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Showing posts from May 8, 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 oout 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 (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 heating eff...
Falafel My class is over! I passed. It looks like I got B-. That was a life changing event for me. I learned about myself more than I may have learned about the class material. It was challenging. I may not go back to school. Seattle was good. The conference sessions were good. It was great to see our manual out there in front of Microsoft, IBM and Cisco Systems. People were impressed. The big thing at the conference is DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). There is a lot of hype about DITA and we are contemplating using DITA as our DTD or a derivitive. IBM is strongly backing the freely available DTD. That always makes me suspicious. I went out to dinner with some sales guys and had a good time. One night I went out for Egyptian food. That was great. I need to make falafel at home. Pete is coming down to borrow my bobcat for a week. I need to work on my truck this weekend. It needs brakes bad. I will start catching up on all the work around here that has not been getting...