whartonstreet.com

My photo album is down for the time being. I'm in the midst of a major upgrade and things didn't exactly go as planned. I still have all the pictures and other information, I'm just having problems with the display not being compatible with the latest version of my gallery software. Hopefully I'll get it working soon, but for now, no pictures.

Yay, my blog is back. It's been missing for at least a month or so. I noticed it had disappeared, but didn't have the time to troubleshoot and figure out what was going on. All that was displayed was "n/a" for each blog post. It came down to a corrupt table in the database.

When trying to access the drupal_node_revisions table I got this message:
...is marked as crashed and last (automatic) repair failed

My forum has been hit hard by spammers..I've been trying to clean that up and I'm wondering if that's where the error originated.

If you are a Drupal user and happen to stumble across this post because of the same issue, I ran a single SQL command to fix it. Simply, "repair table drupal_node_revisions". And that did it.

I did something the other day for the first time ever. I shoveled snow out of the way in order to plant a tomato. Yep, I've got maters in the ground right now, put them there on Tuesday, Mar 9.

I got a new variety of tomatos this year called Northern Nibbler. They are supposed to be cold hardy and frost resistant. The guy I bought them from said he has had some covered in snow before and they've survived just fine.

The weather has been soo nice this week. I've been getting the garden ready. I've also planted a bunch of seeds.....Lettuce, spinach, radishes, peas, carrots, and some onions along with a couple tomatoes.

It looks like we're in for a good rain, so I'm hoping they will all get a good start. It still feels so strange planting tomatoes with the early spring crops. I'm really interested to see how these things grow.

I didn't get many pictures up on the web last year. So, I've been going through them and I just added about 600 new pictures from 2009.

These pictures include many days and nights at the lake, our infamous stew, some pictures from the beach, Lauren's birthday, 4th of July, loomisfest, many rides on the golf cart, and much more. Check em out.

I've got a few demo songs from Loomis. Check them out

And, I have a few pictures up from their gig at Captain Sam's on New Year's Day

So, I've embarked on a winter project with my Dad. I wanted a chair that was a little more capable in rugged terrain...rugged meaning anything with a grade of more than 5° and bumps bigger than a gravel. Wheelchairs just aren't made for off-road.

So, lets make one that is.

We've decided to go with tank-like tracks for the wheels. These are made by the company Mattracks. They are designed to fit directly onto an ATV, basically as if you were changing a tire. They are sweet!

It is going to be powered by two, 24v electric motors. I found some on ebay that are 900 watts each, and they are only about 4 inches x 4 inches. That's an impressive amount of power to pack in such a small motor. They are designed to power electric scooters, but a pair of them should be plenty sufficient for what we are doing.

That makes the total vehicle power about 2.4 horsepower. (1 hp = 746 watts)

I found a pair of 12v deep cycle batteries also to go along with this. But, from my calculations, these two batteries will only provide about one hour of run time...and that's running the batteries dead. Not acceptable. And, not healthy for the batteries, even though they are deep cycle. So, we decided to mount an on-board generator powered by a small gas engine, basically making the vehicle a hybrid.

AlternatorAlternator specsAnother ebay purchase....I got a killer deal on a 24v, 70amp alternator. That is huge, like, Mac truck size, but it should be perfect for our needs.

Bike EngineFor the gas engine creating the power, I considered going with a go-cart engine...I have a few around. But, instead, settled on this neat little bicycle engine I found on ebay. This thing comes with everything you need to bolt it on a bicycle and make it gas powered. It is a 2 cycle engine, I wasn't thrilled about that at first, but it's nice because you can pack more power in a smaller size with a 2 cycle, and with it's efficiency, I don't think it will be anywhere close to a gas hog. It's rated power is about 3hp at 5000 rpm, max 5hp at 6000 rpm. That is just enough power to turn the alternator. (Alternator power: 24vx70a=1680 watts=2.2 hp) Perfect.

Now that I've got all the parts, let's put them together.

The tracks come with these perfect little 1.5 inch square holes on either side of the main hub. They will be perfect for mounting the frame. And, would you believe we had some scrap 1.5 inch square tubing lying around. I've checked with the company to make sure these points on the tracks can be weight bearing....they can, so, on with construction.

I just downloaded the new Picasa 3.5. It absolutely rocks!! Picasa has face detection now. It will go through all of your pictures and detect all the faces on them. Then you only need to name a person once or so and it will go through and match that person's name to all of their pictures.

Google has had this for a while on the picasa web albums, but just recently made it part of the standalone Picasa program. It takes it a while to scan all of your pictures, though. Mine has been running well over an hour and it says it is only 3% done. I do have over 100,000 pictures on my hard drive though, so I'll cut it a little slack. :) You should really download and try this program. It's free and it really works....quite well.

http://picasa.google.com

I suck at blogging, huh?

Been a while since I've posted anything, but I'm still here. Actually, I've been quite busy the past few weeks. I'm back in school this semester for the first time in almost 8 years. I'm taking three classes at Blue Ridge. Two of them are online. I thought that would be easier with online classes, but they seem to be quite a bit of work.

The three classes I'm taking are Web Design 1, E-commerce, and Principles of Info Systems.

It's nice to be back in school, but I miss my loads of free time. Oh well, guess it'll pay off in the end.

The lake is looking pretty good after several weekends of cleanup. Thanks Kristen and Michael for doing the majority of the cleanup work.

Now that most of the mess is gone it's time to make some improvements. Here are some ideas that were discussed this past weekend:

Electricity under the shelter is the first big thing. We hadn't done that before because the wire would have had to run directly over the fire or it would have been expensive to run wire to all the trees around the fire. But, now the fire pit has moved and we can run a straight shot over to the shelter. (I have some wire in the mail, by the way......<3 ebay)

We were thinking small time lighting under there.....no need for more stadium lighting. Probably just LEDs is all we would need. So, if we're gonna go the LED route, I think we should do it from a 12v circuit. It would be much safer than having every single light directly connected to the mains.

We can use an old pc power supply for a reliable, efficient, 12v power source. I probably have one lying around here somewhere. Even a really old one will put out plenty of power for just a few LED lights.

I like the idea of having several small LED's scattered about, shinning on the ground to light the way so you can see where you are walking. Something like those solar thingies, but hard wired, so as to be brighter and more reliable. I guess the hardest part of doing this is burying the cable to get it done.

As I'm writing this, there is a stack of really nice 6" wide tongue and groove boards that would be perfect for building a small box to keep the power supply. We could mount outlets on the outside for when power is needed. At least one 120v outlet, and probably a 12v cigarette lighter plug. Ya never know when it might be needed and since we are already going to have a 12v circuit, why not?

As for the old fire pit, I think we're just going to fill it in with dirt and plant a tree there. We had considered making a cooking fireplace, but the wire thing thew that idea off.

So, that's another thing that could be built elsewhere. A big cooker. Maybe over near the slide....somewhere on that side of the shelter.? What do you think?

The permanent wooden bench still needs to be moved from the old fireplace. I'm not really sure where we should put it though. Maybe in front of the cooler pallet? I would like to keep the path on both sides of the fire pit open so we can drive the golf cart through there. It would still be passable if placed in front of that pallet. I dunno...where do you think it should go?

Do you have any ideas or suggestions for other things we could do up there?

I've added a new feature to my page. There is now a section on the left sidebar where I can post links to articles and other interesting things I come across while surfing the web.

The way I have this working is really cool. I've created a bookmarklet, which is basically a standard bookmark like any browser uses, but instead of being a link to a webpage, it executes a chunk of javascript code. This script copies the URL and title of the page I'm viewing and automatically posts it as a link on this site.