Ann Vole

01:42 am: Radiant flooring and Raynolds number
New infrared imaging equipment is very cheap now so installers are finding that there are better ways of making radiant floor heating such as heat plates. Heat plates are just sheet or cast metal that conduct the heat away from the source of heat and then radiate that heat through the flooring material. To be more durable, I figured the besr tile shape should be a hexigon (6-sides, closest to round while still having flat sides). The problem is I wanted to put the tubes between the tiles in the cracks and a hexigon tile will mean lots of bends. When a fluid flows through a pipe slowly, it flows fastest in the middle of the pipe and slower as it gets closer to the inside wall of the pipe (this is called "laminar flow"). When the fluid flows faster, eventually eddies form causing the fluid to mix up (called "turbulent flow") and thus the resistance to the flow is much greater so the pump needs to work harder. Normally having a pump work harder is a bad thing but if it is your source of heat energy, you want more resistance. Oil is usually not used for radiant floor heating fluid because it usually flows too fast for laminar flow. The point where laminar flow becomes turbulent flow is determined by a calculation and whether the results are above or below a number called Raynolds Number. This sort of radiant heating system will use more energy for the pump but all that energy will go to heating the floor more then the heat in the fluid before it is pumped thought the pipes in the floor. I was thinking of having the oil pumped with both an electric pump and by a hydraulic pump turned by a windmill. This would be able to provide 100% of the heating by wind power on windy days with a low heating load and only need to tap into stored heat if that is not sufficient. Oil will not wear the inside of the pipes, will not freeze, can handle high temperatures, will maximize the life of the pumps and various fans and heat pumps can also be powered with the hydraulic pressure too.

12:37 am: Amen Roofing
While doing my "anarchist job" of bottle picking, some guys in van gave me a whole bunch of cans and bottles. Later they gave me some change and then offered me a job with their roofing company called Amen Roofing. My building designs are going to require unique roof designs and materials so it is a good idea to have a working knowledge of "normal" roofing practices. I still need to be making twice as much as I am at Petro-Canada but I don't want a permanent job, just a temporary or seasonal job so roofing works great. With a company name that includes "Amen"... sounds "heavenly".

09:25 pm: Broad smiles and pidgin names
Lots of "cheeky" cartoon characters have broad toothy grins and names of a pair of identical sylables. I just found a cartoon bunny character named Kiki and was trying to figure out why he looked unique inspite of a rather genaric bunny design and realized it was the grin that made you know that he was both cute and cheeky.

09:17 pm: Red head in my sights
Yesterday I passed a location with lots of baby ground squirrels and noticed that one had a fox-red belly, cheeks, tail and parts of the head including the ears. The back was still peppered with black an white to make the agouti color. All the other babies there (about 40) had light grey turning to cream on the belly instead of this fox-red so I assume this individual has some sort of recessive gene being expressed. I will definitely have to catch it. My dad found out about the chinchilla and was not too pleased so keeping ground squirrels is not an option there until the house is completely in my name. I might be able to get a mortgage after I do a few things which might happen as early as September but for now, my only option is to keep animals at Colfax instead of Regina.
edit: Someone just cut the locks on my garage but I think nothing was stolen.... good excuse to try to get everything moved to Colfax.

10:54 am: Interesting person of the day: Joe Ranft
I am always googling a few people a day and finding interesting people connected with one of the many interests of mine. I think I will try to do an interesting person profile every day. Today I will do

Joe Ranft

While being co-director and the head of story for the Pixar movie Cars, Joe tragically drove over a guard rail and plunged to his death in the Pacific Ocean. Of course the movie Cars was dedicated in his memory. Joe started in the writing department of Disney after graduating from California Institute of the Arts (including the film Brave Little Toaster). Later he worked for Pixar starting with their first feature film Toy Story. Joe's skill that made Pixar movies so successful was Joe's ability to make complex characters that the audience could feel empathy with. Joe would also do the voices for all the characters in his pitches of stories and so often would do a more entertaining performance than any actor hired for the part could do so many of the Pixar characters ended up voiced by Joe in the final films (this even happened on Disney's Brave Little Toaster). Joe is also credited as executive producer for Tim Burton's Corpse Bride which was also credited "in memory of Joe Ranft".

Joe's mentor at Disney, Eric Larson taught him to ask ‘What does the audience perceive?’

"I have this notion that there's a story there that wants to be told, and you're just trying to find out what it is. And you go from trying to lead it to listening and letting it lead you." - Joe Ranft

Here is a nice tribute to him in "Disney Legends" section of Disney's website:
http://legends.disney.go.com/legends/detail?key=Joe%20Ranft

and of course you have to see the Wikipedia and The Internet Movie Database on Joe_Ranft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Ranft
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0710020/

03:57 am: Partial families as characters
Heather and Osmund the opossums on Over the Hedge are a father daughter pair. There is no explanation what may have happened to the rest of the family. They are contrasted by the complete porcupine family also on that same movie. They are also contrasted by RJ, the raccoon who claims to have lost his family in "the weed hacker incident" (and the other three species of character without others of their kind - squirrel, turtle, skunk). The bond between these broken-family characters is often damaged or diminished in some way but at the same time compensated by a very strong of need being that they do not want to lose the only family they have left. Our current society seems to have a high proportion of broken families and so it seems obvious that we need them in entertainment to provide characters and situations people can identify with and learn from. The other thing that having a father-daughter pair provides is that particular relationship is rarely explored but in this case, all the rest of the family relationships do not exist so we can focus and concentrate on that particular one.

07:49 am: Screenwriter's bug
When ever I try to write a story, I either go completely visual or go completely dialog. I cannot seem to strike a novel-style balance. Good script writing for movies should be 100% dialog or should go storyboard. Storyboard works best without dialog. So, between my radio-play dialog script stuff and my action movie storyboards, I think setting up movie ideas is my forte.

10:54 pm: Trite sayings, puns, dialog, twitter it
I am not so interested in twitter to read or make contacts but as a writer's tool via a cel phone, it could be highy useful so I will try to get twitter working on my cel and maybe mirrored on LJ if I can do a day's worth of twitters into one LJ post or some other way to not spam my journal with twitters.

11:55 am: Pre and post electricity filmming
The small area in Saskatchewan where Colfax is (and where the house I have "in the country" is) is one of the few places where all electricity is distributed underground so there is no power lines. Shooting large sets of miniatures are a lot easier if there is nothing around the set like power lines to remove. Blue skies are also easy to work with as they can be turned into a blue-screen mask. That same area is often cloudless and lacking con trails from jet planes. Very few buildings or trees on the horizon and minimal lights at night on the horizon too all help to make Colfax a great location for shooting stuff. I might be able to capitalize on that if I make Colfax into an animation and miniature model/puppet production facilities with underground or low profile buildings.

11:36 am: Story = journey
A story is really a journey of some kind... a journey through space or time or emotions or understanding. The characters in the story usually make this journey but that does not really matter... what matters is that the audience makes a journey. If you want the audience to make that journey more then once, you have to have many different types of journey the audience can go on or to have great things to explore or enjoy along the way.

09:55 am: Spielburg's secret
"I swore to learn a long time ago to be careful about detailing what motivates me to tell a story as if it is some tremendous thought process that takes years to figure out first emotionally and internally and to be able to turn around tell you the story that I worked so hard to figure out whether I wanted to tell it at all and I realized that all the decisions that I make about a story as a teller come in two different decisions: I either spark to the story or I don't." - Steven Spielberg in "Creating A.I." DVD extra for the movie Artificial Intelligence

11:19 pm: freedom to be true, or at least a jerk
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. - George Orwell, Preface to Animal Farm (1946).

People seem to get confused about freedom when they try to stop discrimination and "hate crimes"... censorship is not freedom and never will be. You must always be able to say anything... even if it is a lie or nasty or hateful or - maybe more dangerous - a disliked truth.

11:27 am: Robot junkyard dream
I just had a dream that I woke from that the only thing I remember was a few teenage humans were gathering parts for some robot project from a junkyard of just robot parts. Many of the broken and partially dismantled robots were begging for help or for the humans to take them home with them. If removing parts from a talking robot, it would plead or complain about the humans making them more useless or taking particularly hard-to-replace parts and say that such a loss will keep them in the junkyard forever.

03:46 am: Fox's Chicken Farm
A customer at the gas station here used a credit card that brought up the name "Fox's Chicken Farm" on the cashier screen. I thought the guy sort of looked and acted as I would expect a fox-turned-human might be like. Farmers sometimes grow things based on markets but I think more often choose what they grow based on what they like to consume themselves. Personally, I cannot get enough pets so... I need to raise pets. As a business venture, I need alternate energy for my own use so I should be providing alternate energy solutions as a job. Animation and children's books supply most of my entertainment with a bit looking for alternate energy books with something new to learn so as intellectual property products, those three should be my focus (with children's books at the top of that list). They say "need is the mother of invention"... I have loads of inventions I need to start testing prototypes.

04:47 am: Mr. Energy expert on green apartments
Akktri asked "Okay, Mr. Energy expert. I have a bedroom in my parents' house. How can I use household materials to make it more alternate energy friendly?"

Apartments and living in someone else's place eliminates a lot of the HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) and DHW (Domestic Hot Water) ideas for alternate energy but there are still lots you can do. As far as HVAC is concerned, you can:
1) turn down the thermostat or possibly replace the thermostat with a programmable one. Set the temperature high for AC or low for heating when ever you go out.
2) use an electric blanket so you can set night-time heating temperature even lower or small personal fans or sports ice packs for personal cooling rather then use the AC to cool the whole room. Wearing the right clothing for being outside will also reduce the need to control the inside temperature as much.
3) Windows can be covered with insulated coverings to prevent heat loss in the winter or heat gain in the summer. Windows can be shaded inside or outside to stop heat gain from sunlight or in the winter, make sure the sun does shine in for passive solar heating. Windows can be opened for air flow instead of fans when AC is not being used for cooling.
4) air tightness will greatly improve the efficiency of both heating and cooling; use weather stripping, foam inserts in wall plug-ins and possibly changing the plugs and switches with new ones which have been designed for air-tight operation. Use a candle or insense stick on a windy day to find air leaks in the house and try to fix the leaks with the above measures or using "sonic sealant" (caulking specifically made to make things airtight) or spray-in expanding foam insulation (read a book on the subject because there are lots of serious mistakes you can make with expanding foam).

Usually the DHW tanks can be set at a lower temperature and still have hot enough water although you may have to use 100% hot water for some uses. Washing with a cloth and only turning on the shower for getting wet to start and rinsing off can reduce hot water use. Most laundry can be washed effectively in cold water as well as most dishwasher loads.

For more personal energy use, many electronic items can be solar powered or use a solar powered charger. I use my cel phone for email and posting on my blog for majorly lower electricity use (the charger uses less then one watt but my desktop computer with monitor uses about 600 watts... and 6 hours of cel phone use needs less then 1 hour to recharge... that is about 4000 times less energy used!) Laptops are also designed for low energy use.

Lighting can be reduced with lamps for specific use and then you can use much dimmer lights for the room... just need enough to prevent tripping over stuff. I have recently found very low wattage fluorescent bulbs (7, 5, 4, and even 2 watts) that still make enough light for general room lighting as long as I use reading lamps or a desk lamp for reading or more specific visual tasks. You might be allowed to install automatic lighting for hallways and bathrooms to prevent leaving those lights on. I also read stuff using my cel phone which I can do in the dark for way less energy then even a flashlight uses.

Use a one-cup coffee maker if you like fresh coffee or tea or use a thermos or insulated jug for keeping the beverage hot or cold.

Choose foods that require less or no cooking. If you can eliminate all foods requiring refrigeration or freezing from your diet, you can also unplug the refrigerator (or not have one).

03:07 am: Pulling the race card
Based on my previous post, I started thinking of examples and "American Tale" came to mind. Fievel Mousekewitz and his family are definitely Russian Jews fleeing the communist revolution with all the cultural references intact. There are a few other pieces of literature/films that portray Jews as mice and the persecutors as cats (both communist and fascist) so the connection has been made on a wider basis. Being made by people of the same culture as being portrayed (namely Spielberg), makes any claims of being stereotypical in any racist way to make that claim to look racist itself. I wonder how much of the writing, directing and (voice) acting needs to be done by each culture portrayed to claim that immunity to be considered racist.

02:14 am: Stereotype breakers and cultural censorship
When taking about cartoons that were banned because they had a negative stereotypical portrayal of black people, they mentioned the crows in the film Dumbo. Those crows were acceptable in the minds of the people discussing this because those crows were cool characters. Speedy Gonzalez, "the fastest mouse in Mexico", was banned from some networks until a Mexican cultural awareness group did a letter writing campaign to get Speedy back because he was a Mexican hero character. I believe the typical stereotype of Mexicans is that they move slow so Speedy breaks that stereotype. The thing that I remembered most about the crows from when I saw the movie as a kid was that they looked rich (gold shoe cover things) and they definitely took charge of the situation with leadership and intelligence. I am not so clear on stereotypes of blacks at the time but I suspect the crows broke some stereotypes. I think having characters of different cultures is great for making a show interesting and giving people an identifiable role model. I specifically desired to do animation so I could avoid cultural stereotypes but have cultural differences among the characters by making them different species or from different planets or different dimensions or times. The problem is that people will still assume you are making a stereotype reference and assign a race or culture to your character even if that never crossed the mind of the author. Since some people are going to make the connection, might as well make sure they see the character as someone people of that culture or race can be proud to call one of their own.

09:39 am: Nazi kittens
The thinking among dogs is communist... everything is done to be part of the group. There may be alpha characters but they only get that position by the group choosing them to take on that role. Cat society is one where each individual is the most important person in the society in the eyes of that individual. The leader assumes the role and only keeps it based on the personality of the leader being too strong for other individuals to dare try and take over. Ferrets have no leader but stash their own supplies and try and make local friends who they know will not steal from them. Ferret society is the anarchist one I need to look at closer to find a model that may work for humans.

10:22 pm: The good life, the bad-ass and the ugly situation
Our civilization is a self-induced slavery to get a good life but a good life means you do not fight for anything but instead do nothing or go crazy because there is nothing to spur us into action except a desire for freedom.

10:35 am: The color of anarchy
Just curious if a color has been assigned to the political ideas of anarchy or minimum government. Red is for left, socialist, communist and blue is for right-thinking, fascist, and maybe capitalist ideals. Green generally means local government and concern over environmental factors (good for anarchists) but it also advocates stronger government controls and standards which clash with anarchic ideals. Recent changes in right-wing politics advocates less government controls over economic forces which is desirable for anarchists but the right-wing politics are still strongly on the side of big business rather then local and small business. Left-wing politics generally pushes the ideals if treating everyone equally and not having anybody have power over another which anarchists agree with whole-heartedly but have a big problem with the typical strong controls and big governments that left-wing politics uses to force everyone to be the same... the difference is anarchists have no problem with people being different (like rich or poor) as long as they are treated the same... leftists usually want to tax the rich more then the poor.

A simple rich color with an easily recognized name will be needed... yellow is not very rich and red, blue and green are taken leaving no primary colors. I will have to do some research and pick one of one does not already have a history for such a use.