We just got back from a week long vacation in Ohio with my parents. We had a really nice time with the family, but it never takes long to remember why I moved to Virginia…. winter! Check out the truck, can you say salt? It was amazing to see all of the cars and trucks from Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, coated in white. No wonder you see so many rusted out old cars and trucks! What a difference a little soap and water makes! The truck looks pretty good for being nine years old, it only has about 80 thousand miles on it. Now that gas is back to a reasonable price, we can actually afford to drive it again!
Fortunately, we only had one day of snow, but it was quite cold at the end of the week. I guess being so close to Lake Erie makes the air much damper, which makes it feel a lot colder. We did not even feel like going out side, the cold air felt like it cut right through you. There was a 30 degree temperature change, from the time we left to the time we arrived at home. Gas was also about 25 cents cheaper a gallon in Virginia too! Nice to be back home!
My parents came for a visit this Thanksgiving and I was able to spend some time in the shop with my dad. I installed a cyclone dust collector last Spring, and realized that this thing really sucked… I installed the dust collector on the outside of my shop, and when it runs, it basically creates a vacuum inside my shop. The amount of air being removed from room is amazing, you can really notice it when you try to shut the door. This was not a big deal during the summer months (other than it might not have been running at peak efficiency), but now that it is cold outside, it was sucking all of my heat out with the dust! We came up with this idea to box in the dust collector filter, and push the clean (warm) air back into my shop. We built a 66″x 24×24 frame out of split 2x4s and covered it with drywall. I still want to make a frame around the front panel, so I can take it off easier. I need to (should) clean the filter out every so often, to keep the suction at a maximum level. We then cut a 14×14 inch hole in the back of the box, which when went through to my shop. Inside the shop, we covered the hole with a furnace return grill; it looks pretty cool. We did not make any real dust after putting it together, but the initial tests seems promising. The cyclone sounds a little different when it running, but not that much louder. It really equalized the pressure in the room, as the doors are much easier to close now. Hopefully, the motor is not working as hard and actually pulling more air through the duct work.
I’m no gamer, but when you have have two boys (13 and 11), you can avoid it! We purchased an XBox 360 last year for Christmas… can you say “excited” kids? Anyway, that XBox lasted about two (2) weeks and we were introduced the the “Red Ring of Death”… Sounds like a really cool video game, right? Unfortunately, it means your XBox is toast! We returned it and decided to buy another one from Best Buy, only because they offered an extended warranty. Normally, we do not buy the warranty, but if you do a Google search on XBox reliablity, and you will see thousands of pages of people with issues…. I hoped it would be money well spent, at least it would make it easier on the kids.
Sometime back, using the Spring Framework and jUnit 4.x was not very elegant. Spring only supported dependency injection by sub-classing their AbstractDependencyInjectionSpringContextTests class. The coolest thing about jUnit 4.x was the implementation of annotations and the elimination of the requirement to extend the jUnit TestCase class. Obviously, this was considered an issue by many people, as several projects created their own solutions for jUnit 4.x integration. One such implemenation was 
This was not one of my more pleasant Linux experiences. The upgrade seemed to take more than it gave! Anyway, my issues have finally settled down and everything is almost working. (I’m starting to miss downloading my daily bug fixes!) I believe the only real issue I have is SAMBA; I cannot access my NAS device anymore (or any windows boxes for that matter). That is kind of a drag when you need to share files!
