Trey’s Blog|brain spillage!

Yesterday morning I woke up from a dream, but of course I can’t remember it now. What crossed my mind was how we dream. I’ve read that we do most of our dreaming in REM sleep, but I haven’t heard at what rate. Do we really dream in real time or do we dream at a much faster rate since our bodies aren’t fatigued by all of the action? It sures feels like I’m cramming a lot of dreaming into such a small portion of my sleep state. Anyone have thoughts or links to studies on this matter?

This year I purchased my first diesel, a Jetta to be exact, and I did so to gain fuel efficiency.  The Jetta TDI compared to it’s gasoline counterpart is head and shoulders better in the fuel arena.  The standard engine gets about 32 MPG highway, while my TDI gets 42 MPG with combination of highway and city miles.  In fact, when I did my research a year ago, I found that as long as diesel prices do not exceed gasoline prices by $0.80 per gallon, my TDI would be more efficient than the gasoline version.  The point of this story is to now point out that gasoline has moved above the price of diesel in my area.  At the station I frequent, gasoline is now $2.99 while diesel remains at $2.75 per gallon.  I found another Kroger in Cypress, Texas that offers diesel for $2.66, E85, and gasoline all at the same station.

I recommend everyone get a diesel powered car.

What is being done?

The time has come for the first of many camper projects. This time, I’ll be outfitting my popup camper with a receiver hitch to allow the use of a bike rack while in tow. This would be very easy for larger RVs since they typically have a 4″x4″ bumper with many choices of bike racks aftermarket. However, the standard popup camper bumper is only 1″x3″, which hardly offers an easy solution.

What is the plan?

the bumper is slightly offset from it rail mounts as they are only 1″x2″ leaving approximately 1″ gap between the bottom of the bumper and the side rails. It was decided to purchase an 1/8″ thick 2″x2″ square pipe to be fitted across from side rail to side rail. To account for the gap mentioned previously, grooves will be cut lengthwise in the square pipe and the pipe will be fitted tightly to each side rail. After the pipe is positioned, small spot welding will add to the strength of the new bar. With the new bar in place, there are now two points to which a receiver hitch can be mounted giving it the strength we need to support 200 lbs of bicycles.

What we need to purchase?

2″x2″ steel square pipe 52 inches long, Sawzall blades for cutting through metal pipe like butter, and a receiver hitch combo bar. The combo bar is similar to a hitch extension, but is only the receiver portion straight through. I found this at etrailer.com in 6″, 8″, 12″, and 18″ versions in their Fabrication section. The 18″ was my choice since it would leave plenty of room for cutting away excess if necessary.

Steps

1. cut support pipe to fit between side rails
2. measure distance between bottom of side rails and bottom of bumper, then cut a 1″ groove (1/8″ thick) that distance from the bottom of the pipe
3. cut through one side rail near the rear bumper to allow access to slide the new support into place
4. once in position, make spot welds to assure to movement and good bond with side rails
5. weld the cut made in the one side rail to put bumper back into original position
6. put spare tire back into place, then clamp hitch receiver into position
7. put empty bike rack into receiver hitch to check for clearance
8. adjust receiver distance from end of bumper as necessary allowing for full access to bike rack pins
9. remove bike rack and spare tire
10. weld receiver hitch into place
11. for added support, run a bolt up through the receiver hitch and the support bar
12. sand bumper
13. paint with high gloss black paint

Pictures

before project

new support bar resting across side rails.

Support bar is now welded in place.

Receiver hitch ready for installation

Receiver hitch installed and painted

Bike rack fits nicely in the new receiver — I know I painted this sloppily

Let’s go camping!!

Project Summary

The project was a success. I now have a place for my bikes when I’m hauling my camper. Most of the time was spent waiting for the hitch receiver to arrive, but as projects go this one went pretty quickly. There are a couple things I would have done differently. I should have ordered the hitch receiver before starting the project, but at that the time, I had no idea the fabrication receivers existed. The other thing would be to tape off the camper rear before spraying the bumper and hitch receiver. It shouldn’t be that hard to remove the paint as it is not that much, but it could have easily been avoided had I taped off that area.

As you may or may not know, I’ve been actively camping with my daughter this past year, and it has been very exciting.  We are part of the YMCA program, Safari Princesses.  This being my first year I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it has been nothing short of great.  The people in our tribe are fantastic people and we all enjoy getting out to spend time with our daughters and giving them an opportunity to play freely.  Now that this program is over for this year, I started planning for the next season.  I found a good deal on a popup camper on Craigslist, and made the purchase.  My girls couldn’t be more eager to go on the next campout.  They’d be plenty happy camping in the driveway if I’d let them.  Anyway, what most new buyers don’t realize and old buyers already know is that you aren’t just buying the camper.  The are a lot of other expenses associated the purchase.  Besides the obvious license registration, there may be some sales taxes, storage costs, maintenance costs.  You’ll also find yourself needing to purchase items for camping you didn’t need before.  It adds a new level of complexity, but it sure makes ‘roughing it’ pretty comfortable.

First of all, let me state that I do not condone evading the police. I read this story today and it reminded me of a question I’ve had in the past, but never asked. Here is the story/scenario:

An innocent bystander was killed Tuesday morning during a high-speed chase in southeast Houston.

My question is this… would this innocent bystander still be alive had the police not been chasing this person? I know it seems obvious the person committed a crime and must be cited for that crime, but is that citation worth the life of those around the chase? I’m curious what you think. Let me know in the comments section.

It has been a while since my last post.  I’ve been busy camping with my girls and readying a business plan.  I should have more posts up shortly.

Let me premise by stating my daughter is deathly afraid of just about any pet, except fish, which could be a full post in itself.

My mother came over last night and we were discussing the death of a family pet, my grandmother’s 16 year-old cat. When it came time to explain to my daughter what happens to pets, we simply told her that pets go to heaven when they die. Ten seconds after we told her this, we realized that this may have just caused our daughter to be afraid of heaven due to her fear of pets. We had a good laugh about it, but I wonder if this is something to be concerned with later?

This will seem a little odd, but I was talking to my daughter the other day about the people living in our neighborhood and she asked who our neighbors were. She wanted to know if the people down the street were our neighbors. Honestly, I couldn’t come up with a logical answer to that question. Basically I couldn’t figure out what constitutes a neighbor. Most dictionaries state that a neighbor is someone living near or bordering you. Many people just use the word neighbor to describe people living next to them, then others call those same people ‘next door neighbors.’ So are the people down the street our neighbors? We are in a neighborhood after all. What I finally told my daughter was that the people bordering our house were our neighbors, and each house in our neighborhood has neighbors, so the collection of each of these neighbors makes up our neighborhood. So those ‘people down the street’ I mentioned earlier would be our neighbor’s neighbor’s … neighbor. Is that right? I don’t know, but that is what I’m sticking to until I’m convinced otherwise. Let me know what you think.

I’d also like to hear other stories where your children generated abstract thought in you.

In the past 2 weeks, I dove head first into the world of XML with XSL, and now I’ve found myself floating to the top. The fundamental reason for using these two together is to allow the retrieval of data from a data source, output it as XML, then apply the look and feel to it using XSLT and CSS. By keeping the data separate from the design, we are able to adjust the look and feel without bothering with the backend programming or data. When your company requires a Change Management process to publish code, this will be your best friend.

One issue I came across that others had also come across was the confusion of what XSL calls variables. Many programmers such as myself find ourselves upset when we cannot reassign values to these variables, but XSL intended for these variables to behave in the same way that variables do in a math equation. They don’t reassign. They get substituted as the problem is executed. While this seems easy enough to grasp, I still wasn’t happy with the fact that no website I visited offered the solution to what I needed accomplish. All they did was argue why XSL variables made sense or not.

In a loop, I was wanting to trigger a flag (variable) that would tell the program to do something different after that flag was raised. This is easy enough to do in most programming languages, but XSL is special in that way. Though not published anywhere easily found, the way around this is using recursion and passing your values through parameters rather than variables. In other words, you need call the template with a initial value for your flag, then call the template again from within the template with a new set of parameters, which reflect the change you wanted to make (to your flag). I have a sample XSLT here. You see near the end of the days template, I call the template again with new parameter values. I also removed the for-each because with the recursion it is not required for my project. Just make sure you program your recursion to end at a certain point, otherwise all of you programmer friends will laugh at you as your XSL gets caught in an infinite loop. I’ve done that enough that this time, I avoided it. I hope this helps others looking for the answer to how to reassign values when XSL variables won’t take them.

Despite not actually having any fast cars, I really do enjoy watching, driving, and hearing fast cars go fast. Most of them are out of my budget, so unless something major happens, I’ll likely never have a car with more than 200hp. Anyway, a lot of people out there like to put their cars to the test, Dyno test to be specific. Some of those people video tape these tests and put them online. Check out this drag-ready Mustang blowing 1200hp. Notice how the turbo charger blows loud enough to cancel out the engine noise.

Has anyone had an issue with creating a YouTube account? I have one, but a friend of mine is having an issue. She fills out the form to create the account, but then gets presented with the following error:

“Sorry. Based on the information you have submitted to us, you are ineligible to register for YouTube.com”

I thought this was very odd because nothing she put into the form as abnormal, deviant or criminal. What criteria do they use to determine who can and who cannot create an account? I’ve seen a large amount of videos on YouTube and there a lot of stupid stupid videos on there. How did those people get accounts?

See Imelda’s post here

I think the first thing I should mention here is that I live in Harris County, which surrounds Houston, TX and beyond.  With that said, I was wondering if we had the most amount of police coverage in the state or even the country.  The following are the police patrol cars that can be seen on the average commute around Houston:

• Houston Police
• Metro Police
• Harris County Sheriff
• Harris County Precinct Constable
• Texas State Trooper (Department of Public Safety)

Obviously they all have overlapping jurisdictions, but I thought it was odd that we can pass this many different officers on a single trip into town.  Is that normal for larger cities or counties?  That is my random thought of the day.