Unearthed

We went to Unearthed, a fundraiser for the Friends of the Pittsburgh Urban Forest last night. A handful of artists created work from dead and fallen wood from Allegheny Cemetery. Some of the pieces were great. Some seemed like the artist either couldn't find inspiration in the piece they received or by the deadline. It was a fun night. Maya was circulating sort of on the clock for her job at the Lawrenceville Corporation. Tim's band, the Metropolitans played a set during the show. Silas just hung out in the carrier the whole time. He slept for the first hour or so and woke up and looked around for latter half. We didn't end up with any decent pictures of him. Alas.

Thursday at work

Oh yeah, cold mornings now - I love it! Or at least so far. A little bit of snow and some wind made for a fun ride in. It was sunny and really pretty today, despite the temperature.

Bethany and Silas came to work for a short visit as well. Silas slept for most of it in his double thumbs-up pose.

Gravity of Light

Upon Courtney's suggestion, she, Dave, and I went to the Gravity of Light visual art presentation this week during lunch. It was set up in an old warehouse that Dave and I both bike past every day on our way to work. The artists, from Brooklyn, set up several large scale pieces along the walls of the Pipe Building and illuminated the room with the blindingly stark light of a 50,000 W carbon arc lamp.

The carbon arc lamp itself was fascinating. Basically, the mechanism brings two charged carbon elements together and pulls them apart, creating an arc in the space in between. The process burns off some of the material, so the mechanism slowly brings the rods closer and closer to keep the arc distance approximately the same over time. The light it cast was brilliantly white and caused amazingly sharp-edged shadows throughout the warehouse. It was a good experience.

Less than a penny

Yes, more of my pedantic behaviors. I don't remember when I took this, but it's from Stan's Market in the Strip District. With these cheap prices, who wouldn't shop down here? And why would you buy regular potatoes when you can get yams and red potatoes for 1/100th of the price?

Not quite a snowy commute

I have no picture, but wanted to document that today was my first ride in to work with snow. Of course, it was a grand total of maybe 10 flakes, but snow nonetheless. I need to get wider tires with tread for the bike. The narrow road slicks on there are going to serve me poorly when it gets wetter and/or icy.

With the beard, I can still ride to work without the face mask to stay warm. I might try out some goggles, as my eyes water the whole way. I remember the tears freezing on my cheeks and beard in previous winters.

Presentation is over

The presentation went well. I'm glad it's over. I have to admit, despite the stress of putting together an hour and a half of material, it was kind of fun. The presentation part went fine. I didn't have a mic, so some people in the full room had trouble hearing me in the back. Overall, we got positive feedback. For the kid that about wet his pants in nervousness in high school speech class, it's kind of funny to be pretty comfortable talking to 50-100 people once or twice a year... This is my second presentation at the EEBA conferences. I've presented papers at two others.

EEBA is the Energy and Environmental Building Association. There is one more day left in the conference, so I'll get to do the rest without the cloud of the never-finished presentation hanging over me.

Nightime break for dinner

Just posting a few nighttime pictures around the resort from my walk out for dinner. I didn't do much besides work on the presentation all day. I did get a nice 3 1/2 mile run in the evening before it got dark. Even though it wasn't all that hot, the air is so dry.

Water heater or sci-fi bomb

Well, it's not nearly as cool as the Maker Faire in Austin this week, but this electric water heater was sure a looker. That turbine-looking device is the flow sensor. It provides the computer some idea of the flow rate of the water so it knows how hard to pulse the heating elements hidden in those sexy stainless steel tubes. Of course, the timer is there so you know how long you have to get off the ship before the core goes critical and you need to be at least two parsecs from the resultant thermonuclear explosion.

In Phoenix for a conference

I'm speaking at the EEBA conference tomorrow about energy saving strategies and modeling techniques for the wild west of the efficiency world: lighting, appliances, and miscellaneous electric loads. I'm co-presenting with one of the partners of our company, but really that means that I create the whole presentation, and he gets to present it with me. The part that is going to be fun to watch is how Brad is comfortable standing in front of 75 people and talking to them as if they were in the parlour at his house. I'm not that experienced of a presenter to be at that point. However, this presentation is about as unscripted as I've ever had it, as I probably know the material more than any other and have written much less than any other. It is going to be conversational no matter what, because I have gotten all wrapped up in modeling and the conundra involved in that side of things that I have very few slides actually prepared. It'll be interesting...

These photos are of the resort/conference center where it's being held, and where I'm staying. The top picture is of the resort from the restaurant looking over the water park toward the building where my room is (building on the left).

Each building has two pools in the courtyards. Here is the view from the door to my room at 8 this morning.
This is where I've spent most of my time here so far.

They even left me a teddy bear on the bed! Yay! Now I have something to cuddle up with and not miss my family as much. :)

I'm sure it'd show up as a $99 cost on my room bill if I were to take it with me. I accidentally broke the seal on the refrigerator not realizing it was sealed with a plastic device that breaks irreparably into several pieces when you open it. That way, they know to do an inventory and charge for the drinks in the fridge.

Here is the reception area. You drive in under these chandeliers and park to check in. The valet takes the car away, and they drive you to your building and room in a golf cart. Kinda silly. Anyway, these two fixtures have something like 50 lamps in them each. That's 100 bulbs! At least these are all compact fluorescent candleabra bulbs. So, 100 times 7 watts each is 700 watts of installed lighting. That's more than all the lighting in our house. If they were incandescent bulbs, it'd be around 2,800 watts! The electric water heater that Bethany uses to boil water for tea draws 1,500 watts.

Weekend project: install flooring and turn the heat on

Remember the bamboo flooring post back in August, just before Silas was born? I barely do, as that was really long ago in my world. In any case, I had to get back to doing the floor, as the radiator had been removed. No radiator means no heat. No heat when it's getting into the 30's at night means high likelihood of me having a familial mutiny on my hands. So, this was the weekend to get it done.

The top picture is the mess I had to work in. Our stupid house has nowhere to put anything on the second floor outside of the bedroom. I just worked across until I hit the mess and then moved it onto the floor I had finished. Just like the tile game. Or at least it was called the tile game when I was a kid in Indiana. Wikipedia is calling it a sliding puzzle game.

Guthrie and Max liked helping until I started actually cutting with the miter saw.

This is bad. It is the cause of several large bouts of cursing. Nailing through the face of the board always ended up happening near the end of a long board, maximizing the amount of flooring I had to waste and pry up off the floor. The flooring nailer doesn't do a great job of feeling like it is positioned right. I ended up with three of these mistakes and one of the saw jumping cutting one out and hitting the next board, which of course then needed to be removed and replaced.

This was the end of day 1 and about 7 1/2 hours of work.

Bethany liked to peed in and see how it was coming. She was great: kept bringing me food and drinks as well as helping carry crap out of the way and planks downstairs.

Done with enough to install the radiator at 10:15 pm Sunday night! I hope my neighbor (who's house is attached to ours on the other side of the wall to the right in the pictures) didn't want to get to sleep before then...

Yay, heat!

I'll get the next few boards this upcoming weekend.

Rocking chair

Got my great grandfather's rocking chair our of the car finally and put it in the living room. This is closure for the previous post...

Great grandfather's chair

A while ago, my father and stepmother sent us my great grandfather's rocking chair. It's been in a crate at work for a few months, and I was getting a bunch of heat at work about that. So, this was the weekend to dismantle the crate and bring it home. I have a picture somewhere of the crate when it was delivered, but can't find it now. Here are a few from the dismantling process. The Dewalt boxes are empty (alas). They were filler to take up volume around the chair in the crate.

Once the crate makes it to its final spot in the house, I'll post a picture.


Dave helped take it apart. Fun Friday night. I owe him a beer or bike tube or something.


The term "station wagon" is certainly a little anachronistic, and none of the car companies use it anymore. However, this style of car is so utilitarian and gets good mileage.

Dark mornings

It's getting darker by the day for my commute to work. I got out a little earlier this morning, and it was fully dark. I'm fine with the darkness, as it is probably safer than the dusky transitions for visibility. The bike lights scream out "pay attention" in the darkness much better than they do in the light transition times.

The picture is looking past the back of my office toward downtown along the cliff that the railroad tracks and busway parallel.

Parting shot: Family camping

Autumn scenery

Some more pictures from the camping trip. I can't decide if I like the horizontal or vertical version better for these first two. Any suggestions?


This was not posed. Bethany was really doing that when I happened to have the camera ready...

Best mobile in the world

He's getting more emotive and happier by the day. Bethany let him hang out on the tarp while we broke camp. He just laid there, giggling, flailing his arms and legs, and watching the best mobile in the world above him...the autumnal trees and sky. What can compare to that?

Silas and his first canoe trip

He was sure mad about having to wear a PFD. He did calm down quickly, though, as canoeing is a peaceful sort of activity. I'm so happy we could share the love of the outdoors and the beauty of canoeing with him.

This was a Raystown Lake. It was very scenic and nice. There were a lot of pleasure and fishing boats out, though. Luckily, they were respectful and gave us a good berth and usually slowed down to keep the wake down. Being a winding river reservior, once they got away from us much, they had rounded a bend. That made it pretty peaceful in between boats racing by.

More pics at Bethany's Life of Silas blog.



Guthrie would much rather be running around on shore than sitting sedentarily in the canoe.

No, not posed. Something was rustling around in the forest. We were hoping to catch sight of some wildlife. Me to enjoy it. Guthrie to bark furiously at it. We were both let down this time.


I'm not sure Bethany was terribly disappointed in getting shuttled around in the canoe on a day like this.