scott.hodson.blog

The article is cool, but I like the picture even more!

Oil is bad. No, I haven’t gone enviro-wacko. I’m just saying, we just have to stop using oil! For me the main reason is that high oil prices gives money to “petro-authoritarian” regimes (Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, etc) which fund terrorists and other opponents to our way of life. So you might say, “OK Scott, what are my options? We have to get around.” And yes we do. Get a hybrid, OK, good start. But I find it disturbing to see that the tack our govt seems to be taking is to be funding “alternative fuels” such as ethanol, biodiesel, vegtable oil, wood chips, hydrogen, etc.

But I’m against these alternative, renewable, clean-burning fuels too. Why? Because alternative fuels still require lots of infrastructure to move the fuels around. Trucks, fuel stations, pipelines, refining plants, etc. These all create inefficiencies and provide choke points for those that control them to make huge profits at our expense. Imagine Exxon monopolizing hydrogen refineries. So forget about alternative fuels too.

What we need is electric cars! With electric cars there are almost no moving parts, so say goodbye to most auto mechanics and dealer service centers. With electric cars we just plug them in, there’s no “fuel station” to fill up at, we fill up at our house. That has tremendous implications. Think of all of the freed-up real estate that the elimination of most gas stations would provide. No more pipelines, no more tanker trucks clogging up the freeways, no more shortage of refineries driving up the price of fuel, no more oil spills, etc.

Now, of course we will never exterminate our need for combustible fuels. Large trucks, airplanes, trains, etc., they will likely need these sort of fuels for a long time in the future. And even though the upcoming electric cars such as Tesla Motors have a range of 250 miles on a single battery charge that still makes the occasional cross-country road trip pretty tough to pull-off. Nevertheless, 99% of our car use require much less than 250 miles of driving in a single day.

And all of this increased demand for electricity will be a challenge too. We will need to generate more electricity, hopefully cleanly and without using imported fuels. Nukes are better and safer than the ones built for us over 30 years ago. And with solar cell technology getting better and cheaper, we could conceivably charge our cars with solar power generated at our house off grid.

I hope we start having more electric choices available to us in the marketplace soon. In the meantime, every time I fill up the gas tank I wonder how much of that money is going towards funding Hezbollah, Hamas, and Hugo Chavez.

And, no, I haven’t watched Who Killed the Electric Car? and I don’t own a hybrid or electric car (yet) so go ahead and call me a hypocrite if you want.

UPDATE: I watched “Who Killed to Electric Car?”, great movie, rent it.

UPDATE: I’m now less of a fan of nuclear after reading how much energy it takes to mine the uranium nukes need and the mining disaster that is caused to the land and the amount of energy it takes to “clean up” the abandoned mine.

I was down at Irvine Spectrum last night and my wife was spending quite a bit of time looking at skirts and sweaters at some stores…needless to say I needed to find something else to do. So I walked around and came across their new Apple Store, which I didn’t know was there. Anyways, I played around with the new MacBooks, deciding if a 13.3″ or 15.4″ model would suffice, but decided the 17″ MacBook Pro would have to be the way to go, mainly due to the lack of pixel resolution the smaller models support. Then I admired the design of their iPods, lamented at the paltry selection of available shelf/shrink-wrap software Mac OS X supports, looked at what other people in the store were doing on their macs, mostly teenagers playing with the built-in iSight or looking at photos of friends online, etc. This is the prototypical Apple store run-through for me.

So I camped out at a G5 with a 30″ monitor (”Cinema Display”) running at an astounding 2560×1600 resolution! I played with Photoshop, used Microsoft Remote Desktop to login to some servers to check on how things are going at the co-lo, tweaked some blogs, etc. After a while in front of a 30″ screen it was hard to leave. When my wife came back to find me she said “As much time as you spend in front of a computer you’d be pretty justified in getting one of those.” Ah, what a wife!

To make it even better, I was standing the whole time!

I played with the YouOS recently. Conceived at MIT, the YouOS emulates an operating system desktop environment within the confines on a web browser. Apps for the YouOS are written in HTML/Javascript/CSS/AJAX and offers some interesting possibilities. All of your session state is stored on a YouOS server so the next time you login you continue where you left off. It’s pretty slow, and the screen UI responsiveness is average at best, but I like the fact that someone is working on something like this.

While I’m not sure a browser-based operating system is really the best way to go, pushing more state, storage, and applications onto a network is becoming more viable as network speed and reliabilities increase. I think Sun Micro has made some great strides in this area, but most apps today are still built as 80-90% desktop with some HTTP/Web service “phone home” calls, or are heavily web browser based with some Javascript or Flash/Java running in the browser. I think we need more convergence between desktop and network application services.

Click on the screenshot above to see a larger version of what some of the running apps look like.

You can trade in your old CDs for an iPod over at MilleniumMusic.com. This rewards all of those people who’ve actually been paying for CDs. However, they don’t accept all CDs, and make sure you have ripped backups of the CDs you really care about before you send them in.

Here’s a story about some people that have used the service.

Here’s details on how it works.

In case you haven’t heard, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, articulately desribes the reasons against Net Neutrality. He refers to the Internet as a set of “tubes” and that the whole Internet was sent to him, among other things. Maybe he was getting the Internet and the Alaska Pipeline confused.

Remmeber, this is the same guy that got over $453M of federal funds for bridges in Alaska including the famous “bridge to nowhere“.

Here is the full audio

Here are some excerpts:

• “I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.”
• “They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that? Do you know why? Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.”
• “Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.”

1. Click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Notepad.
2. Type .LOG on the first line, and then press ENTER to move to the next line.
3. On the File menu, click Save As, type a descriptive name for your file in the File name box, and then click OK. When you next open the file, note that the date and time have been appended to the end of the log, immediately preceding the place where new text can be added. You can use this functionality to automatically add the current date and time to each log entry.

Click here for full info

Read this:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/blog/2006/07/why-windows-takes-so-long-to-shut-down.html