January 22nd, 2007 by 
imagery
Email is almost a necessity nowadays. Very few companies and business can survive without this form of communication whether it is emailing a simple message, travel itinerary, purchase confirmation, forgotten passwords or a whole gamut of other things. If email consisted of only text messages and no file attachments it would be virtually harmless. The thing that makes email dangerous are those file attachments and the recipients not understanding the consequences of double-clicking an executable file.
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January 22nd, 2007 by imagery
Many joke about how mobile homes and trailer parks always seem to get hit by tornadoes. However, some people truly believe that mobile homes attract tornadoes. The fact is, nothing attracts tornadoes. They form and move based on wind and other meteorological variables, not the type of home on the ground.
The reason people may think tornadoes target mobile homes and trailer parks is that the most damage seems to occur when they do strike these places. Mobile homes and trailers are not securely fastened to their foundations and are usually structurally weak in comparison to well built homes. Even relativley weak tornadoes can cause significant damage as compared to other well-built homes that would otherwise suffer comsemtic damage. Therefore, those inside these mobile homes and trailers have no safe place to hide and as a result, serious injury and death results. The media’s motto then applies; if it bleeds it reads. Damage, death and injuries are the reason why we hear about tornadoes hitting trailer parks with greater frequency than other neighborhoods. Also, there tend to be a greater number of trailer parks in that part of the country which experiences tornadoes on a more frequent basis. It has nothing to do with the structures themselves.
Other Tornado Myths
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January 19th, 2007 by imagery
We have a DirecTV Dual Tuner Tivo in our bedroom, but unfortunately we only had one coax cable jack. So we couldn’t record one show and watch another at the same time unless we ran another cable into the bedroom from the basement. A daunting task because I didn’t want to run the cable around the baseboards and I didn’t want to run it all the way around the house and in through the outside wall. That leaves just one option, and that was to go up through the interior wall.
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At first I thought it would be easy thinking the walls would be hollow and I could simply drop the cable down the wall and fish it out in the basement. I was wrong. In newer construction homes, there are 2×4 fire breaks between the studs which prevent one from doing this. I then thought about cutting a square hole in the dry wall at the firebreak, drilling a hole and passing the cable through. Because we have a split-level home, the hole in the dry wall would of been in a very visible spot and unless I patched it perfectly, the wife would of had my head.
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January 17th, 2007 by imagery
When I bought my 2005 BMW 650 GS Dakar, I quickly realized I was going to need a top case for carrying some of my gear. The question was, do I go with the BMW case that is made for the bike or do I go with a 3rd party case? After speaking with some co-workers who have BMW motorcycles, none of them had many good things to say about the BMW top case. The two biggest complaints I heard were it was very compartmentalized which made storing larger items difficult and that it sometimes leaked water. That latter surprised me.
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January 14th, 2007 by imagery
Normally I’m not one to complain, but in today’s day and age with as popular as online shopping is, you would think the web sites of two of the biggest DIY stores would have a descent search capability. Truth is, they are both pretty bad by today’s standards, or frustrating to say the least.
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For one, unless you know the exact name of what it is you are looking for, your search will return no results. This leads me to believe there are no keywords attached to products or if there are, they aren’t very relevant. So, if I want to find a long flexible drill bit extender or wire puller I can’t just search online for it because it will return no results. Yet I know they have them because I’ve seen them in store (and eventually bought them). The fact is, a DIY store is going to have a lot of people who don’t necessarily know the exact name of the tool or product they are looking for because they are amateurs. That’s who these stores are geared towards! So why not make the web sites a bit more versatile and useful?!
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January 12th, 2007 by imagery
The blizzard we had on December 20th, 2006 was probably the worst I’ve seen since living in Colorado Springs. The 10 minute average wind speed hovered around 45 mph for 3 hours and wind gusts exceeded 55 mph. It was one nasty storm that caused a lot of problems all throughout the country.
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For us however, and most people I spoke with who live all around the city, the pain was troublesome. Because the wind came from the northwest, it blew snow directly through the louvers on the gable vents in the attic which then accumulated on top of the insulation. However, I didn’t know this until 3 days later when the sun came out, heated the attic which then melted the snow. This was not good.
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The wife thought the pipe to the toilet in the bathroom had a leak, but there was a splatter pattern to the water. Just as I was crawling around looking for the leak, water started dripping on my head. I looked up and saw water dripping all around the bathroom vent in the ceiling. When I went up into the attic to take a look, I realized we had a problem. A big one.
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