Aren Cambre – Page 54 – Aren Cambre's Blog

Amazing office window view

(This entry is dedicated to Pat Gary. Earlier today he whined that I haven’t updated my blog recently enough.)

I’ve worked in the same building for four years. Only recently did I realize an incredible part of the view out my cube window.

Here’s the overall view of the horizon:

The two vertical bars are fake slats in the window to maintain the Collegiate Georgian architecture.

To the left of the right slat is a building with two peaks. Just to the left of that building is Texas Stadium:

This picture is a crop with my camera zoomed in to its full 10X zoom. You can see the stadium’s distinctive roof hole. I figured this out shortly after moving into this building.

Here’s the amazing thing.

Guess what this is?

In the top picture, it’s just to the right of the rectangular building (Bob Hope Theater) left of center of the picture.

That’s downtown Fort Worth, over 30 miles away! Compare that view to Boston Radio’s Ft. Worth skyline picture.

That blew me away. Fort Worth is over 30 miles away!

My coworker looked up the Dallas-Ft. Worth area aerial maps and found that there is a lot of green space in the line of sight between my office and Ft. Worth:

Ft. Worth has 278.7 feet more elevation than Dallas, helping counteract the earth’s curvature.

Some day I’ll bring a higher zoom lens and see what I can get.

Oops, I Did It Again

Got quoted again. (Again, press cancel when the print dialog comes up. People Newspapers’s site is pretty bad about facilitating direct links.)

A/C Fun, Part 3

When I left off on this thread, I had fixed an electrical problem and buttoned up my A/C system, waiting to see if any leaks materialized.

The A/C ran decently on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. In fact, Wednesday morning, the system dumped lots of condensation as I backed into a parking place. That’s a good sign.

Come Thursday, the compressor won’t kick on. Wiggling the clutch wire didn’t help.

After I put the kid to bed, I took a look. The high side service port cap looked off, so I checked it further and found it was broken. The center piece was still in the port:

And notice all the green around the port? That’s the color of leak detection dye!

The plastic piece came out easily with a pocketknife.

I mixed up some soapy water:

…and threw a little on the fitting and got bubbles:

Eureka, I found a leak! The complete lack of visible dye anywhere else suggests this could be it!

The next question is how do I fix this leak? I have a Schrader valve repair kit, but there is some rubber piece over the valve that prevents me from engaging it:

(This is looking straight down the valve.)

Looking two pictures up, you can see a clear hex pattern at the base of the service port. Does the port come apart? I’m going to check with a few people and figure this one out, hopefully soon!

Now here’s what I don’t get. I had enough refrigerant for the system to work acceptably on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Today, the pressure was almost 0 PSI:

How did it lose so much refrigerant so quickly? Was the service port cover actually retarding the refrigerant flow, and it finally broke under pressure, allowing refrigerant to escape more quickly?

Stay tuned. Once I locate vacuum pump oil, I’ll get this completely fixed.

Published and quoted a lot recently

My quotes or my writing has been published a lot recently.

First, I was quoted (a print dialog will pop up; just press cancel) in the Lakewood People newspaper. The article was about a bank that was proposed for a dilapidated property on the edge of my neighborhood.

Second, the Dallas Morning News quoted me on a recent article about my Emerald Isle development web site.

Third, my article about the Emerald Isle condo project’s City Plan Commission defeat is published at dallas.org.

Passionate indifference about companies

Responsible citizens should be passionately indifferent about for-profit companies unless there is something in it for them.

Pro-corporate activism without a quid pro quo:

Disrupts the free market system’s feedback mechanisms by irrationally rewarding or penalizing companies. This can create undeserving winners and losers. A great example is American automakers, which are still around mainly because of consumers who irrationally ignore better alternatives to almost the entire domestic vehicle lineup.
Unethically saps resources from charitable nonprofits, which are the only entities that really deserve uncompensated activism.

I recently directed my activist zeal towards a for-profit company by publicly and forcefully supporting a developer’s for-profit project, and I did it without violating my ethical code.

How do I justify this undeserved activism? Here’s my quid pro quo:

Should the project be built, it will increase property values and desirability of my area.
I get the experience of taking a forceful public position on an issue.
Valuable lessons learned.
I am exposed to leaders and “the way things worked” in ways otherwise impossible.
I develop contacts and meet people I would have otherwise never met.
I was pissed off at reactionary, anti-development zealotry, and this experience was cathartic.

Even though I ended up on the losing team, the experience was worth it.