Midnight Cheese

This is a compilation of 3 months of radar, one image taken every hour. 1 second = 12 hours of time.

La Vergne has opened a new Police sub-station in the heart of the Lake Forrest neighborhood. This places a Police presence in the heart of a neighborhood that has been on the nightly news one too many times over the last several years.

City officials and the Police department are all standing behind this effort and I’m glad to see this activism come to our neighborhood, as we certainly need it.

Yesterday on the way to work I noticed XM had switched most of their music channels over to Sirius channels as a result of the Sirius-XM merger.

I’ve been an XM subscriber for several years now and have loved it. There’s nothing better than commercial-free radio. XM had a lot of fun with their station line-up as well. For example, most of their rock stations were named after characters from the old I Love Lucy TV show. 90s alt-rock was Lucy, 80s alt-rock was Fred, modern alt-rock was Ethel. Their promos and bumpers reflected this well.

Sirius channels are much more generic. Alt Nation, Classic Vinyl. So it sounds like no more witty promos and station IDs. One of my personal favorites from XM went along the lines of “Satellite Radio–Keeping listeners sterile…” and on the radio display it referenced the mass amount of power the satellites have to pump out to deliver the signal from space. Lucy mostly made fun of Art History majors and how much their life probably sucks now, post college. Good stuff.

Nothing like that coming from the Sirius folks. Reflects their name well, I suppose.

There’s just something sad about your favorite radio station going away. Reminds me of Thunder94 going out in the late 90s only to be replaced by KDF which soon switched over to country music. That left a nice void of alt-rock in the Nashville market for a good while.

Anyway, I may try streaming Pandora through my phone during my commute and see how that works out.

More photos are on my Flickr page.

I recently found a local gas station that only sells gasoline that is ethanol-free. I’ve been keeping track of my mileage over the last several weeks to see what the difference is between buying ethanol-free gasoline vs. most gasolines which contain up to 10% ethanol.

With a good mix of city and highway driving during my daily commute I’ve found that I get up to 13% more MPG using the non-ethanol gasoline. I average 30mpg on straight gasoline while gasoline with up to 10% ethanol has ranged between 26 and 28mpg.

This certainly correlates with the fact that ethanol contains a lower energy content than regular gasoline.

I want to encourage everyone to go out and vote! Take responsibility and perform your civic duty. Don’t succumb to fear!