Hi. This is my personal web site. I publish articles here about things like astronomy, bird watching, reading, and atheism. The Site Map lists all the articles on the site, arranged by topic. Information about the design of this site, the tools used to create it, and me can be found on the About page.
What’s been going on lately?
On Sunday, December 10, 2006 I ported over five of the ten articles about building a 22-inch Dobsonian telescope I had posted on the blog version of my website. I’ll get the other five over here soon, and I have many more articles to write under this topic.
Progress on the scope is at a standstill now while I wait for my Porter-Cable plunge router to be repaired. While I was working on the altitude bearings for the scope, the router started bogging down and losing power. At first I thought the problem was that the spiral cut router bits weren’t sharp enough. They dull quickly when routing plywood. New bits didn’t fix the problem, though. I took the router to Overland Tool (a great Kansas City tool supply company), and they replaced the bearings. I guess 99% of the time this fixes the problem I was having. Only I was unlucky enough for my router to be in the 1% that this fix doesn’t work for. They were really good about the problem, though. The only other possible cause, I guess, is a solid-state module that controls the motor speed. Normally, it is a $90 part to replace, but since I had already spent $70 on the repair, they gave me a break on the additional work and only tacked on another $30, which seemed very fair to me.
Dustin House, the Overland Tool service manager, told me if replacing the module doesn’t fix the problem it must be some freak thing they would never be able to figure out and would call PorterCable to see about having the tool replaced.
The picture above shows one of the altitude bearings with the top layer removed to show the internal positioning dowels. Each bearing consists of two pieces of 3/4-inch Baltic Birch plywood with a 1/2-inch piece sandwiched between them. I added the dowels (three of them) to ensure that the three pieces would remain precisely aligned during glue up. From tip to tip the bearing is 44.5 inches and weighs 13 pounds. My router broke down right when I was starting to make the cut-out holes for the second bearing.
BookTalk.org
I found booktalk.org a few weeks ago while looking for on-line forums devoted to discussing books. The site tag line is “The freethinker’s book discussion community.” I was immediately encouraged by this and joined the forum. I’m glad I did. Chris O’Connor, the site owner, has done a terrific job developing a forum with lots of cool features and a large community of informed and friendly readers. He says his goal is to make booktalk the number one internet forum for atheist authors, and it seems to me he has already gone a long way to accomplishing his goal.
I’ve been having a lot of fun debating whether atheism is a more rational (reasonable) position than theism in The God Delusion topic with the MadArchitect (another forum member).
Christmas tree calamity
Last Sunday (December 10), Elly and I had to return the Christmas tree we bought at Home Depot the previous week — a first in our 18 years of buying fresh Christmas trees. It was a 7-foot Douglas fir. We followed our usual routine of cutting the bottom four inches off the base, drilling a series of 3/8-inch holes up the trunk (to increase liquid absorption), and adding a mixture of Sprite and water to the tree holder. Within a couple of days, though, needles were cascading off the tree. By the time we took the tree back we had already swept up a kitchen trash bag full of them.
We noticed that the other Douglas firs available also seemed to be losing needles at an alarming rate, so we went with a Balsam fir after giving it a good shake test. I don’ think the problem is specific to Home Depot, though. Christmas trees on a lot of the lots we’ve seen this year seem to be dried out. It might be due to the unseasonably warm weather we have had in November. I don’t know how long the trees wait in storage after being cut (4-6 weeks?), but warm weather could certainly dry them out.
Bird report
I got out for a little bird watching late Sunday morning while taking Samba for a walk in our neighborhood. I previously noticed a lot of interesting birds on the south side of Karnes Boulevard a few blocks from our house but hadn’t had my binoculars with me. So Samba and I went back to check it out. We’re fortunate to have large sections of wooded areas around our neighborhood, despite living in the midtown Kansas City area. These attract a lot of birds and other wildlife
The prize of the outing was a beautiful golden-crowned kinglet that I was able to watch for a number of minutes. In addition I saw a brown creeper (one of my favorite birds), a white-throated sparrow, a female cardinal, half a dozen or so dark-eyed juncos, and scads of robins. We’ve had an unusually high number of them in the area this fall. Oh, I also saw a black-capped chickadee and a downy woodpecker. The day was very windy, and the birds were foraging in the lee of the bluffs edging the Valentine neighborhood. I got this nice picture of a bluejay in our backyard using my Tele Vue 101 APO refractor. The picture is afocal — I just held the camera up to the eyepiece.
And here is Samba trying to mooch a piece of pizza. The poor dog is starving...
