For my mum, who didn’t believe that you could have multiple heads on the one plant:
 
Tag: 2006
butterfly, fish
Two unrelated pictures: a butterfly
and a cory, admiring itself
Here do books lurk
Catherine has a project involving Toronto’s libraries, and so I, for no particularly good reason, compiled a geocoded list of the Toronto Public Library system: libraries.gpx
You can thank MapSource for the bloated GPX file. It quadrupled in size when I changed the symbols to look like buildings.
First, second and third sunflower
First of the year …
the late b.p. helium, live at The Boat, Toronto — 28 June 2006
- (intro)
- crying*
- reminder to self
- they broke the speed of light
- fela*
- i tried to make it with you
- (banter)
- bluebeard
- rabbit’s ear
- the curse of the trial
- raisa raisa
- the weeping soul
*: These short titles are taken from the setlist. I don’t have their full names.
Info page: the late b.p. helium, The Boat — 28 June 2006, which also includes a link to FLACs.
old spuds
I guess we forgot about these baking potatoes a few months back …
 
scissors, shears, geddit?!
The presenter of this paper claimed that PowerPoint changed α, the wind shear coefficient, to ✂. We laughed, briefly.
didn’t make it
One of the little guys didn’t make it. There’s a sad little grey fuzzy corpse in the back yard, already pulsing with disco rice and greenbottles.
flahz
Our peonies are the envy of the neighbourhood, despite our (well, my) slightly lax gardening skills.
and then there were eight
The formerly seven locks of Chester.
my, how you’ve grown!
Rum Do At WindShare
WindShare‘s having a special general meeting tonight to discuss the following resolution:
Moved that the Board of WindShare recommends to the WindShare I membership at their general meeting of June 7, 2006, the merger of WindShare I and WindShare II for the purpose of entering into the activities necessary for the development of the proposed Lakewind Proposal.
This is quite an important step, and since I’m still in Pittsburgh, I’d hoped to vote by proxy. I was informed by the WindShare administrator that this wasn’t possible; the Cooperative Corporations Act does not allow proxy voting.
I’m annoyed by this, as it looks like WindShare is going to merge its capital with a 10MW project being built on a site with a 6.5 m/s mean wind speed. I wouldn’t develop a project on a site with this low a wind speed, so I asked the following of the board:
Can you clarify, please, that the vote can only be carried if a majority of WindShare members are present at the meeting? It would be grossly unfair if an important vote like this one was carried by a minority.
I would also like to have questions brought to the board, and if possible, the meeting itself. The LakeWind information package states that Bervie has “an average wind speed of 6.5m/s … making this an excellent site for Ontario”. I would not consider a site having this wind resource to be excellent, and it would certainly not be one that would attract a commercial developer. So my questions are:
- Is it in the membership’s best interests to develop a relatively low wind site? WindShare made their political point with the ExPlace turbine, and now we must show that community wind is economically viable.
- Would either of the potential sites be forced to curtail output when/if the extra Bruce units come online? While LakeWind would be connecting to local distribution, any generation in that area might be subject to queueing limitations.
So far, I’ve heard nothing, which makes me uneasy.
it’s over ….
AWEA 2006, that is. Best swag was probably the places that had USB keys; yeah, they’re only 64MB, but these are big enough for tiny Linuxes or restore tools.
Freebies aside, it was a great show, and I guess a few hundred thousand business cards changed hands.
Stewart’s Images :: AWEA 2006
Stewart’s Images :: AWEA 2006 – pictures from the floor of the American Wind Energy Association trade show and conference, Pittsburgh, PA – June 4-7, 2006
AWEA06: by the river (or in it, nearly)
We’re not getting the best weather for the conference, but I hear that the coincidentally-running Three Rivers Arts Festival has had rain 18 out of the 20 years it has run, so noone’s surprised.
Conference hasn’t quite started yet, but the preliminary swag is quite promising; yoyos and balsa aircraft.
I spent the day in workshop run by KidWind, who have a school science kit for teaching the basics of wind turbine effectiveness. We got to build wind turbines, and test them. Here’s mine, big wean that I am:
I guess I got some losses near the hub there, but at least it worked. I was the only developer type there (there was a DoE person, and lots and lots of Pennsylvania teachers). I came away impressed, and hope I can work with Michael Arquin of KidWind to bring the project to Ontario.
(This post has the worst GPS location ever; could only get a fix to within 100m, so that’s why the map location appears to be in the river.)
Pittsburgh: I’m only hea for AWEA
In town for the AWEA 2006 Conference. Pittsburgh looks like it has some interesting topography, and has some huge buildings downtown. Trying to get a GPS signal for the map (amid a bemused high-school prom crowd) was hard.
tee hee
Happy Danish Sockets
Am I losing it, or do Danish power sockets look like smileys?
Two happy people:
Happy person with a chef’s hat (isometric view):
Do these remind you of anything?
A chilly evening in Søndervig
The concrete lump is a WW2 gun emplacement.
Danish Modern in Ringkøbing
I’m currently checked into a hotel which reeks of 70s Danish modern — blonde wood, bare brick, smoked glass surfaces — and, like many places in Denmark, cigarette smoke. Being in the presence of an authentic Beocom phone makes up for it though:
Also, there’s a cute little wind farm outside; a few Vestas V27s (or smaller) on lattice towers at 56° 7′ 22.11″ N, 8° 13′ 48.94″ E:
