the fact that our planet still has nuclear radioactivity happening keeping us warm. It does things like give us volcanoes. The other factor is that we have large bodies of water, and an atmosphere with a variety of gasses that respond in various ways to sunlight. Carbon dioxide is one of those, and yes it does behave as a greenhouse gas. That means that sunlight absorbed by the earth, warmed and re-emitted as heat, is absorbed by CO2 and on average, half of it is re-emitted back towards the earth.

Well, OK, so CO2 is a green house gas. But even the most pessimistic report is saying that the temperature is only going up a couple of degrees over a century. That doesn’t seem like much. I can’t see it doing things like raising sea levels, or melting glaciers…

The average temperature during the last ice age was only about 2 degrees cooler than the average temperature over the past 5 centuries. Yet that 2 degree difference was enough to sculpt the great lakes out of the North American continent. A 2 degree difference changes when the first and last freeze of the year is by months. And that is far more important to what is happening to glaciers and Ice build up than what the highest temperature day of the summer, or the coldest temperature day of winter is.

The thing is, I’m pretty sure that with where we are right now, there’s not a lot that we’ll be seeing that can be done to improve the situation. Nanotech might help strip carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. I can imagine it being used to build carbon Bucky tubes for space elevators or even just sheets of carbon. The problem is that as neat as such imaginative activities may seem, I’m not sure how long such a ’solution’ would take to materialize. And to tell the truth, I think that there is a lot of other things that will be happening first.

People talk about how we’re spending our children and grand children’s inheritance. I’m pretty sure that it will hit us even earlier. We may have caused an issue that we’ll be seeing affecting our standard of living in a negative way within our own lifetimes. I’m kind of hoping that things like nano-technology, and advances in computation and problem solving will result in a resurgence within our extended lifetimes, but I think we’ll have to take what we get.

From what I’ve been seeing, and hearing, the vast majority of the people who are claiming that global warming is not an issue, are sticking their heads in the sand. My suspicion is that they will be complaining about people saying ‘I told you so.’ But I don’t know. And while I think the evidence is there for what I suspect is coming down the line, I’m pretty sure that all that evidence is actually corelation, not necesarily causation. It’s entirely possible that even if global warming from our current state happens within our lifetimes, that the actual cause has nothing to do with humanity, other than possibly as Gia using it’s abilities to kill us off for our own stupidity.

Questions is right. Well, I ran today, and I felt a lot better about it while running than on Wednesday, but still working out sore muscles and such from the Tuesday Gym Experience. Going there again tomorrow, thoug I have not heard about pricing, so I may notactually be working with a trainier tomorrow. We’ll see. Then another runon  Sunday. (Monday?)

Worst today was probably the feeling of wanting to have somethingto drink (water) I didn’t have a need to get something to drink (thirsty) but knew that that was in the cards at some point. The conversion from drinking Diet Mt. Dew to non-carbonated, no caffine beverages is taking it’s own time, but is happening.

Hardware problems today. Hardly something unusuall, but it did affect my routine. I didn’t want to be carying around a mic on the headphones today, not that it’s obtrusive or anthing,but the headphones that came with the cell phone have a button on them that switches the headphones from audio playback to ‘phone’ mode headsets. I suppose if you are out at the park, sitting watching the birds and the dogs, that being able to press a button to answer the phone is nice. I’m not really happy with it though. I think one of the problems I may have been having on Wednesday may have been tied to that, as the dial pad was one of the things that I was seeing on the screen andI don’t think that that was a shake managed device, or app. In any case the problem today appears to be related to the headphone adapter for my phone. It appears thatit is not providing a solid contact for the headphones at some level. The headphones would sound really distorted, which I otherwise would have thought of as a problem with the playback codec needing to be reset. In fact I even power cycled the phone to see if that would help. No good. I finally realized that I was hearingdifferent results as I actually moved the headphone plug around with the adapter. So I appear to have a faulty adapter (headphones have been working in other devices, but I won’t entirely rule them out either.) Most anoying was that Buddy Runner was trying to give me status points and i could hear that it was ’saying’ something, but not hear what was being said.

In all I suspect that I would have been better off without the headphones at all. I may even give that a go.

Nope, didn’t complete the run today. Though I think I did better than Wednesday. I’m contemplating repeating this week, or even going back and repeating week 7 again, though I think I completed that week acceptably. I had been thinking that this week was 30 min of running, but it’s only 28. Next week should be 30. It doesn’t seem like a huge step to add 3 minutes of running to what I did last week, but then the conditions are a bit different this week as well, with the workout at the gym.

Oh, well, enough for now. Have to get cleaned up for work, and if I have time, stop in and pick up a pair of shoes and shorts for the gym. Not really interested in wearing the running shorts again, though the style is OK. (I really need to add to my exercise wardrobe.)

Stay safe. Run. (28 days to the 5k!)