Nerd Corner

Behold, the efforts of several months of labor: my basement nerd corner:

Due to my hobby and school projects often monopolizing our dining table, my wife and I agreed that if I could find a desk for cheap, we could rearrange things in a basement a bit and give me some space where my sprawling mess could live.  In a week or so of hunting Cragislist I found this "L" desk for $50.  The desk is an oak monster and the effort in getting it downstairs dulled my enthusiasm for the project somewhat. I got all the computer stuff re-situated and then at a much more relaxed pace re-organized the material in my old desk into the new drawers.  This evolved into a culling and scanning activity where the amount of physical paperwork I had on hand was significantly reduced.

A month or two ago I realized the utility of the desk was significantly reduced due to all of my electronic components and tools being in boxes rather than readily available.  I began a hunt for shelving options and, again, with my wife's input and guidance, found a way to construct some ugly yet functional shelves with scrap lumber we had on hand.   The result is shown on the left, resting on the desk and almost reaching the ceiling.  Another Criagslist find got me the "mailbox" shelving on top and after spending WAY TOO much on fishing tackle boxes, I was able to sort and store virtually all of my components.

The component storage taking up the top half of the shelving, I left myself some work space in the bottom half and put a shelf half way up for miscellaneous tools.  To store the rest of my tools I cut up a dowel into pegs and drilled holes everywhere I pleased, hanging tools throughout the shelving.  For lighting, I purchased a plug-in work light and screwed it into the bottom shelf.

Today I added two small finishing touches.    The blue patches on left is masking tape holding up some cheap red/green LED lighting in a very ugly manner to provide a small amount of light for the tools on the bottom shelf.  I also added some hooks to store my banana cables behind the shop light.

Having this work space has been fully wonderful and I am some thankful to my understanding and supportive wife in this.  There may come a day when we don't have the space for something like this but for now, it is a great blessing in my life.  There is enough space that projects can live on the desk and not interfere with the rest of our daily lives.  My wife gets a cleaner kitchen table and I get space to nerd out.  As they say, its a win/win.

Wichita PSERC Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of the spring 2012 PSERC conference and this year Wichita State is hosting. Unfortunately, due to the reconstruction of the student center on campus, we're hosting the conference at the newly remodeled Drury Plaza Hotel Broadview. The hotel is great but it's not the same as being on a university campus. There was a lot of interesting material covered yesterday (at least for power nerds like me) but there was one talk in particular that seemed more widely applicable; it was titled "Do We Need a 21st Century Electrical System?". The speaker's answer was a resounding "YES!" and he made a compelling case. The system we are using today is by and large over 50 years old and was built in a very piecemeal fashion with each utility around the country doing its own thing. As the system grew these utilities began to connect to each other which allowed more and more energy exchange between the utilities, helping each other during emergencies and other unexpected events. These energy exchanges soon became the daily norm these local utilities found themselves as parts of a much larger system, each controlling a small part of the system and being influenced by the choices of others, even those geographically distant. The grid when it was built was not designed with this kind of operation in mind. Energy is now routinely flowing long distances from the generators to customers and a much higher degree of coordination is needed between the utilities. More and more we are thinking of the "grid" as a single entity and a greater need for information regarding the state of the grid is becoming evident. Customers are using more and more energy and the ability to build additional transmission lines is becoming more difficult due to population growth and the lack of available land in and around urban centers. We, the power industry, are being presented with a unique opportunity. In a relatively short portion of time, much of this aging equipment will be replaced and/or upgraded; we have the possibility of largely transforming a patch-work system that has been organically grown to meet pressing needs of the moment into a system that has been designed with intentionality and foresight to handle the expected needs of the future. The hardest part of making these changes in a unified fashion is the question of coordination. Standards need to be agreed upon by all the industry members and decisions need to be made with the bigger picture in mind. This is extremely difficult to do purely from a technical standpoint, never mind the vast political complications. I don't know how this will turn out. I think we as power engineers all desperately want a better system that we have now and recognize the opportunity we have. But will we choose to sacrifice and expend effort to together to make this happen? I don't know, we'll just have to see.

Summer is Nigh

The weather is changing.  This week the overnight lows have been right around 70'F and the highs have been in the mid 80's.  We've been using our whole-house fan all week and its been keeping us cool enough but the first day for the air conditioner is just around the corner.

We had our second major thunderstorm of the season on Monday, one of the few rainy days we've had this spring.  I was able to get a few lighting pictures out of it; something I've wanted to do for a while.

On an unrelated note, I caught Ansie doing her confused head-cock on the porch yesterday afternoon.