potpourri for $800, solarbird

[solarbird]

Last Wednesday I had an idle thought; what's going on with the stock market is a combination of the reversal of capital flows that I found noted in mid-February (correction; originally remembered as January), combined with the Shanghai market shock as a trigger effect. A combination of little or no continuing capital inflow to the US from the far east added to a sudden need to pull already-invested money back in order to cover losses - and doing so in a controlled fashion to limit the market-shock losses - could explain the kind of pattern we've been seeing in the markets the last five days.

That's just me connecting a couple of dots, of course. It could be entirely coincidental. Now, on the other hand, if you want to see a larger number of dots connected, you might look at this graph of EIA, OPEC, and IEA numbers for Saudi Arabian oil production this past year. I usually ignore the comments on this site - they're full of cranky - but the actual posts are often informative.


A Quick Series of Handoffs

I've been crazy productive today. I repaired a wooden soap dish that fell apart, rebalanced the washer, reorganised the big closet of shipping stuff, refreshed more of the 3-day pack stuff, disassembled the bad network switch and pulled out the damaged part for replacement later, pulled the dead batteries out of the old APC ups and ordered new ones, ripped through a few boxes of the emergency food supplies that need replacing, fixed the old PS2 "arcade-style" controller, contacted Cascade Solar Lighting about the solar garden spotlight that didn't make it through the winter, properly attached the light sensor for the low voltage lights out back to the wall, and some other stuff I've already kind of lost track of. Oh, and I worked on my email to people in the UW neurobiology and behaviour programme. So that's all fun.

Here're those shelves I talked about earlier. Yay organised pans!


Pots and Pans

If you're interested in tiny houses, I took some pictures of Shoreline Community College's experimental "solar house" a few days ago for ginmar. Most of the construction is from salvage material; it's kind of a test bed for a bunch of different building materials and power and water collectors. The inner utility core is made of a metal cargo container; I don't know what the outer sliding metal doors are made of, but they slide surprisingly easily. Regular glass doors are behind the metal ones.

I think it's cute. I particularly like the siding material. It's kind of strange - it's some sort of very hard plastic beams of some sort, I think. (Honestly, I don't really know what it is.) The vertical grooves are routed out, and it's attached by screws to an inner layer of siding. The idea of the house is to be a modern, living house - small, but modern - that is as sufficient as it can possibly be while off-grid. It's kind of a neat project.


Solar House

You can click through for more shots, if you want.

Thursday's miles: 0.7
Friday's miles: 1.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1542.9
Miles out of Rivendell: 1085.9
Miles out of Lothlórien: 630.9
Miles past Rauros Falls: 213.0
Miles to Isengard: 253.7

Comments

[norincraft.livejournal.com]

I really liked the photos of the building. It seems like a good use of a CONEX box.

Thanks

[solarbird]

You're welcome. ^_^

It turns out it's a joint thing between Western Washington University and Shoreline. This week's Riptide (school paper) has an article on it. They've decided to put it on the grid because they expect it'll be feeding power back into it most of the time. ^_^

[norincraft.livejournal.com]

Is that paper online?

I tried the websites for both schools and could find every club and organization from LGBTA to Brown coats but not the school newspapers.

[solarbird]

Weirdly, none of this years' Ebbtides (Shoreline student paper) seem to be online. That's kinda strange. The archives through Summer 2006 are on, but that isn't really useful here.

[solarbird]

Also, it's Ebbtide, not Riptide, regardless of what I spazzed before.

I could mail you a copy if you really want one.