Vegetable Oil Road Trip

I’m currently in Eureka, CA headed up towards Portland. I’ll have photos and more details by Friday evening.

Last Thursday, we stopped by the South Valley Academy, a public charter school in Albuquerque. They focus on academics and the environment – helping kids who didn’t do well in traditional settings be successful.

It was a lot of fun to teach kids in my home town – especially because they seemed so interested in what we were doing.

If you are in the area tomorrow (Saturday, May 19), I suggest that you check out the Dragon Farm open house – the open house for the South Valley Academy’s organic farm tomorrow.

We uploaded the photos from our visit in the road trip school pictures gallery here:

Vegetable Oil Road Trip Schools

Hi all – I know we’re having problems with the main website – www.vegetableoilroadtrip.com.

My hosting service was trying to upgrade servers and ran into issues – we should be live again in about an hour or two. Sorry!

UPDATE: Looks like the problem’s fixed and we’re back on line.

It looks like we’ll be making our first presentation to a few classes of 2nd graders in the very near future (March 5). It’s funny – I’m completely sure of myself talking in front of adults, but the idea of bombing in front of 2nd graders has me terrified.

We’ll have some photos from the event, and maybe we’ll be in the news!

Just noticed today that we broke a bunch of links when we switched to the new template. Everyone who tried the “contact us” link but found a page missing error – sorry about that. Everything should be working better now, thanks for the patience everyone…

OK, we’re all done switching to the new template – Firefox users should notice nothing new, but Internet Explorer users should now see a prettier view of the website (not perfect, just better). Sorry bout that.

If you want to see the entire internet as intended, just click on the “get firefox” buttons at the bottom of every page of the main site.

If there are any remaining bugs, please drop a line or comment…

So, it has been a long time since I was a fan of Microsoft (it’s true! I used to enjoy using their software!), and this recent event has done little to endear me to the company and its products.

In designing the main website, I worked exclusively with a Powerbook running Firefox to verify that my work displayed correctly in a browser. If you look at the site with Firefox, you’ll see how it was intended to display.

And here is how Internet Explorer renders it:

If you’ve never seen it – everything lines up in the center of the page, not messed up like this…

Lesson learned: don’t assume that Internet Explorer is in any way standards compliant. I.E. mangles that which it does not understand.

I am unable to completely fix the problem with IE, but I built a template that renders much more nicely in I.E. (not perfectly, mind you, just better), and I’m working to convert the entire site over to the new version. Firefox users will see little to no difference between the templates, but IE users notice a big improvement when I’m done.

In the meantime, if you still use Internet Explorer as your browser of choice, may I suggest a more advanced, faster, more secure, better looking, and more flexible alternative?

I know it’s a subtle change, but we’ve moved our blog from vegetableoilroadtrip.blogspot.com to blog.vegetableoilroadtrip.com. We’re doing this to keep a more consistent naming convention for people searching for our site.

If you go to the old site, you’ll automatically get redirected to the new one (…which is why you’re actually able to read this post), but if you don’t wish to wait the extra miliseconds while your browser is redirected every time you visit us, you may want to update your bookmarks (and links, if you have any web pages linked to us).

I hope I didn’t just break your RSS feeds.

As mentioned earlier, education is one of our major goals for this trip. Until now, that goal has unfortunately gone without attention. Luckily, with our growing readership, I actually get reminded of things I write in here. Reader Cathy asked us if we would be interested in becoming the class project for a classroom full of second graders. So, I hope that we’ll soon be able to welcome some students from the Abe Lincoln grade school to our project. This means we all have to start watching our mouths. No more cursing, and I’ll have to begin using correct spelling and grammar…

Whether this opportunity to work with this particular second grade class works out or not, I’d like to extend an invitation to any educators: use us as a project for your students! Off the top of my head, I can think of several areas where this trip could fit into a classroom (I’m sure some excellent educators out there can think of more):

• Chemistry (of combustion) – how fuels burn, how different fuels burn differently, and the byproducts of burning.
• Chemistry (of fuels) – what fuels actually are, how different fuels are made, how to make biodiesel. (if you’re a chemistry class and make a batch of biodiesel, we’d be happy to take it off your hands when you’re done – just please prove to me that the pH and water content are good before we put it in the tank…)
• Environment – global warming, pollution, recycling vegetable oil as a fuel
• Health – exhaust pollution and it’s effect on breathing diseases (asthma, etc)
• Geography – we’ll be visiting a lot of places
• Physics and mechanics – how gas and diesel engines work
• Business – we actually started an LLC to fund this trip, you could talk about that

What we can offer your class:

• photos
• videos of our travels – we could post a video greeting to you!
• If you’re on our way, we may be able to stop and show off the car, and give a demo of how we filter our fuel (it’s messy, so I’m sure that kids will like it)

What we ask in return:

• A digital photo of your class for use on our website.
• If we stop by to talk to your class, a photo of your class with the car.
• Also, if your cafeteria has some used fryer oil (not grill oil please), we’d love to take some with us (we could even filter it as part of our demonstration…).

So, if you are an educator or know an educator, please contact us (please choose “education outreach” as your topic). If you have other ideas for things we could do to help educators, leave a comment for us. We’re willing to talk to educators at any level – from grade school to graduate school. Send us your proposals!

If you live in or around Madison, need household stuff, and are willing to brave the mind-numbing cold out there, please feel free to check out the stuff we’re trying to sell in preparation for our move. We’ll try to keep that site up to date, so if its on there, its probably for sale.