We’ve long considered doing something to solve both the problem of old plumbing running over from our laundry, and needing to water our large backyard — adding a greywater system to the washing machine. Our laundry room is in the back of the house on one side and it is up on a hill above the backyard. A simple water diversion scheme for the greywater makes a great deal of sense.

It would seem simple enough to create an alternate drain line that instead of going to the sewer system, goes to a filter and greywater system in the backyard taking advantage of the gravity to water our hillside, and perhaps the lower section of the yard. Given wash water is fairly significant, we’d have a greener backyard without any added water. What a deal!

We’ve contacted Devin Slavin of Abundance in Balance and hope that a consultation with him will give us the knowledge and direction we need to go to make this all work well. It sure seems like the right thing to do.

What we learn, we’ll post here to share with others. Water is a precious resource we need to not waste.

We live in an old home. Old by California standards that is. Built in 1939, with some additions and changes done mostly in the ’50s to it’s core infrastructure, it has the original ‘gravity’ furnace for the main living areas still. That makes it sound like we live in a large home, but we don’t. The two smaller bedrooms and bathroom are on one side of the living room, the dining room, kitchen and garage were built on the other side. In the ’50s, the garage was carved up to be another bathroom, bedroom and what I now call a Miata closet. There’s also an additional laundry room added on to the back of the house.

Having a furnace for only half of the house actually is fine. Well it’s fine when it works. Currently, it’s not working. It hasn’t worked in over a year and we’ve now assumed it’s completely dead. No one wants to repair such an old beast wrapped in asbestos and in a difficult to reach, small, Hobbit sized death chamber under the house. Yes, I tried to fix it, too, but after 65+ years, it’s no longer really something I think we can rescue. Read More…

I’ve found a few sites I like a great deal for use with my iPhone, or in conjunction with other Mac programs and my iPhone. I have to say the switch to using this device was nearly painless. My Palm Pilot took a lot longer to configure, and the search for software didn’t yield as good of a crop as what I’m finding already for the iPhone. I’m hopeful that future products will be even more powerful.

Here are some of the sites and tools I’ve found to be quite powerful, and how I’m using them.

Remember the Milk - this web based application has an iPhone component that you can subscribe to for $25 a year. (There’s a trial period for using the iPhone component, too.) The web service itself is free although donations are encouraged. I found it so useful that I got the “Pro” version right away.

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It’s been a year since I made the jump to a completely digital note taking and scheduling world and adopted a Palm Pilot over my paper and pen based DayTimer. Using tools like “Shadow” for list management - I’m a follower of the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology - worked great for me. I was able to do more work in less time and not lose my notes.

My wife suggested we consider getting iPhones a few weeks back. They are great devices and are truly slick little gadgets. However, it was the idea of trimming the number of things I take with me to work and what I want with me that made the sale for me. Instead of an iPod, Palm Pilot and cell phone, I now carry just an iPhone. We bought two about a week ago and after about a day and a half of adjusting to it and looking for tools I could use to replace my existing management systems, I have to say I’m really happy with it. It integrates so perfectly with my Macintosh and now I have email, the Internet, and a camera always with me, too. It is saving me time.

Next blog entry will be on some of the tools I’ve found to replace what I was using on my Palm Pilot, and what I’d still like to have.

Not long ago, I changed my Joomla template to one from RocketTheme.com that has their RokZoom feature. RokZoom is a customized version of the popular slimbox javascript tool. It works great and I plan on using to update my site content where I describe what Open Source projects I work on and show samples of past work. However, one place it didn’t work was in my MojoBlog. Now I have it figured out though.

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