Still on the Edge in Sumas

Not a lot of blogging recently, lots of blogs that way, huh? Everybody runs out of steam eventually. Sometimes they find more wood for the fire, sometimes they opt for electric heat. If you follow me.

Same goes for the bus. Gawd, a week ago about everything that could go wrong did. Shall I bore you? In a sentence, the circular saw smokes thanks to the dullest blade in BC; the rain came through the roof and stained my shiny new propane lamp; the inverter doesn't convert 120v to 12 for cry'n out loud; and the POWER went out in the WHOLE TOWN. I mean, JESUS! Shine your light HERE please!

Just keep your followers the hell away from me.

A moment of silence for anyone effected by the right to die.

Anywho, the bus is still very much alive; my constitution will surely be brought to a close long before she is. Now if we can just have continued draught conditions and absurdly cheap gas I'll be pleased as Sunday. Unfortunally (for me anyway) the weekend promises neither. Eighty percent chance of rain up there tomorrow. Of course, everything now is indoors; though I still want to paint the outside some.

Meanwhile Mark is working on the network to get us some proper celebrity. Some guest stars for his show in April are already lining up. Thank god for drag.

Pat has been teaching me the importance of putting yourself out there; I've seen no-one with so few walls around him.

Got back from Seattle yesterday; I can't believe I can find anything to complain about my work. Actually I can't. This is year four of the telecommuter's digest and what surprises me most is how few people do it. The amazing part of course is that I'm one of them. The technology is if anything more annoying and cumbersome than ever before. Mictrostation and SpecsEdit both are designed almost completely to be compatable with a local area network only.

I've been reading about digital controls. There are several families of industrial controls--classified by the level of speed and complexity. The fanciest one is called Fieldbus. Similarly, there are two families of building controls--BACnet and LonTalk. Annoyingly, the LonTalk protocol is but one of five alternate communication options available for BACnet. Both seem to use Ethernet. Also annoying--I don't know what Ethernet really is. In any case, the industry challenge is to make sure that any time-consuming computer processing takes place in a location close to the sensors (i.e. in the building, not on a computer connected far away via Internet). Or at least I think that's the challenge. I'm trying to learn about the hardware needed for building automation. For some reason its important to know the difference between a router and a gateway (near as I recall, a router is a good way to allow devices that can talk to each other to readily share information on a network; a gateway is a langauge translater and therefore a potential bottleneck). Why that's relevant I have no idea.

Once I've mastered the literally exhausting specialty of building controls (should be Monday afternoon or so, hardy harr) I'll move on to vibration transmission and sound attenuation. Do I sound like I'm whining, or bragging? I am SO not proud of myself.