Another neighbor becomes the victim of cold weather

Well it looks like another neighbor's house has become the victim of the cold weather. Can you say "thermal expansion" folks? I guess many property owners have failed to understand the basic concepts of thermal dynamics when it comes to that most common substance WATER. Whenver water freezes it EXPANDS, hmmmm...curious. When this happens to a pipe that's on the outside of your house, you have all the elements to a disaster, a broken water pipe! I went outside this morning to shovel off a spot in the backyard for our dogs to "do their business" when I noticed a quiet hissing sound coming from our neighbor's house. I peeked over the fence and to my surprise saw that their outside sprinkler pipe had burst and was spewing out water. This must have been going on for quite some time because the water was frozen all around it, despite the fact that water continued to run all over the ice. Also, noteworthy was the huge pile of trash in front of their house on the street. Trash day was Tuesday and the trash people, it seems, refused to collect it. This probably had something to do with the fact that it mainly consisted of household furniture: I counted 2-3 TVs, a computer monitor, desks, mattresses, and other household furniture. Being the "good neighbor" that I am, I decided to go around the back of their house and attempt to shut off the water. I tried the first valve, nothing, the water continued to pour out. Then the second one: success! With the water off I decided to call the City water dept. to have them come and shut off the water to the house. I followed up this phone call with a call to the HOA to let them know of the huge mess out in the street. Not only does this mess make the neighborhood look bad, but obviously no one wanted the stuff given the fact that the monitors and T.V.s now had over several inches of SNOW on top of them!

P.S. oh yeah, when I saw "another neighbor", I'm referring to a prior incident that happened to the neighbor on the other side of us a couple of years ago. When the temperature drop outside combined with a blown out furnace pilot light, the inside house temperature dropped below freezing. This was enough to burst the pipe, JUST BEFORE the main water shutoff valve. The water dept. had to be called out in this case too in order to shut off the house's water and stop all the water that was leaking out into the living room, utility closet, and spewing out into the street from under their garage.

Learning to make my own DVD

Last night I played around with making my own DVD and it was kind of fun. I have been recording one of Nikki's favorite soap opera's "Days of our lives" with our new TV card. Trouble is the recorder doesn't seem to know when to shut off :-) So, then the files are so large there's no room for anything else.

I figured out how to save them to DVD and have made a few DVDs for Nikki so she can watch her shows when she's ready.

My Brother, Nathan, learned how to do all this years ago, but I never had the right computer gadgets to do it until now. It's kind of fun. I'm planning on making some more DVDs from family videos of the past.

-- Adam

Learning Twitter

Well, I heard on the radio today about "twitter.com" and I've read about it in passing. I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I googled it and read up an article on Wikipedia. Interesting. So, I signed up for an account and may try it out.

Facebook status on my blog! Cool, who knew :-)

Well, I just figured out how to post my friend's status on my blog as an RSS feed. Pretty cool. Who knew you could do that? (Well, I'm sure many of you did, but I thought it was pretty cool).

Ham Radio class in January?

I'm thinking of starting up another Ham Radio class in January 2009, probably the 2nd week of January.

Just wanted to see what the interest level might be? I have Tue, Wed,or Thursday open. I was thinking of doing it on a Thursday night togive a day open other than Tue. night leadership meetings and Tu/Wed.night youth activities so that anyone who wants to attend may have that day open?

Sign up for a Yahoo account and join our group to get future announcements.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/errs-denver/

Midlife crisis? PhD program

Well, the other day I was waxing philosophical and I thought to myself, Hmmm...based on the average life expectancy in the U.S. and my age now, I'm probably "1/2 way through my life"! Then, I got thinking and considering the fact that I don't drink or smoke, I may add an additional 5-7 years on to that (not quite 1/2 way over with that).

Anyway, I have aspirations at becoming a Univ. College Professor, which means I'll have to pursue a PhD at some point. I guess I'd better get going on that :) Or at least planning for when I'll start, what my disseratation topic will be and where I want to get my degree from.

I started "shopping around" for a PhD program and found two that might fit well for me, one at CU-Denver and the other at CU-Boulder.

The other day I got a flyer in the mail from Univ. of Colorado, Health Sciences promoting their latest "Computational BioScience" PhD program:

http://compbio.uchsc.edu/

That kind of interested me too. However, when I read the admission requirements of some advanced, graduate level, biology classes I thought twice about it. I'd have to take 3-9 credits of undergraduate and graduate biology just to get myself "up to speed" in the biological sciences. I don't think Biology 101 at BYU would count :-)

I have done general reading in news papers and online articles about science, medicine, and new drugs that come out all the time, and the subject is fascinating to me. There was a good special in PBS about "epigenetics" that really interested me too. (see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3411/02.html)

I really like Math & Science and biology is a different twist on science and a different domain field of knowledge. I have had several co-workers and graduate classmates that went from a Master's in Biology to computer programming or getting a M.S. in Computer science. Perhaps Biologists are much smarter than computer programmers (probably true), but if you can go from one to other, perhaps I could go from CS to Biology?

Thanksgiving

I can't wait for Thanksgiving tomorrow. It represents the start of the Christmas season. I hope the weather stays warm enough to put out Christmas lights outside on Friday. I usually hook up a timer to the outside lights, but I'm a bit frustrated because I can't seem to find the timer from last year. Maybe it will turn up when I start digging out the Christmas boxes?

I'm also looking forward to going to Seattle this Christmas to visit my Sister & Brother-in-law and my nieces and nephews. I haven't been back there for several years and I'm looking forward to leaving Denver for a little trip.

Updating my blog pages

Well I finally decided to update my blog pages with "followers", RSS Feeds and links to other blogs. The funny thing is many of the other blogs I'm following haven't been updated in years! :-) Come on guys, start blogging!

Hello there!

Just starting out this Blog thing. :-) Hmmm..we'll see how it goes.