JLH Design Blog

In my daily travels I often come across people that are clueless and really have no idea what they are talking about. I also see budgeting and engineering choices which are way off the mark. In a not so subtle way I like to offer my opinion in picture form in emails, to let them know that they are not even in the ball park.

Another image that needs to be sent often is to those people that insist on typing with their caps lock on.

No matter what happens this Sunday. One fact remains, and that is that the Bears Still Suck. Celebrate the bear suckiness with some new Bears Suck Gear.

Link expired 2/6/07

Primatene Mist is not available anymore on most store shelves. The good ones have a notice that there has been a problem in manufacturing, which can be also viewed online.

The note linked to above doesn’t mention a time frame but in speaking with a few pharmacists they said it would be about a few months. This seemed odd to me, as my years in product distribution has taught me one thing, anything is possible if you throw enough money at the problem. The Bunker Buster was one example I could think of.

Further investigation into the Primatene Mist situation also revealed that all generic versions are also unavailable, even though they clearly state on their labels that they are not manufactured by the same company, Wyeth Consumer Healthcare. I also stumbled upon this little FDA Considering ban of Primatene Mist news story

Conspiracy Theories

1) We can conclude that the generic versions offered by Walgreen’s and Walmart are in fact manufactured by the same company, or at least the main key component of them are, as a disruption in the supply chain for Wyeth Consumer Healthcare clearly has affected their supply as well.

2) In light of the possible FDS ban on Primatene Mist based solely on the fact that it is not yet ruled an essential drug, what is a better way to prove the drugs worth by cutting it off from the estimated 700,000 users for a while. The outcry and people left wheezing will be a testament to the usefulness of the drug.

Unfortunately there are no over the counter solutions comparable to Primatene Mist. The users of the drug will be forced to seek medical treatment and prescription drugs, many of which cannot afford it.

At Amazon

There are several online resources still available for the product if your local seller is out, one is oddly enough Amazon, the book selling site.

On Ebay

Another option is to buy un-opened and sealed containers of Primatene Mist from consumers on ebay.

I’ve been playing around with a wordpress multi-user installation on two domains. It’s not nearly as user friendly as regular wordpress. Seems like every plugin and theme I install needs extensive work to make it function, but it’s coming along.

Eventually the goal is to give people a place to start their free wordpress blog and when they are ready to move to their own hosting enviroment we can do that for them, including 301 redirects from the old domain to the new domain.

Odie, has been busy working on some artwork for the project.

If you read the resume you know, I know a thing or two about boilers. I started a new group on google groups, follow the above link to see it. The following is a sampling of the type of conversation I hope to get into, its a reply I wrote to a poster about surface blowdown.

You will need to know the pressure of the steam drum to do any
calculations. The degree of superheat isn’t relevant as that energy is
added to the steam.

When you refer to blowdown I assume you mean surface or continuous
blowdown. Bottom blowdown is usually too dirty and intermittent to
consider heat recovery from it. Usually we use the energy from the
surface blowdown and recover it in two different places, as low
pressure flash steam, and with a heat exchanger to preheat the boiler
make-up water.

I’ll run through some of the calculations, but you will need to know
the operating pressure of the boiler, the low pressure equalizing line,
and temperature of make-up water to complete the Calcs yourself.

First off, lets discuss the process. You say that you have a 1%
blowdown rate. For those who don’t fully understand I’ll
elaborate. Let’s say the boiler is running at 100,000 lbs/hr of
steam production. So we are bringing in boiler feedwater with a
certain amount of dissolved solids in it and heating it to boiling temp
and letting the water vapor leave as pressurized steam. As the steam
evaporates it leaves behind the dissolved solids in the water. If we
let it run like this the concentration of solids in the boiler water
would raise higher and higher. Too high of solids concentration leads
to problems such as priming etc. To control the solids left behind, we
drain off some of the boiler water continuously which is replaced with
feedwater with a lower concentration of solids. So using the example
of 100,000 lbs/hr capacity we’ll actually have a feedwater flow rate
of 101,000 lbs/hr with a blowdown rate of 1000 lbs/hr.

The boiler water is at operating pressure and mostly at saturated steam
temperature, so let’s assume for discussion you are running at 250
psig. Referring to a steam table at 250 psig the temperature is 406 F
and the sensible heat in Btu/lb is 382. At 1000 lbs/hr that’s
382,000 btu/hr going down the drain which is probably worth recovering.

Generally there are two components of heat recovery. The first is
flash steam recovery. In our example we are going to drain the water
at 250 psig and saturated temp. This water will go through valves and
to a lower pressure, where it can’t exist as water at this
temperature and pressure, some will flash off as stem. So we take
advantage of this and design the system around it. Generally we take
the blowdown to a flash separator, which is nothing more than a
pressure vessel that brings the water in the side tangentially to the
walls. The water swirls around the outside of the tank, flash steam
rises out the vent on top, and water goes out the drain. (For a
picture visit http://www.pennseparator.com/pbs12.htm) The first
component of our heat recovery is generally to connect this vent to a
low pressure steam usage, such the preheat steam supplied to the
boilers deareator.

Let’s further assume for this example that your dearator is operating
at 10 psig, and the flash steam from our blowdown will go to this.

>From the steam charts steam at 10 psig has a sensible heat of 207

btu/lb, latent of 953 btu/lb at 239 F. So our water is going to go
from having a sensible heat of 382 btu/lb to 207 btu/lb, the difference
is 175 btu/lb. This times the flow of 1000 lbs/hr means we have
175,000 btu/hr of energy released as flash steam. From the steam chart
above 175,000/953=183 lbs/hr of flash steam at 10 psig is produced.
Another calculation is to take the difference of 175 divided by the
latent heat at the equalizing pressure 175/953=0.183 which means we are
producing 18.3% flash steam.

Now we still have the water left over, 1000-183 = 817 lbs/hr of water
at 239 f is available. We’ll then take this water through a heat
exchanger. On one side of the heat exchanger is the cold fresh make-up
water for the boiler system, let’s assume this is at 60 F, we’ll
also assume further that we selected this heat exchanger with an
approach of 20 F, so our blowdown water will be cooled to 80 F before
going to the drain, the energy recovered is then 817 lbs/hr X 1.0
Btu/lb-F X (239-80)F = 129,903 btu/hr.

So our total energy recovered is 175,000 + 129,903 = 304,903 btu/hr.
Our original blowdown had 382,000 btu/hr of energy, so we are
recovering nearly 80% of the blowdown energy available. Selecting the
heat exchanger with a tighter approach will increase the amount of
energy recovered, but maybe be cost prohibitive depending on the size
of the unit.

There are factory built systems above, I’ve personally used the ones
by Penn Separator the most, and have a lot of confidence in their
abilities. Visit http://www.pennseparator.com/home.htm for more
information.

I hope that helps, if you have any more questions, or need to get a
source to size and price them let me know (send an email to the email
address in the profile). John.

I’ve had the domain linked above for a little while and haven’t done anything with it yet. I uploaded some store software to test some asp scripting changes and that’s about it.

I could talk about boilers for days, weeks, or months. So should I:

1) Blog
2) Sell Products
3) Build a directory
4) Do all three?

I’ve often wanted to import boilers from Europe as I know their technology is far superior right now, maybe this would be a good venue for such a thing.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

More information on Jennifer Love Hewitt

Huh? You say. Of course I’m not Jennifer Love Hewitt nor do I have anything to do with her, or even thought of her until a few days ago.

While perusing through the server stats I noticed an inordinate amount of traffic coming my way for the search term “JLH”. So I checked it out myself. Apparently Miss Jennifer is referred to by her fans as JLH often, actually searching for JLH brings up 1 - 10 of about 903,000 for JLH on Google. My site is the 7th on that list.

I wonder if there’s any adsense clicks for JLH out there? Or maybe I should set up sort of web store for her junk? Or maybe an eBay affiliate link?

So if you came here looking for Jennifer Love Hewitt, I don’t have much to offer other than this picture I found on google image search. Enjoy.

Well…He went and mowed around my landscaping detail. So I promptly went and mowed right up to the correct property line. This will start getting real funny if he mows again tonight when he gets home from work.

The real big news is that I’ve got a graphic to go with the saga, courtesy of Odie.

So I promised I would post some pictures.

Here’s one of me, Ben, and Tarl, at some bar…

And another one with Tarl’s girlfriend, Tiff, giving me a kiss. She’s the one who supplied the camera as well. ..

The older gentleman that lived next door to me moved to a nursing home last winter and sold his house. I haven’t met the couple that moved in yet, but have seen them around. They’re middle age-ish if they plan to live to 110 years old. I must admit I didn’t give them much of a chance right of the bat because the first thing they did was build a kennel for their large dog in the back yard. This poor thing is relegated to living its days out in 12 X 20 foot chain link cage.

So anyway, back to the story at hand. I live in nice neighborhood that was built in the 60’s and early 70’s. The streets aren’t straight and kind of meander around the base of the hill that the neighborhood occupies. The lots aren’t all perfectly flat or even square for that matter, mine for example is on the hill. From the street it looks like a normal 1 story ranch, but in the back yard it opens up to a 2-story walk out basement with a tons of privacy due to the old growth trees. With all of that being said, the lot lines are clearly delineated by fencing, hedges, utility poles, and off course the official demarcations.

Apparently my new neighbor isn’t quite satisfied with his lot size as he has taken to annexing some of my property through proxy by mowing more and more of my lawn. I’ve seen this before back at my parents house with a strange neighbor so I thought I’d nip it right in the bud this spring. I walked up, introduced myself, yada yada, then as I excused myself casually mentioned that if he insists on mowing my yard to have the courtesy of mowing the entire yard. This lead to a discussion, he didn’t really know the lot lines, etc, we walked around, I showed him the big telephone pole with the lead lot numbers situated right at 4 corners where all the lots came together. We then discussed how the lot line probably radiated to the streets at right angles from that point. So the spring went by….

Apparently he has rethought his position on the matter, and has again began cutting my yard. He still only goes to where the pole denotes the lot separation but now goes out to the street at an angle. I think the real problem is that my house sits back on the lot farther from the lot line than his. So when mowed properly it looks like I have more land as their is more grass next to my house than his. So began our passive aggressive battle.

I started noticing that he would make a point to mow just the stripe between our lots (but in reality on my side) then go and finish the rest of his yard, maybe go in and have drink and finish the spot by my house several hours later. So then I started timing my lawn mowing to coincide with his, as soon as I hear their mower stop, I’m out there with mine, set about 1/2″ shorter to clearly mark out my territory. So he stepped up his mowing habits. We keep this up and we’ll both be mowing daily.

So my son was up to the house for the weekend. We like to work in the yard when we can, so I thought of a project. I’ve got a landscaped area out in the front yard, kind of an island. It’s got some shrubs, rock piles, wood mulch the usual stuff. We extended the border about 3 feet so that its within 1 lawn mower width of the lot line.

Today was his first mowing since this bold move on my part, we’ll have to see how this escalates!

I’ve been asked about my domain and blog name. So let’s try to tackle that.

The JLH part is no large mystery, those are my initials.

The design part is a bit more complicated. I chose that based on its the defining word for everything I have ever done, succeeded, failed, or attempted in my life. I suppose there’s also an existensial meaning behind it as well. From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential, Existentialism is a philosophical movement that views the individual, the self, the individual’s experience, and the uniqueness therein as the basis for understanding the nature of human existence. The philosophy generally reflects a belief in freedom and accepts the consequences of individual actions, while acknowledging the responsibility attendant to the making of choices. It’s easy to view the scientific observances of cause and effect and believe you understand the world, but if within those details you discover the design you have truly understood the meaning.

For me design is a process, a unique one, that not all people are capable of. There is the artistic design which combines creativity with personal expression, I have little talent in this field. There is also layout design which has more to do with spatial relationships as seen in such fields as graphics design, architecture, interior design, landscaping, etc. I’m impressed with people that can do such things, but again I have no interest in this.

I must say that I have done work as a designer in the HVAC industry and in process design, mainly with heat transfer and controls.

For me the design process is used daily in work and lifelong in living. The design starts with the final product, or at least the initial notion of it. This may be a project goal, a sales goal, a marketing plan, a piece of furniture, or a business model. You have to know what you want to achieve until before you can design a way to attain those goals. I find that not having clearly defined end goal is usually the failure of most designs. Most good designers end up in the end with what they wanted from the beginning, the great designers have clearly laid out their goals before it even began. That’s the easy part.

The fun part is figuring out how you are going to attain those goals. This is the education experience, the time of discovery. When you take stock of your current assets and abilities and figure out what you don’t have and how you can get it. This is generally a time of a lot of reading, interviews, writing, and trial and error. For example when I decided I wanted to design furniture, this is the couple of years I took learning the tools of the trade, working with material, understanding the methods. When I wanted to start an online business I already knew all that there was to know with the HVAC market in which we went into, however I didn’t know a thing about HTML, shopping carts, web design, SEO, etc. I spent 6 months of research before the first page was published. Three months later we had 18,000 pages in the google index and were doing $50,000 a month in business. When an idea came up at work for a better lead/lag control system, the control theory was the easy part, for me I had to learn how to program a PLC.

The hard part is actually doing the work. The good thing is that the hard part is also usually the shortest duration of the process. If you start with well thought out design and clear directions the work can usually be delegated, any my role becomes more supervisorily in nature.

Within those brief descriptions you can see my grand plan. For me to succeed at anything I need to know it inside and out. How the sausage is made. I can’t tell a drafter how to lay out a drawing without first knowing how the drafting system works, its limitation, its possibilities. I cannot sell a product to someone without knowing how it works, how its made, or how the competition makes theirs. I need to know how its used, the processes it benefits, the applications its effective or ineffective.

I’ve got 12 domains online at the time of this writing but most are commercial in nature, this is personal. The internet is great opportunity that still exists for designers of all types. Designing a website requires a little technical knowledge, a lot of intuition, but most importantly a unique understanding on a topic.

more later.

Made a great business contact last night. I’ve landed the rights to build a web site for a well established local business, its in a great sector that is kind of disorganized but has a tonnnnnn of traffic so I think I’ll be able to make it very profitable.

M, as she signs off has her email is all set up at the new location linked to above. It’s quite an interesting read, full of energy and spunk. Makes me think I should start writing more here…but then I’d need some time to do that.

What I learned from the whole experience is that 1) Blogger is a very buggy system, much like copy machines only breaks down when you need it the most and 2) that using an Apache server is much easier than IIS as I set up a 301 on her site in about 10 seconds, nothing to it.

What I need to figure out is how to do a proper 301 on a blogspot domain, or in the least how to set up the meta refresh to at least send you to the right page on the new domain.

Any ideas out there in blogville?

Oh well, its Friday afternoon, and I think I’m going to bug out of here and head down to the river to my favorite watering hole, Pettibone Boat Club.