We Saw a Chicken …

Tag: wind

  • In Edmonton, but no thanks to WorstJet

    Edmonton: view from my hotel

    Jet lag, lack of sleep, and a whole day of company orientation isn’t doing much for my clarity of thought right now. What I need is steak and beer.

    Last night’s flight was supposed to get in at 10:30, but what with WestJet‘s faffing around, we got in well after midnight. It was about 1am (or 03:00, Toronto time) before I got settled in the hotel room.

    I’ve never been in a city with trolley buses before. Guess I can’t say that any more. It’s also the furthest west I’ve ever been.
    I wonder if the snow drawing below (as seen from my hotel window) is supposed to be a hometown homage to Bob The Angry Flower?

    hometown homage to Bob?

  • Photos of Toronto’s WindShare Coop AGM 2006

    Paul Gipe posted pictures of the Toronto’s WindShare Coop AGM 2006.

  • WindShare AGM 2006

    WindShare is having their AGM tonight. I got a nice plaque for my years on the board.

  • little turbine on the desk

    GE 'Your Wind Turbine In A Box'

    I’ve finally managed to snag a model wind turbine. Thanks to Jay Wilgar at AIM Powergen, I now have a GE Your Wind Turbine in a Box 1/265 scale turbine, complete with tiny plastic cow.

  • deadly windows

    Millions of birds perish every year from crashing into glass windows. And architects don’t need to do costly and time-consuming migration studies.

    But us wind guys get it in the neck.

  • part of the landscape

    51c wind turbine stamp
    I see that wind turbines make it on to the recent 51 cent stamp series. I guess they’re part of the landscape now.
    (Would it be astonishingly churlish of me to point out that the flag is flying one way, and the turbines facing the other?)

  • last WindShare meeting

    Last night was my last WindShare board meeting. I’ve been on the board ever since there was a board to be on. I hope I was useful.

  • go train chkdsk

    so *that\'s* what these displays are running!
    One of the GO information signs was knowing a difficulty this morning. Looks like they’re something like a Mini-ITX box running Windows XP, but I’d rather I didn’t know that.

    At least the signs (when they work) are better than they used to be.

  • Good Morning, Mr Edmonton

    I just accepted a job with Edmonton-based utility EPCOR, to be a manager for their Ontario wind projects. It’ll be based in Toronto.

    (Look, I know the oM song is Good Morning Mr Edminton, but it’s too good a line to waste, okay?)

  • Dun Law Attitude Change

    You can’t know how happy it makes me to read about the survey that shows that over 90% of people living closest to the Dun Law site supported their local wind farm. The early planning stages of this project were particularly fraught with opposition.

  • Schultze Gets The Blues

    from Schultze gets the Blues
    It’s German, it’s funny (no, really), and it has wind turbines in it. Horst Krause is wonderful as the retired and bewildered Schultze, as he makes his quest for musical identity in the Deep South.

  • big windfarm, big deal

    So there was a stramash that the RSPB published a map showing where the Lewis wind farm would reach if it started in Edinburgh. Oh noes! Looks like it’d go all the way to Methil.

    I’ve been working on a couple of medium-sized wind farms in Ontario. For top laughs, I tried overlaying them on Scotland, using streetmap.co.uk for the measurements.

    Since I’m a weegie, I started at George Square. One of the farms would stretch all the way west by Wishaw, near Murdostoun Castle (and the comically-named town of Bonkle). The other would run north to somewhere between Fintry and Kippen, in Stirlingshire.

    For those of you unlucky enough to be based east of Falkirk, I tried the same starting at Edinburgh Castle. The first wind farm would run west to the hamlet of Gilchriston, which is just north-west of Dun Law Wind Farm, which I worked on in the distant past. (If you run the farm west from Edinburgh, you end up in Bo’ness, which no-one would want to do.) The other design would end up somewhere between Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes, near Thornton — and not that far from Methil, a distance that the RSPB would have us believe is just too far for a wind farm.

    So, where’s the news, RSPB? How did your land get somehow more precious than ours?

  • OS bad craziness

    DSL running on top of Windows XP
    Yes, it’s really a linux box booting inside windows. Thank Damn Small Linux and QEMU for that.

    It opens up an X session, and passes through most system services — so I was able to print to my network printer.

  • Goodbye, Star Wars Tree

    burnt-out mini mall, Kennedy & Eglinton
    The mini-mall burned last night. Looks like the centre of the fire was the gift shop in the middle of the block. The rest of the block is pretty badly damaged, though. It looks like the place will have to be rebuilt — or replaced with a condo block, which seems to be the fate of shops in Scarborough.

    I hope that noone was hurt.

    So, goodbye Yoga’s, with your selection of teas and Sri Lankan groceries. Goodbye Star Milk, the mom, pop and smiley baby store with your VLT in back and dodgy videos over the drinks cooler. Goodbye Poondy Bread, purveyors of that which has paneity. Goodbye Amma, ace Sri Lankan takeout food shop, the place where I developed a taste for really spicy food.

    But most of all, goodbye to the gift shop. Even though I never went in there, I’ll miss the sun-yellowed unsold toys in the window; the almost-Transformers and plastic racing cars.

    One toy, unsold through two summers, perplexed me most. It was a cardboard tube wrapped in tinsel. Cardboard tags with pictures of Star Wars characters were attached to it with those nylon annoyances you get on new clothes. It resembled more a christmas decoration than a space weapon, which I think it was supposed to be. We called it the Star Wars Tree, and I’m guessing it wasn’t officially licensed from Lucasfilm.

    It’s all gone now, washed away by the fire hoses.

  • O turbine thou art sick

    We had a component failure on the WindShare turbine today. Just when the winds have got really good, too. We know how to fix it, it’s just a matter of getting the people and the parts together.

  • aargh, why’d ya do it

    yes, it is windows
    Because the Mini-ITX box was sitting doing nothing all these months while there was much bickering amongst the driver developers. At least this will work, for smallish values of ‘work’.

  • queen west

    Went to Canzine today after meeting. Can you belive it, an almost full house and it was a silent meeting?

    Anyway, Canzine was full. Bought a couple of Spacing TTC buttons to show my commuter tribe affiliation (Kennedy — Union), and also a m@b book. Eveyone’s favourite Bramptonian Friendly Rich was there, being friendly and well-dressed. Jim Munroe looked in his element in his No Media Kings room.

    After that, I walked down to the turbine. The warm weather had brought the ladybirds out. They were all over the deck.

  • IEEE Toronto Talk

    Looks like I’m waving my hands in the air and talking to the IEEE Toronto Section on Thursday October 27, 2005, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. It’s in the Business Building, Room BUS 108 at Ryerson University.

    They fed me an exceptionally keen meal on Saturday night in advance thanks, so it’d better be a good talk from me.

    Update, October 27: the slides are here — scruss.com/talks/02005/ieee_toronto — still in a kind of draft state. I used Eric Meyer’s fabulous S5 again.

  • canwea over

    Well, that’s CanWEA 2005 fully over. Yes, I’m still sifting through the contacts, brochures and swag I picked up, but it’s back to work for me.

    I met a lot of people (including, quite unexpectedly, Stuart Hall of Natural Power in Scotland, whom I hadn’t seen in about 8 years), and the show seemed to be absolutely jumping. Could 2005/2006 be the year that Canada gets wind energy?

  • review of CanWEA 2005 swag bag

    So I’m at the 2005 CanWEA conference for the next few days. The swag bag is a standard nondescript nylon thing, thankfully big enough to take my iBook and a few other bits and pieces. The contents are a bit disappointing, though:

    • a very plasticky flashlight that I may discard after harvesting its batteries.
    • a small bag of jujubes.
    • a copy of North American Windpower magazine (which in itself is quite a decent magazine, so is actually one of the highlights).
    • a trade show guide, but no conference program (they were held up in customs; can’t we print ’em here?)
    • various company brochures, zzzz.

    You’ll note an absence of useful pens, pads, USB keys, model turbines, or other special swag. I was hoping for more …