Today was the hottest day this year, so far: 96 Deg. F / 35 Deg. C and max humidity at 90%. Summer has begun in Durham!

If you have ever traveled or lived in a tropical country, you can appreciate the value of a fridge there – especially in rural areas with no access to the electrical grid. There is nothing quite like getting a cold drink from the only refrigerator within miles on a scorching hot day. However, beyond cold […]

Although Memorial Day is a a bit of a somber holiday, to most Americans the long weekend at the end of May is less about death and patriotism and more about celebrating the beginning of summer; about cookouts, parties, fishing trips and other family fun. For us, last weekend was all bout bonding with our […]

This evening, Laura tried out her new waders in the pond, and as she was poking around the edge of the pond she met the pond’s resident turtle: a 10-inch yellow-belly slider. The poor turtle protested some, but did not seem too worried overall. At her size (10 inches/24cm) she is pretty much as big […]

Yesterday, Jacob and I went to the Durham Country library and he got the current Guinness Book of World Records. So I started wondering what the connection was between the book of records and beer. Wikipedia to the rescue: On 4 May 1951, Sir Hugh Beaver, then the managing director of the Guinness Breweries, went […]

One of the first things you do when you start a farm is to buy a farm truck. We bought the land a few weeks ago and last week we bought a 1999 Ford F250 pickup with a 7.3 liter  Powerstroke Diesel engine that produces 235 horsepower (175 kW) and 500 foot-pounds force (680 N·m) of torque. The odometer […]

Today, Jacob and I tested and received out purple belt in Shito-Ryu Karate-do. It was more than a year ago, since we got our orange belt, so it was definitely time. However, for me it was a bit of a painful affair, because I hurt my right foot a couple of weeks ago – not […]

Today was a great day: we bought the property next to ours! That is a huge milestone towards our dream of owning horses, because that property includes a 2-acre pasture. When we bought our house, we were just excited about having a horse pasture next door. We befriended the two horses who lived there, Stormy […]

Yesterday I saw a hummingbird on the home security camera, so we set up the feeder last night. Sure enough, this morning, as I enjoyed my first cup of coffee, I saw a hummingbird and it went straight for the feeder. Welcome back, little helicopters!

In a recent interview about his TV Show, Dr. Stephen Hawking questioned the wisdom of trying to make contact with alien civilizations. When one of the few bona-fide geniuses of our time weighs in an any debate, it is significant. And I think the debate over whether to send signals into space or just to […]

Google has long ago ceased to be the little search engine that could. The Mountainview Chocolate Factory has turned into a massive data-slurping behemoth with growth aspirations that make me think of Skynet: Last fall, Google released a brief video of a data center it built in 2005. The facility held 45 shipping containers, each […]

Saturday thru Wednesday we were at the beach and besides lounging, eating and drinking beers I also did a fair amount of running. The weather was great – lower 70s, sunny with a pleasant breeze. So since last Sunday, I ran a total of 28.35 miles (45.62 km) in 5 runs – all barefoot of […]

This is not just another story of how a large corporation exploits poverty in Africa to extract the wealth from African soil and make lots of money. Even if you don’t care that much about whether the Touareg people have a place to live and whether they can breathe, you might still want to pay […]

Over at Au Village, Togbui posted his account of the CMAF protest in Washington, DC against the fraudulent “election” in Togo earlier this month. (Yeah – you guessed it … the ruling RPT’s candidate “won” by a landslide.) Togbui writes: We marched from the Togo embassy to the White House singing Togolese independence songs and […]

The answer to life, the universe and everything!

Tomorrow, the Togolese anti-RPT diaspora in the US will demonstrate to protest the ridiculous “election” that confirmed Togo’s president earlier this month.  Apparently a North Carolina representative has arranged for a meeting of representatives of the protesters with President Obama. Not that I expect much of that. Obama has got bigger fish to fry right […]

Endangered Durham has a great post about the Watts and Yuille tobacco warehouses, nowadays known as Brightleaf Square. The post includes this aerial shot of the warehouses (this is just a cropped version). I was looking for some evidence of how old the trestle is. This question keeps coming up when people ask why the […]

Surprise! The Gnassingbes did it again! 40 years in power and counting! The CENI published the “election” results and Faure Gnassingbe, son of  Togos late dictator apparently won by a landslide. To celebrate this victory he had a couple hundred protesters in Lomé teargassed. The military is in the streets of Lomé, making sure no  […]

Today is election day in Togo. The borders are closed, the military patrols the streets and 6000 polling stations are open across the west African nation. Fraud and violence marred the last election in 2005, so several hundred international observers have been deployed across the country. The hope is that this presence of observers can […]

Every year the earth’s rotation slows a bit and so we have to add a second to our time keeping once in a while to keep it in sync with the old rock. Large earthquakes like the devastating tremor last week in Chile, or the Sumatran quake that triggered the massive tsunami 0f 2004 can […]