Renewable Energy Project

For sometime now, I have been looking at ways of generating electricity on a small scale, for things such as camping, or if there is a power outage and you need to keep something powered on or a battery charged up. I’ve looked Wind Power Generators and recently found a neat one that uses rare earth magnets and generates 1000w of power. I’ve even looked at Solar Panels.

I think my first project will be a wind turbine. Not the 1000w one at first, because those magnets can get REALLY expensive.  But the only thing I want to look at is, making the unit easily portable and possibly with adjustable height. The key problem with adjusting height is the force the wind will be putting on the turbine during wind gusts, the adjustable height may snap the whole rig in half.

My biggest issue may be building the charging unit, I am horrible at reading schematics, and would need to build a unit that will both charge a battery and then once the battery has a full charge stop sending a charge, and possibly have a second output linked to another battery.

I will want to look into the option of having multiple inputs, so if I have two turbines or a turbine and a solar panel (or two of anything really), I can charge with both without needing a second charging unit and battery.

Bad part is, since my plate is already pretty full, this whole idea may take a back seat for awhile, which may be a good thing since I will need time to learn how to read and understand schematics.  If you can assist me in this quest, please contact me dwalker@merval.org

Thanks for reading!

Chris Jericho Suspended.

(From WWE.com)

At a WWE Live Event in at São Paulo, Brazil, on Thursday evening, Chris Jericho reportedly denigrated the Brazilian flag during a match against WWE Champion CM Punk. Suspended for 30 days, Jericho responded to the incident in his own words.

“I made a bad judgment call in the course of entertaining [WWE] fans in Brazil,” Jericho told WWE.com. “I apologized to the people in the crowd for showing disrespect.”

During Jericho’s match with the WWE Champion at São Paulo’s Ginásio do Ibirapuera, the flag found its way into the ring, where Jericho crumpled it up and then kicked it.

Local law enforcement stopped the bout and gave Jericho the opportunity to apologize to those in attendance or face incarceration. The former World Champion expressed his regret to the crowd and the WWE Live Event continued.

Due to his actions, WWE officials suspended Jericho for 30 days.

“It was a bad move,” Jericho said. “I did it with [our] fans’ entertainment in mind and I’ll accept the consequences for that.”

Latte Da Coffee House and Wine Bar

Every Sunday for the last nine months or so, my wife, mother-in-law, sister-in-law and I have met up for coffee, just to hang out and talk and enjoy conversation. We jumped around weekly for awhile trying to find a place that we felt comfortable with, and kept going from place to place until we found Latte Da. The moment we walked in, we were hooked.

It felt like we were walking into our own home. There was music playing softly in the background, there was a fire in the fireplace and just felt warm and welcoming. You can find us there almost every Sunday drinking our coffee and enjoying life. We have certainly found our favorite coffee house to chill at! The atmosphere is like none other, they have outdoor seating and multiple rooms for you to sit in.

But they do so much more than just coffee! They have Open Mic nights, and have regular musical guests. You can enjoy baked goods with your coffee as well! We find the multiple kinds of quiche quite delicious!

You can also get a sandwich with potato salad if you want something a little bigger.

All around Latte Da is the perfect place to enjoy a cup of coffee, or two 🙂 Or if you’re into tea, they got ya covered as well!

If you’re in the area, check em out! Visit their website OR Like them on Facebook!

Check out these Columbian articles:
http://www.columbian.com/news/2012/may/23/coffee-shop-a-west-side-hub-latte-da-vancouver/

http://www.columbian.com/news/2011/oct/28/latte-da-is-more-comfortable-than-la-di-da/

Triple H vs Brock Lesnar

When Brock had the Undisputed Championship in September 2002 and left Raw for Smackdown he was all set to face Triple H for the title. This was when Eric Bischoff (Raw GM at the time) handed Triple H the former WCW belt (renamed the World Heavyweight Championship). Hunter and Flair had a match to determine who was the champ.

Pro Wrestling Needs To Change It’s Way.

I really got into wrestling when I was a kid, I grew up during the era of WWF vs WCW, Monday Night Raw Vs Monday Nitro. If you weren’t into wrestling during the late 90’s, you missed on hell of a ride!
It was the “Golden Era” of Wrestling, you never knew who would go from one company to the other or what they had up their sleeves and that made it so special.

I remember when Scott Hall walked onto Monday Nitro through the crowd acting like Razor Ramon (having made his last appearance in WWF on May 19, 1996 and showing up in WCW on May 27th, 1996), they made it appear as though WWF was coming in to take over WCW, and this was the start of the nWo, “The New World Order of Professional Wrestling”. During an era of WWF when cartoon like characters were “top”, WCW had guys using their real names and they were using cutting edge story lines. Th battle for number 1 went on for 5 years, from September 4, 1995 until Vince McMahon and the WWF bought WCW on March 26, 2001. That was the night Pro Wrestling changed forever.

WWF (Later changed to WWE) has been the only major Pro Wrestling Promotion/Company that has main stream TV exposure, and boy did they take that for granted! Story lines became lax and things really got hard to watch, but because they are the best (and only one) at what they do, it’s hard not to watch.

But, in 2002 TNA (Total Nonstop Action) Wrestling was founded, they were a small regional promotion for a long time, they held weekly Pay Per Views (111 in 27 months). It took them 4 years to get on TV break and they started airing TNA iMPACT on Fox Sports Net. WWE Finally had some kind of competition! Except that TNA was an unknown promotion.

TNA has done just about everything to get attention, they brought in several former WWE wrestlers, Hulk Hogan, Ken Anderson, Jeff Hardy, Mick Foley(who returned to WWE). But the reason TNA hasn’t made a big splash in the water is the quality of their programming. Sadly, it’s sub-par at best.

WWE has long been the only Wrestling company on TV, and because of that TNA will need to up their game vastly in order to really become a threat to WWE.

WWE absolutely needs some kind of big player competition so they can be more successful, when you are the only one doing what you do, you can do anything you want and get away with it. This includes making bad TV. If it’s not TNA that comes to the challenge, there needs to be another company that will.

Check out my post about TNA