I want some coffee!

When SE Arizona starts getting monsoons, the temps are usually a crap shoot. We have to wait to see what the trend will be. In a good year we'll get both a lot of  monsoon rain plus cooler temps... the temps don't necessarily correlate with the rains. So far this year the monsoons (which started early in late June!) seem to be giving us pretty good rain fall and manageable temps. Yee haw!! T-Storm in New Mexico a little west of Santa Fe Skies RV Park about July 2011. New Mexico is also in the path of the monsoons and has a share of the rain they bring to the American Southwest. That 200 kW solar array (lower left) can't earn its keep with all the cloud cover! We had a 'gully washer' yesterday. As of 22 July that brings the monthly accumulated rainfall to 3.35". That compares to 1.5" as about the minimum in a monsoon season during July. On the high side we had a one-time monsoon season where July hit 4.5"... that was spectacular. And scarey!! During th...

I have no excuse. June is the hottest month in southeast Arizona followed by July, August & September. Nothing has changed to justify me thinking this year is going to be any more miserable than the last. Yet every year I blurt out 'I don't remember it being this hot last year!' But it was. Get over it dude...it's the same as last year! The only reason July thru September are cooler than June is because of monsoons. Monsoons in Arizona are a miniature replica to what folks endure in e.g. India. Monsoon refers to the weather pattern which brings moisture-laden air from the Eastern Pacific across Baja California Sur and southern Arizona, then up the eastern slope of the Rockies in New Mexico, Colorado and the western great plains. Some years have more moisture than others, but the pattern has (so far!) been pretty consistent. The monsoons give us moisture via T-storms. Not in the quantity expected in southeast Asia, but it does follow a similar weather pattern. Cloud...

The last post caused me to plod through old memories about my own personal computers. I had a couple desktops and one tower (a Gateway IIRC), but living on a boat dictated something smaller.  My first sortie into 'portable computers' was an Osborne 1. It was new on the market having been introduced by Adam Osborne in the fall of 1981. I bought mine about Mar 1982 from a dealer who failed to mention that about 10 days later Osborne Computers would declare bankruptcy and be gone from the market. But the price was right and it worked properly. This one isn't mine but it looks identical with it's 5" screen (amber text) which displayed ASCII characters only. "Graphics? I don't need no ^(*&^%$# graphics!" The 'portable' Osborne 1 'compact computer'... all 24 lbs of it! The Osborne had 2 floppy drives but no HDD (hard disk drive). IIRC I booted up with a floppy drive which had the MS-DOS operating system on it. Adam Osborne was a tech wri...

That's what this is supposed to be. Somehow I drift off into a little bit of everything. But coffee roasting is a way of life these days. So if something goes kaput in that endeavor it's a big deal. And that's what happened. In about 2022 my trusty Samsung laptop succumbed to what was probably a virus which affected the display processor. I'd been using it daily for 5 or 6 years. As laptops go it seemed indestructible. Wrong. Again!    Dead laptops. Lots of them! No they're not all mine... a couple more than the pile on the right. I replaced the Samsung with a Lenovo which had an ARM (brand) microprocessor (vs. Intel); that lasted less than 6 months (!). The issue seemed to be construction quality of the Lenovo laptop- it became intermittent and kept rebooting after the screen suddenly went blank for a moment. If I couldn't trust it, it had to go. That led to an HP Probook. That laptop was a real work horse. Sadly work horses get viruses just like a no-name piec...