Long hiatus but back from my Whistler mountain biking trip with Christopher. I am now a convert. He built a great bike for me, used up his supply of excess parts so I got a bargain! Here's a video of our trip - more coming later.

A landmark day! Second day of sunshine, and second day of bike riding, getting in shape for a fall mountain bike trip to Whittier in British Columbia with my son. This has been an awful June – gray, wet and cold. Rainfall 3 inches, only 10 dry days, only 9 truly sunny days. Finally finished rebuilding my rotting shed and now back to repairing my weather station and working on my photography. No matter how much time I have, it’s never enough.

Well, our New England winter has been a tough one weatherwise for my weather station here in Brewster. One of our coldest and snowy winter starts kept my anemometer and wind vane frozen. A brief thaw helped to free up the anemometer but the vane stayed locked at WSW. That is until a few days ago when I did a visual check and discovered the vane was gone! Soon I was amazed to find it intact in one of the rain gutters. Apparently the bearing remained sufficiently frozen so that the wind pushing against the vane unscrewed the nut that had held it attached. So I guess I will be reporting a WSW wind until spring when I'll be able to get to the roof to take down the AAG wind unit for repair.

After another hardware battle, I discovered my 1-wire hub had a failed port so I had to reconfigure my wiring, dropping my solar sensor. Will get back to that another day. More importantly, I had decided to make the switch to Linux on my old T23 thinkpad that's running my Java software. It is maxed out at 512mb ram(!!!) and has a 20 GB drive. After playing around with Linux (Ubuntu 8.10) on my destop with great success, I decided to replace the slow XP on the T23 with a Linux system. Should be perfect - right? Old, small slow machine - just where Linux shines. Well - NOT!

Things started to go to hell in a basket in late August. My wife's computer died (motherboard) and after two dead replacements, bought a new machine. Took the better part of a day to update & cleanout the crap (Dell, Vista). A day or two later my motherboard went out - one DOA replacement, second one good to go (several weeks passed). This all happened shortly after my station went dead for no apparent reason. During the summer I had moved my AAG Wind unit to a mast mounted on the peak of my roof.

Today I received a free replacement temperature probe for my Taylor Digital Oven Thermometer/Timer. This is years old and has given me total satisfaction until about two weeks ago when the probe failed due to a break in the insulation/wire. Email communication to Taylor was answered quickly informing me that I was eligible for one free replacement probe, with additional ones costing $5.00. The thermometer goes for about $20 delivered on the 'net. No questions about receipts, when purchased, if abused, no returns - no nothing. Just my address and I got the probe!

In addition to relocating the temperature/humidity sensor, I've enclosed the solar sensor in a translucent cover from a CD spindle stack. This has eliminated sensor saturation (in effect, sunglasses for the sensor) and I can now calibrate the sensor for 100% at peak sun (around 1:30 PM these days).

Well, at around 8:00 AM Saturday, 12 April we got hit with a major thunderstorm - lightning, hail, wind, much rain. At which time my station went dead. I didn't discover this until later in the day. Turns out the DS9097U RS232 interface connector got zapped by a lightning induced surge. This gave me a chance to make some more updates to my software and things are now back up using my spare DS9097U. I've ordered the parts to build a surge protector to avoid future recurrences.

August 29, 2005 - Another day that will live in infamy.

See The Great U.S.A.