Today was the perfect ‘that kind of day’ I have so much on my mind about work that I needed the kind of day that forced me not to think o fit.. It was incredibly sunny and beautiful out..   Diane. Gabe , the doga and I left here about 7am for Smugglers nithc for the final event in teh ASaSA )American Ski and Snowboard Association) for our regien. Gabe had a pretty good day.. he came in 2nd. that gives him enough poins to go compete in the national finals in Colorado in early April (along with a thousand or so kids). I’m going to be taking him. it’ll be be so much fun !

After the event today there was a rail jam in memory of Molly, a 5 year old girl who died of lymphoma last July.. this is the second rail jam her family has held/. last year it was raising money for her treatment. this year its a memorial .. The money raised goes to help the family of kids battling cancer.

I met Buck. moolly’s dad and tlaked for a bit. .he knows about Sam. We shared alot in that short conversation about our kids. I know exactly how much it took for Buck and his family to turn it on for their friends and hold this event.

Even though the event was for a very sad reason, It was a good turnout.. which made me happy.

The rest of the day was sleepy and fun.. I did two geeky projects.> Gabe and I finished the forge we’d made. We needed to add legs to the forge.. Gabe did all the welding. He’s such a natural at this stuff. Makes me so proud..

TH elegs on the forge will kep us from having to bend down to heat the metal.. a great build for a sunny Saturday afternoon

I also did another goofy project Diane and I are obsessed with this new power monitor
I installde in the house.. We’re trying to figure out what appliance take which power.. the catch is, you need to be staring at the screen all the time to see the power changing.. which makes it tough to figure out what’s using the power.. Today I wrote a simple program that plays a simple tone sequence over the sterieo when the power he house is using increases or decreases suddenly .. it makes it easy to figure out what device is using the power.

Right now it s driving us crazy   dah-dah-dah dah .. dee-dee-dee-deeee

here’s the code if anyone’s interested..

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
from time import sleep
import re, urllib2
import audiere

def read_entry(url):
   
    try:
        resp = urllib2.urlopen(url,None,100)

        html_code = resp.read()

        soup = BeautifulSoup(”.join(html_code))
        power = soup.findAll(“powernow”)
        return int(power0.contents0)
#        print soup.prettify()

    except IOError, e:
        print e.reason

go = 1
last = 0

# Open default audio device
d = audiere.open_device()

threshold = 50

while (go == 1):
    this = read_entry(‘http://ted5000/api/LiveData.xml‘)
    diff = this – last
    print this,” “, last, ” ” , diff
    if  abs(diff) > threshold :
        steps = abs(diff) / threshold
        freq = last
        for i in range(steps) :
            t = d.create_tone(freq)
            t.pan = 1
            t.play()
            sleep(0.05)
            t.stop()
            if diff > 0 :
                freq = freq + threshold
            else :
                freq = freq – threshold
   
    last = this
       
Gotta go now.. Diane is watching the “Flying Nun” on Youtube..
Now that was a weird show

Nite folks.. nite sam
-me