The forum is online!

Still hidden though. I gave out the address to about a dozen people who are in there posting a few messages in it and testing. It seems like it is going to work. If you want to get in on the testing, drop me a mail and I will send you the address.

Server is on the way!

The new web server, setup to be the new Corn Burner's Forum, has been shipped to the ISP. Here is a photo of it all boxed up, the wife is just ready to go out the door and take it to the post office with a bunch of her EBay sales. I am hoping it shows up at my ISP on Thursday. So, don't dispair folks! The forum is about to be back online!

I had really hoped that I would be able to migrate over the old usernames and passwords from the old forum, over to the new one. I was able to get the migration to work on my laptop, but then when I tried to get it to work on the production server it failed everytime. I don't know quite why. I decided not to take the time to figure it out.

I will send out email to a few of the heavy posters (ahem, Tallcorn) and let them get in a day or two in advance to secure their old usernames back again. With all the work that they had put into all the posts they did, I would hate to see them loose the name to someone else.

In other news, I am pretty sure I am going to be going to the Wind Energy Forum that I mentioned in my last post. It is about an hour's drive from Chippewa Falls but I think a couple of my neighbors are going to go up there with me. It sure sounds like it is going to be an interesting forum. Make sure you send your registration forms in. There are going to be FREE SNACKS PROVIDED, :-) and they want to get a good count on the attendees so they are sure to have enough.

And one final note. A rather interesting box showed up in the mail a couple of days ago. It is a new burn pot design from Traeger. A bottom feeding burn pot, similar in style to the LDJ, that will push the corn up from the bottom. I don't think this burn pot is on the market yet. It sounds also like the weather might just be cold enough tomorrow to try it out. I will do some burning and let you all know how it goes. If this works, it could be the solution to many of the complaints everyone has about their Traeger boilers and could be a great thing for the company! I will post some pictures of the new burn pot in the next couple of days so you can all see it.

Another Day, another crisis

I don't know about you, but I am burning corn again. As a matter of fact, I think you are doing the same thing. You want to know how I can tell the outdoor temperature? I look at the hits on my website. The hits go up, people start emailing me asking when the heck the forum is going to come online again. That pretty much tells me that it is cold outside. Today, you are sure right. It's 40 degrees outside right now! Heading toward the lower thirties tonight! Snow in the forecast! What month is it???

I tell you folks, I like Wisconsin and all, but, sometimes I get listening to that Jimmy Buffet music and get thinking about those little latitudes. My friend Dave Jones says he wants to live a life where his biggest decisions of the day involves what color of umbrella to put in his drink. That seems to me like a really warm weather thought, doesn't it? Yeah Dave, you got the right idea.

Yesterday was another interesting day. I was driving in to St. Paul for my weekly penance of sitting in an office cubicle. Driving down I-94, the far side of Menomonie, just (luckily) a mile past the single lane road construction area my old dependable Saab coughed. Then shortly later it coughed again. Then it choked, sputtered, spat, gagged and, finally, coasted. Damn. That's how I got to meet Tim, the tow truck guy. Heck of a great guy. I even say that now, after he lightened my load by $200. I hit him up with what I consider my universal conversation starter.... "So, how do you heat your house?" Ummmm Propane huh? We had a good chat about global economics, peak oil production and how are children's live are going to be different than ours. He was much more of an optimist than I am. I suggested some depressing reading material, _The Long Emergency_. Depressing, but one of the best books I have ever read. We'll see if he is still an optimist the next time I run into him.

One thing Tim was real interested in was wind energy so it was quite a coincidence that when I got home and was telling my friend Andrew Dane about the whole experience he hit me with a brochure for a Wind Energy Forum he organized. It really sounds like a great forum and I plan on attending. It looks to be a real overview of where wind energy is at and might offer some information on local wind generating systems. Hope to see you there.

A corn burners forum update. What with car trouble and now the wife is gone again for a couple of days I didn't get the new server packed up to ship down to the ISP. I still have hopes for tomorrow. I would like to get the forum online early next week.

--ja

An update

Hello everyone! It has been a long month, and it is what, the 9th? Oh dear.

Already this month we have had some low points. I took a call I had not been looking forward to receiving. My wife's step dad passed away from cancer last week. It was a very rough week on her. She went to her mom's house for the week. She delt with a whole bunch of family issues, as happens at times of death. It was a very rough week for her. I stayed home with the kids and though there were still three of them left after the week was over, I sure didn't get much work done on the corn burning web site.

This week though has been much better. I was able to get the web server reformatted with a new version of the OS and got the forum software up and running on it. Just today I got my new IP number from my ISP and I hope to put the server in the mail to them on Thursday. I would like to think that the forum will be live by early next week.

Everything always takes longer than I expect it to. Even when I inflate my expectations by 2x

On a corn related note, my neighbor got his corn burning stove in tonight. He bought an LDJ boiler. I have already been down to his house to take some pictures of the room before the burner. If I can talk him into waiting until Thursday (I am busy tomorrow) to bring it home I can also get some pictures of it coming in and being moved down into the basement.

It should be interesting to have a second case study on the web site.

--ja