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I posted this on SR so rather than rephrase anything I'll just copy and paste it here verbatim: It's been over a month since I posted last due to a lack of time and some family issues. Nevertheless, this thread caught my interest because of all eight Presidents I've lived through Reagan was...

Sorry, I couldn't resist. :mrgrn: I have a lot more to say on this topic and in the hybrid cars thread. When I collect my thoughts later today or tomorrow I'll state my piece.

As I'm discovering this week the amount of sleep I need depends heavily upon when I need to wake up. If I have to be up during early morning hours I require a few hours more sleep and I'm still not at my best until after noon. In general I can't stand having to get up before about noon which...

It probably should. I think color cameras use the same CCD devices as B&W ones, but selectively filter the red, green, or blue light going to the CCD depending upon whether it is a red, green, or blue pixel. The filters probably let through enough IR so that the camera remains sensitive to...

Unfortunately, I've been too busy to spend much time here, and I'll be helping my friend who owns a taximeter shop with the rate change coming to the city taxis for the next three weeks so I won't be around much, if at all, after around next Monday. :cry: Don't despair. I should be back...

Actually, when I was commuting to college I probably spent a good 3.5 hours a day on some type of rail vehicle (either commuter rail or the subway). It was preferable to the alternative of sleeping away in noisy, filthy dorms. And cheaper as well by a few thousand dollars.

Part number is SFH-487-3. The camera uses 21 of these in three series strings of 7, driven at ~100 mA. The only data I could find on them was Vf=1.5 @ I=100mA. Since most LEDs these days are about 10% efficient (state of the art in a lab is around 35% efficient) at converting electricity into...

Not necessarily. The IR LEDs in the remotes are pulsed so that they send out an appropriate signal to the receiver. Thus, they're not operating at 100% duty cycle. They may also be operating at way less than rated current in order to conserve batteries. I'll see if I can find the specs for...

For visible LEDs brightness is measured in mcd but this spec is meaningless for IR LEDs which emit at invisible wavelengths. Thus, they are generally rated in mW and beam angle. For a given mW output a smaller beam angle will be "brighter" but will have a narrower field of vision. I would say...

I have one of those to inflate my bike tires in the garage (I use a battery charger for power). It inflates my bike tires to 110 psi with no problem. All the ones I've heard so far are noisy, and a fair number are so cheaply made they break after inflating one or two car tires. My brother's...

Yesterday I went to my sister's for her 40th birthday. :b-day: I had heard she was having trouble with her PC being slow so while I was there I decided to do some troubleshooting, which was actually better for all involved since I avoided the people downstairs. :mrgrn: Anyway, there were...

I really don't feel inhibited here, either, although I'm getting more and more unsure of exactly where I stand on the political spectrum. For instance, my environmental views are probably closer to the far left, although an increasing number of Republicans are starting to share them. My views...

I did read the quote, and my point is that regardless of how you go after terrorists sooner or later some sort of force will be required. They're not going to just turn themselves in for prosecution. You can and should use intelligence services, and hopefully you'll catch some operatives in...

Yes, indeed. That did make sense. I had surmised something along those lines but wasn't entirely sure.

Sounds good in theory except you need to actually catch the people first. Given that many of these terrorist types like to hide out in remote, heavily guarded areas sending in just the police would result in a nice massacre. Besides, what deterrent can the law possibly be against someone who...

Thanks everyone for the honors. I appreciate having a place to come to where I can talk about all things technical, go on my rants about various subjects, cry about the losses of my pets, and in general just enjoy the cameraderie of being part of something bigger than myself. Despite the small...

Congratulations my friend! :beer: As you are the only one I've met in person from these forums I can say you are the same person in real life as you are in your posts-always polite, interesting to talk to, and good at listening to others. I look forward to your next 1000 posts.

I finally saw it tonight. I didn't have the time until today thanks to a busy last two months, and was lucky it was still playing at a few theaters. This is actually the first time I've gone to the cinema since StarTrek: First Contact (which was in 1997 I believe). Despite the length of the...

Happy now? 8) I'm reaching the 1K mark on SR almost simultaneously-not that I planned it that way or anything. I noticed my post counts were close, and decided to hit submit at the same time on both sites for my 1000th post.

We broke that record yesterday-it's 43 now, and 42 right now while I'm typing this post. I'm one post away from a record of sorts myself.

I guess that's why nobody started a thread about you passing 1000 posts. You are well past the 2K mark already if you count you old account. BTW, I forgot to mention that Mercutio, Tannin/Tea, GaryH, Buck, CougTek, and all their alternate personalities are really me. :lol: There's also...

This is something I just don't understand. Leona Helmsley did something similar by putting personal expenses on her company's petty cash account, and ending up going to jail for it. I don't get why people who are worth many millions worry about a few thousand dollars. It's pocket change to...

Thinking about this a bit, you could get the shoplights two across and four deep, which means you could have 8 shoplights above your workbench. When overdriven as per that article, you get about 10,000 lumens each. That's 80,000 lumens over 24 ft², or 3333 lm/ft², which is very intense. Full...

You're such a part of this place that I missed your posting while you were thinking of something momentus to say for your 5000th post. Thanks for helping to make this place worth coming to, and don't worry about burdening us with your problems. It's no bother at all. I personally feel honored...

You might be interested in Sylvania's cool white deluxe tubes then. We bought 3 ten-packs a while ago, and I noticed the better color immediately, especially the reds. After I got interested in light, I checked for the specs online. The color temp is 4100K, like all cool whites, and the CRI...

Those pictures of the dead city are haunting. I also wasn't aware that the death toll was so high.

I wonder how Martha will spruce up that drab orange jumpsuit? :lol: As e_dawg said, the comedians will have a field day with this one. :mrgrn:

This place has CFLs with a 5500K color temp and a CRI of 91. They are a bit pricey, but if you buy 12 or more you get free shipping. Subjectively, 5000K to 5500K is about as white as it gets. If the color temp is higher, the light does look noticeably bluish. Any lower and it looks...

It's not just the cost of CF bulbs that turns people off. It's also the fact that they don't last as long as claimed when turned on and off frequently. People just don't get it that you can't turn a fluorescent on and off constantly. LEDs don't suffer from this problem. I also wouldn't be...

Some red-orange LEDs in the lab have approached 50% efficiency. Within a few years you'll have production LEDs close to that or perhaps even better. It's a rapidly evolving technology whereas fluorescent and especially incandescent likely won't get much more efficient than they already are...

The best T-8 and T-5 fluorescents have an efficiency of around 100 lm/W, which translates into about 35% efficiency dependng upon the particular spectrum the tube is putting out. Most run of the mill high-brightness LEDs these days have efficiencies in the range of 15 to 40 lm/W, depending upon...

Another interesting development on the LED front. Osram reaches 96 lm/W in 617 nm. This technology will be employed in the next generation of Osram LEDs. While it is not a white LED (617 nm is red-amber), it is an interesting develpment nonetheless as 96 lm/W in red-orange color represents a...

Ah yes, that was the name of the movie. I couldn't remember it. I "watched" part of it while I was in the middle of designing a circuit so I may have misinterpreted some parts. You're saying there's no such malady as a brain cloud? It wasn't an early April fool's joke. I was 100% serious as...

My Yahoo! is my start page. I like to check my e-mail and get up to date on the news. After that I either go to SR or SF, depending upon which I'm more active in at the moment.

I think the being easily awakened part means you just never go into REM sleep, which is why you feel tired all the time and never remember dreaming. I've had nights where I was in bed 7 or 8 hours, but constantly awakened, and felt tired. I've also had times where I was dead tired, conked out...

Since I work at home I can work when I'm sick without worries of infecting anyone. When I worked a regular job I would go in if it was only a slight cold but anything serious I would stay home-I only missed one day of work as I rarely get seriously ill. Most jobs I used to work had no sick...

You mean you get penalized for paying your balance in full each month the way I do? :o It's almost as if they want people to carry balances. I learned that carrying debt is never a good thing. Sometimes it's unavoidable with a big ticket purchase like a house, but generally I see debt as a...

My sister has the Elantra for I believe the past two years and she's very happy with it. No problems so far, and I think it has a 10-year, 100K mile warranty on the drivetrain.

Even more stupid is that Windows can't even recognize, let alone format, some of the extended formats that let you get more on a disk. It can recognize the DMF (21 sectors per track) format, and can deal with non-standard numbers of tracks(some of my drives can do up to 86 tracks instead of the...

This assumes that whatever reporting biases are present in the survey are spread across all makes of drives. It also assumes that the samples for each drive are large enough to draw reliable conclusions. While you might make a good case for the first part, the number of people self-reporting...

Version 2.7 is actually a step back for me. It only reads the first 8GB of the drive and there's no check box for advanced size check. No fix either-according to the docs on some Win95/98/ME systems HDTach will only read the first 8GB of the drive.

I lost about 5 pounds myself when I had the flu. About the only other positive thing was I caught up on the first two parts of Lord of the Rings, which happened to be on cable when I was sick. I watched them like five times each. Hope you're feeling better soon.

Yuck. :( That sounds like the summer of '93 here in New York-strings of days over 90°F combined with oppressive humidity, and we had one day where it reached 106°F in the shade. I think that day shattered the records-until we hit 108°F a few years later. Strangely, this past January was the...

Congratulations on passing the road test. :) Now all you need to practice is keeping your anger in check as you deal with the legions of idiot NY drivers. :x I think Prof. Wizard jinxed your truck in that thread on SR. :(

I'm grasping at straws here, but perhaps some of those places that rejected your card have your old address in their database, and because it didn't match your new address (as reported by your bank when verifying the card) they rejected the card. I had a similar problem where my ISP was...

Amen to that. That's also why we grow some of our own vegetables, especially tomatoes. The store bought stuff is inedible. Yes, we wash them before eating. I'm sure some of them get covered with bird poop. Too bad we don't have room for a few nut trees (especially almonds and walnuts), or...

So do city-adapted squirrels (and house-adapted orangutans ;)). We have two squirrels who derive a good portion of their diet from birdseed. One of them hangs upside down from the metal bird feeder hanger on the garage wall in order to get its meal. Unfortunately, until it has its fill the...

You left out one choice-try to take the bird out yourself-assuming you know how. This is a tough call. I'm bothered way more when I see injustices to animals than to people. Around here we've had our hands full dealing with stray cats. We took in some, and found homes for others. There's...

Very nice. :thumbright: I think for good measure I would have also told him that I informed the authorities of his little side business. :diablo: If nothing else, it would have had his heart up a few beats every time a police car was nearby. Bad boys, bad boys, what you gonna do, what you...

I don't know about you but perfume makes me as nauseous as gasoline fumes. I feel genuinely sorry for you having to put up with that all day. :cry: