Chaos / Order by cogdogblog posted 30 Mar ’08, 11.54am MDT PST on flickr I finally got the pieces of my office desk up here, and with some cussing, drilling, glue managed to re-assemble it (a few of those cam/post things got mangled in my hast of packing up). So on the right side, meet […]
I cannot even remember what I was doing poking around San Francisco with Google Maps, but I was looking around The City with the Street View option turned on it was along a stretch of a street I notice that as I move around, I was following the same car. This makes sense as the […]
+ = I have documented the hungry actions of the squirrels who raid my bird feeders and again. Fresa, the cutest beagle in the world just gets wild when she spots the squirrel, and gets riles up in chase/hunt mode. As I just got my Canon Powershot back from repair, I was equipped today to […]
A majority of my blog posts are spontaneous spurts, yet sometimes, an idea takes root somewhere in the gray matter, and just sits there quietly demanding to be let out. This one has been rattling around, and tonight demands to see that publish button clicked. So there is a strand here, some storytelling, and a […]
The travel route for where I live now in Strawberry to Phoenix is a lovely drive down highway 87, the “Beeline Highway”, that romps up and down some fabulous jumbled up geology, connecting the Sonoran desert to the forest plateau. Ir cab be idyllic… until something happens to close the highway, as the alternative routes can be 60, 80 miles of detour. Lats summer a fuel truck lost control on a steep downhill, crashed, and the northbound highway lanes “melted” from the heat of the explosion.
And just Friday, I heard, that a landslide caused by water running below the surface which loosened rock, buckled the highway, and it is still closed as repairs continue. So with some curiosity I’ve been Google mapping some bits and pieces, and have been dismayed that none of the news actually provides the map location of this incident. Shouldn’t most online news be geocoded to map??
So, in normal conditions, the drive from Strawberry to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix is 107 miles, calculated simply by plugging in these end points into the driving directions tool on GMaps.
If I had to drive today, with Highway 87 closed from Bush Highway to State Rt 188, I’d have to take 188 to Globe, and then Highway 60 into Phoenix. I’m not sure how many people know tis, but with one of the Google Maps driving directions displayed, I can click on spot on that path, say where highway 87 meets State Route 188, and I can drag the path onto 188 to change the route. This detour makes a total distance of 176 miles, a 69 mile detour!
I am a die hard Google junkie. For more than 2 years, iGoogle has been home on every computer I use, while others clamor about their RSS tools, I just dig and dig Google reader, Gmail is my hub for all my non-twitter communication 😉 and I put all my time into Google calendar.
Yet, I have a gripe. It’s the menus that are supposed to make it easy to be moving around my Googlespace. For the longest time, there were no menus in Google Reader. Then a few weeks ago, Reader just disappeared from all menus.
But lately I am just looking at these menus, static, and saying, “Boy are you dumb.” Let’s say I start in Gmail…
I’ve just swapped the spam “defense” here from SpamKarma2 to Askimet. The word is that Dr Dave is going to top updating it. Sk2 has sure needed regular attention lately, a lot of moderation, and then I found out that friends of mine were being tossed its captcha, and I hate bad captchas. Bad news. […]
Caveat Emptor– this blog post has nothing to do with technology, learning, spam, WordPress, twitter, or the other junk that makes up the focus here. Its just about what I did with a tree. I could make a stretch and leap to something about learning objects, re-usable content… but that can be an exercise left for the reader.
Now that I am living in Strawberry Arizona, a small town in the middle of a National Forest, at 6000 feet elevation, a number of environment differences are obvious. First, form where I lived before in Scottsdale, the city has a progressive recycling program- paper, cans, bottles, plastic go in a big giant can, it disappears, and we assume it is all recycled. That story is another blog post.
But in a small town, recycling, transporting, etc is likely cost prohibitive. There is a collection for aluminum can at the fire station, and WalMart in Payson takes paper can cardboard. How I hate now tossing glass and soup cans in the trash! And most of my paper has been used for starting fires in the wood stove.
And heat is an issue, cause it gets damn cold; well below freezing December through end of February, and even through May, can get to or below freezing. I have propane heat provided as a utility (flows out of a pipe form somewhere), but propane prices have gone through the roof- the paper from Payson has stories of people closing rooms, lowering the thermostat to 60, and still paying $500/month. The place I am in now is small (less than 900 square feet) so it heat up well, but I’ve been trying to do most of my heat from burning firewood in the wood stove (another issue not mentioned is the effect of smoke on the ozone, or consuming natural resources).
The wood goes fast when you are here all the time, and I can say there is some exercise value to splitting wood and moving if from the pile to the storage area below the deck to the rack on the deck to inside. I’ve taken a few medium/small trees down (one too close to the house or ones the weather got to) so its nice to use my own wood.
A few weeks back I bought from Alex a cord of wood (good lord what a weird unit- “One cord is defined as 128 cubic feet (3.62 m³), corresponding to a woodpile 4 feet wide × 4 feet high × 8 feet long.”) which is really a pile from the back of a truck. When Alex was here he was eying a big oak off the corner of the houe, right between that and my shed. It was maybe 35 or 40 feet high, with branches over the house, and wa honestly of not much use, especially if I ever considered adding a room or a real garage.
Plus, a he told me, the tree was top heavy. These are either Arizona White Oak or Emory Oak (I tried to find the difference, but am not a botany dude and it really does not matter to me). Alex told me the centers of these tree tend to stay soft and absorb water like a sponge for times of lean water. Smart species find a way to adapt to arid conditions. Anyhow, this tree had a huge open hole on one side, so the sun shined in there and dried out most of the bottom of the tree, which was then largely hollow, while the top was still solid and heavy. So the whole tree was top heavy, and possible in danger of falling.
It was a much bigger job than my chainsaw and skills could manage, so I hired Alex to take it down and leave me the wood. He said something about an extra $25 to haul the crown and smaller limbs to the dump, but I said, “woah” I can find a way to use it all. Let’s not add stuff to the dump I can put to use.
So this is how I used an entire oak tree (or will use).
It was with a smile I just saw the title in my RSS reader that I knew that another initial skeptic, George Siemens, had followed the path I charted in April 2007 as the Twitter Life Cycle. I have seen so many people, myself at front of the list, first see twitter and remark, “That […]
photo credit: ekai Don’t miss out on the 2008 NMC Symposium on Mashups – early registration ends this Sunday. Stop reading (or at least skim), and register now. This is another one of the NMC’s online conferences, and to fit with the theme, we are even mashing up our venues between the 3D world of […]
