Category: Misc
June 25, 2008
Cool Polyphemus Moth on Our Door (Updated)
He barely moved around while I was taking pictures, even with the flash. Using a macro, I was easily under an inch away at times. It's hours later and he's still there, too.
The slideshow here is from my Picasa account, but the Flickr image set can be found here. I wish Flickr could do the same sort of thing so easily without any additional tools. Oh well, this works well enough. He was too boring to take video of and he didn't even open up his wings.
The other night, up in our top-floor office, we had one of these flapping around in a window. At first we thought it was a bat because of the size, but we quickly realized it wasn't. It, or one like it, visited us on subsequent nights, too.
I looked up what moths eat because I was hoping maybe big moths would eat things like mosquitos. Sadly, it doesn't work that way. If anything, they absorb moisture through their long tongues. Many adult moths don't eat at all and some don't even have mouths. I guess that means they aren't terribly long lived in their adult form. As a caterpillar, though, it can apparently eat 86,000 times its weight in just two months. Too many of these can strip a tree naked.
Still, it's neat. It's also so amazingly furry that I kept wanting to just try to pet it. I didn't. I was worried about hurting it or simply scaring it away. Trying to pet it without touching it's wings would be pretty hard. Speaking of wings, you can see in one of the images just how furry it's wings are, too.
Anyway, enjoy the pictures. :)
Update: These moths natively exist across all of the US and Canada except Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, and Newfoundland. This particular moth is male because of it's large antennae. They're used to detect female pheramones. This site has much more information.
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(0)June 24, 2008
Neat Weather Underground Feature
I've been using Weather Underground alongside weather.com for a while now as it gives an alternate view on things, even if not particularly more accurate. Just today, though, I followed a link that generated a great Google Maps view with lots of overlays that can be turned on and off. It's quite wonderful -- they call it the WunderMap. Also neat is that you can create links to it -- the one I got this screen shot off of is right here.
One great feature is the ability to turn animation on and off as well as the "storm track" feature -- you can see it in the shot as the long white arrows. These seem most accurate for figuring out of a particular piece of weather will cross your area or not.
Additionally, at their iPhone site (simply i.wund.com), they have a nice summary page for zip codes that can even animate the radar image. The whole page is nice, quick, and designed well for the iPhone. Their "tab bar" is pretty well done, too, even if it isn't a "real" one.
The iPhone site works great in Firefox but draws more accurately in Safari, of course.
Anyway, I just found these to be interesting, even if well known to others.
May 26, 2008
The Playmobil Experiment
So, a few months ago my wife begged for a Playmobil set. I looked over what she wanted and thought it seemed fine. She ordered it. When I got out here, I got to see it all set up. It was a great, happy forest scene across two pieces of furniture.
Then her brother came out to visit this weekend. And, without prompting, made some changes. This prompted Laurie to create a collection on Flickr, in my account, for our Playmobil Expirement. Her text on the collection sums it up best:
A tranquil forest setting comes into contact with household visitors...
So here's how it works.
We have this great Playmobil set that looks a lot like our house, yard, etc. We set it up in the spare bedroom, which will eventually be a kids room, but for now is a guest room. Then we invite our houseguests to customize it as they see fit. And we document the results in picture and video form, as well as do an exit interview to make sure we understand what we're seeing...
The normal configuration will be available later. Laurie had to reset it and we haven't had a chance to take those pictures just yet. These are more entertaining, anyway.
May 12, 2008
When a 7.8 Isn't Top News
I started going through my Google Reader feeds when I ran across folks blogging about the earthquake in China some number of hours ago. From the chatter about it, the quake sounded pretty big.
So, I figured I would go over to msnbc to check out more info about it. The top story, though, wasn't about the quake. Instead, it was about a large storm that went through a few states killing a couple of dozen people.
What a night, huh?
The quake, on the other hand, was supposedly felt from Beijing to as far south as Hanoi. That's a rather large radius, especially to not make top spot on news sites.
Don't get me wrong; the storm is probably more correctly the top news. That's really the part that's sad. It's even the same on Google News, which is supposedly all automatically generated.
Anyway, I'm off to find happy news. Does that exist anymore?
August 13, 2007
DHL Really is Bad
I can't even count how many times I've had very bad shipping experiences with DHL. From claims of items being in warehouses and having to wait for them yet the people not being able to find them to many, many late deliveries.
This latest, though, is quite amusing even though my box arrived two days late on two day shipping. It was supposed to arrive last Wednesday. However, I was quite busy last Wednesday so I went home. Then I realized that I didn't get my Amazon prime shipment.
Read the rest of "DHL Really is Bad"July 21, 2007
Harry Potter and the Case of the Early (?) UPS Delivery
So, I can't figure out what's going on. Amazon, who guarantees delivery of the Deathly Hallows today, shows that we'll get getting our book by UPS.Checking the package tracking, however, shows that it was delivered. Yesterday. At 8:41am. To "the front desk." By an unknown name.
Uhhhhhh....
First off, we don't have a front desk at our house. Second off, there is no way they were supposed to deliver Friday. Thirdly, we didn't get a package yesterday of any kind.
What's going on with this? Other blogs are showing that they are tracking the package normally.
I don't get it. Maybe we should have gone out last night after the audio CDs, afterall.
Or maybe we'll not be getting it today and Amazon will have to refund our money.
Erf.
UPDATE:
So, I found out what happened with this order. As it turns out, Amazon shipped the book Wednesday via two-day UPS shipping to the local post office. The shipping label then had instructions for the local post office to deliver it to us. Since it's our post office, they would deliver the next day. That day was Saturday; yesterday. Yes, it did come on time. That's all I'm going to say about it, though. ;)
March 2, 2007
Why CompUSA is Troubled
Or, why they are closing 126 of 229 stores or over half of their retail chain.
I recently had a dealing with CompUSA that left me with never wanting to buy anything from them again. Now, I should say, that I hardly ever bought from them before, but I would often go in and look around because, well, I like perusing such stores to poke at stuff. ;)
Right before our trip to Maui, we had a need for a small, point-and-shoot camera. I've already talked about the Canon SD900. Well, we first got it at CompUSA the night before our flight and about an hour before the store closed. I though the price was decent and within the "good enough" category. However, when I got back I found that it wasn't even close. CompUSA had the camera for $425 ($25 off) and the 2GB SD cards for $40 with $10 rebate, which I thought was a good price. I didn't do any research though as we didn't have any time to. Well, I found that Amazon had the camera for $350 and the same sized SD cards for $12.
Looking at the receipt I found that not only was the return policy only 14 days for the camera (21 for the cards) instead of the more usual 30 days at places such as Fry's, I found that they also charged a 15% restocking fee! I've never had to pay a restocking fee before. It seems silly, to me.
However, as it turns out, after subtracting the restocking fee for the camera, returning both cards, and taking the $65 loss, I was still able to go to Amazon and buy the camera and cards for $100 less than I got back. Sure, if I'd done that in the first place I would have saved $165 total, but I didn't.
When returning, they weren't even willing to deal with me. They just accepted the fact that their prices were actually so horrible that the restocking fee wasn't even an issue to me. I'm sure that to restock the item, they'd actually end up having to pay more than the $65 for the labor and overhead plus the reduction in the cost of the open box item. Had they made a counter offer that was close enough, I might have just gone for it. Although, by then, I really didn't want them to keep much of my money.
So, that's why I think they are having to close down most of their stores and will ultimately either fail or get acquired by a competing and better chain. They have terrible prices and their return policy is even worse.
February 28, 2007
TV Sets Your Internal Clock
That is, when you watch normal television, you'll find yourself knowing what time it is more frequently than if you are watching other stuff. For instance, if you're just watching HD-DVDs, streaming media, downloaded media, and other such stuff you'll just finish watching stuff and then wonder what time it is.
If you watch TV, though, you're constantly reminded of what time it is. For instance, just about everyone who watches TV knows that if you put Leno or Letterman on it's around 11:30pm and the news has just ended.
You even get to know the day of the week better because of what's on and the constant reminder with the stations own ads.
Why is this?
Likely, it's some simple form of conditioning. Through repetition, you learn to know what time shows are on. You will also learn the day of the week shows are on. After long enough, you'll get to be able to just know what time it is based on what's on TV. Many people live in households where the TV is just always on. It's turned on when people get home. It's used as background to whatever is going on, including making dinner, eating dinner, doing homework and housework, and pretty much throughout the whole evening and, in some households, the whole morning.
The household I grew up with was somewhat like this. In fact, I was someone like this until just over 6 years ago when Laurie and I decided to drop cable and not have any sort of paid TV. We didn't have any TV reception, either, until about a month ago when we discovered we had digital TV reception in our area. Since we switched to using Netflix to watch shows, we weren't totally out of the loop. However, the times of the shows didn't matter.
For Heroes, though, we used the net to catch up (sort of) and now we've watched it a couple of times on the air. Of course, if you watch it, you're already well aware of the fact that we've watched it on a Monday evening (9pm, we're not central time... heh).
A strange thing that's happened to me with the TV, though. I've gotten to staying up later. Sure, I'm blogging more in front of it, but it also tends to keep me up. We haven't been following Studio 60, but it's on and it has a couple of great actors from the West Wing and, of course, Friends. After that, I'll probably watch most of the news because occasionally there is something interesting. After that, how can I possibly turn off Leno?
"It's a sickness!" exclaims Laurie. It's addicting, too. I agree, though.
February 7, 2007
An Amazing Clock!
The story over at this persons site about him building a clock entirely out of a rare wood from Australia is just amazing. The person had never built a clock before. It sounds like they were pretty good with wood already, but the sort of challenge building a clock presents is far beyond almost anything else you can build out of wood. The wood chosen, Western Australian Sheoak (as opposed to maleoak?), turned out to very hard.
Now, I don't know anything about clocks (well, physical ones, at least) but one of the pieces, the escapement, looks truly amazing. The building of it is also quite amazing. They heated the wood to make it harder. This removes moisture from the wood and if cooled in the right shape, it becomes harder than it was.
The claim is that it took 3,000 hours of labor over nearly three years. That's really amazing to me. You can build small airplanes from kits in that amount of time. Granted, part of the time was rebuilding an escapement that broke -- and they took 3 months a piece.
I've always been fascinated with physical engineering feats like this. Sure, to some people, the behavior of software is like magic. To me, though, these sorts of devices are like magic. Sure, all of the physics makes sense, but the level of patience, extreme levels of precision, and just shear beauty of the gears and wood pieces is really impressive and fascinating to me. It's one thing to build a precision clock out of metal and buying pieces and putting them together. It's a completely different thing to build it entirely out of wood and with all pieces self build and measured.
Thanks to the MAKE: blog for the link to this.
February 1, 2007
The Obsolescence of Incandescents
So, a friend sent me this article about the possible banning of the traditional incandescent light bulb by 2012 in California. My first thought was that it would be nearly impossible to do that. Except that I thought to think about my own house and every light in our house is already either fluorescent or LED that isn't on a dimmer switch.
And it's not because of wanting to save the environment and such. That's a nice side effect, of course, but the most immediate need was to save a few greenbacks (or whatever color they are these days). Out here in California, PG&E has relatively high electricity rates, especially for those who actually use any power. Here is a snippet from a recent bill that shows the rate scale (hopefully it's OK to share this):
As you can see, any additional usage is at least at a rate of over 32 cents per KWh. We recently had some recessed lighting installed in our house. With the flick of a switch, 6 lights come on that aren't on a dimmer. If these 6 lights had been 60 watt bulbs and they were only on a third of the time (8 hours a day, shorter than a typical working day) they would have cost us $28 a month. However, PG&E also does rebates on screw-in type fluorescent light bulbs. We found some large packs at Costco that were a great price. So, we used six 7 watt light bulbs instead that easily produce the same amount of light. These would only cost us about $3.25 a month if we ran them 8 hours a day. That's a monthly savings of $25 for just one room installation. There are plenty of other examples of this in our house. The savings are, of course, even more if you're replacing 100 watt bulbs with the 12 watt fluorescent variety (88% reduction in wattage).
So, I got to thinking... perhaps they won't have to ban incandescent lights here in California. Just to save a few bucks, everyone will be going with fluorescent. Not only that, but they last longer. Some of our screw in fluorescent lights have been around for years now without any trouble.
Recently I also got a couple of screw-in LED bulbs. These only use 1.2 watts each (or in the 6 light, 8 hour a day example above, that's just over 50 cents a month to run). However, they have a blue cast to them when used around regular lights and even the new fluorescent lights. They also are bit more directional than I would like and not quite as bright as a standard 60 watt bulb. However, at this sort of power use, I'll find places to put them since they almost don't even show up on the bill.
Do you still use incandescent light bulbs? Why? Have you switched to any other kind of light? Why?