A Tour of the National Weather Service Office in Chanhassen

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As Rice County Skywarn is a Weather-Ready Nation Ambassador, we got the opportunity to tour the National Weather Service in Chanhassen today! We talked to the meteorologists that forecast our weather and do such a good job updating the public over social media, without sensationalism. At 6 p.m., we watched a weather balloon launch with a radiosonde which measures temperature, humidity, and pressure all the way up to 100,000 feet. The data is used to create the models we use each day to predict the weather. The staff was so accommodating, informative, and polite! Afterwards, we stopped by Lion’s Tap for supper. It was a great afternoon away from the office!

 

Big Island Retrospective

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As we take a moment to look back at our relaxing and enjoyable week on Big Island, I am left with several thoughts:

1) Why do I always get a pat down and a groping from the TSA whenever passing through airport security? EVERY time I get scanned, I turn around and see two big red squares on the screen where my balls should be. I know you may think this feeds my ego as the scanner detects steel and other metals, but this really just slows down the line. I wonder if TSA precheck will exempt me from the upper inner thigh check I receive as part of my vacation package.

2) You’re nothing on the islands unless you drive a Toyota Tacoma with a minimum of a 3″ body lift.

3) The Jeep Cherokee Trailhawk is potentially the worst vehicle I’ve ever driven, and that’s saying a lot coming from a previous owner of a 1978 Plymouth Volare’. When going up a slight incline with cruise control on, it can’t even keep speed. It won’t downshift to a more powerful gear, and you have to floor it to get back up to the cruise speed. I needed 90% throttle to keep 35 MPH speed up an 18% grade going up a mountain. I thought the newer Dodge Dart was the worst rental I’ve ever had, but this thing takes the cake.

4) Mauna Loa last erupted on March 25, 1984, nearly destroying the city of Hilo. 34 years earlier in 1950, it also erupted, destroying the village of Hoʻokena-mauka. Following this pattern of 34 years, it could erupt again on Sunday. I sure hope getting out of the car twice on Mauna Loa to take a whiz behind the car door didn’t anger the volcano Gods too much!

5) The best food is ALWAYS at the rundown looking food stands. Bonus points for having the Department of Health ahead of you in line… because he is hungry.

6) You won’t hit a deer on a road in Hawaii, but goats, donkeys, mongoose, and the elderly are all fair game.

Mahalo (thanks) for joining us on our journey! 🤙🤙🤙

Poor Sears

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Poor Sears. They are shutting down another 100 stores as their businesses continue to fail. Sears was perfectly positioned to monopolize computer-based sales since they had a 100-year head start with their mail order business.

Before almost anyone had Internet, CBS, IBM and Sears joined forces to create an online service called “Prodigy” in 1984. This actually allowed people to purchase things from Sears on their home computer some 10 years before Amazon was founded. Unfortunately, their vision was just too early as most people had to pay long distance phone charges to connect in addition to the monthly subscription.

In the mid to late 90s when Internet became more popular, Sears was gun-shy about investing more money into the same idea. Unfortunately, this would be the beginning of the end since Sears never really did innovate again.

Enjoy this commercial for the Prodigy online service from 1990.

Bitcoin

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Since the increase in Bitcoin’s worth to almost $20,000 (before Christmas), I’ve been asked by several people about Bitcoin. Here are a few reasons why getting involved with them, in my opinion, is a horrible idea.

1. Your Bitcoin wallet is kept on your computer. If you lose the key to your wallet, or your computer crashes, you lose all of your money.

2. If you put your Bitcoin on an exchange, when that exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. This has already happened several times since there are only a handful of exchanges that deal with US currency.

3. In order to buy something with Bitcoin, you have to pay to have that transaction processed by all the Bitcoin “miners” in the world. This on average costs over $20 a transaction, and takes 2 hours to complete. The more you pay, the higher your priority in line.

4. This one transaction, according to https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption, takes as much electricity to process as what is consumed by 10 average U.S. households in a single day. This is mainly due to inefficiencies in the Bitcoin protocol.

5. Refunds or chargebacks are impossible with Bitcoin. There is no turning back a transaction.

6. Since there is little value to using Bitcoin for everyday transactions, most of its current value (in my opinion) is only from its possible future prospective value (when will the bubble completely burst?)

Now that Bitcoin value is back down to under $15,000, some are wondering if it might be time to invest. Take a look at these graphs and ask yourself, is this the bull trap before the bottom drops out?

Like it or not, electric cars are the future.

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Anybody in their 30s or 40s now will definitely be living in a world where electric cars, charged by renewable energy such as solar or wind power, will be the majority of vehicles on the road. Major trucking companies have already put orders in for the Tesla Semi based on ROI for delivery in 2019. AND, they release an electric car that does an 8.9 second 1/4 mile with a 600 mile range at highway speeds.Gasoline and diesel engines will go the way of the steam engine in the next 30-40 years.

Digital Video Editor Certification is now Available!

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I am proud to announce that the Digital Video Editor Certification offered by Electronics Technicians Association, International (ETA) is now complete! I served as a Subject Matter Expert on this committee for the last half year, and we believe we have created a certification test that employers will value. The future job prospects for this field are expected to grow much faster than average, and median wages for a DVE were $30.18 an hour!

ETA is a US-based not-for-profit 501(c) 6 professional association which provides certifications in industries such as basic electronics, fiber optics and data cabling, renewable energy, information technology, photonics and precision optics, customer service, biomedical, avionics, wireless communications, radar, and smart home. ETA is also one of the 13 COLEMs (Commercial Operator License Examination Manager) for U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) testing. ETA works with technicians, educators, and military personnel. ETA also partners with companies such as Motorola Solutions to provide certification to their employees.

Fred Rogers melted Senator Pastore in about 6 minutes

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I very seldom share a video or a meme or something like that from another page on Facebook, because seldom do any of them get more than a few second response, be it a quick chuckle or a scroll-through. This video will stay with you throughout the weekend. I guarantee it.

In 1969, Mr. Fred Rogers gave the following emotional plea to a Senate Subcommittee. President Richard Nixon was trying to cut funding for PBS. Mr. Rogers was trying to save it. This speech is one of many fantastic memories that remind us just how fantastic a happiness hero this man really was.

Somehow using nothing but a few minutes of gentle words, Mr. Rogers was able to convince them not to pull funding from public television. The transition of the committee’s chairman from skeptical and dismissive at the beginning to having an attitude of outright admiration at the end is beautiful to behold. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when kindness and the happiness of others is your goal.

Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence and ALT Tags

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Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence, and ALT tags. #Engadget #alttags

I figured I would post something about this because I haven’t seen it discussed on any forum I am familiar with on the Internet.

Facebook reveals a little information about the information it collects from the pictures you post in the form of ALT tags. ALT tags are included in the raw HTML code of nearly every website you visit. They are primarily used to briefly describe a particular picture, image, or graphic for users that can’t view images, either because they are visually impaired, or their Web browser doesn’t support it.

By inspecting the HTML code of anyone’s Facebook profile, you can see some of what Facebook can recognize in your photos. Take for instance these examples on my own profile. In the first example on the thumbnail with my girlfriend and I in the car, Facebook believes it sees 2 people, smiling, sitting, outdoors, with sunglasses and a beard. This is amazingly accurate (it HAD been a few days since I shaved!) In the second example on the thumbnail of me jumping my four-wheeler at Jordan Supercross, Facebook believes it sees one or more people on a motorcycle outdoors. Again, not too shabby on Facebook’s part!
If you care to experiment a little, what other criteria can you find that Facebook’s AI can successfully identify? Share here!

The last T1 has been disconnected!

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Once the configuration was done, the only thing left to do was plug in the fiber! As you can see, a few Nerstrand Elementary School students happily helped out with this process. With a simple, positive “click” of the fiber-optic patch cable into the transceiver, Nerstrand completed their upgrade from the two trunked T-1 lines offering about 3Mbps of bandwidth, to the 10000Mbps of bandwidth now at their disposal. The speed is exciting, but even more exciting is the capacity this line will give the School for bringing in more devices and perhaps even having a one device per student option down the road. Thanks Amelia and Stefan!

My Humble “Thanks”

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The humble act of saying “Thanks” implies that not one of us can exist solely by themselves. Whether it’s the physical assistance we might get from someone stronger than us, the professional assistance we get from someone who is more skilled than us, the life assistance we get from someone who is wiser than us, or the spiritual assistance we might get from a being more powerful than us. Life is a combination of what we accomplish and what we have to offer others, the bonds with our loved ones, friends and family alike, and good fortune when none of us are quite strong enough.

For this, I offer my humble “Thanks”. I am grateful for my good fortune, my loved ones, my good friends, and my good health. I have everything anyone could possibly ever want. Please take some time today, instead of feeling envy about others, to reflect on the people, things, and abilities you yourself have, and to be thankful, and grateful.

Homemade Solar Tracker

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It was a bright, sunny day, so why not build a homemade solar tracker? Solar trackers help solar panels always point at the sun as the sun moves from east to west across the sky. They slightly improve efficiency of panels connected to them.

We took an old “C-band” satellite rotator and controller, and soldered some wires up to the “east” and “west” movement buttons to give us a couple of dry contacts that we could control with electronics. We chose (2) X-10 Universal Modules which momentarily close the dry contacts when a signal for it comes down the powerline (which a computer can control). One module for east, one module for west. The contacts short for about a second and a half with every ON command. Starting at the east-most side, 18 WEST ON commands make it go to the extreme west-most side.

After verifying the modules worked properly, it was then time to start writing code! After calculating the number of possible minutes of sunlight after subtracting the Sunrise time from Sunset time, we took the result and divided by 18 to find out how many minutes between ON commands. It is this interval (45 minutes right now) that the rotator will move west. At the end of the day when the rotator is at its west limit and the sun sets, the rotator will turn all the way back to the east limit to prepare for the next day.

This was a pretty fun project to conceptualize and put in to operation in a single day. The jury is still out on whether or not the extra energy produced will offset running the rotator, especially on non-sunny days.