Greg In The Desert

Last year I received a Master Cool evaporative cooler for free. I purchased some duct work from a local home improvement store but never permanently attached it. I had used duct tape to hold the whole mess together last year. Duct tape does a poor job of sticking to concrete.

This year I came up with a method of attaching the duct work by installing concrete bolts and bolting down extruded aluminum L channel to the concrete. I considered gluing the aluminum directly to the concrete but I wanted to have the option to remove it in the future.

I learned a few things about drilling through concrete. First: it takes a lot of power and my cordless Dewalt drill had a tough time with the drilling. It was just really slow (perhaps a lithium ion nano battery would have helped). I was meaning to buy a corded hammer drill anyway and the corded drill was 10 times faster. Second: it was easier to drill the holes in the aluminum L channel then use that as a template for drilling the concrete, rather than marking the concrete. The drill bit tended to walk a little in the concrete. Third: drilling concrete is hard on the drill bits. It’s good to have extra on hand.

I attached double sided window and door weather stripping to the aluminum L channel but left the paper backing on the other side. I filled in any remaining gaps with some outdoor rated silicon sealant.

I am far from done with this project. I need to verify that water is not leaking into the duct. I need to have someone clean all the duct work so I have not completely sealed the duct to the aluminum L channel. I want to install some sort of concrete sealant to the duct once it’s cleaned out.

Finally, I want to build a better stand for the cooler. I envision a wheeled stand with a built-in jack so I can easily move the cooler around for maintenance and adjust its height without additional help.

I primarily listen to my music collection through my iPod. I don’t care what Apple says, the shuffle feature of the iPod (and to a lesser degree iTunes) does a poor job of preventing the same Artist from playing randomly. Even with the the scheme I came up wit here, my iPod still played 3 songs from Metallica in a row the other day. These methods do a good job of addressing the issues.

I start off with master playlist called “Filtered”, it’s filtered for genres. Second playlist is “Filtered – 4 Stars + Played”. This ensures that songs which are rated have actually been played. I ofter will rate new songs high but not really listed to them (I have another playlist for new songs). The next playlist is “Filtered – 4 Stars + Played last 14 days.” Finally I’m to my primary playlist, “Filtered – 4 Stars + w/o last 14 days.”

Unfortunately the iPod does not automatically update these playlists, they only get updated when I sync my iPod with iTunes. At one time “The Stroke” had 2x as many plays as any other song, I like that song but not that much, this does a reasonably good job of reducing this effect. I’d prefer to have a playlist that removes, say the top 10% of played songs, but iTunes doesn’t have this option in the filter lists. This also doesn’t prevent the same artist being played in a row.

I’ve posted some photos of our trip to Las Vegas this week. In the next few days I’ll write some more about the trip.

I took about 100 pictures and almost a hour of video. I put the 25 most interesting pictures on the web. I did much better with the pictures as I think I got a good handle on working the exposure settings on my PowerShot S100. Unfortunately I am hitting its limitation and wishing I had more control. Looks like a new camera will be in the works.

Update 01/25/08: The orginal link has been removed and all the photos have been posted on a flickr set.

What’s most interesting is the camera I took these photos in 2003 with, the Canon Powershot S100, at the time seemed to do a poor job. Most of the photos seemed under exposed. Since then I’ve been going through my photo archives with Aperture and found I was able to really clean them up. It’s amazing what a good job that little camera did after all. Here are a few of my favorites.