Keep Calm and Carry On

Vera's design on the Keep Calm and Carry On site was an eye opener because I'd never heard of the original Ministry of Information poster before.  Naturally from there I wanted to do a little refresher reading on Operation Sea Lion.  I was a little surprised that the article didn't list museum-quality medieval uniforms under the effects of substitutiary locomotion as one of the obstacles to invasion of the British Isles, but perhaps the Ministry is trying to keep that under wraps.  


At any rate, the article on Operation Sea Lion mentions the Attack on Mers-el-Kébir, where the British navy sinks French naval vessels and kills 1,300 French sailors without having declared war, all in order to prevent the possibility of these ships falling into German hands.  I'd never heard of this before.  Fascinating stuff.

Colchester Triathlon 2010

The race was on Sunday and I'm overdue on an update.  First off, it was a great event; it was organized really well and checkin, bike station setup, and the race start all went smoothly.  I definitely want to do it again.  During the race:

• As expected, I finished the swimming quickly and had a good spot in the pack.  I actually need to be more aggressive about taking a spot further up in the pack.  The swimming pack itself is quite an experience; just a lot of bodies and someone can run into you or pull up short in front of you, at any time.
• As expected, I got creamed on the cycling.  Several dozen people passed me.  Gotta get a road bike for the next time and improve my cycling.  Probably some aerobars, too.  My right hand was numb by the 10th mile.
• Slightly unexpectedly, I got winded on the running and had to alternate running/walking.  Somewhere between one or two dozen people passed me.  Gotta improve my overall conditioning so I'm not as beat once I get to the running.
  

The "interim results" posted at the race said I finished in 1:28, smack in the middle of the pack.  There'll be more on the swim/bike/run breakdown later.

We Love You Spider

This is one of our friendly neighborhood wolf spiders.  Like the barn spiders that take up residence outside our dining room picture window, the wolf spiders are incredibly fascinating, but being predators that hunt their prey by chasing it down rather than spinning a web, the wolf spiders also get around quite a bit more and can surprise you when they suddenly appear in the garage.  And by "surprise" I mean "momentarily terrify"; this one here is maybe 3, definitely no more than 4, inches from leg tip to leg tip, and yet it's got that eeeeeyoaugh factor that briefly takes control of your spine.  


Is it any wonder that Shelob is scarier than Sauron?  I mean, we all know that if Sauron gets the ring back that Middle Earth will be plunged into an age of darkness and the free people will be enslaved, but it's all a step removed from Frodo and Sam's immediate experience.  Shelob, on the other hand, is going to catch you, string you up, and eat you slowly.  Eeeeeyoaugh.

Summer Lunch

Stonyfield Farm plain yogurt, Nature's Path pumpkin granola, freshly picked blueberries and raspberries from Adam's Berry Farm.  Uh well-a well-a well-a huh!

Colchester triathlon: Weeks 2-5 Training

Belatedly following up on Week 1. 


Running: Still no better than 5 min/km, I meant to do some running during our travels in PA, but it was too dang hot to be outside, much less running in it.  I suck.

Swimming: Started swimming in the lake and am doing approximately 1/2 mile in 20 minutes at a not-too-tiring rate.

Biking: Got toe clips for the bike and did the 12 mile route that starts and ends at our house in just under 45 minutes (yay!); finally did the official bike route last night and finished in ~45 min as part of a longer hour and a half ride.  The first half is all uphill and took about half an hour; thankfully it's mostly gradual with just a few relatively brutal sections.  It's a good thing the bike leg isn't longer because right now wrist and testicle fatigue kicks in ~50-55 min.  If I'm gonna to regularly do triathlons in the future, gonna need a better bike.

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto (2003)

Isao Hashimoto's "1945-1998" is a visualization of (known) worldwide nuclear detonations from 1945 to 1998. It starts slowly, showing the first three detonations Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki individually and "zoomed in" at the point of detonation.  It then zooms out to show the world map, and counts off a month per second for the next 53 years.  It's a beautiful viz.


I originally saw this on the information aesthetics blog.  There are also some versions on youtube, but they are  less satisfying because they've been trimmed to fit the 10:00 time limit for most youtube videos.

Home heating and pellet boilers

A little history: when our house was built in the early/mid-70's, it had forced air electric heating.  In the mid-90's, when the Burlington Electric Department was busy trying to keep electric usage in Burlington down, they offered incentives to switch away from electric heating and the homeowners switched to baseboard heat with a fuel oil boiler.  In the 9 years since we've bought the house, we've seen #2 fuel oil prices fluctuate from $1.21/gallon to to $4.50/gallon; it's hovering just under $3.00/gallon lately, and I'm betting it'll be higher than that next winter.  Very roughly, we burn 850 gallons per year for home heating and hot water.


Now there are incentives to start moving away from fuel oil, but our neighborhood is not hooked up for natural gas (we'd have to have it delivered to a tank on-site), we have trees on our south side that we're not willing to cut down in order to do solar hot water, and our lot is all ledge so a geothermal heat pump is out.  So... how about wood pellets?


Around here, wood pellet stoves have become fairly popular, but these are not really replacements for your boiler, and some of the early pellet boilers require you to manually feed the boiler hopper ever So far, we've found the following leads:

• Building Energy VT sells the Fröling P4 boiler 
• Blodgett Supply sells the Woodpecker boiler 
• Maine Energy Systems imports and distributes the Oekofen boiler
• Pellergy makes a converter to retrofit the existing boiler
• Stove & Flag Works sells Harman boilers 

There are also lots of options for what the set-up could be like, from installer a pellet boiler alongside the existing oil boiler so that we have a backup (we don't really have room for this in the garage) to removing the oil boiler and oil tank and having pellet storage in a silo just outside the garage (which I actually kinda like because we'd be able to reclaim the space the oil tank takes up in the garage).

Perhaps more as the summer progresses.