I keep getting asked when we're going to post some video of our dancing. Well, the time has come. Kinda.

Incidentally, this particular lesson involved fifteen different steps plus variations. Feel free to watch again and try to count them.

The debate about the merits and hazards of hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells will likely never subside, as its opponents argue that the process causes everything from fiery faucets to endless earthquakes, and its proponents claim you can drink frac fluid without suffering ill effects other than an unnatural affinity for the Houston Texans. 

But at least one argument against the process is gaining validity, and that's the undeniable fact that fracing takes a heckuva lot of water, and water is a precious commodity that's growing painfully scarce in many parts of the country. The typical frac job uses tens of thousands of gallons of fresh water (and can require more than a million gallons), and much of that is rendered non potable by the process.

Perhaps it's time for oil and gas companies to take a serious look at using liquified petroleum gas (LPG) as a replacement for water. LPG is generally a mixture of propane and butane. I ran across this article on the Unconventional Oil & Gas Center website that describes the process and a Canadian company, GasFrac Energy Services, Inc, that specializes in LPG frac technology.

Once you get past the psychological impact of thinking about pumping a highly flammable mixture under unimaginable pressures into the ground (GasFrac contends that the process is actually quite safe, although they probably make that claim from deep inside a bunker in an undisclosed location), the benefits are obvious. You're using a hydrocarbon to entice other hydrocarbons to flee their rocky bonds while eliminating not only the need for copious amounts of water, but also for CO2 which is commonly used to "energize" the frac fluid. The frac fluid becomes a part of your revenue stream as it's produced with the reservoir oil and gas, rather than being an expensive disposal problem.

Some companies will be better positioned than others to take advantage of this technology. For example, those with gas plants in the area of the drilling operations could, in theory, produce the LPG used for fracing, and then reprocess the produced liquids stream.

As recently as a couple of years ago, the proposition of pumping LPG into the ground as frac fluid was laughable, from a cost perspective. That perspective has to be changing as natural gas prices continue to tank, and the reality of dwindling water supplies sets in. Water may still be cheaper, but it's also more valuable. 

Earlier this week our Denver IT group was troubleshooting some network issues that were slowing down our work. In order to diagnose the issue, they needed to know which ports some of our computers were connected to.

The problem is that in certain offices, the furniture has been conveniently placed in front of the wall ports, and that furniture weighs approximately the same as the USS Nimitz. In other words, it's not moving. This presents quite a challenge in discerning the ports' identities, which are a combination of letters and numbers that correspond to their switch connections in our server room.

My challenge therefore was to figure out a way to identify a specific port which was obscured by a desk that had about 3" of clearance from the wall. So here's what I did.

I went home at lunch and found my little extension mirror, the one that looks like a dentist's mirror on the end of a radio antenna (for those old enough to remember telescoping car radio antennae). When fully extended, I could contort myself enough to get the mirror positioned in front of the wall port and read the labeling. Sort of. The real problem is that my bifocals aren't synched up with the mirror. Plus there's that whole "mirror image" thing that hurts my brain trying to interpret what I'm barely seeing. Then there was the complicating factor of the darkness behind the desk. Gee, if there was only some way to light the scene, capture an image, and then manipulate it so that I could confirm that I was reading the wall plate accurately.

I'm nothing if not committed - or at least a candidate for being committed. I held the telescoping mirror in my right hand, arm stretched full length and angled just so. I held a small LED flashlight between my teeth, and my iPhone set to camera mode in my left hand. It took some doing, but I finally got the mirror, flashlight, and camera all angled properly, and snapped a picture just before my entire body cramped.

Here's what I had on my phone following that contortion:

This is pretty close to the actual size of the photo as viewed on my phone's screen. You can make out my hand at the lower right, and the mirror is on the left side, near the middle of the picture. Obviously, it wasn't helpful at this size.

So I emailed the photo to myself, and opened it in Photoshop. The view was a little better after cropping:

You can begin to make out the port label, right? Would you stake your life (or your network) on a correct interpretation at this point? Me neither.

A little more massaging was called for. First, I flipped the whole image horizontally, eliminating the mirror image issue. Then I sharpened the image and tweaked the contrast a bit, giving this still-ot-great-but-definitely-usable picture:

Port P2-26. As far as I know, after all that trouble they still didn't figure out what was slowing down the network. But at least I can now add "contortionist" to my résumé.

I do know the characters and the storyline...but you don't, unless you were there. Feel free to make up something.

We were about halfway into our ride yesterday when we pulled up to an intersection and hit the brakes to yield the right of way to an oncoming car. The brake gave way and I thought a cable had snapped.

Fortunately, this is the control for the rear brake, and since our bike has a second rear brake which Debbie controls, we still had plenty of stopping power. But we'll certainly need to get a replacement.

I'm now working on a version powered by AAA batteries. I figure it will take only about 600 or so to cook something, so stay tuned!

The "weather event" was an interesting study in contrasts. The city of Lubbock sent snow removal equipment to Midland to help clear roadways, and Midland International Airport was closed for the day by noon. On the other hand, the public schools weren't canceled in either Midland or Odessa (although all the private schools let out early). Many businesses let their employees leave early (ours didn't), but the roads were not dangerous (except for the presence of those who've never mastered the art of self-control).

The one thing we can all agree on is that this will provide some desperately needed moisture, probably the equivalent of an inch or so of rain, and it will soak into the soil. Good, good stuff for a parched land.

Photos? Of course; I thought you'd never ask.

This is the obligatory view of the snow-enhanced pond. The ducks were not amused.

Also not amused was our palm tree.

An interesting predicament: snow-filled traffic lights.


This is a clumsy 360° panorama taken from the hill just north of our neighborhood. Click for a bigger view. There's software that will stitch these pictures together much better than I did by hand, but I was too lazy to look for it. Oh, by the way, the big photo is 3,300 pixels wide.

I've spent the past four or five months slogging through the e-book series - the equivalent of more than 4,000 hardback pages - finishing up A Dance With Dragons last night. I must say that if the true test of a novelist's skill is to make the reader so emotionally involved with the characters and plots that he or she gets angry with the writer when things don't turn out "right," then Martin must be deemed a true master of the genre.

A Dance With Dragons has one of the worst endings - meaning "it's not the way the book should end if there's any justice in the world" - I've ever encountered. Not only did it end abruptly, as if Martin grew suddenly weary of wordsmithing, but it also [seemingly] ended the lives of some of the book's primary characters, although in a fantasy novel, much is not what it seems. But with possibly years to go before we find out what happened, or happens next, this is very uncomfortable for the reader.

Of course, IANAN (I Am Not A Novelist), and so I can't really get inside Martin's head and know his motivations or strategies. I would love to ask him a few questions, such as...

I hesitate to recommend this series to you if you've not already gotten hooked. Martin's maddening habit of making you invest deeply and emotionally in characters and then killing them off is, well, maddening. On the other hand, you'll not find a richer alternate universe anywhere in literature.

I'm sure you're no more surprised than I was when we couldn't get the 3D DVD to work in our setup last night. It was a comedy of errors, although we needed a laugh track because I certainly wasn't giggling.

First, I couldn't find our 3D glasses. They weren't where they were supposed to be, where I put them intentionally so they'd be easy to find. Debbie finally discovered them laying on top of the DVD player. Who stores their 3D glasses on top of their DVD player. (Ed. You, apparently. Me. Shut up.)

We fired up the DVD player, A/V receiver, and TV, and the picture opened to a 55" panoramic view of...a bunch of text in four languages telling us that in order to view this movie in 3D we needed "a 3D capable Blu-ray DVD player (check), a 3D capable HD TV (check), and a 3D capable A/V receiver (che...uh, say what?).

That receiver thing caught me off-guard; I had never considered that an HDMI-equipped A/V receiver might not be capable of handling a 3D data stream. Given that our Onkyo receiver is almost four years old, making it an octogenarian in consumer electronics years, I needed to check its specs to see what they said about 3D.

And, of course, we couldn't find the owner's manual. Of course.

I finally just downloaded the manual in PDF form from the Onkyo website and did a search for 3D. Nada. Looked at the technical specs, and learned that the version of HDMI used by the receiver is 1.3. The most current version of HDMI is 1.4. Is that a problem?

Another series of searches to find out the answer to that question led to a slew of websites and message boards on the topic, all of which read like, well, stereo instructions.

I now know more about HDMI than I ever wanted to...and I still don't know the absolute answer. HDMI 1.4 differs primarily from 1.3 in that it supports an Ethernet connection between two HDMI devices, and (AFAIK) Ethernet is not required for 3D playback. HDMI 1.4 cables are compatible with HDMI 1.3 devices, but those devices may not (will not?) be able to take advantage of whatever additional capabilities are built into the 1.4 specifications. But, still, it appears that 1.3 should be able to handle 3D.

Except for this caveat, from the Disney Blu-ray 3D FAQ (which, btw, was the most helpful resource I found in terms of being understandable by non-rocket scientists or those older than 13): In most cases, your existing HDMI high-speed cables should be able to support Blu-ray 3D, though cables over 3 feet in length may have problems.

This could be our problem, since I've run a 12' in-wall HDMI cable from the receiver to the TV. But, who knows? Should I install a new 1.4 HDMI cable, hoping that does the trick? Does our old-ish A/V receiver make 3D viewing a non-starter regardless? (If you're thinking "firmware upgrade," I applaud your geekishness, but the 1.3-to-1.4 upgrade path requires a hardware boost, too.)

There is a workaround. I can run a 1.4 cable directly from the DVD player to the TV, bypassing the receiver. But to maintain 7.1 surround sound, I'll need to run a separate optical cable from the player to the receiver (and even then, we lose the 3D surround sound that built into some movies). But the whole point of having an integrated A/V setup is to avoid having to run messy ad hoc cables. And, of course, the HDMI ports on our TV are on the opposite side from the other components. (Ed. That went without saying, didn't it? Me. Shut up.)

In summary, we ended up watching the regular 2D Blu-ray version of Captain America, and didn't miss what we didn't know about. But I have to say that any presumably consumer-level technology that's this arcane and complicated just isn't ready for prime-time. It's ridiculous to have to re-wire your system just to watch a movie.

Now, whether it's a good enough excuse to buy a fancy new A/V receiver...well, that is a legitimate question.

The 3D thing was not a selling point for us; there's simply no option to leave it out, if you want the same overall picture quality and other features. We have yet to even try out the glasses, other than to put them on and look around the room to see if they turned an actual three-dimensional environment into a 4D one. (Sadly, they didn't.)

That's going to change, however, as we broke down yesterday and bought a 3D movie on DVD at Best Buy. It's Captain America, which we haven't seen, and which got some very good reviews from people whose opinions I respect. The darn thing cost $35, which is ridiculous, but still not much less than seeing it on an actual movie theater screen by the time you add in the required peripheral purchases.

And not only do you get a Blu-Ray 3D version, you also get the plain vanilla Blu-Ray version, as well as an old-and-busted non-Blu-Ray version, and also a digital version. So, theoretically, you could watch this movie in four different formats in four separate rooms at the same time. Does that count as 4D? (Sadly, it doesn't.)

I hope I'm not setting myself up for a big disappointment, but I'm prepared to be blown away by the awesomeness of 3D in my very own living room. I'll try to file a report on these pages, assuming I'm not trapped in an alternate universe.