Author Archives: John

The Enemy is Dirt

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My laptop was getting more obnoxious by the week; progressively getting slower, taking longer to boot up, taking longer for pretty much everything except aggravating my temper. All the symptoms of having picked up a virus, trojan or other malware from a website. But my battery of free security programs found nothing. I caved in and bought Spysweeper. It found nothing, either, and just made things even slower. :banghead:

I started noticing it felt hotter than it used to under my right wrist. Well, okay, I thought, it is over five years old, after all. More’n likely getting ready to blow the power supply or something. Before it could do that, though, it started just shutting itself off. I gather they’re made that way, to automatically shut down when the internal temperature gets too high. :bomb:

Of course, by now I was primed to use the imminent demise of the machine as an excuse to get a new one. Even started checking the BestBuy ads. But, the damn thing wouldn’t die; just kept after my goat. Last weekend the combination of aggravations got so exasperating I asked my wife if it would upset her if I got out the .38 and shot it. She said it would. So, I tabled the notion of hastening its demise. :shootem:

Today it shut itself off before I could print a letter I needed to get out. So I turned it over to have a look at the fans. A busted fan could certainly cause overheating. Couldn’t tell antyhing from looking, except they looked kind of dusty. I grabbed a can of Dust-Off and shot a blast at each fan. The first thing was a major cloud of dust flying out the vent. The second thing was one of the fans didn’t spin. It occurred to me laptops maybe consume and store dust as well as desktops, despite what seems to be a more enclosed structure and less room. And it occurred to me I might just need to replace a fan. Fans are what I’ve had to replace the most on all my computers. :propeller:

Okay, okay, I’ll get to the end. At home after supper and between Olympic events I removed as many panels as I was comfortable removing and used about half a can of Dust-Off blowing through strategic locations. In the process, I dislodged a major dust-kitty that I had to slowly work out with tweezers, from behind one of the fans. Yup, it was actually keeping the fan from running. Got it all back together and the difference is incredible. :bouncy:

Sounds way better, runs way cooler, runs way faster, hasn’t shut off. Keeping fingers crossed, of course, but it’s looking (and sounding) like I’ll have to spill a cup of coffee into the keyboard if I’m gonna get me a new one in the near future. :mischievous:

Stinkin’ dirt. :yuck:

Plugging Abandoned Wells

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In a major and surprising ruling, the Kansas Corporation Commission ruled in Docket No. 07-CONS-155-CSHO that a lessee who takes a a new oil and gas lease does not, without more, thereby become responsible for plugging existing wells on the leased premises. The July 16, 2008 order In the Matter to Show Cause … with regards to responsibility under K.S.A. 55-179 for plugging abandoned wells … was a pleasant surprise to operators who, motivated by $100+ oil, have been scrambling to lease up properties with expired leases. They will be responsible for existing wells they rework, as this will fall under the “exercising control” criterion of the statute. However, this was always to be expected. However, the July 16 order represents a virtual reversal of the Commission’s long standing but unofficial policy of holding operators responsible for old wells drilled or operated under a previous lease regardless of whether they were operated under the new lease.

The case started out on a more narrow issue. The old wells on the property in question were oil wells and the new lease was for gas only. The lessee argued that since its new lease did not cover oil, it was not responsible for plugging the old oil wells. This is a logical argument that I thought likely to be persuasive. In past years, when clients got a new lease on property with old wells, we’d sometimes craft the legal description to exclude the well spacing acreage (essentially 2.5 acres in Eastern Kansas, 10 acres in Western) around each old well. If the KCC sought to assert liability, the argument would be that they were not covered under the new lease and, therefore, the client had no liability and, indeed, no right to plug the wells. I never had to test this argument, as the Commission never sought to impose plugging liability on a client with such a lease. But, drafting a lease with this sort of legal description was a pain in the rear end and, frankly, raised other interesting (in an academic way) issues. The issues in the recent case, however, expanded so that the “gas only” lease defense turned out to be unnecessary. It appears that the Commission’s public policy rationale is that the ruling will motivate operators to report old wells they “discover” on their “new” leases, so the State can get a handle on these abandoned wells and take appropriate measures to protect against pollution of groundwater and other potential problems posed by these old unplugged wells.

You can download the order as a pdf file here.

Safari for PC’s

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Apple’s Safari web browser is now available for PC’s. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and rather like it. It seems to be faster than IE, Firefox, and Opera as well as other browsers using IE and gecko engines such as Flock and Avant Browser. Well, maybe not faster than Avant Browser, but I like Safari better, regardless. However, I’ve grown rather attached to Flock, due its “networking” and media oriented features. The main drawback with Safari is that almost all plug-ins work only on Mac installations and, of course, none of the Firefox plug-ins I’ve gotten accustomed to will work on Safari. I particularly miss the Google Toolbar and Web Developer Toolbar. But, for sessions when all I need is speed, Safari is becoming my browser of choice.