Another Hurricane Update

It is now one week after the hurricane, and still no power at home. The first night of the hurricane, we hung out at our neighbors' house, and he had a clever little set up to provide minimal power. He connected a small black and white 12V DC television directly to the battery, as well as a light socket with a 12V DC bulb. Works great, but everything he can use with it needs to be 12V DC.

I figured I would take his invention one small step further, and get an inverter to convert it from 12V DC to 115V AC. Home Depot has some really nice relatively high-wattage inverters (up to 3000 watt) on the website. However, I went to the store and they didn't carry any at all. I went to Walmart and found a little 200 watt cigarette-lighter one. I also picked up a cheap-ass car battery, some wire, battery clamps, and some connectors.

With a little wire cutting, wire stripping, and crimping, I had myself a nice little make-shift generator that can output 200 continuous watts. With it I can power up a lamp, a little 80 watt color TV, my laptop, cell phone chargers, digital camera battery charger, and other low-power items. It can't power up as much stuff as a big generator can, but it is a hell of a lot more quiet. When the charge on the battery runs low, I can just use some jumper cables, hook it up to my car, start it up, and let the alternator recharge it.

I'm actually using it right now this very moment with my laptop. My laptop battery died some time ago, and will no longer recharge, so this is the only way I can use my laptop right now. Our phone line came back, so I was able to dial up and bring you this post from my electricity-lacking home. Hopefully we will get power back soon (and cable/broadband). For now, we'll continue to depend on Sheila's family for nice hot showers and food.

Hurricane Wilma Update

In the six years I've been living in South Florida, Wilma is by far the worst storm I've seen. We've been out of power since the day of the storm, and have been told it may be weeks before power is restored. Most intersections are literally without traffic lights; they are thrown about the floor or dangling closer to the ground where the support cables were snapped. Many light posts are lying on the ground along with the cables connected to them. Most gas stations do not have power and the ones that do have lines that go on for blocks. Ice and water are a luxury, although we were fortunate to obtain some early this morning.

Fortunately, our home did not attain any structural damage. We spent this morning cleaning up branches in the yard, digging up plants that were blown over and replanting them. There are just a few roof tiles missing, but nothing major. I have not yet returned back to work, due to the power being out at the building. Sheila has not been back to work this week either.

Sheila's parents do have power, so after cleaning up outside we came over here and took nice, warm showers. Everything is fine, we are all doing well, and we are patiently awaiting power to be restored. We have plenty of water and now have a place to go for hot meals. Our phone at home is currently out. We brought our cell phones here to recharge and will periodically check voicemail for messages and make calls as needed. Feel free to call one of our cell phones and leave a message if you like. We'll get back to you as soon as we can.

Zoom Zoom Zoom

Last week I had been hearing a lot about an event sponsored by Mazda, called Zoom Zoom Live. They had 3 different racing events where you could drive on a race course. All of the events were timed, and you compete for prizes depending on how well you do against the clock. The course was quite challenging and the target times were pretty hard to beat. I made it within about 3 seconds of the target time for the Performance Challenge. I made it within 8/10ths of a second on the matched time event. I didn't get a chance to try out the other two events.

Hopefully, they'll do it again next year. It was a great event, completely free (even parking was free). Quite a brilliant marketing strategy by Mazda, as I'm sure they make quite a few sales out of the event. I would highly recommend it to anyone who loves cars and has fun driving fast.

2004 Hurricane Video

I was fooling around on Google Video and I found this really neat time-lapse movie of the 2004 hurricane season. It's really neat to see it put in motion over the course of several months.