Category Archives: Technology

Captcha

Folks, I have been inundated with spam the last 3 weeks. My usual spam checker has apparently been beaten. Normally just a few got through and I would simply delete them but it has grown into hundreds per day that I have to delete and that won’t fly.  So, I added a captcha – one of those funny letter deals where you type in some nonsense to prove you are real and not a spam engine. The only reason I mention it is because it actually crashed my system last night. If anyone sees anything weird going on or if your comments don’t post or you want to share your lottery winnings, please email me

Solar Powered Electric Fence

Part of moving the bees to our place in the country is so they can be out of town and away from people.  Of course, getting away from people means getting them closer to good old mother nature herself.  For anyone who has read Winnie the Pooh, you know that bears like honey when they get a rumbly in their tummies.

Bears don't read very well...

Not much will really stop a hungry bear, but the official recommendation is to enclose all “country bees” in an electric fence.  When a bear attacks a hive, the bees always come out in great number to ward off the attack.  Bear fur is typically too thick to present a problem.  The only sensitive place on a bear is apparently their nose/mouth area.  While my electric fence is a little more “juiced” than a bee sting, most folks agree that a bear has to learn about the fence with their mouth or nose.  I’ll talk more about that another time, but it makes sense that an electric fence properly set up should deter all the Poohs out there.

So, you may be wondering how solar power can deliver enough juice to make a bear even notice it was there.  It turns out that the people who make electric fence controllers make a version that runs on DC (i.e. deep cycle batteries, not house current which is AC).  The controller I bought is designed to power up to 25 miles of fence.  All told, I have maybe 1000 feet of wire strung on a few poles, so the charger will deliver a good shot when it fires.  I won’t bore you with the calculations about the capacity of the battery but it is roughly the size of a car battery just for perspective (a car’s starter battery would not work here though…this application needs a long continuous  draw on the battery rather than the quick hit when you start a car)

The battery, fence controller, and charge controller

The instructions show that the fence will run for 2 weeks on a fully charged battery of the proper specs but I do not want to have to worry about whether the battery is still charged if I don’t make it out there for a few weeks.  Instead, I bought a solar panel and a charge controller to keep the battery full.

See? It's pointed south

I pointed my solar panel south and angled it to the optimal angle to get direct sun.  Output wires from the panel go into the charge controller which regulates the power going into the battery.  The charge controller makes sure the power is the proper voltage and that the battery does not get over or under charged. The charge controller also has a “load” connection so I connected the fence controller to that connection and we’re off and running!  All of the charging/controlling/shocky-shocky stuff is inside a beehive surrounded by my other beehives as a sort of a theft deterrent.

Oh, by the way, without thinking I tried to use a regular household switch at the gate to turn the power on and off.  Of course, the fence controller pushes somewhere around 10,000 volts which didn’t even slow down for the switch rated for household current of 110 volts.  If you want a switch, make sure you get one rated properly…same with any wire you may need to use (I only used fencing wire which handles the charge nicely)

So, I hope some of that makes sense.  So far it is alive and well.  Let me know if you want more details…

I love this picture

Isaac is trying out for middle school soccer and practices have definitely stepped up a notch from the rec leagues in which we have been playing.  The poor boy was exhausted after the first practice.  I picked him up and we talked all the way home.  I pulled into the driveway and we just crashed on the steps.

We didn’t talk about anything in particular, but I so loved sitting there, relaxing and just talking with Isaac.  Middle school is going to be ok…

Why thanks

I got an email last week from a nice lady telling me this blog was listed as one of the best blogs by West Virginians.  Honestly, I think it is one of the best blogs in the entire world but  that’s just me maybe.

Anyhow, I am happy to say thanks to the folks at Very Best Sites. Check out the post and especially take a look at the other WV sites that are listed there!

100% Kindle enabled

On Christmas day, 75% of our family was connected to the great bookstore in the sky…Amazon.com.  Emily and the kids each got kindles for Christmas.  I think we were all pretty skeptical when we first started thinking about this evil magic but Emily’s mom and my mom each got kindles and they seemed to like them.  The kids begged to read on theirs each time we saw them so we thought it might be worth a try.

Emily opened hers on Christmas morning and sort of gave a scowl…much like when I gave her a frying pan for Valentine’s day.  Rats…I blew it again.  Still, she turned it on and started reading the book that I had bought and installed.  She came out of hiding a day and a half later!  Maybe a kindle was better than a frying pan!  Isaac did the exact same thing so I knew his gift was a hit too!

Before Abigail had a chance to even turn hers on, I commandeered it and downloaded a bunch of books and hid from her while I read.  She finally tracked me down and insisted that I return her kindle so she could use her Christmas present.

Dang kids who read…well, I had to order my own.  Yesterday I received my kindle from the kind UPS driver and moved all of my stuff to it.  Of course, I had to take all of my stuff off of Abigail’s kindle.  She finally got it back right before bed last night.  Was that mean?  I think it will make her appreciate being able to use her Christmas present even more today!

Well, we do read a lot and I guess you could say we are 100% kindle enabled finally.  Thank you great bookstore in the sky.  Thank you for giving us cheaper books at the touch of a button.  But please great bookstore, please make it just a little harder to buy a book…we are becoming addicted and the credit card on file doesn’t seem to know how to say stop!

The end of the world

Well, maybe it wasn’t quite the end of the world but sometime last night, my web server crashed.  The whole computer didn’t die, just the actual program that is the web server.  Did you know that’s how the web works?  Individual machines run programs that receive requests for certain web pages.  The web server program finds those pages and pushes the information back to the requester.  My web server machine resides in my office at work.  It’s pretty cool to manage my own system in a lot of ways…but not always.

Anyhow, my web server machine was fine but the program stopped for some reason.  It’s not supposed to do that.  It rarely does that.  I was bummed that hundreds of spammers could not assault my machine all night long as I slept.  I hate to let those folks down, but alas, software is fickle.

Well friends, the web server is back up and running so let’s hope the spammers can catch up to meet their quotas!

Tap…Tap…Is this thing on?

I have been pretty out of touch lately…but I have an excuse, honestly!  We went to the beach at Topsail Island, NC!  We typically go to a beach somewhere in NC but this was our first year at Topsail (pronounced Top-sul).  Anyhow, I’ll get to the pics of me in a bikini later but first, let me tell you about the trip there.  From Charleston, we have to travel south on the WV turnpike which is a toll-road.  Typically we pay our 6 bucks each way and forget about it, but this year, we discovered something new…E-Z Pass!  I always figured those lanes that nobody used were for decoration only…or maybe WV got extra booths because they were on sale.  My sister-in-law educated us about the E-Z Pass system which is what those always-empty lanes are really for!

Emily went on down to the West Virginia Parkways Authority and bought our transponder.  Basically we just had to load a $20 credit on our device (which required a $5 refundable deposit).  The device hangs on the windshield behind the mirror and is out of sight.  Now get this, it took Emily mere minutes to fill out the paperwork (at a government agency) and walk out of the building with our very own you-can-use-the-empty-lane-on-the-toll-roads transponder.  Instead of the typical $2 per stop, with the E-Z Pass system, the toll is only $1.30…so on our trip, we saved$4.20 which almost covered my recommended daily allowance of Mountain Dew for the trip down.

Do you ever feel that special happy feeling down in your belly when you get to do something cool that puts you in front of other cars, saves you some money and speeds you on to the beach faster than normal?  Yeah, me too.  We took pictures of cars around us and the empty lanes each time we came upon a toll booth…I was like a kid in a toll booth shop!

My patents

A long time ago in a land far, far away, I worked on some projects from which some colleagues and I applied for a couple of patents.  We were doing some pretty cool software development and had the opportunity to be officially labelled as  “inventors”.

The most recent patent was just awarded last week and I have since been inundated with mail from companies ready and willing to help me bring my new invention to market.  Though I am very appreciative of these folks trying to take a cut of whatever money I might make from it, I would prefer that they stop sending me mail.  They say, “hurry, you need to get <insert your invention here> to market as soon as possible!”

The funny thing is that it has taken four and a half years for this most recent patent to be awarded.  I wonder how many things are out there that could be saving lives or cleaning up oil spills, etc that are stuck in the big patent machine.  There are tons of silly patents and mean patents and patents that will have a profound impact on people’s lives.  I can’t imagine patenting human genes (which is quite a scary mess).  Seeds are patented and patent owners may do all sorts of evil enforcing those patents.

My patents are not evil and will not ever make me a single cent but I often wonder why some patents are awarded and who in the world thinks it is ok to patent some stuff. I am pretty proud to have been awarded these patents but I can’t imagine being so proud of a bit of work I might do that I would be willing to withhold treatment for someone’s illness because I own a patent on some gene. I cannot imagine forcing third-world farmers to buy my genetically modified seed (or suing them if their seed crosses with someone else’s seed for which I owned a patent).  I just can’t imagine!

I guess I am rambling as usual…of course, maybe if I owned a patent on a gene, I could afford to buy one of the plaques that the aforementioned “take your product to market” companies was selling and I might actually have something to take a picture of so I could do a proper picture-filled post. Until then, I will be content with having my name buried in the records of the US patent office.

By the way, if anyone is interested in tattooing my patent numbers on their bodies, I am willing to sell the rights to the numbers for a small fee…

(oh yeah, none of the pics are my patents…though I wish!)

And…we’re back!

So, we’re back and up to date (mostly anyhow).  My Dell server (the last Dell product I will own) that I got 14 months ago died sometime over the weekend.  I had the techs at my company take a look and they just shook their heads and handed me the box of tissues.  RIP Dell piece-of-crap!

Incidentally, I also discovered a great stress reduction technique and took a picture of the “process”.

I feel very tranquil now…

Oh Rats!

freakingoutMy dang server blew up sometime this weekend…I have this old backup up on a clunker machine for now but it is certainly not up to date. The extra hard drive that has a good backup is in the dead server so I can get it back to where we were, but just not instantly…so, for now, sorry for the pain in the butt…we’ll be back soon!

In the meantime, isn’t this a cool picture?  Of course, I, being calm cool and collected, did not freak when I saw my server was toast…my 14 month old Dell POS server was toast.  The motherboard and processor for it are not cheap so I will be replacing it soon with another brand…