House of the rising Moonglum

The Colbert Report word of the day “honored” George Carlin for banning 7 words. Awesome.

The government takes money from us (taxes) to deliver services (mail). My mail sucks. They never deliver to the correct address, sometimes sticking it in the wrong box in the building, sometimes the wrong building on the street. It also appears, however, that the government also misplaces my taxes. I pay my quarterly taxes every quarter, since I am self-employed. However about half way through the next year I often (this is three times now) get a letter from the Dept. of Revenue fining me for not paying every quarter. I suppose there is some symmetry there. If they can’t keep track of the money I give them, why should they be able to keep track of the letters that others send me?

(FWIW, the checks always clear, they just aren’t credited to my account. Solution? More work for me. Come up with the front and back of the canceled check(s), and write them a letter pleading my case. UGH. First time wasn’t bad, second time was less fun, at this point it is becoming downright tiresome. If they aren’t even going to get it right, why do they make me do the quarterlies?!?! Grrr.)

I just got back from a trip to Hawaii (pics forthcoming) and while there I had the opportunity to read some local news. In particular, given my own predilection for fear mongering, a series of articles on geothermal energy interested me. I was wondering aloud to my wife why Hawaii didn’t have more geothermal power generation, and it turns out that the locals have all sorts of concerns about the environmental damage that it would cause. (Unlike I guess the 78% of their electricity which is currently generated from oil.) Given their tidal wind solar and geothermal sources, renewables should be able to easily make up a majority of the power generation needs for the island, but it currently only provides 6%[1]. But vocal local opponents have stopped major projects from going forward to far. The series in the newspaper did a pretty good job of showing the benefits and describing more scientifically what the actual dangers are, and not just the presumed dangers.

Given that, the next piece of local fear that appeared in the newspapers is extremely humorous. There is currently an ongoing eruption on the big island. This is great for visiting, because you get to see something that doesn’t happen that often, but annoys the locals because it creates a bunch of SO₂ vapors blanketing the island with a fog like substance they call vog. People wrote into the paper complaining about it, and suggesting that “something needs to be done about the volcano.” Awesome. Some suggestions were put a dome over it and fill it with concrete. Fortunately that day a scientist responded, “the lava has been coming up through three miles of the earth’s crust, I don’t think your concrete is going to stop it.”

And now I read about another item from the Hawaiian courts. Apparently someone is suing to stop the LHC at CERN. Oh yeah, because it is going to create micro black holes and eat the planet away, all Earth style. I think the scientists who were afraid that the first nuclear explosion was going to engulf the entire planet in a chain reaction had a better argument. It also makes my fear of peak oil look like a downright sure thing.

[1] Numbers are from 2002.

I’m glad to see that the CTA is trying out serial hybrid busses. While cars are really too small to use current technology in, busses are large enough that the different drive train makes sense. A similar system has been in use by trains for years. The addition of a moderating battery and regenerative braking turns the diesel electric drive train into a true serial hybrid. The advantage of this over a standard hybrid is that you only have one drive-train and the gas powered engine can always run at optimal efficiency since it is just running a generator. This also means no more busses idling downtown for a half hour at a time.

CNN appears to have gotten their hands on a bunch of papers from al Queda in Iraq detailing the command structure and operations from mid to end 2006. It is a very interesting read because it shows that there really was a central structure for the insurgency in the Sunni areas in Iraq. It is also interesting because it shows that there is a real enemy to be fought there, and not just a conglomeration of independent groups. It gives some hope that they might be able to straighten things out some day. I think the most interesting item for me was their internal awareness that the tide had turned against them, long before the US ever figured that out.

It is also worth noting that much of the al Queda in Iraq violence has died down now, but there are plenty of other groups out there. I have to wonder now though if they aren’t similarly run, giving some chance that they could be stopped one day as well.

The announcement that wasn’t on Monday was that 10.6 is going to be coming out sometime next year. The reason they didn’t make a major announcement about it was that it isn’t going to actually have any new features. Apple is planning on going back over what they currently have and consolidating and pruning and improving. (The name is very clever, since it will basically have the same customer facing feature set as Leopard (aka 10.5) they are calling it Snow Leopard.)

For the non programmers who read my meow posts, cleaning up old code is absolutely critical. There are so many instances where the second time you write something it is about a million times better than the first. So doing an entire release cycle with no new user facing features is just about the best thing you can do with an OS.

My guess is that 10.6 will be by far and away the best OS Apple has ever made if they are able to stick to their plan. Of course, there will be some new features. Some API internals that will make the life of developers better, but hopefully they will be able to keep those to the minimum needed to really give the developers time to work on improving the existing code base. It is simply a focus on quality that you normally don’t see in software, where the constant drumbeat is for new and flashier features.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out, if they are able to not shove a bunch of extra features in it, and how much they will charge for something that, while wildly improved over the previous version, doesn’t show any new features to the end user.

Another in a long list. My wife got me an iPhone for my birthday. It was very well done, she got me a case, stuck a picture of the phone in the case, and said that we could go get it when the new model comes out. True love. Well, we all know that the new model is coming out on July 11th so I was getting excited and started looking into what I need to do to have my cell phone number follow me. (Being self employed and being that business cards are the only way that I advertise, keeping my cell number is critical.) It looks like it won’t be too hard, but just to be sure I called Sprint (my current carrier).

I knew that my contract was up, because I have had my old phone for almost 4 years, and they keep asking me to extend by getting a new phone. We tried to use that to get my wife a new phone last year, but they wouldn’t let me switch the phone over to her number. (Again with the phone number.) In any case, her contract was up in March, but it turns out mine isn’t up until November!! After much cussing and moaning, it appears that when my contract was up last time, they sweet talked me into another two years by giving me $10 off my monthly bill (along with smaller charges if I went over on minutes.) I totally didn’t remember that, I mean it was a year and a half ago! ($10 x 24 = $240, how they talked me into that I don’t know or remember, but I definitely have the contract that spells it out rather clearly. I guess I didn’t think that I would ever want to get rid of my Treo.)

Grr.

So I asked how much it would be to break the contract given that there are (will be) only 4 months left on the contract. They said $200. I asked how much it would be if there was only 1 month? $200. 1 day? $200. Given my last few interactions with Sprint (see getting wife new phone from above) I was actually planning on leaving them anyway. This is the final nail in the coffin.

Now I just have to figure out the least expensive way to leave them without lying or losing my current phone number. I suppose I could just shell out the $200, but that makes the (admittedly much cheaper) iPhone that much more expensive. I could just wait the four months but I don’t really want to give Sprint another 4 months of business. (And aiiiieee! Waiting 4 months for the shiny!) I could try to find a taker for my cell plan, but I have a hard time believing that someone looking for a short term plan would want mine. Also I don’t know if that interferes with keeping my old phone number.

I could try dropping everything I don’t need, I can get it down to $70/mo. (tax & fees incl.) but that is still more than $200. Then of course there is just waiting until November.

Grr. I hate phone companies.

When I used to go to NYC all the time on a $100 per diem, I had to lower my standards for hotels. I did end up with a few rules however. No garbage on the floor when I enter the room. Nothing else living in the bed but me. Bathroom in the room. That sort of thing. All of those were made from experience. I recently attended an “emergency” wedding in Seattle. This means I didn’t have a lot of time to pick hotels, however it was suggested that La Hacienda might be near the event. It was, but it turns out that was about all it had going for it. I should have read the reviews before reserving a room. One guy claims they had bedbugs (I didn’t even put my bags down) and another said he thought he saw it on Cops. The walls were so thin that it shook with the wind, and didn’t keep the outside weather outside. Suffice it to say, there is a fairly long story involved in what happened next, but I will cut to the chase. New hotel rule:

Hotels must actually provide shelter.

Best wife ever! Makes me breakfast in bed!

Also: Presents! I can has (running) watch! I don’t wear a watch, but have been running some lately and needed one to know how much I am running when not on treadmill. Running watch lets me do that. The radio link to the atomic clock in Ft. Collins, CO was a bit unexpected though. I haven’t gotten a new watch since high school, is that common now-a-days?

Thanks to carneggy I have now seen a series of videos that all the people in my game need to watch.

Apparently National Geographic is doing a series on Stonehenge. Of course they needed to interview Stonehenge expert Nigel (yes from Spinal Tap) for the show. These five videos are those interviews. Most critical line: “Of course Stonehenge was originally amplifiers.”

The detritus of the “Faster, Cheaper, Better” (pick any two) Nasa methodology was picked up and modified for the Phoenix mission. Because of that this was a fairly risky mission. However it appears that NASA managed to land a powered legged lander on Mars for the first time since the 70s. It appears that everything worked as expected, the legs are on the ground, the solar arrays are deployed, and pictures are coming back home. I’m only sad no rover. At least there are still two running about elsewhere on the planet.

I don’t normally link the viral videos from YouTube, but this one just kills me. Weezer gathered up all the “stars” from last year’s virals on YouTube, and stitched them all together into this hilarious video.

I don’t know why, but I just went to the energy star web site to try out their “save money with a new fridge” feature. I’m always interested in eeking the most dollar value for using less energy over time (e.g. CFLs and that sort of thing, high up front cost, but lower lifetime cost) and was wondering how my fridge did. Apparently by switching to an energy star fridge I will save up to $25 over five years.

Hmm. Looking back through the energy star records, my fridge missed the rating by a smidge and then was slightly upgraded in 07 to meet the new standard. That had to have been a good deal when they bought it. Much cheaper because it wasn’t energy star, but actually has the same efficiency as an actual energy star fridge. That is pretty awesome. Sort of maximizes two of my interests: long term and short term price management.

Unless there is a major technological breakthrough airline tickets will continue to become more and more expensive until only the super rich are able to afford to fly. The problem is that while it is reasonably straightforward to build a car that runs on electricity, it is generally of lower performance and to build a jet you need maximal performance, thus you need highly refined oil. The Financial Times looks at the problem in the short term:

British Airways last week reported record profits for the year to March and the first 10 per cent operating profit margin in its history.

And yet it also warned that $125 oil could wipe away the entire operating profit this year, without further cost-saving, fare increases and cuts in capital spending.

$135? How about $150? Or $200? British Airways is one of the most financially sound airlines around. The US airlines have all be scrimping on upgrades for years and thus have less fuel efficient jets. Expect US airline travel to become more unpleasant as oil prices continue to rise. I’ve already gotten an email from my airline this summer, letting me know that they changed my flight because they canceled the one I was on. I just hope they are still around long enough for me to make all my flights this summer.

I’ve always thought gas was underpriced in this country (making it harder for public transportation projects to fight for funding, etc.). I’ve also found the “we’ll it’s cheaper than starbucks!” argument pretty lacking as well though. Value can’t be compared on a straight gallon by gallon basis. But as gas gets more and more expensive I suppose we will see more and more of those comparisons. I like this one a bit more I think because it really shows a range of consumer products, from the necessary (milk @ $3/gal) to the useful (paint @$25/gal) to the luxury (nail polish @ $5760/gal). I’m not sure what it says about how we value things in society, but it does give some perspective.

I appear to be on a gun ownership kick lately. In any case it appears that in the most anti gun city in the country, city council members own guns. Not only that, but since the laws they passed on gun ownership are impossibly difficult to comply with, when they screw it up they change the laws so that they can keep their guns.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that anyone is surprised.

Saw the movie, then read the book. They were both very good, although I like the book better. Main differences: the movie portrays the family as the reason the boy ran off, but the book places the blame squarely on his shoulders. The book was actually very careful to present a number of possibilities of what was going through his head, but to steer clear of judging him. It actually breaks the fourth wall regularly, describing the author discussing the boy’s motivations and reasoning. Another difference is that the movie says that he mistook a poisonous plant for an edible one. Krakauer suggests however that the seeds of an edible plant were in fact poisonous, though not described as such in any current books. (He even went so far as to collect some and send them off to a lab for spectra-analysis, which showed that they were alkaloids.) All in all I came away from the book thinking that the kid was less ill prepared than I thought initially. Having said that, the book did drive home the fact that no matter how separated we may feel from those around us, we are always connected.

Another thing I got from the book is that living off the land is REALLY hard. At one point some Alaskans are saying that the boy would have had to be stupid to die in the woods given that the Inuit have lived off the land there for years. The author then points out that Inuit have also been known to starve to death over the years. Paraphrased: “The life of a hunter is a hard one, always on the move, always afraid that the next encounter will be missed and the food supply will dwindle.” Given my obsession with Peak Oil however I do now have the urge to go hunting and get good at it, before I have to be good at it. (Turns out the killing part is the easy part, turning the dead animal into meat that will last until you can eat it is much harder. Takes practice among other things, and is location dependent. Smoking is good in the south in the summer, and simply slicing into thin strips and drying is better in more alpine climes.)

And finally, I have a friend who likes to say if he doesn’t know what something is he puts it in his mouth to find out. Turns out this is not always the best idea.

Oh yeah, and always carry a map. The irony of the whole story is that he wanted to go “off the edge of the map” but he was never more than 6 miles from a cabin that possibly had supplies he could have used, and 16 miles from a road. There is no more off the map.

Mike posted a link to a rant about computer languages. I was just recently having this argument about whether to use SQL queries or do the work inline in the high level language (Java in my case). The conclusion was pretty much, “when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” One quote from the rant matches perfectly:

But what we wound up with was a bunch of entry-level programmers all around the world who know one language, whichever one it is, and they don’t want to switch. Switching languages: the second one is your hardest. Because the first one was hard, and you think the second one’s going to be that bad, and that you wasted the entire investment you put into learning the first one.

So, by and large, programmers – you know, the rank-and-file – they pretty much pick a language and they stay with it for their entire career.

Admittedly SQL v Java isn’t really a language issue, but I have seen this problem over and over again. One of my first clients was willing to blow two months of time for the entire dev team to have them switch from VB6 to C#, and the team wasn’t willing. They really did have that block of thinking that learning a new language was hard, not realizing that the vast majority of the skill-set transfers over.

From the ground to your car has a number of steps. Drilling, shipping (or flowing through pipelines), and refining. The drilling and shipping is normally done by the big oil companies who are making a pretty good profit right about now. Prices go up profit margins go up and all that. Of course as oil gets harder to get out of the ground, the price of drilling goes up, but over all the oil companies are doing ok. I am always trying to figure out why gas is so cheap though. If $20/barrel oil = $1/gal gas, you would think that $100/barrel would be $5 gas (modulo additives and sunk costs, like the refineries themselves).

Turns out the refineries are sort of taking some of that cost. I assume this is a what the market will bear situation, but it is interesting to note that independent refineries in the US are tanking in the stock market. Turns out their profit margin is way down. They rely on a heavy difference between the cost of oil and the cost of gasoline (the “crack” price) in order to maintain good cash flow to do maintenance and general operations on existing refineries. Not only that, but they also rely on that extra cash to make efficiency improvements. Unfortunately that crack price has dropped to record lows. One of the reasons that gas prices aren’t $5 yet is that the independent refineries are taking it on the chin. Unfortunately this also means that newer more modern and efficient refineries are not being built. As we learn to wean ourselves from oil we also need to be learning how to use what remains with the utmost efficiency. Right now it looks like the refining process may be one of the bottlenecks there.

On the plus side, they finally finished sequencing Trichoderma reesei and most Americans think that the world is running out of oil. Wow. I really didn’t expect that result at all.

Well, that’s one way to prepare for the coming oil apocalypse. I would highly recommend getting your FOID card however, before stocking up on weapons.

Also, if you are going to go all road warrior, you might want to pick something a little more wieldy than the 80 pound M2HB. When the world is out of gas, you have to carry your own guns.