Then fan the flame and keep the dream alive

Fossil fuels are a dead end, everyone knows that. The fact that it's 2006 and we're still using internal combustion engines is a pretty good indicator that any sort of real space exploration is still several hundred years away. We're not even in the toddler stage of power production.

I know everyone is all hot and bothered about wind power, but I think it's another great example of how short sighted we are. Sure, it's pretty much always there and once your wind farms are in place the production costs are relatively low compared to fossil fuels. But I would argue that it's at least as environmentally damaging as fossil fuels are. On the scale it's being used today the impact isn't significant (that we're aware of, I don't know of any actual research that's been done). But if wind became a primary source of global power production it would have very severe impacts on global weather patterns. Something no one appears to have noticed.

Corn based ethanol consumes more energy in production than it generates. It's inefficient and the only reason it's being pursued at all is because the taxpayers in the US subsidize corn farmers to produce far more corn than anyone has any use for, so they have to claim they're doing something useful with it. Stop subsidizing corn to the tune of billions of tax dollars per year and corn based ethanol will disappear overnight. You're simply shifting the cost of producing inefficient fuel to the taxpayers.

There are alternatives. Brazil produces something like 70% of their auto fuel from sugarcane based ethanol which is quite efficient to produce. That's a good interim solution. Of course the corn lobby ensures that the import duty on sugarcane is prohibitively high so it's not feasible. Yes, the claims of 'we are a free market' are a lie. And everybody knows it. Cellulosic ethanol would be even better than sugarcane, because it relies on all the plant parts that usually get thrown out, and doesn't require a particular species of plant either.

The two real replacements for fossil fuels are solar and nuclear. Solar doesn't suffer in a significant way from the problems of wind power. The same rays that are hitting a building now can simply be captured and used in a more efficient manner. I realize some of the heat is reflected back into the atmosphere, but buildings currently absorb a lot of it already. Perhaps the small amount per square acre that is not reflected back will reduce global warming?

Nuclear, when done safely, is the third cleanest power source there is (after solar and hydrogen). Nuclear power accounts for 80% of all electrical power in France. We could learn a lot from that.

I am not a scientist. There may be options which I'm unaware of. Yes, I'm thinking about all these things far too much at 6 in the morning. These are the kinds of things I think ...

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Upgrade your grey matter

I'm clearly doing something wrong. I called a meeting and came out of it with more action items than anyone else. Massive upgrades are in progress, serious process changes are afoot, and nobody likes change. Oh, and I have to document it all. The next month will be very intense. My action item list from just today is a page and a half.

I need to really make the most of what downtime I get during this period as I will need the mental break.

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Big and strong

There was a Father's Day song back in vaudeville that Groucho liked to use.

Today father is father's day
And we're giving you a tie
You say that it was nice of us to bother
it really was a pleasure to fuss
For according to our mother: you're our father
and that's good enough for us

Here's what I did today:

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Make it easy

I haven't had much time to play with GarageBand in spite of earnest intent to do so. Over the weekend I grabbed the four tracks to Easy from the upcoming album BLAM off of BNL's myspace site (guitar, guitar 2, vox, drum and bass). It is remarkably quick and easy to really tweak tracks. A nice complement of built in effects, great EQ, and all the usual sorts of things you'd expect. I can already tell that if I had the time I wanted to be able to dedicate to music that GB would be too limiting, but for casual entertainment it will work just fine.

One thing I've encountered when mixing voice with background music for my wife is that it nicely autocorrects tracks with different time signatures, but if you have edited for a specific length that will screw you up rather nicely.

Easy sounds very cool with overdrive and the Big Wheel amp simulator on the lead guitar track...

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If you think you think outside the box you're trapped in one

Sometimes you just need to take a step back and think. The canned reports that come with ClearCase are nice. Not perfect, but nice. I've been wanting to work on some custom reports and work up some maintenance and clean up scripts, which is hard to do during the day as I don't want to impact anyone's ability to work on code. So I've been doing it intermittently on weekends or when most people have gone home.

One that seems completely simple but I couldn't figure out how to structure in a script is "give me all files changes since a particular label was applied." Frankly I'm surprised that's not a canned script. I worked most of last Saturday on writing a Perl script to do this and got nowhere. Partly due to my rustiness in Perl. I have been hunting down examples of scripts online and digging through the man pages with no luck.

Today while waiting for the new build to complete I was thinking about what exactly I wanted, and how it could be expressed differently.

Then it hit me. I dropped into the command line tool, tried this:

find -all -version 'lbtype(BUILDX)' && ! version(/main/LATEST)' -print

Bingo. In english this says "Give me all files where the label X isn't on the latest version of the file." It will take some more work inside the perl script to filter out trees that aren't relevant, but it's a damn sight closer than I was a week ago.

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I know the zoos protect my species

Tomorrow, I will be at the Zoo.

Elephants, Rhinos and Hippos Supper Safari

Come and explore the Zoo after hours for a tour of an immersion exhibit -- the River's Edge. Get the scoop on Raja and his new mate(s).See how the rhinos are settling in, and how the hippos are doing in their riverine home. Learn the challenges of taking care of these unique animals. SOLD OUT.

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Cold coffee and cocaine

The best coffee chain in the world. Even Consumerist likes it! It is one of about 6 things I actually miss about living in Hell A. I like Starbuck's. I think the Frappuccino's are great, particularly the bananas and creme. But they are such a sad, pale, and dull imitation of the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf's incredible Ice Blended's that it isn't even fair to compare the two.

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Yo Guinea Love keeps a pen up in her messy hair

As I walked into the bathroom there was a guy combing his hair. He's starting to go bald, so he's putting a lot of effort into the hair he has in order to divert attention from it. In passing my first thought was "Wow, I save a lot of time by not bothering to put much into my appearance."

What a geek.

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Turn me on, dead man

It is a very rare thing for me to laugh uncontrollably on MetroLink. Particularly the whole way to work. I was listening to the Penn Jillette show, where he was talking with Mac King about the worst show he'd ever done. It cannot be summarized, it must be heard in it's entirety. Go to the Pennradio site, grab the podcast for May 31 in whatever way you prefer. Starts at about 21:00 into the podcast.

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