HeadphoneAddict

Another scary photo from yesterday.

So far the fires are heading back north again, after a brief change in the winds towards the south (us). It's now on the Airforce Academy property and about 1/4 mile from structures. It's also less than 3 miles away from the city of Woodland Park, which is under evacuation. So far Garden of the Gods and Glen Eyrie have been spared. It's almost on top of the Cave of the Winds though. With that shift in winds earlier the air quality down south got bad, and it's definitely harder to breath down here.

Happy Birthday!

My location is about 1/2" from the bottom of the map, about 1/2" below where hwy 115 is identified, and about 1/2" to the left of where it says Fort Carson. Red is the fire, and blue is mandatory evacuations.

Unless a new unrelated fire starts down south in a new location, the authorities believe that we're safe for now (at least until tomorrow). This is just terrible so far.

We have well over 800 firefighters on this now!

I mostly just sleep with the oxygen, or at high altitudes and exertion, and I have a portable bottle in my car. My oxygen company can always replace the oxygen concentrator and other stuff. Without the oxygen, with just cpap at a mile elevation, my O2 saturations while asleep or at rest stay around 90%. The concentrator takes up a whole seat in the car.

Yeah, we have our passports, papers and recent tax returns in the fireproof safe in the house, and will empty it in the event of evacuation and take papers with us. The safe isn't huge but it's too heavy to load in the car. I'm going into the accordion files for the newest insurance policy and other papers, just in case. We only renewed the policy 6 weeks ago, and it's filed but not in the safe yet. We all have a bug out bag with clothes, toiletries and meds. We can easily grab pets, laptops, data backups and photo albums, and could leave everything else if we had to. If there was an evacuation we'd hope to have time to load a little bit of other personal affects, like my oxygen and cpap machine, or SR-009 and HE-60.

As far as we know, it's not like flood insurance.

We're watching the news showing houses burning, and the newscasters are barely holding back the tears. The wind is shifting and now the smoke is blowing south towards us. "The fire is creating it's own weather", they are saying.

The entire city west of I-25 and north of Garden of The Gods Rd is under mandatory evacuation, including the Air Force Academy. That's about a 20 - 25 minute drive north from our house. Our kid's high school has been an emergency evacuation center since Saturday (and still is for now), so we feel somewhat reassured that we are safe for now or they'd be sending people to another school farther east. The fire is jumping 4-lane streets in the neighborhoods that are burning, and jumping house to house now.

Yikes. Here's to hoping you don't have a job where Homer Simpson works.

The Fires have entered Colorado Springs. The famous Flying W Ranch is on fire, and the neighborhood we lived in 20 years ago (Mountain Shadows) is on fire. We appreciate any prayers, best wishes or kind thoughts this way. Thousands of people are displaced right now on the west and northwest side of town, and may become homeless soon. We currently live on the southwest end of town, and are about 10-15 miles from the closest flames. The winds kicked up to 55MPH earlier, and the fire just took off for the north - it's covered over 3 miles toward the north in the past 4 hours. A change in the winds could force it to the south of HWY 24, and in our direction. While the Garden of the God's is not out of danger yet, the fire is now headed toward the Air Force academy. On the way it could take out our church and the entire neighborhoods of Peregrin and Mountain Shadows west of I-25. Much of the city (but not all) north of Garden of the Gods Road and West of I-25 is under Mandatory evacuation and many roads have been converted into one way streets heading east. Be sure to be careful wherever you are about such dry and hot conditions, where a fire could start in an instant. Be sure to do fire mitigation around your homes, so that there is a fire break around your homes. We live in a designated wilderness preservation area by NORAD and weren't allowed to cut anything more than 10 feet from our home. We should have ignored the regulations years ago, and now that we're willing to violate the rules we can't get anyone to help us cut large amounts of scrub oak that's within 11-15 feet of our home (we should even go out to 20 feet or more). There's just too much to remove in 102 degree weather right now. We did manage to get rid of most of the stuff the other day that grew closer than 10 feet over the years. We have a beloved pine tree with branches only 6-7 feet from the house that we are debating whether to mutilate it or not. I can't see that one tree being the sole cause of fire reaching us, when the scrub oak is only 10 feet away. More info: http://www.gazette.com/articles/fire-140851-highway-waldo.html http://www.facebook.com/springsgazette

True, forest fires are nothing new. But local authorities have evidence that the 23 fires in Teller county the past week are arson. That's three more fires since Friday, on top of the 20 last week. The Waldo Canyon fire here at the west end of town is at the edge of Teller County and El Paso County, but we don't have any information about whether it was Arson. There were no reported lightning strikes in the area Friday or Saturday, but people smelled smoke in the area Friday, and the fire became apparent by noon Saturday. On the other hand, the High Park fire around Ft Collins and the Wyoming border was set by lightning.

From the newspaper website.

I can't help with wiring sorry, but if you really need some realistic headphones go look for a vintage pair of realistic Pro 30 orthodynamic headphones. Then mod them with extra dampening and you'll be surprised at how well they perform. And you'll still have the pride of getting your hands dirty inside them.

It seems like the whole state of Colorado is on fire right now. There are 9 major fires are growing so far. Some asshat set a grass fire in Fountain CO today (SE Colorado Springs) but it was put out pretty quickly. They said it looked suspicious for arson. Then there was the arsonist in Teller county who set 20 fires last week. And they think the large Springer fire around Lake George was unrelated and due to people shooting exploding targets in the woods - that fire cost my son Boy Scout Camp this week. We don't know if the Waldo Canyon fire (aka Pyramid Mountain Fire) here just outside of Colorado Springs was part of the teller county arsonist, but it's pretty close to there and it's threatening the City of Woodland Park, Garden of the Gods, Glenn Eyrie and Eagle Lake Camp run by the Navigators.org, and several subdivisions like Cedar Heights and Mountain Shadows. People can't go to work, and tourism is being killed here. The Pikes Peak Hill Climb may be canceled, and more bad things. 4th of July is our highest peak tourist season, and all our major tourism attractions are closed - Pikes Peak and the Cog Railway, The North Pole, Cave of the Winds, Manitou Cliff Dwellings, Garden of the Gods and Glenn Eyrie, Flying W Ranch, and more. If this fire jumps HWY 24 it might head south through Manitou Springs, Skyline, the Broadmoor area, and then to the NORAD and Broadmoor Bluffs area where I live. I'm more worried about a fresh fire in our neighborhood. Right now I'm all for any arsonist being up for the death penalty if caught, assuming the posse doesn't do them in first.

We did some fire mitigation work on the scrub oak growing too close to our home. We have a 6 foot high pile of branches, and still more work to do tomorrow. The big fire at the west end of town has us all freaked out.

If it's a Thunderbolt port I wouldn't mind so much, especially if they have an adapter that can allow plugging the old cable into the iPhone.

I found a simple script to make Safari default to a higher zoom level than default. No more hitting "CMD +" every time I open a new browser window. One simply creates a new text file with the code below, and saves it as a .css file. Then you can have Safari use the .css file as the default settings by going into Safari > Preferences > Advanced > Style Sheet and selecting your .css file. I tried 110% and 115% and settled on 120% for night time browsing and 110% or no zoom for daytime. (in the dark the pupils dilate and old eyes focus worse) body { zoom: 120%; }

I'm so blessed - now someone snagged my main credit card number and went on a $2000 shopping spree. Card is canceled, new one is on the way, and now I'm changing the automatic billing for dozens and dozens of accounts that are applied to that card every month (Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, iPad data, Flickr, uReach fax, nook account, SiriusXM, blah blah blah). Bastages...

Thanks, I grabbed one for my daughter's 13" Macbook Pro. If she doesn't like it her sister can have it.

Some fucker has been setting fires in the Woodland park and Divide area outside of Colorado Springs, 20 since Monday. All were contained quickly, until today. My 18 year old daughter is at work at the riding stables in Garden of the Gods, which is at the bottom of the mountain that's on fire. They're preparing to evacuate the horses. This could be a terrible disaster, with all the homes and lives that could be destroyed.

I would get the Airport Express and use it to extend the wireless network at 802.11n speeds, and plug the PS3 ethernet port into the Airport Express. This is what I do with my PS Audio PWD and it worked better than the PS Audio USB dongle that I beta tested. It's very speedy on my 5 Ghz network, and I didn't need to use a power line solution. If you don't have a DLNA or uPNP media server on your computer or don't want to leave the computer on 24/7, and adding a dedicated NAS with built-in drive and server is too expensive, you can use a $79 LaCie LaPlug to connect any old USB drive to the network and serve media from it. I plugged my LaPlug into my Airport Extreme ethernet port and it's server works with my PS Audio Bridge (haven't tried it with Xbox or PS3 yet). It also supports 802.11g if you can't hard wire the LaPlug into the router.

I'm just a little concerned that my 50 year old eyes may not like the tighter pixel density on the hi-res antiglare screen, and switching the screen to non-native 1440 x 852 makes it fuzzier. I'm using the "CMD +" key combo to increase font size a bit more than I used to. I don't need reading glasses yet, but the new screen makes it likely that it will happen sooner than later. Sigh...