My favorite Music

Yanni's album "In My Time" is my favorite of all time. It is amazing how Yanni's music escaped me for so long. Perhaps, I just wasn't ready for it, or maybe his being on a private label kept it from being found. It is original music and from a person who graduated from college with a degree in psychology and who did not know a note of music; He taught himself how to play the piano starting at the age of eight. His music is from a truly gifted individual that found his gift.

Christmas and New Years time

I built the online Christmas and New Years cards and placed them online today. I should not say I built all of them because I didn't. The applets were free, the music was free, one picture was mine and I don't know where the other came from. After 10 years of building web pages I have so much stuff on my hard drives, I have to run searches to find things. It is like googling my hard drives. I do like the Scottish version of auld lang syne in the New Years card and listened to it well over an hour tonight while thinking about past times. I think the fireworks go along with the music, too. Does anyone know what auld lang syne means? After all we have been singing or listening to this since God knows when or at least since Guy Lombardo made it popular starting in 1929. So what does it mean? Hang on, I have to go to google to find out. Well it means "old long ago" and is better described as "times gone by." It is an old Scottish song originally written in old Scottish.

So here is wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a very Happy and Prosperous New Year with good health.

Still hacking away at Perl

For the last month or so I have been working on learning Perl again. I now have 11 books on this and am beginning to appreciate the humor side of being a geek at age 61. Oh yes, I am an electrician, but my real aspirations is more on the computer side, I suppose. It all comes from when I was a kid and bought J. E. Thompson's math series of books for the Practical Man when I was 13 years old. I sent away for them after seeing the ad in a magazine when we lived in Ketchikan, Alaska at 11 1/2 mile North Tongas. I will never forget learning how to extract the cube root of a number that I learned from the Arithmetic for the Practical man book. It rained a lot in Ketchikan and I had plenty time to learn from these books and experiment in rocketry. I found some old chemistry books and learned how to make my own black powder. I baked charcoal by placing alder wood in a coffee can on an open fire and bought the saltpeter and sulfur by going to several drug stores in town. I also tried making gun cotton but never got it to work. My rockets turned out to be pipe bombs with one end open. Several blew up and several flew like a pipe in the sky. Well I am getting of the topic here, aren't I? The cube root of a number did amaze me and there was some sort of magic there - just like computers. To me they are magic and every time a program works I feel as if I have approached some God like being because I have created something that works like magic. After 40 years of this, the ah and wonder of computers still amazes me. I started programming with an Olivetti Programma 101 in 1969 that only held 48 instructions on a magnetic card and had no built in functions. I had to write a program to find something as simple as the sine of an angle all in 48 instructions. My next experience was with a HP 2000 that had an 8K drum memory using Fortran 2. My, how things have changed. My present computer now has a one gigabyte RAM and 370 Gigabytes of storage on two hard drives.

Anyway, one of the books I have studied is Teach Yourself Perl in 21 days. It is written by Laura Lemay, who is a technical writer of sorts. She also writes fiction and has a blog at http://blog.lauralemay.com/ if you are interested. Her book is the best of eleven and I wrote her an email to let her know.

Raceway Fill Calculator corrections and Latest News from electrician.com

Raceway Fill Calculator Problem

The cross sectional areas for No. 14, 12, 10, and 8 THHW, THW, and THW-2 have areas in the 2002 and 2005 Code Chapter 9, Table 5 that are not the same as in the 1999 Code. Starting in 2002 these insulations were moved to the TW slot in Table 5, but this was not done in Appendix C, Table C. Table C is still the same as the 1999 NEC for these insulations.

The raceway fill calculator recalculates Table C using the 1999 areas and still duplicates Table C in the 2005 NEC for conductors of all the same size and insulation (at least so far as anyone knows.) There appears to be an error in the NEC and until it is corrected I am not going to change the calculator until this problem is resolved (maybe in 2008).
Temporary fix

If you are installing Nos. 14, 12, 10, and 8 for THW, THW-2, or THHW insulations and want to use the 2005 areas from Table 5 substitute TW for the insulation type in place of THHW, THW-2, or THW for sizes 14, 12, 10 and 8. This will overcome the problem for the time being and allow you to place more conductors in a raceway for these insulations and sizes, but will not duplicate Table C in Appendix C where all wires are of the same size and insulation.

Here is a breakdown of the differences for THHW, THW, and THW-2:
(areas from Table 5 and all areas in sq inches)

Wire size	1999 NEC	2005 NEC areas
No 14	0.0209	0.0139
No 12	0.0260	0.0181
No 10	0.0333	0.0243
No 8	0.0556	0.0437

I had a call today from an engineer about the Neher McGrath Excel Calculator at electrician.com. He was working on an underground 4160 volt duct bank. I explained that the calculator was only for above ground 600 volt wiring in conduits and was only for teaching electricians about Neher Mcgrath. I suggested several sources for him one being the Calcware program for Neher McGrath that sells for about $2,000. Complete Neher McGrath calculations for underground Duct banks are far beyond the normal tasks performed by electricians and most engineers. Appendix B of the NEC has some tables for Neher McGrath Calculations.

I received an email asking for a cable tray fill calculator. It has been my experience that calculating cable tray fill is not a normal task for electricians, and such a calculator would only be used by very few, and I doubt that they would rely on a web page calculator for such an expensive installation. I know I wouldn't. Cable tray installations in industrial establishments are usually done under engineering supervision. Of course electrician tests can have at least one very difficult tray fill problem, and the electrician test course has one such example.

I have also seen a bitter mistake made when 4 each per phase paralleled 500 Kcmil 480 volt single conductor cables were installed with all the A phases, then all the B phases, then all the C phases in flat configuration. The code clearly states for very good reason that paralleled single conductor cables in cable trays shall be bundled in groups of A, B, and C Phase and the neutral if there is one. I actually had the experience of finding such an installation where the cables were not bundled in 1978 on Alaska's North Slope. The adjacent A and B phase and Adjacent B and C phase cables had such low inductive reactances that in a run of only 20 feet they carried about 90 per cent of the current while the outside cables for A and C phase carried about 10 per cent of the current.

Now about the alaskavirtualtour site...
I added a link to electrician.com for this site. It is a hobby of mine to develop various multimedia productions about Alaska and I place them at my domain alaskavirtualtour.com That is a long name but all the short ones were taken.