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Showing posts from April 10, 2005

Carbon Monoxide!?

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Weird. The smoke alarm went off, not incredibly odd when I am using the fireplace, but it wasn't the smoke detector. It was the CO alarm. I was totally surprised. It had never gone off as long as I have had one, over many many years. Yep, after resetting it a few times. It was getting a reading over 200 ppm CO. When I took it downstairs I got a reading near 300 ppm. I started getting light headed at this point. After thinking maybe the furnace heat exchanger failed and puzzling around a bit I figured out what happened. As part of the huge winter storm that recently covered almost half of the US, we lost our electricity. So, being well prepared, I rolled out the generator and started doing what I normally do. The generator (although it was completely outside) was creating CO to get in the house. Using the fireplace draft (and possibly other leaks) the whole house created a vacuum around the seal of the basement garage door. After the CO got into the house the forced air heat...
We received more facts about the Awards that Donna Cuyle, Dave Schriber, Susan Spear, Kim Bush and Joan Rifanburg won in the Society for Technical Communications Annual competition. In addition to the Award of Excellence we were honored to receive a Distinguished Award from the Rochester chapter at the 43rd annual conference. This is the first time we have been successful in obtaining that level of award. This is a difficult achievement to obtain and we have been working on this level of award by reviewing the comments (mostly from non-winning entrants) from judges over the past few years and identifying areas where we could be effective in making improvements. Much to our delight, when we went to accept the awards in Rochester we learned that not only did we win one of the five distinguished awards, we also won “Overall Best of Show,” out of 38 submitted publications. Our publication was judged higher than publications from Eastman Kodak, Xerox and other companies. If that was...
From Douglas: He drives a Honda Insight. The following vehicles must have fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. From least ugly to the ugliest, here they are: 10. Chevrolet Avalanche 9. Scion Xb 8. Chevrolet Aveo 7. Chrysler PTCruiser 6. Subaru Baja 5. Toyota Echo 4. Scion Xa 3. Honda Element 2. Honda Insight 1. Pontiac Aztek
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STC Awards Woo Hoo! The folks in my department won the top awards at the Regional STC conference Friday. You can't ask for better than that. The PDF link above shows some of the awards we won. We are still sorting out the significance of some of the awards, including overall best of show! I don't think I could be more proud. All sorts of folks were scrutinitizing the books and we let a Technical Communications professor from RIT borrow them for some work she is doing. Friday was a good day. Saturday, the weather was fantastic. I don't know how warm it got, but I was lying in the grass next to the llama pen for quite a while. I did some farm work and relaxed. Now I have to pay for it. I have a lot of home work (at least 10 hours) to get done on this great day (possibly even nicer than yesterday). It takes a lot of discipline to concentrate and work through homework on a weekend like this one. I will do it. If someone, someday, ever asks, "How did you manage to ...