Geek

It’s been said that in her later years, Erma Bombeck obtained a state of the art word processor to write her newspaper column, “At Wit’s End” and her last few books. After several attempts at being witty while following the cursor on the screen, she subsequently ignored said electronic wizardry and opted to use her trusty typewriter instead.

I totally understand where she’s coming from.

I have a Mac PowerBook G4 that’s approaching three years old. It’s still quite functional, it’s beautiful to look at and it purrs along like a content kitten. However, during our time together updates from Apple and the more and more software I’ve added have taken it’s toll on it a little bit and have subsequently slowed it down. It still trudges along doing it’s thing but it doesn’t have the zip or pizazz it had when it was a young chip.

When I started school last year we bought an HP laptop that had Windows on it but was converted to Linux (after a number of false starts) a couple of months ago. The computer is a delight to use and I’ve tried on numerous occasions to make it my main computer but I just can’t into it. Like a favorite pair of underwear or the t-shirt that makes me feel sexiest, I just like the feeling of using my PowerBook. So it takes a little longer to download porn or watch the BearForce1 video on everyone’s blog. While the cool kids at the internet café are doing their thing on their zippy MacBook Pros, there I am sitting in the corner with the MacBook’s big brother.

I guess as I get older I’m less concerned with keeping up with the Joneses and have ended up set in my ways.

Earl surprised me this evening by buying me a new digital camera for my birthday (which is tomorrow). Technology is amazing in that it does twice as much stuff as my old camera for half the price. It’s a Sony Cybershot DSC-W55. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to buy an inexpensive digital camera, as it’s small and thin yet packs a lot of punch.

Frankly I think I look like hell in this video, but then again I’m winding down from several beers this evening, as well as hanging out with friends at the local brewery.

Can I just say I must give credit to everyone that uses Microsoft Windows Vista. I’ve had it installed on my HP laptop for the past week and already Internet Explorer 7 has crapped out to the point that I can’t upload anything to my blog nor reliably open websites without it freezing. Mozilla Firefox, on the other hand, purrs along like a happy cat. I’ve been having problems with IE 7 since I got a blue screen of death on Vista yesterday and I wasn’t even near the computer when it happened. I must give kudos to Windows users, you must know what you’re doing to keep your computers usable. I’m sticking to my PowerBook G4. Oh, the reason for Vista is because I have flash converting software (my videos are done in Flash, like YouTube videos) for Windows that is 10 times faster than the same software on my old PowerBook. That’s the only reason I’m using it these days.

What does one do when it’s 80 degrees at 11:00 at night and there’s no hope of sleeping due to the heat and humidity? You do a science experiment, of course!

Earl and I live near where many of the main power lines for the entire state come together. From here, large towers carrying lots and lots of volts can be seen headed off in all directions. In fact,some of the only UHF (Ultra High Voltage) lines in the United States, clocking in at 765kV, are a couple of miles down the road from our home as they march off to Massena, which borders the province of Quebec, connecting the Empire State (and the eastern seaboard) to HydroQuebec.

Tonight I decided to park the car under one of the towers and jump out to see if I could get a fluorescent tube to light up like the urban legend says. I didn’t expect the tube to light up to it’s full potential, and it didn’t, since I stood to the left of the lines when I filmed this. I had a creepy feeling about standing directly under the lines, as I could hear them sizzling a little bit from the humidity and dampness in the air.

This video is very dark because the use of any light would have negated the effect of the tube. I hope you can make out what I saw, which was a fluorescent tube lighting up in my hands. When held vertically and pointed at one of the lines, it glowed blue. When held horizontally, it glowed red. I don’t know the cause of the color change. Adjacent to the 765kV towers is a set of two lower voltage lines, I believe they’re 345kV each. The 765kV lines are three lines, one for each phase of electricity, and each “strand” is a bundle of four wires. The 345kV lines, two sets of a group of three are single strands. There’s another set of 765kV lines on nearly identical towers nearby that head off to Oswego and they’re accompanied by one set of 345kV lines that are one group of three strands made up of two wires. Anyways, perhaps the color change is due to the fact that I was standing between the 765kV and the 345kV lines. In addition, I was standing about 1/3 of the way between the 765kV towers. I didn’t want to stand directly beneath the lowest point where the wires sagged as they’re only 30 feet about the ground and since I’m 5′ 10″ and holding an 8′ bulb, I would have been running around waving a metal object 14 feet in the air, nearly halfway to the sagging lines.

I have to give lots of credit to Ben Franklin and his kite and key setup.

Again, the video is very dark. I might do this again to see if I can improve the lighting somehow, and the next time drag Earl along with me to run the camera.

I had a blog software upgrade go bad, so all my data is here but my pictures, videos and display themes are a little wonky at the moment. Please bear with me, but I’ll continue blogging with this temporary setup.

You’d think after 25 years of doing this computer thing I’d get it right by now.

Update 2007-07-03 23:50 – I’ve restored 3/4 of the videos and pictures from the past week. I’ve also restored the look of the page. Hopefully, my webhost will be able to restore it all tomorrow but I’m not banking on it. I’ll just keep working on restoring pictures but a couple of videos might be lost.

I wanted to try out new video software for my laptop. I’m happy with the video quality of this clip and the software I’m using.

Sweet Jesus, I need to get some sleep.

I find Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders to be two brilliant comedians. I can never get enough of their sketch comedy. Inspired by Séan at Pretinama (fscking awesome blog title, by the way), I did some digging on YouTube and found this great spoof of the always lovable ABBA.

I have to wonder, what kind of geek gets this song stuck in his head for an entire Sunday?

Today I had to drive up to my old stomping grounds to run some errands for my high school alumni marching band. I’m trying to find a good price on t-shirts for the band members and I had a hot lead to follow up, so I made the 150 mile round trip. It was worth it, plus I got to have lunch with my mother which was very enjoyable.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in a rural part of Upstate New York, downwind from a group of nuclear power plants. I’ve always been a fan of driving along the Lake Ontario shoreline on the closest road possible, and these rides used to take me quite close to these power plants. Close, as in within hundreds of feet of the reactor buildings and cooling tower.

Since I was in the vicinity I decided to see if 9/11 had changed security measures enough to prevent me from doing this. They have. There are now big signs proclaiming the presence of security gates, requiring photo identification, on each side of the group of plants. One is no longer able to drive really close. Now you can drive only sort of close.

So I took a picture from a close as I could get to the plants. After snapping the photo a state police car came whipping by me. I have to admit this made me nervous, though I don’t know why because technically I don’t think I was doing anything wrong.

I decided to just get the heck out of there.

Ok, I’m in love with Apple again. Leopard looks really cool and it’s coming out in October so I’ve calmed down a little bit.