One of these windows is not like the other.....

So.. Since I recently bought a 130 year old house and we are having a super cold winter,  I’ve been looking for cheap cost effective ways to improve the insulating qualities of my house.

Guy Marsden Sustainable living  to the Rescue!

I followed (with slight modifications) his plans for DIY, inexpensive indoor storm windows. or INTERIOR WINDOW INSULATION PANELS as he calls them..

The pic above shows the results. (taken with awesome FLIR thermal camera)  I’ll post some Pics of my actual built windows in a little bit.

Disclaimer: I’ve got no relation to FLIR or Guy Marsden, they havn’t sent me a thermal imaging camera or a truck load of spare solar collectors. But as far as I’m concerned they both Rock.. Except that FLIR used to mean Forward Looking Infra Red.. so using that is like calling your company LASER..am I nit picking?   but still.. awesome product.

Check out this thermal Image I took with a borrowed FLIR Thermal Imaging Camera.

Inner Video card is RED

For Reference:

Yellow blob on bottom is Video card getting enough air.
Red Blob on top of it is the inner video card cooking,
This is why I need to find the time to setup the water blocks!
Blue Circle on top is the copper Water block on my CPU, That is doing it’s job!

Disclaimer: the FLIR Camera is AWESOME and super easy to use and I would be happy to take a review Unit  from the company and would then post tons of more crazy pics. But unfortunately they and I have NO relation and I had to borrow this one.  oh well.

Now the dilemma: how do I cook a whole chicken in the crockpot without getting it super greasy?  Vegetable steamer – stainless steel and some of them have removable center posts (like the one I bought).  Take the center post out (if you can’t, just spear the chicken – I’ve done this too).  Do your normal roast chicken prep, like dry rub or something.  Keep the cavity empty for this one, though I suppose since you’re cooking 8 hours you could technically stuff the bird.  I put some seasonings on the skin, then cut up some veggies (specifically this time red peppers, onions and carrots) and placed all of this on the steamer in the crock pot.

I cooked it on low overnight.  Basically had it in there by 9 pm, stopped it about 7:30 am.  All that grease drops to the bottom.  There’s still some fat in the chicken, but the meat isn’t sitting in rendered fat.  Its tender, fall off the bone kind of chicken.  Easy to separate bones from meat (use the bones later for stock).  And you have the stock at the bottom for use later (maybe in making rice…  i usually cool it off in the fridge first and scoop off the congealed fat before using).  So…  rice, chicken and vegetables – so good.  Take the skin off or your personal trainer will yell at you!

So, if you’re getting this post on facebook or an RSS Feed instead of going to the site directly, please run to the IT Legends site and poke around a bit.  We like the layout, but we can be convinced to find another theme.  Does it need to be free?  How about free as in beer or less than $50 (but we prefer free since we’ve only made $3 – actually considering the cost of the domain, hosting, etc – we’re still in the red).  Yes, if you send a theme suggestion that we end up using, we will buy you a beer (or a beverage of your choice) the next time we are in proximity.

I know, I know.. those pins aren’t “Required” but with a Pentium D class power hog, what do ya expect..

Luckily we had an extra PS around the house(surprise)

Anyway.. to the point.. I’ve mostly managed to avoid Vista.. really, but this PC has it installed and I have to say.. WoW.. It really sucks!

First I couldn’t connect to my own wireless networks, so I disabled the  firewall, then it displayed that it was back on, then it displayed that it was off again,  is not on.. now it is on..Then Windows showed it ON but not at recommended settings. So I click on what is recomended.. mistake…

So I mange to get onilne and head straight to windows update… more fun…

First, There are no important updates, just optional ones.. So I click to see those.. oh wait.. now there are actually 69 critical updates right next to those… . sigh..

I’ve used Windows 7 for a couple hours, nothing like this crap….

Disclaimer: I’m still on XP on my main PC.

So, as soon as it arrived I did the only thing I could do: Opened up and snapped a few pics with the Iphone.

Here they are:

BTW: I also just picked up a 2nd one of the 8800gt cards.  Now I’ve got to get a 2nd water block!.. Will update once I get them hooked up.
Also.  I went with these instead of the Danger Den for 2 reasons: 1. Price  2. Size/orientation: These have the barbs on the side while the DD ones are on top and I’d have to cut a chunk out of my Sunbeam acrylic case. (same 2 reasons that I have the 8800GT and not the GTX, that and power usage) I already had to drill 2 holes in the case for the coolant tubing.

Disclaimer: I received no product or  Treasure from the listed companies. (though I’ll take some, and then of course disclose it)  Just writing what’s at hand and what I know. I purchased all this myself.

The cool part is that it has current clamps for all the circuits in your breaker box and software that looks pretty slick to monitor everything.

Will update when I hear back from them.

Travis.

Digestible training would be training in chunks of size that your brain has an appetite for and capacity to assimilate.  Perhaps not all training can be done in this fashion, but the tools available to us today to provide skills training at a distance are incredibly easy to use.  I think trainings can be broken down into small, 15-minute or less digestible chunks.  If a topic at hand truly takes 8 hours, then break it down into something more easily processed and retained.   If its self-paced distance learning, it gives people the opportunity to work at their pace to properly absorb the skills and information.  People that learn fast can take on more chunks at once than someone who might be new to a subject or got stuck on one point and needs to research a little more to grasp a concept.

It is my goal to issue a series of digestible training videos to my clients and different ones the public at large.  There are a lot of good examples of this type of training already out there, but I still see a lot of these intensive 3-day training camps that, in my mind, are more of a waste of money and time than a benefit (if there were other ways to teach the topic – some skills to not lend themselves to distance learning).  Here’s a good example of how to make an MP3 podcast in digestible chunks.

I’m looking forward to hooking it up to my office network (which runs an Astaro Security Gateway 220) so I have VPN hooked up all the time instead of just when I run the client.  :)

So, we begin our trek for food (I gave him Doritos to calm the burning pain in his stomach – Abe eats a lot but is thin as a rail) and I decide to have him taste Modern Apizza on State St.  Its a place a client and friend recommended to me – she suggested the bacon and onion and wow was it good!  However, they were closed on Sunday afternoon.  How sad, we were put out a little, but hungry and I remembered that Tony and Lucille’s on Wooster St served it ready by the slice (I found out the weekend before when I was moving things into the new apartment)!

So, we ventured over there.  There was, as usual, this very long line of people outside Frank Pepe’s (my first New Haven pizza, it is world renowned).  I shook my head, thinking the fools don’t even know they can get good pizza just about anywhere on Wooster St.  So we go into the takeout side of Tony and Lucille’s across the street.  We order a few pizzas by the slice and decide to eat them while we wait for a pizza to be made for us to go (for Abe to bring home to his little family in Vernon).  They are pretty amusing there, they treat you like family because they expect you to know exactly how things work in their shop.  Apparently, you’re not supposed to order whole pizzas from the takeout side, nor can you call ahead (I asked) to have them make one for you to pick up.  If you want a whole pie, you go next door to the restaurant.  I thought it was strange, but after being told this they gave me one of the pies they already had made for slices.

Starving, we headed outside to eat our slices at the nice tables they put out.  An older man, a bit portly with white hair and a gruff voice comes out as we’re tearing into our second piece.  “Where did you get that pizza!?”  We told him we got it from his place and he put a smile on and had a great conversation with us.  That was how I met Tony of Tony and Lucille’s on 150 Wooster St (they don’t have a website).  He asked us who’s pizza we thought was best, we told him the one we were eating was better than one we had to wait for.  haha.  But no, seriously, his pizza is nice.  It has a light, crispy, thin crust and is well put together.  Tony is a great guy, and when I told him I was a local business owner and had just moved in a couple miles down the road, he chatted with us for awhile.  His daughter (I didn’t catch her name) also joined in.

So far, I’ve been loving New Haven.  You just don’t get this kind of attention up near Hartford unless you twist a couple arms.  So far, all the shop owners and managers have been very forthcoming and friendly.  Especially when I tell them I just moved in, they all have some nice advice on where to go and what to do.  Oh, and Archie Moore’s is about a 3 minute walk.  They have awesome wings!  I would have had more tonight if I could have, but I made myself a promise that I’d only be going there as long as the World Series was going on and I guess that’s over now.  Not that I won’t ever go back, it will just take me a month or so.