In Response

Looking at one of my previous posts you would probably like to know that good things happened in the world and iTunes will now be only providing DRM free music. 

It’s ironic that the comic was posted and within a month of it, there was no more DRM on iTunes.  You should note though, that if you decide to start purchasing music on iTunes that they’ll learn things about you.  Things like: what music you listen to, how often you load it to your iPod, how many times you have listened to it, how many people in your neighborhood listened to it, etc…

So stealing for some of us may still be the only option, but DRM free is a good step in the right direction.

Just In Case You Were Interested

On The Power Consumption of Cars

There are a lot-o cars in the world at last count. According to the current statistics there are enough cars in the US for every man, woman, and child in the US to drive a car.  With the rapid development of the 3rd world the number of automobiles in the world is likely to geometrically increase over the next several years.

Taking a look at the power consumption of cars should be a very important task for me and everyone. So the first major analysis is going to be of the amount of energy that goes into the creation and running of a typical motor vehicle. This analysis is going to take into account several things that aren't normally accounted for in quick analyses of products.

Here is a quick list of the things I intend to review:

• Cost of manufacturing.
  
• Cost to transport the car from the factory.
  
• Cost to create the fuel, and the fuel storage system in the case of batteries and in other cases.
  
• Cost to run the vehicle based on the average driven millage in the United States.

Cost is going to be defined as the ‘energy’ cost for the vehicle.  I’m going to break it down into work or Joules for those of you that are interested.  That way everything will be on a level playing field and we can compare apples to apples, instead of ourang-outang to amoeba.

All Electric Cars

So, I got to thinking because of a wonderful piece that I heard on 'Talk of The Nation: Science Friday." The particular episode that I'm interested in was a piece about the viability of plug-in cars, or all electric cars. You can review the article here. During the show there was not a lot of time spent analyzing the actual cost of every car in the US being powered by purely electricity. Since I'm a glutton for punishment, I'm going to try and quantify those variables and see what it would really cost the US in electricity to power the nations automobiles.

Obviously this experiment is going to have some caveats. For example, no time soon will there be freight going by purely electric means. This means: Trains, Trucks, Cranes, Construction Vehicles, Mining Vehicles, etc. So to limit the scope of understanding, I'm going to look at purely consumer, what I'm going to call, "Point-A to Point-B" cars that are meant for personal transport only. The last assumption is the destruction of SUV's because all-y'all that are still driving SUV's are not eco-friendly and this analysis will assume that we're all going to simpler cars. We can analyze in the future what it would take to power such a vehicle, but that is a paper for another time.

I guess that is good to get things started. I'm going to make this the first post for this series of posts and look at the research with further posts. I will combine all the posts into a final white paper at the end but I want to track the progress of research with cataloged posts.

TTFN

"powered by purely electricity" should be "powered purely by electricity"

nations needs an apostrophe - Comments from Brett 'The Defender' Ship

Why Linux Wins

This was pointed out to me on xkcd by a friend of mine. Linux always wins... Long live SUDO.

Animaniacs - A Geography Lesson

One of the favorite cartoons that was on Saturday morning cartoons was Animaniacs. As I grow up I realize how well it was written and how much humor the didn't necessarily write for kids. This though is a geography lesson that they put on the show every once and while. It is very good and I enjoy reliving my childhood.

Brainman

This is a documentary about Chris Tammet. He is a savant living in the UK. (Follow the link to learn more about that word.) He has the ability to do multiple powered numbers in his head, as well as learn languages very fast. In this documentary he learns Icelandic in one week. If you have 40 extra minutes, give it a watch.

Brett's Kaiten Sushi ADVENTURE

I don't know if anyone knows Brett or not, but he is a good friend of mine from high school that moved himself to Japan after he graduated from college.

This is an awesome video that he did while he was at a Kaiten Sushi in Japan. For those of you that don't know; Kaiten Sushi serves the sushi on a little tray that rolls around on a conveyor belt. When you want something, you just grab it as it is coming around and eat it. You pay for everything when you're done eating.

What Brett did in this video was put his digital camcorder on the conveyor belt in an empty spot to capture peoples reactions or inactions as it goes around the restaurant.

Enjoy!

Robert Jordan - A Memory of Light

It looks like they found someone other than Harriet to write the last book. For those of you that don't know; the Wheel of Time has been this long stretching epic fantasy series that has captured many fans. I'm personally a fan and have been reading since book 4 came out on shelves.

One of the largest complaints that was had about the series, after book 4 was that Harriet, Robert Jordan's wife had a significant writing influence on 3 of the middle books. These books while not bad, weren't nearly as good as the previous books in the series and fans rejoiced with the last several books as Robert took back his lead.

As things would have it though, Robert sadly died on September 16th, 2007 and there has been a great fear that Harriet was going to be the ghost writer that finished the series. Thankfully that isn't going to be the case and a new person has stepped up. That person is going to be Brandon Sanderson. It looks like Brandon has done several other fantasy series but I haven't read a single one of them, so I don't know if he is going to be the guy that does it for us.

You can look at the official Robert Jordan Blog which has a post by Harriet and you can also look at Brandon Sanderson's page to get a feel for who he is. Good luck to us all.


Official Robert Jordan Blog Post About Brandon

Brandon Sanderson Official Web Page

Time for Some Hellboy

Scheduled for July 08. Check out this trailer.

Google Orkut Woes

Here is an article that came across DarkNet yesterday. It seems that Google's Orkut service is have a little worm problem. It isn't an everyone feature, it has to do with the 'Scrap Book' feature on the service. An update to the user that generates a 'Scrap Book' entry sounds like it has an embedded javascript in it.

Now, this really isn't an example of a large corporation making a flounder. What it is, is an example of a social networking being exploited by criminals. I know there are some that would be quick to jump on Google, I'm sure that with some time they will have the situation fixed.

Anyways, just so you all know, don't use the 'Scrap Book' feature on Orkut, or at least don't respond to updates from unknown people.

Article Link: Worm Spreading Fast on Google's Social Network Orkut

Simply Recepies

Simply Recipes is a food blog that I subscribe too. The author Elise has some great stuff on there, and an awesome back catalog of great food for people to enjoy. I love to cook.

Here is a link to a cookie recipe for the kids and looks to be a lot of fun to make.

Stained Glass Cookies

That is all.

First Post

Purpose of this blog:

• To maintain a log and journal of what I do.
  
• To keep a repository of all the cool things that I find on the internet.
  
• To keep everyone up to date on the latest breaking news in technology, security and the world.

That is most of what will be here. There may be every once and while be something else, but not often.