Category Archives: Nerd Stuff

Garmin nuvi 500 and Geocaching

I had a birthday recently and in addition to cake, ice cream and a lot of fun Sweetie and SuperPizzaBoy got me a new gadget. A new GPS receiver. The Garmin nuvi 500. It is a crossover GPS in that it does car navigation and geocaching. If you are a premium level geocaching.com member you can download tons and tons of caches to your pc and with then into the nuvi 500.

So anyway we have only found a few caches with this and I’m still learning how to use it so I don’t know whether it is going to supplement or replace my old gps. The nuvi is not very handy to hold and doesn’t seem to be as rugged and waterproof as the handheld gpsr’s. Also, you have to do a manual change from vehicle navigation to cross country once you get out of the car and I had’t quite figured out how to do that smoothly.

The thing that is helpful in geocaching is the cache description, hints, and logs of previous finds. Most handhelds just hold the name and location. For the other stuff you either have to print them out and carry (yuck) or you can use software for your cell phone like cachemate I use on my Palm Treo cell phone. That’s OK but then you have to juggle two gadgets. The nuvi carries all that stuff in it. That is incredibly handy.

The screen is nice and bright in sunlight, and you can have a lot of fun with the car navigation feature. SPB and I made the vehicle icon into a pickup truck to match good ole 666BOI better and we switched the voice from a bitchy lady Californian (it sounded to my ear) to a merely irritated English female voice. We are going to download a pizza slice icon from Garmin’s web site to be the vehicle icon.

Anyway, the jury is still out on the nuvi. Its a keeper for navigation, and I am definitely going to use it for geocaching to at least supplement by my existing gpsr. I can see using the nuvi to use to drive to the vicinity of the cache and then my handheld to find the cache. I’ll just have to experiment.

This is my existing gpsr. The Lowrance Ifinder Hunt. (Lowrance is a Tulsa based company). I have found maybe 600 caches with it and love it. It can hold in memory about 2000 caches. The nuvi can hold about 4000.

If you are going to do geocaching then you are going to need GSAK. An incredible piece of software that facilitates downloading caches from geocaching.com and uploading to your gpsr. It’s cheap, you can try it for free for a while before a nag screen appears.

The One Minute Engineer

Remember all the “One Minute” books way back when. The One Minute Manager, The One Minute Teacher, The One Minute Leader, The One Minute …. uh no.

Anyway, I never did see a book for the One Minute Engineer. So I decided to write one and did, it took me about a minute. Couldn’t get a publisher in the one minute I tried so I’m doing a one minute post. I have this information and I also have early onset so if I don’t get this out in one minute, its gone forever.

We are going to concentrate on Chemical Engineering! Wow, ok, ready, there are four lessons. Don’t worry, all four lessons take about a minute! This will be quick and it will change your life.

Lesson 1 – What you need to know is that any type of chemical facility, whether it is a refinery or a chemical plant consists of only two types of equipment (and of course interconnecting piping). These two types of equipment are: LRO’s and TST’s. We are done! Wow, review if you feel the need.

Lesson 2 – Notice the picture above. It is a LRO. LRO stands for Large Round Object. Got it? Need to go over that. OK! Great, you are doing wonderfully. Congratulations. These are very important for the proper functioning of any chemical facility. You are halfway done to a Chemical Engineering Education.

Lesson 3 -Now pay attention, we are stepping up here. The above equipment are TSTs. TST’s are Tall Shiny Things. Go ahead and repeat. These are also necessary for the proper and safe operation of a refinery or chemical plant or whatever else you want to build. OK, you are ready for the final lesson.

Lesson 4 – This is the wrap up, so pay attention. This is where all your hard work comes together. What you do to build a chemcal facility is arrange all your LROs and TSTs into a pleasing configuration. This is where all your design and composition skills come into play. Like above, the tension between the tall and skinny and the short and round against the cloudy sky. Cannot beat that. Oh yes, make sure that the guys and gals you hire to run the thing know how to connect the LRO’s and TST’s together.

We are not done! We have graduation. Below is your reward. Not a diploma, something better, a T shirt! Aren’t you glad you did this? I am. Thanks very much and I wish you much success in your new career.

Thanks Dave for the inspiration.

Natural Gas, Nuclear Energy, Nick’s Law and What Else?

I had a whirlwind day last Thursday.

First I drove from Tulsa down to Oklahoma City for a meeting of Natural Gas and Energy Association of Oklahoma. They had the meeting at the Oklahoma History Center near the State Capital.

You could really tell that the price of natural gas is down. Not many people showed up. March prices for Oklahoma gas could be down in the $2.70 per million btu range. That is about 1/3 of last summer’s prices, and its winter. Doesn’t look good for the rest of the year. Also, the speaker was going to talk about Nuclear Energy in Oklahoma. To a bunch of gas folks?

Some people have told me that energy companies rig the prices. I tell them that the energy companies are pretty piss poor at it.

The Speaker was State Represenative Scott Martin of Norman. He is sponsoring a bill to facilitate nuclear power plants in Oklahoma. I think it is a good idea. That is for another post.

I kept thinking Scott Martin, Scott Martin . . . Seemed like he was involved in the Nick’s Law controversy going on in Oklahoma. He is a Republican . . . Some Republicans’ have suggested that Oklahoman’s with autism and their families maybe need to move to some other state. That kind of bothers me. Maybe the politicians need to move instead.

Anyway I got home and googled Rep Martin and was very pleasantly surprised. According to this Rep Martin was one of only four Republicans who stood up to their leadership to try and bring Nick’s law to the floor last year. So, I think that he is a good guy. I wished I had talked to him, but he had to go to a hearing, busy, buys, busy.

Speaking as a Republican, I have been wondering for some time now what they bring to the table, I mean, if you are not a big contributor looking for special favors in return for contributions. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to turn Democrat on anybody. But still I’m wondering.

I had other things to do so I didn’t go through the Oklahoma History Center. I have done it before and I really recommend seeing it if you hadn’t before.

I did go through the grounds though. Lots of oil and gas stuff there.

Drilling rigs of various vintages. Look at the sky, you wonder why I didn’t want to stay inside?

A pumpjack, an older model. For pumping oil.

There was a geocache on the grounds. I’m sorry to report that I didn’t find it.

Now, a boring blast from the past. I used to live close to the Capital in my pre-Sweetie days in an old neighborhood. So I went over there to take a look.

I loved this house. I signed a 1 year lease and left before the lease was up. Everything that wasn’t nailed down was disappearing. I even caught a fine young coed from that great Methodist school, Oklahoma City University, stealing bricks from the back yard. She said she didn’t realize that they belonged to anybody. She offered to put them back where she got them. Boy, that was nice of her.

I then left the city and headed west, to western Oklahoma. To check on some projects I helped put together commercially. In particular a couple of compressor stations.

Here is what one looks like. Isn’t it a beauty? Ok, time to quit.

Heavy Duty Manly Stuff

Well I’ve blogged about cats and dogs, kids, and auction baskets. Sometimes I have to let my inner engineer geek side come out. Below are pictures from a customer who is upgrading a refinery and had to get this big widget over a highway via a temporary bridge.

I think the guy sitting down must be the project engineer. Sitting down far away from work is usually the best use for an engineer when actual work is going on. Usually engineers have negative productivity during this kind of thing. Not only are they not doing anything, they prevent other people from working. So planting him down in the grass like a flower is a smart move. The risk you run is him filing a workman’s comp claim for chiggers or fire ant bites on the butt.

Man I wish I knew how much that bridge cost, let alone widget. I bet they ordered all that early last year when oil was over $100 a barrel.
I wonder how much that trailer cost it is sitting on. I hope it has good brakes. That thing gets rolling downhill uncontrolled it could ruin somebody’s whole day.

Don’t you just love this kind of stuff?

Space

I think that many men and women of my generation got involved in science and technology not because of computers and video games but because of Space. The race to the moon was a big deal when I was a kid. It was a national mission.

It is kind of hard to get worked about it today for some reason. Even with two tragic accidents it seems pretty routine. The only reason the last Shuttle mission got an press was because somebody lost their toolbag up there.

The big things in technology now, are computers, (yawn) and biotechnology (“YAWN”).

Every once in a while though something comes around that ignites the imagination again. For me it came from the most unlikely source: the Reading Adventures blog. She has an advent calender type thing going which I don’t really understand but it led to a link that literally made my jaw drop. Its a Boston Globe newspaper web feature called the Big Picture which is about news in pictures. They have an ongoing advent feature on photographs from the Hubble Telescope. It is awesome stuff. Show your kids!

Space science has been transformed since I last paid attention from the static to the dynamic. It used to be hey, this galaxy is 50 gazillion light years from us (yawn) to hey look at this star exploding (WOW, look at the pictures), this galaxy has such a strong gravitational field that it is acting as a lens to look at other galaxys (Huh, what’s that all about?)

If you have kids, give them a look, who knows what may happen. Little girls also. When I lived in Houston I was acquainted with three engineers who worked at NASA. Two of them were women.