Sometimes Life Gets In The Way

A local limo company has had disk space problems with their office computer. I did my best to free up space but I had to work around their schedule. They are using it between 6am and 8 or 9pm. Their office pretty small as they just use it for a place to store some items and do dispatching of drivers. That dispatching can be done from almost anywhere with Internet but some of needs to be done from the office. If the calls are taken elsewhere, the dispatcher must currently access the office computer to update information all day. I created a process they could move that data to the cloud, but other events put that on the sidelines.

Their computer had a small SSD (memory chip that acts like a disk) and a large physical disk which is slower than the SSD.  The idea is the SSD is fast and had the operating system on it but that users would put all their data on the physical large hard drive. For some reason that never happened and I’m not sure why Dell did not force that to happen. So the limo company stored all their data on the small drive and never used the large one. We were going to just disable the SSD and move everything to the hard drive, but again time was critical and if anything happens to slow us down, they can’t easily do their dispatching in the morning. The replacement SSD worked fro hours but then the system had issues. It was many years old and the decision was to go to Costco, get a new computer and have me just move their data and programs to it. That took a few hours but they were up and running. I knoe the company that makes the SSD is a good one and their items reliable. When I swapped the old SSD back in, the system still failed. I was not sure if Microsoft had sent down bad patches or what, but the new system solved the problem and caused no downtime.

I am still cutting the weeds on the farm. The lessor is concerned and all property they co-own will be checked this month for fire hazards. I know that some of their land had uncontrolled weeds on them over on Maui and contributed t othe wildfires. Even our electric company on the islands has procedures now where they will cut off power to locations if we have high winds or brushfires. Our situation on Maui was somewhat different from wildfires on the mainland like in California. There a fire will start and there will be winds that fan it. It can spread rapidly there but oftentimes most people know about the fire and may have some time to grab posessions. Here, there was a hurricane passing by, it seems that an electrical line went down after dark and the winds fanned the sparks and caught grass and other items on fire. Since this was at night

I almost have all the parts I need to mount my solar panels, but they are not up yet. Well, that isn’t quite right as I have one kinda, sorta up. I ordered a frame that would allow me to mount 4 panels and was hoping I could modify it for 8. I don’t think it will be strong enough so will continue towards using electrical strut. You have probably seen this stuff before in warehouses and outside buildings. It is a “C” channel with mountiung holes. It is rigid and has different pieces which insert and hold pipes and supports.

I have some 4 by 4’s I’ll lay along the ground and rebar that I can pound in on either side to keep them from moving. That may be a bit industrious because the ground is rocky and difficult to get through. I have a post driver (a round pipe with an opening on one end and handles on either side. You set a pipe or rod inside, lift the ram and drop it to drive the item into the ground further. (Following is another image I stole from the Internet)

I now have to figure a way to get some uprights to hold the panels up. Some people use a pagoda and mount the panels on the roof. Others build A frames or prop the panels against a building. My panels will create extra power if I can get them a few feet off the ground so sunlight can bounce up towards the back. That will be a permanet mount. For now I just want to get the panels conencted to the controller and can fine tume and make permanent later when I decide if the current panel location is the best. I have some trees that need to come down or I can move the panels elsewhere.