This week just won't quit. I think I'm going to classify it as The Worst Week Of My Adult Life.
The only good news to come out of this week is that I bought some really cool new music, and today, for the first time ever, I played a 2-turn game of pool: Lewis broke and got 5 balls in, then I ran the entire table. All 7 of my balls and the 8 ball.
But that comes against a backdrop of work, house, and automotive misery. So whoopdedoo.
The Mars Volta is weird. But I like it.
Friday, September 29, 2006
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Yesterday and the Evil Wicked Horrible Rotten Very Bad Day
Yesterday wasn't much fun.
It began decently enough, with me running late, as usual. I realized quickly, though, that I had an 8:45 appointment, and that I wasn't going to get to work until 8:30. There was a bit of paperwork I needed to get taken care of before the appointment, along with running a process on my computer.
I got the paperwork done, but the process wound up taking almost an hour. Damn. So I canceled the appointment, only to realize it had actually been scheduled for 9:45. I could have made it with time to spare. Grrr...
But when I first got to work, my boss's first words to me were "What did you do to the servers last night?" Great. Good way to start the day. And, of course, she was flanked by one of her peers and her boss. So I'm immediately on the defensive, and of course I had personally done nothing. Come to find out, someone had moved one set of systems to production that had Test GPO's applied. So the production systems got brand new patches in the middle of the night and rebooted, rendering the environment unstable.
That took hours to unravel, and in the meantime, we had users accusing us of insulting them by not freely giving them enough space.
Finally, my boss came to me and told me that I'll be rebuilding systems on Saturday the 14th, not working on Monday the 9th, and that I had disappointed her by not volunteering to rebuild a server last night. I'd had enough, and I went home.
I got home, saw my boy for a while, and decided to go ahead and do my oil change. I was due for one, and with this weekend's drive to the mountains, I wanted to get it done. I got the car up in the air, drained the oil, changed the filter, put it back on the ground, put the new oil in, cleaned the air filter, and added WaterWetter to the coolant. I felt good. I'd accomplished more than I set out to do, and was in a much better mood than I'd been in.
Then I came back to work. On the way, I noticed that my back window was wet. There was no good explanation: I hadn't driven through water; nothing had dripped on the car; there was no rain. I got to work, thought no more of it for the next 3.5 hours, and then drove home. I lost traction getting on the highway, and didn't think that was right, since I hadn't bombed the turn too hard.
Then I ran the rear window wiper and left a huge smear instead of a clean spot. It was oil. I stopped at a service station and cleaned the window off, hoping that it was just some spilled oil that had gotten on the subframe while I was filling the car.
Oil continued to coat my rear window.
I got home, sat sulkily through some TV, and when I got up, my vision went starry for a minute. I felt horrible and went to bed feeling weird and depressed. I was sure I'd cross-threaded the oil-filter housing or somehow cracked the oil pan.
Yesterday sucked.
This morning I went out and pulled the oil-filter housing off. The gasket had been shredded when I put it in. I dug through the trash and found the old one, put it back in, used my remaining 1.5 qts of oil, and went to the car wash. No more leaks, but the back-side of the engine and the entire under-carriage are covered in oil, so my car stinks like burning oil.
I also beat a hasty path to Advance Auto and bought another 3 qts of oil (synthetic, so it ain't cheap). All in all I lost about 3 quarts of oil to that chopped gasket, further proving that multi-thousand-dollar devices are almost invariably taken down by $.05 parts.
All seems to be good now, and with the exception of some possible oil on the right rear tire, I'm ready for this weekend's mountain run!
It began decently enough, with me running late, as usual. I realized quickly, though, that I had an 8:45 appointment, and that I wasn't going to get to work until 8:30. There was a bit of paperwork I needed to get taken care of before the appointment, along with running a process on my computer.
I got the paperwork done, but the process wound up taking almost an hour. Damn. So I canceled the appointment, only to realize it had actually been scheduled for 9:45. I could have made it with time to spare. Grrr...
But when I first got to work, my boss's first words to me were "What did you do to the servers last night?" Great. Good way to start the day. And, of course, she was flanked by one of her peers and her boss. So I'm immediately on the defensive, and of course I had personally done nothing. Come to find out, someone had moved one set of systems to production that had Test GPO's applied. So the production systems got brand new patches in the middle of the night and rebooted, rendering the environment unstable.
That took hours to unravel, and in the meantime, we had users accusing us of insulting them by not freely giving them enough space.
Finally, my boss came to me and told me that I'll be rebuilding systems on Saturday the 14th, not working on Monday the 9th, and that I had disappointed her by not volunteering to rebuild a server last night. I'd had enough, and I went home.
I got home, saw my boy for a while, and decided to go ahead and do my oil change. I was due for one, and with this weekend's drive to the mountains, I wanted to get it done. I got the car up in the air, drained the oil, changed the filter, put it back on the ground, put the new oil in, cleaned the air filter, and added WaterWetter to the coolant. I felt good. I'd accomplished more than I set out to do, and was in a much better mood than I'd been in.
Then I came back to work. On the way, I noticed that my back window was wet. There was no good explanation: I hadn't driven through water; nothing had dripped on the car; there was no rain. I got to work, thought no more of it for the next 3.5 hours, and then drove home. I lost traction getting on the highway, and didn't think that was right, since I hadn't bombed the turn too hard.
Then I ran the rear window wiper and left a huge smear instead of a clean spot. It was oil. I stopped at a service station and cleaned the window off, hoping that it was just some spilled oil that had gotten on the subframe while I was filling the car.
Oil continued to coat my rear window.
I got home, sat sulkily through some TV, and when I got up, my vision went starry for a minute. I felt horrible and went to bed feeling weird and depressed. I was sure I'd cross-threaded the oil-filter housing or somehow cracked the oil pan.
Yesterday sucked.
This morning I went out and pulled the oil-filter housing off. The gasket had been shredded when I put it in. I dug through the trash and found the old one, put it back in, used my remaining 1.5 qts of oil, and went to the car wash. No more leaks, but the back-side of the engine and the entire under-carriage are covered in oil, so my car stinks like burning oil.
I also beat a hasty path to Advance Auto and bought another 3 qts of oil (synthetic, so it ain't cheap). All in all I lost about 3 quarts of oil to that chopped gasket, further proving that multi-thousand-dollar devices are almost invariably taken down by $.05 parts.
All seems to be good now, and with the exception of some possible oil on the right rear tire, I'm ready for this weekend's mountain run!
Friday, September 22, 2006
Nerd alert!
This whole California thing has been bugging the crap out of me, so I started doing some number crunching today.
I went to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website and started looking for details into how much pollution comes from cars as opposed to other fossil-fuel burning means (agriculture, power plants, shipping, aviation, etc). They had some fascinating numbers for Carbon Monoxide and an array of other pollutants, but none that were easy to find for "greenhouse gases".
For instance, they show that in 2000, we (US or the world? I'm not sure) pumped 109 million short tons of CO into the atmosphere. Sounds like a horrible number, but while it's above the average for the preceding 10 years, it's below the average for the past 30. Of that 109M, 56.06M comes from transportation. The other 53.29M came from industrial processes. 56.06M is the lowest in the entire range of 30 years, and of that, 48.47M came from "on-road transportation".
Unfortunately, that number isn't further broken down, but the key here is that 86% of transportational CO emissions came from cars & trucks. That's just shy of 50% of the total CO released into the atmosphere for the whole year, and it, too, is the lowest in 30 years. It marks only the 2nd time we've dropped below 50M short tons of CO emissions from cars & trucks, and is 10M below the emissions level of 1990, when we commonly assume the era of eco-friendly vehicles to have started.
So the automotive industry has made some pretty big strides over the last 30 years, and they're getting better all the time.
But now let's analyze the greenhouse gas emissions of today. Wikipedia has a great entry on greenhouse gases, and it states that the number 1 greenhouse gas is water vapor, which is not affected by human activity, except on very small, local scales. Water vapor accounts for as much as 70% of all greenhouse gases (or as little as 35%, depending on the "expert"). Carbon Dioxide is a distant second, running anywhere from 9 to 26%, followed by methane (4 - 9%) and nitrous oxide (?%).
Since our two biggest contributions come in CO2 and methane, they're probably where we as humans can make the greatest impact into the phenomenon we've termed global warming.
CO2 levels have remained fairly consistent over the last 10K years: around 260 - 280ppm. Since industrialization, they've risen to approximately 365ppm: an increase of 31%. However, wikipedia shows a wonderful chart breaking down the sources of pollution by pollutant, and we see that transportation accounts for 19.2% of CO2.
Calculating our man-made contribution to this is fairly simple: multiply the increase (31%) by the contribution factors: 9 to 26%. We show a contribution-factor increase of CO2 somewhere between 1.65 and 4.77%. That's not much, and when we multiply that by the percentage which is attributed to transportation (19.2%), we get a range from 0.32 to 0.92%. All the transportation in the world accounts for less than 1% rise in atmospheric CO2. If we can even begin to assume the numbers for CO to have any relevance to CO2, then we can multiply that finding by 86%, revealing on-road transportation to have contributed anywhere from 0.28 to 0.79% of CO2 increases, and that's before you discount trucking.
The math is even easier for methane: the wikipedia entry shows absolutely no contribution from automobiles. None. So man has pumped that in through other means, principally agricultural.
So let's assume an absolute worst-case scenario: cars account for 0.92% of the increase in greenhouse gases that are supposedly raising the temperature of our world.
(And for the naysayers, the Wiki entry is a pro-global-warming page. They fully support the argument that man is destroying the environment with cars & trucks, but their numbers directly contradict the claim.)
California claims to have spent millions on this research. It took me a few minutes on the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website and a quick trip over to Wikipedia. Maybe Califoria residents should sue their legislators.
Here's another tidbit I just found. The BTS has another page on gas wasted due to congestion. In 2000, 1.188 billion gallons of gas were wasted due to congestion in Los Angeles, CA. The next closest metropolitan area was NY/NJ, at 658M. LA consistently shows over 1 billion gallons of gas wasted due to congestion for all but one year since 1990. By comparison, Richmond, VA wasted 11 million gallons.
1 billion gallons of gas. Per year. In one city. And they're suing the auto makers?
More to come. But in the meantime, consider that the man who brought this suit is running for Treasurer in California this November.
I went to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website and started looking for details into how much pollution comes from cars as opposed to other fossil-fuel burning means (agriculture, power plants, shipping, aviation, etc). They had some fascinating numbers for Carbon Monoxide and an array of other pollutants, but none that were easy to find for "greenhouse gases".
For instance, they show that in 2000, we (US or the world? I'm not sure) pumped 109 million short tons of CO into the atmosphere. Sounds like a horrible number, but while it's above the average for the preceding 10 years, it's below the average for the past 30. Of that 109M, 56.06M comes from transportation. The other 53.29M came from industrial processes. 56.06M is the lowest in the entire range of 30 years, and of that, 48.47M came from "on-road transportation".
Unfortunately, that number isn't further broken down, but the key here is that 86% of transportational CO emissions came from cars & trucks. That's just shy of 50% of the total CO released into the atmosphere for the whole year, and it, too, is the lowest in 30 years. It marks only the 2nd time we've dropped below 50M short tons of CO emissions from cars & trucks, and is 10M below the emissions level of 1990, when we commonly assume the era of eco-friendly vehicles to have started.
So the automotive industry has made some pretty big strides over the last 30 years, and they're getting better all the time.
But now let's analyze the greenhouse gas emissions of today. Wikipedia has a great entry on greenhouse gases, and it states that the number 1 greenhouse gas is water vapor, which is not affected by human activity, except on very small, local scales. Water vapor accounts for as much as 70% of all greenhouse gases (or as little as 35%, depending on the "expert"). Carbon Dioxide is a distant second, running anywhere from 9 to 26%, followed by methane (4 - 9%) and nitrous oxide (?%).
Since our two biggest contributions come in CO2 and methane, they're probably where we as humans can make the greatest impact into the phenomenon we've termed global warming.
CO2 levels have remained fairly consistent over the last 10K years: around 260 - 280ppm. Since industrialization, they've risen to approximately 365ppm: an increase of 31%. However, wikipedia shows a wonderful chart breaking down the sources of pollution by pollutant, and we see that transportation accounts for 19.2% of CO2.
Calculating our man-made contribution to this is fairly simple: multiply the increase (31%) by the contribution factors: 9 to 26%. We show a contribution-factor increase of CO2 somewhere between 1.65 and 4.77%. That's not much, and when we multiply that by the percentage which is attributed to transportation (19.2%), we get a range from 0.32 to 0.92%. All the transportation in the world accounts for less than 1% rise in atmospheric CO2. If we can even begin to assume the numbers for CO to have any relevance to CO2, then we can multiply that finding by 86%, revealing on-road transportation to have contributed anywhere from 0.28 to 0.79% of CO2 increases, and that's before you discount trucking.
The math is even easier for methane: the wikipedia entry shows absolutely no contribution from automobiles. None. So man has pumped that in through other means, principally agricultural.
So let's assume an absolute worst-case scenario: cars account for 0.92% of the increase in greenhouse gases that are supposedly raising the temperature of our world.
(And for the naysayers, the Wiki entry is a pro-global-warming page. They fully support the argument that man is destroying the environment with cars & trucks, but their numbers directly contradict the claim.)
California claims to have spent millions on this research. It took me a few minutes on the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website and a quick trip over to Wikipedia. Maybe Califoria residents should sue their legislators.
Here's another tidbit I just found. The BTS has another page on gas wasted due to congestion. In 2000, 1.188 billion gallons of gas were wasted due to congestion in Los Angeles, CA. The next closest metropolitan area was NY/NJ, at 658M. LA consistently shows over 1 billion gallons of gas wasted due to congestion for all but one year since 1990. By comparison, Richmond, VA wasted 11 million gallons.
1 billion gallons of gas. Per year. In one city. And they're suing the auto makers?
More to come. But in the meantime, consider that the man who brought this suit is running for Treasurer in California this November.
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