Today on my way to school I missed the early train and had to wait a whole 15 minutes for the next one. I knew I was late getting there so I ran from the car when I saw two trains at the station, but half way there I saw my 8:04 train pulling away.  The 8:19 train is much busier and as we stopped at Campbell station and the number of people on the train doubled, the train operator yelled out “lets get this party started”.  I take the 8:04 train usually because that gives me enough time to miss a train, like I did today, and not be late for class.

Its official, we’ve set a date and time for DevHouse 15. It will be located at my house in Los Gatos on February 3rd from 1pm to ~2am. So pack up that laptop, bring some snacks or drinks to share, and your projects to work on and tell your hacker friends to come! We have room for 100+ attendees and hope to fill up the house.

More information can be found at http://shdh.org

Today I decided to figure out how snow machines work, you know, the kind that the ski resorts use to make snow when its cold but not snowing. I found this cool site, http://www.snowathome.com/ which has several different plans for making snow machines of different kinds. I chose this one because it was the only one that didn’t require a pressure washer, only an air compressor. On the down side it doesn’t have the highest output but we’ll see how it works, that is of course if we get another cold enough night. I’ve setup the air compressor in the sound room so I can run it at ~4am without disturbing anybody while I make my snow.

I found most of the parts at The Home Depot tonight with Matt Jeff and Jeff. It cost me ~$34 including a new garden hose and seems to spray the water in a fine mist that will hopefully make nice snow if it gets cold enough outside. The only issue with this method for making snow, at least with the way its currently built, is the possibility that water will push back into the air hose and into the air compressor. This would destroy the air compressor and would most likely cause other problems since the air compressor is practically inside. The weather report says it wont be cold enough tonight so all I can do now is hope it stays cold for a while. You can see my pictures of this build on flickr

This week has been very cool. So cold in fact that the driveway at my house froze over and I am now unable to park my car in the garage (down the hill) for fear of not being able to drive up the hill when I need to be somewhere. Yesterday the ice on the driveway didnt melt because the house blocks the sun from the driveway all day. This picture was taken at about 1pm and only some of the ice had melted.

I remember as a child during a big freeze year we would run the hose all night to create an ice hill to sled down in the morning. I think I’ll try it again tonight and see what happens in the morning. There are sill a few more days of sub-freezing temperatures at night on the forecast and I hope to bring back some memories. Now if it would just snow so I can take some friggin pictures!