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As I’m fond of stating, there are two seasons here in Minnesota: Winter and August 14th.

What I find interesting is that there’s an actual debate raging (yes, I say, raging) amongst the academics and weather experts among the proper way to measure the wind chill. Apparently, the old way to measure the wind chill was to fly some hybrid anemometer/thermometer contraption at 20 feet above ground level. So, for example, on a day like today, when the air temperature was a balmly 3 degrees, the winds careening in from Canada at 25MPH (FYI — Canada is responsible for more than just polluting our beef industry) made the wind chill at -15 at 20 feet about the ground. However, the pundits opposed to the 20 feet level, think that the reading should come at ground level, which would lessen the impact of the wind and cause the wind chill to read at something like only -5 degrees.

Keep in mind here people that we’re talking Farenheit.

Either way, 20 feet vs. ground level, I still classify it as RFC: Really Cold.

I think that we should create a national holiday in honor of the person who invented the thermostat.

Sam

I’ve always set my rearview mirror the way my parents taught me. Set it up so the road is in the middle vertical plane, and so that you can see the back corner of your car. Easy, simple… and wrong.

Here’s the text of an article I ran across while reading over at Insight Central, an online hangout for Insight owners. The reason I was so interested is that the Insight, in the “Daddy’s view” from the rearview mirror, has very limited rear viewing area. The rearview mirror is kind of small, and the view out the back has two large vertical braces and a nearly-horizontal window to look through, plus one large horizontal brace bisecting the view through the mirror pretty badly. But I found once I followed the tips below, I could see just fine behind me — I even find that I don’t need to check blind spots by turning my head!

***TEXT*** Setting Your Car Mirrors Tom and Ray Magliozzi

We’ve discovered that it’s possible to set your three mirrors (rearview and both side views) so that they eliminate almost any possible blind spots.

For years, we’d been setting our side-view mirrors so they gave us a view of the back corner of our cars. This is the way it’s been passed down from grandfather to father to us. But we finally discovered something very interesting. The back corner of the car never moves. It always stays in the same exact place. So there’s really no reason to keep an eye on it. And by moving the side mirrors farther out, you can line up all three of your mirrors so they have minimal overlap — and you can see everything behind you and beside you.

Step 1: Start by setting your rear-view mirror as you normally would.

Then, lean your head all the way to the left so it touches the driver’s window. From that position, set your left side-view mirror so you can see the back corner of your car. Now lean the same distance the other way, and set your right side-view mirror the same way.

Now, here’s what happens. When a car comes up behind you, you should first see it in your rear-view mirror. But as it passes you (let’s say on your left), you’ll see it move to the left side of your rear-view mirror. And as its left headlight disappears from your rear-view mirror, it should instantly show up in your left side-view mirror. There should be no delay. It should slip from one to the other, so you can always see it.

Step 2 – Left-Side Mirror Alignment: Set your left-side mirror so that as soon as the passing car’s left, front headlight disappears from your rear-view mirror, it appears in your left-side mirror.

You might need to make some slight adjustments to your side-view mirrors to make everything line up perfectly. And pulling up next to a line of parked cars (to simulate another lane of traffic next to you) is a good way to do that.

Step 3 – Right-Side Mirror Alignment: Then do the same thing on the right.

Step 4: End result? No huge blind spots.

Driving with the mirrors this way takes some getting used to. You have to learn to rely on your rear-view mirror first. And you’ll have to get used to what your side-view mirrors are now looking at. But, the good news is that your blind spot should now be gone! ***

If you need some diagrams, here’s a web link: http://cartalk.cars.com/Columns/Archive/2002/November/07.html

(Matt’s note: I modified this a bit. When setting my mirrors now, I just cock my head over as far as is comfortable if I were driving driving, and set the outside mirror so I can just see the rear corner when I do that. Then I do the same for the other mirror. This amounts to the same effect, without having to visit a local parking lot to line up your rearview every time someone else drives your car.)

I can always tell when I’ve been out of work a while… going back leaves me exhausted. I’m doing contracting work for Smith Johnson & Associates, for a company that makes software for embedded microchips in devices. Things that monitor vending machine levels and report back on stock, that kind of stuff.

Anyway, it’s pretty fun. I’m subbing in for a woman taking maternity leave for a while. Total brain drain today. About three hours of boredom filling out paperwork & stuff, then the rest of the day was all talk, meetings, more talk, more thoughts, writing, etc.

A nice thing is that I’m paid hourly. That’s wonderful. It’s a welcome change from 70-hour-salaried weeks. No such thing as “time and a half” pay in my chosen career field, unfortunately, but in a way that’s nice. I just do the work, and get paid for how long I work.

Now to line up my next position that I’ll need after July 5. Hmm, where to start looking this time?

Just in case you didn’t feel bad enough about your life already, here’s a little gem to remind you of things other people had accomplished by the time they were your age.

Ain’t life grand?

Just in case you have trouble with that link, the guy who created the page was nice enough to set up the whole darn thing in Javascript. So just right-click on the page and “view source” to see all the lists without manually putting in the ages. Spoiler: If you are a negative number, or over 100, you’re SOL, all the entries are the same from 100+.

I read an an insightful weblog entry over at Wil Wheaton’s web site. It had to do with good neighbors. And I couldn’t help but wonder — am I a good neighbor?

Points against us being good neighbors:

• We had a used tire in our yard for over three years.
• The paint is peeling around our front door.
• We don’t have a deck. Our sliding glass window leads off into the vastness of space.
• We have a dead apple tree in the back yard.
• We let our yard die. And we only mowed it twice last year since it was dead. And we only trimmed the weeds twice.
• We have a big hole in the ground that’s also three years old next to the front door where I planned to punch through my basement wall to finish our sprinkler system. It’s still there, and the sprinkler system is still hooked up every year by plugging it into a hose.
• Our then four-year-old daughter repainted one of our rooms without our consent four years ago. The pink blotches are still very visible on the screen on the front of the house.
• Our garage has always been so full of stuff we could never park our car in it.
• We have a nonfunctional lawnmower and rusting bike sitting next to our driveway.
• I record music late into the night (usually, with headphones, but my singing is still loud)
• I grill outdoors in the middle of the winter.
• We have an oil leak in our van that’s permanently stained our driveway.
• Weeds have overgrown our gardens.
• Our stereo system attached to our DVD player can get pretty loud, and we usually watch movies late at night (9-11:30 PM)

Points in favor of us being good neighbors:

• We invite friends over all the time to quietly play cards and chat — including our next-door neighbors, who have three old non-working trucks parked in their front yard.
• We tend to keep to ourselves, and keep quiet.
• Our kids play outdoors, but only within strictly prescribed boundaries, and they tend to get bullied, rather than be bullies.
• Our cars don’t belch smoke, and aren’t really loud.
• We never have knock-down, drag-out fights in the middle of the nights with our windows open like one of our neighbors. Oh, wait, they don’t fight anymore since she left him…
• Once you’re inside our house, it’s cluttered but comfortable and welcoming.
• We take cookies & homemade goodies to our neighbors regularly.
• We know all our neighbors within three houses by their first names.
• We avoid appearing in the front yard in nightclothes.
• We bathe regularly.
• We have barbeques each summer and invite all our neighbors.
• We make it a point to have all our immediate neighbors over for dinner at least once a year.

I think, on balance, we are reasonably good neighbors with lots of room for improvement. What about you?

In the run of Happy Days, there was a penultimate episode, wherein Fonzie is forced to jump his motorcycle over a shark pool to save the day. This episode is considered to be the moment that the show began its transition from very good to pretty bad, culminating, of course, with the exit of Richie, Ralph, Potsie (mostly), and the entrance of Ted MCGinley, the TV show killer (See married with children).

Thus was born the term “Jump the Shark”, which is used to describe the moment when a show has reached its peak, and its all downhill from there.. favorite jump the shark moments include: “The second Darren on bewitched”, “The arrival of Scrappy Doo”, and when a child character reaches Puberty (Wonder Years).

Essentially it means they are out of good ideas.

SO.. I was reminiscing over some of my favorite moments in TV and Movie history where a once good franchise lost its touch.. and I invite more..

Star Trek: TNG “Data gets the Emotion Chip” ST: Generations

Star Wars “Ewoks” ROTJ

Mad About You “Birth of the baby”

Friends “Birth of the Baby”

STYX (Music) “Tomo Arigato, Mr. Roboto”

Mortal Kombat (Game) “Mortal Kombat 4” (Now in 3D a la Tekken, no photo 2d play)

Pac Man (Game) “Pac man Jr. (Pinball)” or the creation of “Pac Man Cereal”

Superman “The Resurrection (Reign of the Supermen)”

Aerosmith Remakes a country song “Don’t wanna miss a thing”

Pizza Hut “The Triple Crust Pizza”

Dark Angel “the entire second season”

Saved By The Bell “The College Years / New Class”

90210 “Brenda goes to Europe”

Batman “Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr. Freeze”

The Matrix “Zion is really one big sweaty RAVE” – Something is very wrong.

Heavy Metal Hair Bands “The arrival of Nirvana”

Grunge Bands “The Departure of Nirvana”

Cheers “Never jumped the shark”

Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez “Never were that good”

Any takers?

So I’ve had the tires on my Insight pumped up to 50 PSI on each corner since the day I bought it. I’ve enjoyed the gas mileage, but have noticed that performance was very poor over snow and ice, and even taking corners it felt a little slippery.

Before heading out on our near-disaster New Year’s trip in our family van, I deflated the Insight’s tires back to factory-spec 38 PSI front, 35 PSI rear so that my very-pregnant wife, who was remaining home, would enjoy a smoother ride and better traction.

What I didn’t realize was exactly how much of a difference it makes.

Nine hours after we left, we limped back home due to a blizzard forcing closure of the freeways. I was tired and despondent, and decided to take my Insight out for a shopping trip to help me feel better. Getting 14 MPG in a big van against a sixty MPH headwind can make you feel down like that after driving the Insight Anyway, within a few moments of driving it out of our driveway over the left-over slush on the roads, I was amazed to find it seemed to actually handle slush well! Better than the van I’d been driving for nine hours, as a matter of fact. I was surprised!

Snow was threatening on the horizon in the darkness, blotting out the stars, so I decided to test how my Insight handled dry, windy conditions, with patches of ice and water.

Oh. Wow.

I accelerated from a dead stop and did 180’s in an empty parking lot at twenty miles an hour without going more than two parking stalls wide. I whipped around 90-degree corners at nearly thirty miles an hour — hard enough to smash my shoulder against the driver’s door, yet not a squeal or complaint from my tires. I floored the car from an icy entrance to the highway in “S” mode, and only one tire skipped for a second before gripping hard and shoving me in the back of my seat. I slammed on the brakes at fifty, and seemed to stop almost immediately — easily hard enough to kick in the seat belt restraints and push the air out of my lungs. I was really impressed.

Realize, the only performance vehicle I’ve ever driven was a 2002 8-cylinder Ford Mustang convertible as a rental on a business trip one time. Of course, that one had more power, but I was just flat amazed at how a simple change in tire pressure can transform this little red buggy from a genteel commuter vehicle into a fun, sporty toy.

For those of you concerned about your investments in this era of very low returns in the stock market, Jon Brusco has some sound advice on how to lose less money.

So last week we came up with the bright idea of heading up to Idaho on New Year’s Day so that we could check out my brother-in-law’s new sleds (note: “sled” == “snowmobile”). He bought four, and three are in working condition. Apparently, they are pretty fast. Anyway, I wanted to just drive up there in my Insight (Hey, there and back again on a single tank of gas isn’t bad), but Christy impressed upon me the necessity of taking all the children with me if I went. She’s eight months pregnant, having fairly regular contractions, and did not want to worry about delivering a child while three other children panicked around her.

Well, the idea was sound, except for the fact that it decided to blizzard on our way up there. Sixty mile per hour crosswinds. Five to fifteen feet of visibility. Horrible stuff. We made it as far as Pocatello (at least an hour later in our trip than usual) before we took a break because they’d closed the freeway.

The freeway remained closed.

We waited three hours, then gave up, turned around, and headed back home. There was some negotiation on the phone with the in-laws about taking back roads until the manager of the Subway we were hanging out at, who lives on the aforementioned back road we would have used, informed us that there were three-to-four foot snowdrifts on that road. Practically impassable.

The options at that point were to rent a room, wait it out, or head home. I decided to head home. Scary trip back, really — the snow hadn’t gotten shallower behind us — but within twenty miles after Malad Pass was behind us (two hours after leaving the Subway when it normally takes about forty-five minutes), the snow slacked off to rain, then to nothing but wind for the last two hours of our trip home.

Talk about a wasted day. A wasted tank of gas. It basically turned out to be a nine-hour round trip to go eat out at Subway. At least my low-carb Turkey & Bacon wrap was good.

I was grateful that Elijah slept much of the way up and back since he was up very late last night. He was downright cordial when he was awake, too — an unusual state for this nearly-two-year-old tornado. The other kids entertained themselves on my wife’s old Palm M500, and my current one, playing Bejeweled. We liked that game enough to buy it, it rocks, and our kids really enjoy playing it.

So anyway, here it is, over nine hours after leaving the house to try to make what’s usually a four-hour trip, back at home. That’s just a bummer. But it beats wrecking ourselves in the middle-of-nowhere Idaho wilderness.

John Olsen is a published author and mega-computer-geek, with a similarly geeky wife and wonderfully geeky children. He’s written hit computer games that have sold millions of copies. He’s the kind of geek other geeks look up to.

He enjoys over-engineered solutions to common household problems. The problem here: how do you set up an impressive display of timed fireworks using only commonly-available, Utah-legal fireworks? I mean, my family usually follows the tried-and-true approach of “set up three fountains, and try to get the last one lit before the first one burns your hand off”. Not John! To the right is his July 24th (Pioneer Day in Utah, a big celebration similar to Independence Day elsewhere in the U.S.) automated conflagration setup — and below, his setup for tonight’s festivities. Regarding this arrangement, John says, “last July 24th where I was going more for duration than intensity. This new one is relatively small in comparison. The box said to light one at a time, so I redefined one.”

What do you think? Could you do better?