I’m off from my normal job this week so I can take care of some of the details of getting this well drilled. This morning I have to make sure we have some sort of signage to make the Railroad Commission happy.

They look a bit like real estate For Sale signs, only with details some inspector might read from the nearest road.

Oh, and I have to rent a Portable Toilet. You know what those look like.

First, to celebrate my son’s birthday (see previous post)
an article that he would appreciate. During his high-school years, Mike worked at a computer gaming parlor, but one that had a side business of reading old tapes for oil companies. It seems that the oil companies would store their geologic data on archival tape. Most of it was seismic lines. The tapes survived the test of time for the most part, but the machines that put the data on the tape? Not so much. Mike’s company had those tape players and Mike knows how to get the data off of the tapes and into a usable format.

Well, it turns out that NASA is on the lookout for a working tape player as well. It seems that some of the data beamed back from the Apollo missions was recorded on special tape players and then the tape…

was lost. Well, not lost actually. It was misplaced before it was archived. Thrown in a dumpster perhaps? Nope. Just hidden under the floorboards of a theater.

The tape player needed to play the tapes back is about the size of a refrigerator, and there happens to be one in the Computer Museum in Australia, where the tapes were originally made

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/10/2415393.htm

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When ya gotta go, there’s a place out back

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Sometimes you feel like a nut
Sometimes you don’t

I had January 7th in the pool of “When does Lindsey Lohan decide she wants a penis again?” and I was so wrong. It was November 16th.

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Republican ghost writers must be chomping at the bit to write Sarah Palin’s memoirs after reports started filtering in of the estimated 7 Million Dollars advance on the manuscript. I use the word estimates, because there’s no official word, and this is just reading the entrails from the publishers and booksellers I slice open every other week…

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Graphic novels don’t make the New York Times Bestseller lists, much to the chagrin of comic book publishers and cool paranormal mystery writers.

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Where staying AWAY from the Dr. made this woman lighter.

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Folks around the Houston area simply didn’t get their electric meter read during the time when the hurricane came through and the company was working on getting power restored. Last month’s bills were a generous estimate, but now the meters are read, there’s a huge sticker shock. [Chron.com]

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Am I the only person in America that enjoys watching the American version of LIFE ON MARS more than the original English version?

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Update on Blogging RanchoCali — The well spud date got pushed back by ten days or so because of insurance issues. I hope to have an additional update later in the week.

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Finally, all those comic book based movies. Here’s a list of 75 comic book based movies coming to a theater near you.

You’ll note that T.H.U.N.D.E.R. AGENTS is not one of them. There’s a reason for that. And I won’t tell the tale. yet.

WHERE
29° 46′ 21.20″ North Latitude
95° 49′ 14.18″ West Longitude
Fort Bend County, Texas

WHEN
11:18AM Central Standard Time
November 17, 1985

WHAT
My Son

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MIKE!

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Hit and run post —

Lots of talk about trying to grow local so as to save the evil energy and emitted carbon dioxide otherwise used in shipping food and related products to you — but then someone started putting pencil to paper

Local food production does not always produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the 2005 DEFRA study found that British tomato growers emit 2.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of tomatoes grown compared to 0.6 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of Spanish tomatoes. The difference is British tomatoes are produced in heated greenhouses. Another study found that cold storage of British apples produced more carbon dioxide than shipping New Zealand apples by sea to London. In addition, U.K. dairy farmers use twice as much energy to produce a metric ton of milk solids than do New Zealand farmers. Other researchers have determined that Kenyan cut rose growers emit 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per 12,000 roses compared to the 35 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by their Dutch competitors. Kenyan roses grow in sunny fields whereas Dutch roses grow in heated greenhouses.

Reason.org

For a man who was born too late for the draft and the Vietnam War and so managed to make it to adulthood without serving in the US Armed Forces, I believe I have a lot of respect for American Veterans. So, to that, a Happy Veteran’s Day to our men and women who have put their blood on the line for this country!

I only thought about serving in uniform seriously just once. I had an idea that I wanted to attend the Coast Guard Academy, the smallest of the five service academies, and put off my submission. I had finished a really tough Marine Sciences course in my high school, and so inspired, wanted to do something with my life that had to do with the ocean. When you ace a tough course, you do kind of wonder why you did so well, and back then, I was pumped up about the ocean.

The Navy seemed a bit out of reach, because I didn’t want to be on some huge ship that was always in deep water, away from much of what made the ocean exciting. The interaction with the shore and the sea life nearby is what inspires most people about the sea, and the Coast Guard seemed a much more natural fit. Also, I heard that the qualifications for getting into the Coast Guard Academy were a bit easier than the other service academies, so there’s that…

Alas, my submission for attendance was rejected by the CGA admissions staff. And so rebuffed, I never really thought about serving in uniform again. I know that, sure, I could just as easily go down to some recruiting office and sign up, but I wanted that nice college education that came with attending a service academy. Plus, I was graduating a year early and perhaps being a 17 year old counted against me… Well, let’s just pretend that’s true, okay?

I did some research, and while Texas A&M had a really cool marine sciences school on Galveston Island, I discovered that a professor that was even more respected was teaching and heading up the Marine Sciences program at another university in Texas, Lamar. I visited, found out that learning from him would be a great step for my in my academic career, and so decided to attend Lamar instead of A&M. I was still going to be a Marine Scientist!

Of course, this professor didn’t teach any of the freshman/sophomore classes. I would have to complete two years of my other classes for the prerequisites in order to even gain from his wisdom…

And in that time, that professor took a position at Texas A&M’s Marine Science program.

I had to decide whether to try to follow him or not, and actually put in a request for transfer to Texas A&M, but events occurred that encouraged me to stay in Beaumont and Lamar. I changed my major from Marine Sciences to Geology, and ….

often look back at the paths not taken.

Drill Here, Drill Now!

If you’ve been wondering what I’ve been up to since leaving The Professor to blog in this space, it’s doing a bit of geology. Yep, finding oil. That’s what that flag up there represents. A drilling location for the Rancho Cali #1 well, located just west of Houston. The land is being cleared as you can see and the well should begin drilling early next week. The drilling won’t take long, as this is a shallow well. I expect the drillers will be done a week from now.

I hope to blog a few things about the well in the next few days. Alas, most of it will be boring, and for that I apologize in advance. Privacy concerns may be invoked which will silence some of what I say, reducing it to pretty pictures. Or pretty boring pictures.

The rig was visible from the state park we stayed at in Balmorhea, Texas. The mountains in the background are the Davis Mountains, mostly volcanic in origin. The Apache Mountains over the horizon by a dozen more miles, is reportedly the surface expression of the limestone rock I imagine this rig is targeting with its drill bit.