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For the project, http://building-addresses.ucsc.edu, I decided to combine a few training opportunities for myself into an easier to support system. As I prepare to retire, I'm going back to production systems and getting them off AngularJS/MongoDB and into Drupal which will make for easier maintenance and longer life span.

At some point in our home remodeling project, we were about to lose our concrete guy due to weather. It was a El Nino year, so of course we were grading and pouring during the winter! 

So we got a thought. Instead of losing our concrete guys, maybe we should expand our scope. So we had them grade what was already a pretty flat and unused section of side yard and pour a 20x20 pad. We figured at some point we'd install a greenhouse.

As I get into more photography, I started thining about how to get some shots up on this site. Years ago I had followed a tutorial to do simple Flexslider slide shows. 

The Starting Line is a class held by the Sports Car Club of America (https://www.scca.com). After taking the Evolution School class back in October, I had been quite impressed with the level of instruction from the SCCA instructors. SCCA had a deal for $325 that included a year of membership and discounts on events. So I joined up.

As part of the exterior remodeling, we added 2 tanks to the house to capture water for yard use. We get our water from the stockholders membership, but we’re on wells that can run low during drought.

Our approach was to drop in a flat 2000 gal tank under the deck as the primary source. We fill this tank with the downspouts from about 1/4 of our roof. It only takes 1-2 rains to fill this tank up.

After living with a noise that seemed to come from the right front of the car, I finally dug in and did some research. This noise is described as "howling" you'd hear when you blow air across the top of a bottle. For me, this happens at speeds between 25-40 while running at a constant speed. In fact, one way to confirm is to see if the noise stops when accelerating (it does).

I was very impressed with this class the wealth of great driving instructors in our region.

Worked with Shelly Monfort and Mary Pozzi

I'm just back from Australia and started listing out some of what I've committed myself or my teams to accomplishing this next year...

Here's the short list of projects I'm leading or involved in for 2017.

In Feb 2016 the alternator failed in my Porshce 2001 996. My mechanic was on vacation. I used Mobile German Auto Works here in Santa Cruz. They replaced the alternator and evidently replaced the coolant bypass coupler. The repair cost over double what it cost to replace it the second time. 

A simple ExpressJS app that includes a Leaflet example. This is a modified lesson from a Udemyclass I was taking. It uses the jade templating language and pulls in Bootstrap and Mapbox libraries. Here's the description README from github.