Lee Devlin's Weblog

During my first year at Penn State's Wilkes-Barre campus, I took a physical education class called orienteering. The PSU Wilkes-Barre campus is located near Lake Lehman, PA in a rural, wooded area surrounded by fields and farms. The main building on the campus, called the Hayfield House, was previously a country estate that has been converted into classrooms and offices. The campus is visually breathtaking.



The orienteering class required us to use a topographic map and a compass to find a series of flags hidden in the surrounding woods and copy down numbers from them. It was essentially a timed race to see who would find them all and get back to the starting point in the shortest time. It was great exercise, because you covered a lot of terrain in a short time and it had an element of fun to it because you had to think at the same time you were running. Plus, it was all outdoors in a beautiful setting. I still have many fond memories of exploring the countryside around the PSU W-B campus during that class.

A few weeks ago during one of our regular neighborhood walks, Terri and I found a couple looking for something using a GPS. I asked them if they were geocaching and they told me they were attempting to find their very first geocache. I had heard about geocaching a few years ago from my friend Kyle, but I had never seen anyone doing it. We helped them for a few minutes, but we didn't find the cache. GPS units are accurate to about 30 feet, and so it can sometimes be a challenge to find a small geocache, especially if it is well concealed. I learned later from a geocaching website that they eventually located it. It was knowing that they found it that convinced me to give it a try.

GPS signals were not always so accurate. Or, I should say, they were not so accurate for civilian GPS receivers. At one time, civilian GPS receivers were only accurate to about 300 feet. The military intentionally added random noise to the GPS signal which only military receivers could remove. On May 1st, 2000, the Clinton administration turned off this random noise, called 'selective availability', and over night civilian receivers had their accuracy improved 10 fold. The removal of SA along with the availability of inexpensive handheld GPS receivers and geocaching websites has made geocaching possible.

The brief description of geocaching is that someone hides a cache, which is usually a weatherproof container. The cache can be as small as a bullet-sized container or as large as a metal ammo box. The person who hides it posts the container's GPS coordinates on a website that contains a database of geocaches. The first and largest of these websites is geocaching.com which was started in 2000. It contains the locations of more than 500,000 caches around the world. The person who hides the cache includes a 'log book' in it to let those who find it log their username along with the date and a comment. In the small containers like the ever popular 35 mm film canisters, (which are usually covered with camouflage tape), the log is just a small scroll rolled up inside. Some of the caches contain trinkets and, if you're so inclined, you can take a trinket and leave one of your own. There are also some special serialized tags and coins that are unique to geocaching that you can move from cache to cache and the website can keep track of the object's whereabouts. Each cache has a unique identifier that starts with the letters 'GC'. The subsequent characters are assigned by the website at the time the cache is registered. The person hiding the cache usually gives it a clever name and possibly a clue to help locate it. When you set up an account on geocaching.com, you select a unique user ID and you are able to log your discoveries of the geocaches. The geocaching.com website accounts are free, but you can also get a paid account for $3/month that has more features.

The website allows you to download the cache coordinates to your GPS which is a great convenience. I downloaded a free program called EasyGPS and that will take a file of geocache locations and put them on my Garmin eMap GPS. You can enter the coordinates by hand too, which is what I did for the first few caches, but it takes much more time to do that and can be a source of error.




Inside the city of Greeley, CO which has a population of around 87,000 people, there are more than 70 caches hidden. Some of them are elaborate 'multicaches' which have clues in them so that you may have to find 3 or 4 caches before you can find the coordinates to the main cache. Some even have quizzes based on subjects like math or history that makes finding the final cache that much more challenging. Within a 10 mile radius of my home, there are nearly 200 geocaches hidden.

Terri and I have been looking for caches lately and we've managed to find 14 just in the area where we take our regular walks. I've put a GPS handlebar mount on my bicycle and now that we've found most of the caches within easy walking distance of our house, I've been planning to venture out to find the more of them on the bicycle and to get some exercise in the process.




People who like to work with technology can spend an inordinate amount of time indoors, often sitting in front of a computer. Geocaching requires you to get outside, get some exercise, and do some exploring. If you have a GPS, I'd recommend you give it a try. Will you feel funny doing it? Oh yes, you'll feel like an idiot at times, especially if there are any 'mugglers' in the area. A muggler is a non-geocacher who will stare at you and make you feel odd, and who among us can't use a little more of that? You'll get to learn a whole new language too, such as abbreviations that you will put in your on-line log like 'SL' (signed log), and 'TFTC' (thanks for the cache), and 'TNLN' (took nothing left nothing), and it's hard to put a price on knowing an obscure lingo like that. :-)

Labels: misc, technology

A tornado came through Northern Colorado and missed our house by 3 miles. It touched down and destroyed some farms just west of Greeley and then went on to Windsor where it did a tremendous amount of damage. Terri took this photo from the LongEZ today and if you click on it, you can get the full resolution image. If you zoom in, you can see the devastation it caused in this Windsor neighborhood.

I wanted to post this entry to the blog to let everyone know that we are fine and didn't sustain any damage at our house. Please accept our sincere thanks to those of you who emailed and called to check in on us.

Update: I've posted a few pictures of the tornado damage.

Labels: misc

I've read Dan Pink's previous books, Free Agent Nation and A Whole New Mind and enjoyed them thoroughly and wrote reviews of them. Just recently I read Dan's latest book, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need. This book contains several important career lessons that it helps to be reminded of periodically. I liked its creative approach of using Japanese Manga comic style for a business book. It makes the lessons much more memorable and fun to read. The book has 6 lessons, namely:

1. Your plans and jobs will change, so don't try to plan out your entire career in advance. Each position will help you learn what you're good at which can help to direct your career. Positions will sometimes change or move away, so you shouldn't get too attached to a pre-conceived notion of what your long term career plan must look like to be successful. Despite what your parents may have told you, there are no safe "fallback careers" anymore. Also, if a job is safe but you can't stand it, then it is no way to spend your career.

2. Find positions that focus on your strengths and not your weaknesses. If you work in an area that requires you to do things that don't resonate with your strengths, it will be nearly impossible to be successful. There are some good resources recommended about finding your strengths, such as the book Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham. Knowing your strengths will allow you to better choose positions where you spend more of your time doing things that you do well and enjoy.

3. Your career is not about you, but rather about what you do to help customers, clients, and co-workers to be successful. Using your strengths and enjoying your job is important, but they must be applied to helping others, not just yourself.

4. Persistence is more valuable than raw talent. Your career isn't a sprint, but more like a marathon. You need to continue to show up, practice, and never give up.

5. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. The only people who don't make mistakes are those who never try anything. When you do make mistakes, make sure you learn from them. If you make a really big mistake, you'll know because it may be named after you (This has something to do with the choice of the main character's name).

6. Leave an imprint. When you look back at your career, you'll want to be able to know that you made a difference that mattered.

There are a lot of business/career books out there that have useful information, but you'd be hard pressed to find one that has as much great advice concentrated in as few words as this book. I was able to read the entire book during a lunch break. One of the common objections I hear from my colleagues who tell me that they don't read business books is that they don't have the time, but that excuse won't work for this one.

This may be the "last career guide that I'll ever need," but I'll certainly look forward to any future writing Dan Pink does on the subject.

On Thursday, May 15th several members of the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Network toured the Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site to see a new landfill gas-to-energy project currently under construction and nearing completion. The site is constructed on a concrete pad that had previously been used for remediation of materials removed from the Lowry landfill, a superfund site, which is adjacent to the DADS landfill. For a period of around 13 years, beginning in 1967, the Lowry landfill received more than 100 million gallons of liquid chemical waste. I had incorrectly assumed that this Lowry superfund site was in some way associated military activity because it shares its name with the former Lowry Air Force base, but it was actually created by legal dumping at the city-owned landfill. The landfill's name is likely a result of its proximity to the Lowry AFB Titan 1 Missile Complex 1A which is just to the west of it.

In addition to touring the facility, our tour guide also drove us up on to the top of the landfill where large earth movers were organizing the waste into 'cells' that were compacted and covered up with dirt. The dirt helps to keep the trash from blowing away and reduces its odor. The mountain that they are now constructing in this section of the landfill will eventually reach a height of 300 feet. If you want to see an aerial view of the site, here's a link to Google Maps. You can see the Lowry landfill in the lower southwest section, a completed portion of the landfill that is 150' tall in the northwest section, the new part under construction in the north east section, and a decommissioned Titan 1 nuclear missile site in the southeast section. If you zoom into active part of the site with the Google Maps view, please note the number of earth movers you can see on the site. That helps to give you a perspective on how big this site is.

The methane gas that will power the 4 16-cylinder 1100 HP Caterpillar engines is piped from various sections of the landfill. This gas is currently being flared (burned) and relased to the atmosphere in compliance with government regulations. Once the plant has been commissioned, the gas will be re-routed to the engines where it will be used to generate electricity. The current flow is 1200 cfm and that can produce 3.2MW of electricity which is enough to power about 3200 homes.

Landfills leak methane gas as the organic materials buried in them decompose and so if it's not collected, it's possible for it to accumulate and if it does that, it can become an explosion hazard. Even if the methane were not to accumulate, it would eventually find its way into the atmosphere and methane is about 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 so it's better for the environment to collect and burn it and turn it into CO2.

The gas that comes out of a landfill is actually about half methane and half CO2 with small amounts of water along with minute amounts of other gases. The water needs to be removed from the gas to prevent it from corroding the engines and there is an apparatus that uses alternating heating and cooling of the gas to condense out the water. The water removed from the gas is sent to a water treatment facility. The diesel engines have been specially modified to run on a mixture of methane and CO2.




One part of the facility that I found particularly interesting were the controls that took the electricity and converted it for use on the grid. They used Woodward controllers and large cabinets with impressively large bus bars and capacitors. It was one of the parts of the facility where no pictures were allowed.

The 4 engines are currently 16 cylinder models but the facility is sized so it can be re-fitted with 20 cylinder engines that would produce twice as much power should the gas flow continue to increase. Because of Denver's arid climate, the gas flow from these sizable landfills is just a fraction of what it would be in a moist climate. This is a disadvantage in some ways, but a benefit in other ways. It takes a much larger landfill in an arid climate to make economic sense for electricity generation, but it should also produce methane for a longer period of time, because it will take longer for the organic material inside the landfill to decompose. At the current rate of gas production, the existing wells should produce for another 20 years. There is enough land available for many decades before this landfill would be considered 'full' and the newer mountains will be much larger than the existing ones and so this landfill may be producing electricity for many decades.






This landfill is owned by the city of Denver and receives about 1200 truckloads of solid waste per day. It operates 6 days a week, 24 hours a day. In addition to burying trash, there is a concrete recycling operation on site where old concrete is ground up and used over again, saving cost on materials and energy over making concrete from scratch. There are several other recycling operations on the site.

I came away from this trip impressed with the engineering that has gone into designing and maintaining a modern landfill. We have come a very long way from just a few short decades ago when we though it was environmentally responsible to handle liquid chemical waste by simply dumping it in an out-of-the-way place, not realizing that a city would eventually grow out to meet it. To be fair, at that time the links between the long term health effects of exposure to toxic substances were not well known and so many waste handling policies of that era were formed out of ignorance. This site is continually monitored to make sure that nothing hazardous makes its way into the water table or atmosphere.

We'd like to thank Brad Gagne and Steve Derus for making this trip possible and for answering the numerous questions we had about the facility. Everyone felt like they got a lot of out seeing an operation like this up close.

Labels: energy

I've written before about Vestas, a Danish wind turbine manufacturer that built a blade facility in Windsor, CO about 10 miles from where I live. I was out flying around the other day and took an aerial photo of the plant and found that they had more than 70 blades on their property. I was impressed because they hadn't even broken ground at this time last year and they are already up and producing blades. They had started out with a planned capacity of 1200 blades per year, but announced a 50% expansion while the plant was still under construction. They feel as if the U.S. will continue forward with wind development, despite our government's reluctance to commit to a long-term strategy when it comes to renewable energy.

The amount of energy that this blade plant produces annually will generate enough electricity to power about 400,000 homes. I computed this by de-rating the 600 sets of blades to 1/3 of their 2 MW nameplate capacity. This is similar to the amount of power generated annually from a conventional coal-fired power plant.

I subscribe to a Google Alert for news on Vestas, and on Friday morning I found out that Vestas will be building a new facility in Colorado to manufacture steel towers for their turbines. The facility will employ 400 people and be capable of producing 900 towers per year. They didn't specify a location, but according to the Northern Colorado Business Report, it appears that several communities in Northern Colorado are under consideration.

Labels: energy, wind

There's probably no topic more important to those of us who fly General Aviation aircraft than the continued availability of aviation fuel. For those of you who may not be familiar with aviation, the fuel used in aircraft is made the old fashioned way because it uses tetraethyl lead to increase the octane rating. High octane fuel is necessary because about 30% of the aviation fleet use high compression engines, and those aircraft use 70% of the aviation fuel. The engine I'll be putting in my Cozy MKIV will require this fuel. Leaded fuel has been outlawed by the EPA for all other uses, but aviation fuel got an exemption for a period of 30 years. That period ends in 2010, which is coming up soon.

I agonized over the decision over whether to use a high or low compression engine in the Cozy but I figured that with all the aircraft fleet that need 100LL, there would be some fuel developed that would come to the rescue, possibly an ethanol based biofuel. Of course, with an experimental aircraft, I could always put lower compression pistons in the engine and use autogas, if I had to, but that's not ideal. So I was very excited to hear about this new fuel that is being developed that has so many advantages that it's hard to believe it's true.

I emailed the owner of the company and he responded. That's always a good sign. Not only that, he graciously referred me to his associates on the project if I had any more questions about it. I'm really hoping that these guys are successful. Here's the report I got from Avweb:

New GA Fuel Promises Better Range, Lower Cost

"Not only can our fuel seamlessly replace the aviation industry's standard petroleum fuel [100LL], it can outperform it," says John Rusek, a professor at Purdue University and co-founder of Swift Enterprises. The company recently unveiled a new general aviation fuel that it says will be less expensive, more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendlier than any on the market. Unlike other alternative fuels, Rusek said, SwiftFuel is made of synthetic hydrocarbons that are derived from biomass, and it can provide an effective range greater than 100LL, while costing about half as much to produce. "Our fuel should not be confused with first-generation biofuels like E-85 [85 percent ethanol], which don't compete well right now with petroleum," Rusek said. Patented technology can produce the 1.8 million gallons per day of fuel used by GA in the U.S. by using just 5 percent of the existing biofuel plant infrastructure, the company said.

The synthetic fuel is 15 to 20 percent more fuel-efficient, has no sulfur emissions, requires no stabilizers, has a 30-degree lower freezing point than 100LL, introduces no new carbon emissions, and is lead-free, Rusek said. In addition, he said, the components of the fuel can be formulated into a replacement for jet/turbine fuels. The company now is working with the FAA to evaluate the fuel.

Labels: aviation, energy, ethanol

I am the LinkedIn committee chairman for a local Northern Colorado professional networking group called NoCoNet. Each week I present a tip about using the on-line networking website called LinkedIn. Sometimes I will write up the these tips and post them to my blog so that when I invite new members to the NoCoNet-LinkedIn group, they can read through previous LinkedIn tips. It saves me from having to repeat myself and allows me to expand a little on the single slide that I present at the meeting. I volunteered for this position because I wanted to get better at networking and using LinkedIn and found that there's no better way to learn something than to offer to teach it. As a result of this role, I pay closer attention to information about using LinkedIn. One of the best sources of information I've found on LinkedIn is a podcast called The Connections Show by Stan Relihan. Stan is an executive recruiter based in Australia. I credit Stan's podcast with helping me better understand the needs of the talent search specialists who use LinkedIn.

I am contacted by recruiters as a result of them finding my LinkedIn profile. I used to get solicited frequently for my interest in various positions that would have required a relocation. It slowed down when I mentioned in my profile that I'm interested in staying in Northern Colorado. Whenever recruiters contact me, I always try be helpful, promptly returning their calls and offering to publicize the position if they think that would be of help.

One of the topics Stan regularly discusses in his podcasts is that of the 'passive candidate'. Simply stated, a passive candidate is someone who is not actively looking for a new position. When I first heard the term 'passive candidate', it made me think of the term 'poaching' which means to steal people from one employer and place them at another, not infrequently with a competitor. It seemed a bit devious to me. Focusing on passive candidates at the expense of those actively seeking employment also seemed a bit unfair, almost as if the latter category didn't deserve the same consideration as the former.

It's not uncommon to hear people who are seeking marriage partners to lament that 'all the good ones are already taken' and I couldn't help feel that chasing after passive candidates while overlooking active candidates followed a similar sentiment. I suppose part of the logic could be that if a person is unemployed, he may be unemployed for good reason. If he is looking for a job while employed, then he may appear to be disgruntled or disloyal. So active candidates automatically have a few negative stereotypes working against them that passive candidates do not.

After listening to Stan's podcasts for a while, a new view of the passive candidate began to emerge. As Stan is quick to point out, an executive recruiter is hired to find people for jobs, not jobs for people. The distinction is subtle but important. It may explain why when you talk to a recruiter about a position that turns out not to be a great fit for you, he won't automatically start looking for positions that are a better fit for you. A recruiter's value is in finding potential candidates for employers who are exact matches for the positions they are trying to fill. Sometimes the best way to do this is by searching for candidates who may not be looking for a job and thus don't realize they are exact matches. When an unemployed candidate is seeking a new position, there's a chance that he may be so desperate to find work that virtually any job looks appealing and appears to be an exact match for his skills and talents. He may even modify his resume to better match the position, which is a job tip you'll often hear given by career consultants. The last thing that a recruiter wants to do is to place a candidate who takes a position simply because he is desperate to have any job. Recruiters want to place people who are the best candidates they can find and who will be a success in that position and reflect well on the recruiter's skills. A person who desperately needs to make a house payment is probably not going to be an impartial judge about whether or not he is an exact fit for a job. After he lands the job and a catches up on house payments he may begin to think rationally again and decide the position doesn't look so appealing anymore. Placing the wrong candidate in a job can be a recruiter's worst nightmare. If you do that one too many times, you may not get called upon to help fill a client's future openings.

A passive candidate is someone who may be interested in changing careers but hasn't got the time or inclination to launch a formal job search. As such, he needs to be sought out and actively recruited. There are plenty of reasons that people would be in this category. A full time job usually leaves little time to be searching for greener pastures, and some may feel disloyal to be out searching for their next job, particularly if it may involve moving to a competitor. You can't easily recruit a candidate away who is being well compensated and is satisfied with his current employer. But if a person feels underpaid, underemployed, or is worried about his future with his current employer, then he'd most certainly qualify as a passive candidate. Passive candidates are actually a much larger category than those who are actively seeking employment. They're just harder to find. Passive candidates are less likely to have just taken a new position, which is a problem when your list of candidates only includes active job seekers. Resumes from active job seekers get stale in a hurry and it's not unusual to call someone whose resume is a few weeks old only to find that he has just taken a new position. Someone who has just taken a position usually doesn't want to burn bridges by jumping ship too quickly, no matter how attractive a position you might present to him. Also, if a candidate is actively seeking a position, he may be considering several offers and that can make him too expensive for the recruiter's client. So these are yet a few more downsides of being an active candidate as viewed from the perspective of a recruiter.

So, how can a job seeker have the desirable characteristics of a passive candidate even though he may be actively seeking a new position? The best way I can think of is to never be desperate for a job, even if you are unemployed. Also, make sure to do some evaluation to assess your career goals, strengths, and talents so you'll be able to better recognize a job that fits you when you see it. Knowing your strengths will make you a much better judge of whether a position and a prospective employer will be a good fit for you, rather than depending on someone divining it from a keyword search. A good book for this kind of self-evaluation is "Now, Discover Your Strengths" by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. The book includes an on-line test that will help you to identify your top 5 strengths from a list of 34 areas. Be aware that used copies of this book will likely have an expired password, so if you want to take the test, make sure to purchase a new copy. The test would likely help you better decide whether a position is a match for you. If a position doesn't play to your strengths, it's unlikely you'll be successful at it.

You should also be cognizant of a recruiter's needs. When you establish a relationship with a recruiter, you should think of it more like planting a seed rather than trying to harvest a job. Don't come across as needy. The best recruiters keep track of thousands of potential candidates, and you should plan to be among them if you'd like to be considered when an opportunity arises.

To make sure you are never desperate for a job, try to live within your means so that loss of a job won't require you to get another one right away. If you have a working spouse, try to adjust your expenses to live on one salary. If you can arrange part time or temporary work to help pay the bills, that may be an option too because it will leave some time to search for a job and won't give an employer the mistaken impression that you intend to stick around for the long term. Employers have temporary needs too, so this can be a win-win for both of you. If the temporary job is a good a match, it may even evolve into a full-time position.

With some temporary source of income, you won't fall prey to the feeling that every job that comes along looks like it's an exact match for you. Best of all, it will help give you the aura of a highly desirable passive candidate.

Labels: linkedin

I'm helping to organize another Energy Reality Series tour this month. The Northern Colorado Clean Energy Network and NCRES are planning a tour of the Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site to see the new Landfill Gas-to-Energy Project.

Today’s modern, engineered landfill is an environmentally sound system for waste disposal that minimizes the impact on the environment. Landfills also offer a clean, renewable energy resource that is generated continuously through the decomposition of waste in landfills. This resource is known as landfill gas or methane.

Most landfills collect landfill gas, a greenhouse gas, and burn it in a flare system to destroy it. Instead of simply flaring the gas, the Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site will use this gas to generate electricity. Our tour director from Waste Management will explain how this is done and answer any questions you may have about it.

Date/Time: Meet on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 8:15 a.m. We will depart at 8:25 a.m.
Meeting place: Northwest corner of Harmony Road/I-25 Park-and-Ride in Fort Collins, CO

The park-and-ride is located just north of the first traffic light when you head west on Harmony Road from I-25.

We will leave at 8:25 a.m. and carpool to the Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site which is located in Aurora south of Denver International Airport . Directions from Harmony/I-25 intersection:

• Go south on I-25 and take the exit for E-270.
• Meet up with I-70E and continue until you come to the 225S exit. Take 225S until you reach the Parker Road Exit.
• Take Exit 4 and merge on to CO-83S - Parker Road.
• Turn left on E. Hampton Ave and follow it for approximately 6 miles to the entrance of the Denver Arapahoe Disposal Site.

The address for the site is 3500 S. Gun Club Road, Aurora, CO for those who want to program a GPS.

It may be faster to take E-470, but it is a toll road. The tour is scheduled to begin at 10:00 a.m.

The tour should takes about 1.5 - 2 hours and the drive time each way from Fort Collins will be about 1.5 hours.

If you want to go on the trip, please contact Lee Devlin via email at lee810@yahoo.com or by phone at 970-978-6188 and let me know the names of the people you're bringing, and whether you will be carpooling. That phone number is my cell phone that I'll have with me at the time of the tour in case you need to contact me.

The most current information about this tour can be found here:
http://www.k0lee.com/dads-tour.html

I'd like to thank Peter Olins and Patrick Gill for their help in setting up this tour.

Labels: energy

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