Snow Skiing

Back in the day I was a pretty avid snow skier.  I would purchase season passes and then try to see how many times I could hit the slopes with that investment.  It was pretty easy back then.  After the cost of equipment and the pass, all you had to have was $2.00 bus fare to the slopes and $3-4 food money.  It would buy you a bowl of chile and a hot chocolate from the vending machine.

I didn't night ski very much.  It's god-awful cold at night, and the harsh shadows cast onto the moguls by the slope lighting don't lend themselves well to depth perception.  I found skiing down groomed slopes and through powder incredibly boring - I preferred to blast through moguls or find some jumps to fly off.  But the slope lighting really didn't favor that kind of quick-twitch technical skiing.

I currently have only one picture of myself on skis... night skiing.  An old high school friend just sent this to me...  Pretty sure I was on an upper groomed slope, on the way down to where the moguls were.  He does take a nice evening shot, yes?

Half-Life

Half-Life is a really fun shooter/puzzle-solving video game that was released in 1998 or 1999.  Below is a YouTube walk-thru of the entire game.  It's a pretty nerdy game for a first-person shooter - which is probably why I like it so much.

Half-Life is also a scientific term.  It's the time needed for something to be reduced to half its original value.

15th Birthday of this blog

Today it has been 15 years since the first post.  I took a break from blogging for a bit - during the financial crisis (I was focused on financial news instead of nerd-blogging).  I was also offline for a couple of years afterwards, as my attention was diverted as our family re-settled to a new place - first, in Oregon, then Idaho.

In dog years, this blog is 105 years old.  Time to celebrate that minor landmark...

Good enough - I'm done celebrating...  Back to the cool stuff!

"Vacation" spring 2016

I took another brief "vacation", one of those things I seem to do these days when I don't rest very much.  Actually managed to get quite a bit of down-time, but that was mainly due to bad weather.  Below is what I woke up to on the first day of vacay.  It didn't put me in the mood to go out and clear dead and fallen trees.

KH 500 engine update...

I had the spare set of cylinders for the KH500 bead-blasted, and shipped them off for repairs.  They needed an overbore to remove the gouges.  Turns out the center cylinder was damaged beyond repair.

Power Steering Pump rebuild

Taking a break from broken dams for a moment...
I recently did some work on the new (to me) little Subaru.

Hydroelectric failure #2 -Teton Dam

Here's a nice picture taken from a helicopter on June 5, 1976.  This is Teton Dam in Eastern Idaho, in the process of collapsing and killing 11 people and 35,000 head of cattle.

Image courtesy of wikipedia, Photographer/Maker: Roberts ID-L-0010, WaterArchives.org

Car alternator problem at high RPM

On the new little car, I had noticed an issue while driving, but it didn't give me much concern... until Friday morning.

What I had noticed was that the lights would noticeably dim as the engine revved higher, typically just before the car up-shifted.  It was not affecting the electrical system or my ability to start the car however, so I ignored it.

Snow Plowing

The first summer after we moved to Idaho, I bought a little tractor.  It's a 13 Horsepower, 2 cylinder diesel tractor with 4x4, a PTO and a hydraulic bucket loader.  It came with a 4ft rotary tiller and a back blade.

Hydroelectric failure #1 -Taum Sauk

I think we will start small and work our way up on these dam failures...

Taum Sauk was/is a hydroelectric pumped storage facility located in Missouri.  Pumped storage facilities are used by electrical system operators to store power (in the form of water at increased elevation) when demand is low, and to generate power when it is needed most.

Pumped storage units will use their generators as motors, and their turbines as pumps, to pump water to an upper reservoir.  This is typically done at night or during weekends, which are periods of low electrical demand.  When peak electrical load is needed, the water is released from the upper reservoir to a lower one, through the turbine, which spins the generator for additional power.  The process repeats as needed.