Act your age

Boys like to consume and destroy things, but men understand the joy of creating and restoring.

Agree?

Centric

Given that one of the projects I've been working on for the past few weeks here at work involves 17 foreign languages, I have a proclamation to make.

Not only should English be the official language of the U.S., it should also be the official language of Earth. If we're going to shoulder the responsibility of being the world's only super power, I think we ought to enjoy a couple of fringe benefits as well. At the top of the list should be the rest of the world adopting the English language. At the very least, I would settle for all languages agreeing to use only the Latin alphabet. No more squiggly lines like in Thai, Japanese, and so on. If you catch me in the right mood, I might make concessions for those funny accented characters in Portuguese or French, but don't count on it.

Don't even get me started on the differences between Chinese (Traditional) and Chinese (Simplified). I get it that you have a bazillion people, but do you really need two alphabets?

Rain Barrels

As I mentioned a few posts back, a couple weekends ago I built a rain collection system to collect and store rain water. We have a small detached garage, and behind it we now have a garden. I installed a gutter along the edge of the roof, and then added a downspout that feeds into a two-barrel storage system placed at the end of the garage. I built a small stand that elevates the barrels to improve water pressure and usability.

When I first started looking into this, everything I read led me to believe that one would need to spend somewhere between $79 and $150 for a 55 gal. container. I guess these experts have never heard of Craig's List because within a week I found a guy in Bellevue that had 55 gal. plastic containers for sale at $10 a pop. These are food-grade containers that used to hold tomato sauce and can be sealed water-tight. The guy goes to school at UNL, so he agreed to deliver them for free.

You might be surprised at just how advanced a "simple" rain collection system can get. In order to use both tanks I had to build a connection between them so the water level would equalize in the separate tanks. For this I threaded a male 3/4" threaded PVC adapter through a 1" hole in the side of each barrel. Surprisingly, the hole was a tight enough fit that it threaded itself in perfectly. From the inside of the barrel I placed a rubber O ring over the threads coming in from the outside, and then threaded a female adapter covered in thread compound onto the male adapter, pulling the whole assembly tight. I connected the two using a short piece of 3/4" PVC pipe.

I did basically the same thing with a 3/4" hose bib on the front of the system. I had a couple of 1/2" hose bibs laying around from previous home improvement projects, but I didn't realize they were smaller until I had already drilled my hole. This was at about 8:30 on a Sunday night. I drove out to Menards, but they were closed. I doubled back to Home Depot; closed. There's a QP Hardware store on north 48th that's known for having strange hours, so I decided to stop by there on my way back home. Sure enough, at about 9:15 on a Sunday night, they were open. They sold me my hose bib, and I was on my way.

Not one to waste an opportunity for an "upgrade," I drilled a smaller hole toward the top of the inlet barrel and installed one of the 1/2" hose bibs to function as an overflow valve. I drilled a 3/4" hole and it threaded in perfectly.

In order to keep mosquitoes out I added a piece of standard-issue window screen over the top and bottom of the downspout. I also drilled small (1/8", maybe) holes around the inside rims of the lids to vent the system and also so rain water that collects on the lids can drain into the barrels.

Once I had everything built (around 10:00 on a Sunday night), I turned on the hose and started "testing" the system. The water splashed onto the roof, trickled into the gutter, and began flowing into the barrels. Perfect. As they started to fill I wondered if the stand I had used would hold up at full capacity. At about 2/3 capacity I noticed the whole thing was leaning a little. I went to the garage to find some deck screws to shore things up a bit. By the time I got back, things were leaning a lot. I pushed against the side of the barrel, bringing things back toward level, but since I had dropped the drill I couldn't reach it to add any reinforcement to the platform. Oh, and the water was still running. I slowly moved away from the barrels, and they quickly returned to their precarious state. As I ran to the spigot to turn the hose off, I heard a cracking sound followed by a loud SPLOOSH.

Now, I've been known to over-engineer a project or two in the past, but you should see me go when I'm rebuilding something that's already failed once. When I rebuilt the platform I used 4×4 posts on all four corners, and the top level is composed of a couple layers of 2×4s arranged in various orientations to maximize their strength. The whole thing is held together using 3" coated deck screws. You could probably park a small German tank on it.

The first night after I re-built it we got a nice, light rain overnight. I'm not sure how many inches we got (1/2, maybe?) but I ended up collecting about 46 gallons of water. The water pressure isn't too bad, either. At ground level there is enough pressure to push a steady stream through one of those fan sprayers. My plan is to make my own soaker hose by poking holes in an old hose that is already missing its male end. That way I can snake it through the garden and only water the spots where I have things planted. This should help me save some water, and it will also deliver the water right at the roots so not as much evaporates.

Last night I added what should be the second-to-last "upgrade" to the system. Using a threaded elbow, an adapter, and a piece of clear plastic tubing I added a gauge on the side that shows the water level inside the barrels. Until now I've had to undo the clamp that holds the lid closed to check the water level. Now, I shouldn't have to open the lids for anything.

The final upgrade in the plans is to add a plug at the bottom of each barrel so they can be drained before winter, but that can wait until this fall. And, knowing me, I'm sure I'll come up with other modifications between now and then.

You can see more pictures of the system here.

Only in Kenya

This video may change your life. Make sure you watch it to the very end.

Double Jeopardy

A: You're embarrassed when your Christian friends find out you do this.

—and—

A: You're embarrassed when your non-Christian friends find out you do this.

Q: What is listening to KLOVE?

Insider information

Good news: UPS is using software to eliminate left turns, saving the company roughly 3 million gallons of gas since the routing change was made.

Bad news: If you're thinking about shipping something valuable and/or fragile, I would probably wait until Dec. 26th or so. Trust me.

…press two

Just in time for the holiday season, we had a friendly visitor come down the chimney and into our home last night. Only instead of being jolly, fat, and dressed in red this little guest was little, brown, and possibly rabid.

At about 1:30 in the morning Amanda thought she heard something. No, that's not quite right. She thought she had heard something AND felt it fly past her in our bed. She did her best to collect herself and listened for "it" again. When she heard it in the bathroom she woke me up, saying that there was, um, something in the bathroom. Still in a stupor, I asked her to elaborate. She said that there was "an animal… or a bird… in the bathroom." I listened for it for a moment and then heard a clicking, rustling sound from that direction.

I jumped out of bed, threw on some jeans, grabbed the aluminum baseball bat that I keep around for occasions such as this, and went on patrol. I flipped on the light in the bathroom and… nothing. I proceeded down the hall toward the "school room" and looked inside. It was still dark, but there was enough light from the hall light that I could see in. That's when I saw it. Continue reading this post »

Busted

For some reason the theme I normally use on the ol' blog is acting up. I don't really have time to troubleshoot it right now, so I just picked an out of the box theme and threw it up. Hopefully I'll be able to get some time to fix the old one before too long.

What comes after

What's up now, sudoku?

After this monumental achievement, I went outside with Pete and cleaned out the whole garage. Not bad for a Sunday afternoon. Of course, a nap would probably have been nice as well.

Drip… drip… drip…

This morning's downpour got me thinking about a physics professor I had in high school who argued you get just as wet running through the rain as you would at a comfortable walk, except that the former might cause you to get out of breath and/or look silly running around in the rain. Here's how the theory goes, if I remember it correctly.

Consider two people, Walker and Runner, who both have to travel 100 meters through a rain shower falling at a constant rate all along the course. Runner sets out at a dead-on sprint, while Walker takes his time. If the rain is falling at a constant rate it should be thought of as an aqueous medium (i.e. x number of drops per cubic meter) rather than as individual drops. Even though Runner passes through the medium more quickly, he will still pass through the same amount of water as Walker will. Thus, neither of them is "wetter" than the other when they reach their destination.

If you're having trouble keeping up, think of it as driving in the rain on the highway vs. your residential street. You need your wipers on "high" at 60 mph, but only on "intermittent" in your neighborhood, right? Even though the rain is falling at the same rate, you encounter more drops-per-second at higher speeds. Similarly, if you are sprinting through the rain you will run into just as much rain (maybe even more?) as you will if you would just walk.

So far, so good.

However, you may have noticed that when you come in out of the rain your hair is wet, along with the front of your body. The afore mentioned theory accounts for all of the rain you run into, but not that which lands on the top of your head. Even if you're standing still, the raindrops will continue to amass on top of your head at a constant rate.

So, if we really want to know how wet Walker and Runner get, we need to know how long their heads were in the rain.

Let's assume that each of our travelers passes through a gallon of water (for the sake of round numbers) between point A and point B, regardless of their speed. Let's also assume that the rain is falling at a rate of .1 gallons per second per square foot of vertically exposed surface area (i.e. the top of your head). If it takes Runner 10 seconds to get there, he will have received one gallon of rain on top of his head, for a total of 2 gallons on his person. If Walker takes his time and clocks in at 50 seconds, 5 gallons of rain will have fallen on top of his head. Add that to the gallon he "ran into" and his total is 6 gallons of rain.

Since 6 is more than 2, we can conclude that a person does in fact get more wet by walking through the rain than running. Of course, it is worth mentioning that you can reach a point at which you are as "soaked" as you're going to get. In cases such as this, my advice would be to bring along an umbrella.