Sonata Mileage

5,000 Train Cars


We originally thought that when we returned from out west, we would use the remaining days of the week on vacation to go Georgia State Park geocaching. Then, while we were on vacation, we thought we might just go back to work on Thursday & Friday, to save the vacation days for use at another time. Well, we ended up going with Plan A.

Spent about 15 minutes with a couple of train enthusiasts chatting railroading while we waited for a train to pass by here at the Folkston (GA) Funnel – From Wikipedia – With virtually all rail traffic headed to Florida passing through Folkston, the rail lines through the city have acquired the nickname “The Folkston Funnel”. As many as 60 trains a day pass through Folkston heading into and out of Florida, which some years draws ten times as many railfans as people who live in the city. To provide for a safe (and advantageous) viewing situation, the town has followed the example of another high-density rail town, Rochelle, Illinois, and has built a platform for visitors, along with picnic tables, chairs, BBQ pits, restrooms, and grills. And at night, lights shine from the platform onto the double rail so if someone wanted to, he or she could watch after sunset. Trains that come from the north move south toward Savannah, go through the Folkston Funnel, and arrive in Jacksonville. Trains that come from Florida do the same, just the opposite direction. At the covered viewing platform, there is an active scanner running and visitors can listen to train engineers as they run the trains through. As of 2006, there is also free WiFi for laptop users.

The Purple Wale passes 5,000 miles somewhere near Dublin, GA. We find 8 geocaches in 6 different counties, also fill in 3 DeLorme pages and snag 1 State Park.

4000 Picofarads

The Sonata passed the 4,000 mile mark on the way to a friend’s house this evening.

A week ago I received a piece of mail from Amazon informing me that they had made it easier to use my accumulated reward points right at the check out page and that I had a whopping $27.61 points available. Donna was feeling expansive, so she said go ahead and spend them. And because I have been such a good boy I could have an extra ten bucks to cover shipping. I really didn’t need anything in that price range and briefly considered a stuffed purple whale for the back deck of the Purple Whale, but instead opted to upgrade my cheapo computer speakers to some slightly more expensive ones – Cyber Acoustics 3 pc Subwoofer/Satellite System.

Last night I installed the speakers. First up was to remove the old set and if your PC setup is anything like mine, it required a trip under the desk to the land of the Dust Bunnies who live under the mountains of Power Strips and Voltage Converters. I sorted through the hanging wires rounding up the ones associated with the old speakers, unplugging here and there until I had the two small satellite speakers, the 3″ cube that passed for a subwoofer and the power plug/converter in a pile in the bottom of the trash can. The new setup went together with little issue and sounds leaps and bounds better than the one it replaced.

This afternoon I needed to recharge some AA batteries so I placed them inside the charger that rests on the right side of my computer desk. I leave the little sucker unplugged because the manual for it said that doing so would increase its lifespan. When I plugged the the connector into the back of it, nothing happened. Hmmm, usually the display fires up so you can monitor the charging process. Thinking I might have dislodged its power converter plug when installing the speakers I returned to the Land of the Dust Bunnies. I followed the wire down to the power strip and, nope, it was plugged in. I unplugged it and looked at the back of it. It read Altec. Uh oh, that was the brand name of the speakers I just took off. So I rooted around in the trash to retrieve the power plug that I had mistakenly thrown away. Hooked up the correct power thingy to the charger and the display was still blank. Dang.

The photo above shows what happens to capacitors* when 9V AC is applied to where 3V DC is supposed to go. So not only am I hard on batteries, their chargers are none to safe around me either.

*I have no clue if these are 4,000 picofarads or not, but when I looked up farad on wikipedia this phrase caught my eye, When speaking of capacitor values a picofarad is sometimes referred to as a “puff” or “pic”, as in “a ten puff capacitor”. Kind of apt as the capacitors in this charger sure went up in a puff of smoke…

101110111000

On the way to Columbia today the Purple Whale passed through the 3,000 mile mark. We were going there to do a little geocaching and we ended up finding 3 caches and not finding three caches. And as expected one of the ones we didn’t find was the reason for the whole trip (this might be a blog post of the future.) This evening I washed the Sonata, so it would stop being jealous of the Miata which got a bath on Friday.

2,000 Foot-Candles

A few months back I moved into a new addition to our building. Today Donna got to move into the newly remodeled office space on the opposite end of the front office from where she was. Like those of us out back, every one up there got shiny new cubicles, with shiny new modular furniture inside shiny new short walls.

Several years back, when the company president made one of his quarterly state of the company addresses he told us that he likes low walled cubicles because they fostered communication, so now instead of the previous 60″ high walls everyone now has 48″ surroundings. Foster communication is corporate double-speak for I want to be able stand on one end of the office space and survey my row of minions like a proud farmers looking over his acres of rows of corn. What I have found out on the serf level is that fostering communications really means that you can hear everyone’s conversations, business and personal, every shuffle of paper and every burp and fart for a 6 cubicle radius.

More interesting is in Donna’s area, as opposed to mine, is that they installed alternating rows of 2′ x 4′ florescent light fixtures and the same size white tiles for the entire length of the 70′ long room. The effect is literally blinding. The carpet is a light tan/gray, the walls are a light beige, the cubical walls are light gray and the desk surfaces are light beige. The effect is somewhat akin to standing on the side of the planet Mercury that faces the sun. OSHA states the minimum lighting for office spaces is to be 30 foot-candles, they don’t list a maximum, but my guess is the title of this post is not too far off to what it is in this new area. By the afternoon, Donna’s eyes hurt so bad that she put on her sunglasses at her desk. Tomorrow she is taking in a visor…

The Purple Whale passed the 2,000 mile mark on the way home from the brightly lit cube farm.

1,000 Raindrops

The Sonata passed the thousand mile mark on its way to DD this morning in an intermittent rain.

If you stick around on a page here for more than 10 seconds you will notice that I have indeed added a photo of the Purple Whale to the banner. I cheated and just “photoshopped” it over the top of the Emperor. I’m not sure I like it for a few of reasons, 1) the sudden blast of blue in an otherwise maroon and gray page, b) the cars relative scales and iii) it looks photoshopped.

It looks like the only thing that can keep the Red Sox from beating the Angels is the rain. It is tied 0-0 in the 5th inning at Fenway and the tarp is on the field. Looking at the Weather Channel map the rain will taper off about 11:00 PM, so if they do play this I’ll be reading about it in the morning.