500th Post!

A Milestone!

I started this blog in May of 2009, not really sure where it would end up.  I was doing a couple of posts a week, and was pretty amazed when I passed 500 page views in October of that year.  In January of 2010 I bumped it up and started trying to hit five or six posts a week.  Since then, I've had thousands of readers from all over the world, got to know many of you through your comments, emails and Facebook, and gotten some sponsors that help keep this going.  I'm really grateful and thankful for all of you who take time out of your day to read what I have to say.  I'm really looking forward to the next 500 posts and hope that all of you (and many more) will stick around for the ride.


EMP/CME

If you are one of our fans on Facebook, you might have seen the news article that I linked to on Thursday about an X-class coronal mass ejection that was due to hit Earth early Saturday morning with possible effects throughout the day.

Saturday midday, we were in the kitchen whipping up some homemade salsa when the GFI on the outlet that we were using the food processor on tripped.  The processor wasn't going at the time.  A few minutes later, we tried to turn on the microwave for something and that GFI had also tripped.  We've never had any problem with those outlets before, and the fact that nothing was actually going when they tripped, kind of makes me think that it may have had something to do with the CME.

On the subject of defending against EMP/CME...

We were watching Cool Tools this morning on the DIY channel.  They were at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and took a look at the ioSafe.  This thing is a "disaster proof" external hard drive for backing up your computer on a regular basis.  They have several different models that are of various sizes that are fire and water proof such as you might need to protect your backup during a house fire or flood.  The one they showed was their portable model and to demonstrate its resilience, they had a guy in a Faraday cage suit, with a Tesla coil shooting off lightning bolts directly into the portable ioSafe.  They then tested it and saw that it had no damage nor loss of data.  The ioSafe looks like a "must have" if you are truly concerned about catastrophic loss from an EMP or CME.


Project BOV Update

Friday evening we had the old Jeep at the local hot rod cruise-in when my brother rolled up on his 1973 shovel head Harley.  I told him that I had gotten all of the lights working except my brake lights.  He pulled the wires off of my brake light switch and we found that they would activate the lights, so they weren't the trouble.  He took off my master cylinder cover and we found that the rear section had very little brake fluid in it.  I walked over to Target and got a couple of bottles.  We topped off both sections of the reservoir, but there was no real change.  By the time we got home that evening, the brakes had all kinds of feeling to them, and the brake lights were working.  The only problem now is that the brakes grab so hard that it pulls sharply to the right when I apply them.  That's how old rigs go... get one thing working, and something else pops up.  But when all is said and done, my 72 Jeep Commando will be EMP-proof with decent cargo capacity and go-anywhere capabilities.