Tons of Travel

I have been a lot of places lately. Here is my USA map:



The cyan states are places I have been before. The orange-ish states are those I have been to this year. We are talking feet on the ground, I don't count airplane fly-over.

I have traveled a good 6000 miles, even more if I did count flights.

There are clearly some road trips yet to do. I want to visit Florida, New England...Minnesota and the Dakotas.

I need to do an Elizabeth Town type road trip to Tennessee, Arkansas and Oklahoma. While I may not get to all the States this year, I could get pretty close.

What exactly does one see in North Dakota!?

=sw

Pandora

I really enjoy Pandora, the internet streaming music service that works like a radio station keyed to a single or group of seed artists to shape a program of songs in the user's preferred style.

It's pretty damn good and works rather well. It even digs into beloved album tracks you'd think would never get noticed. And the streaming is smart, pre-loading songs as much as possible to prevent mid-stream hiccups.

While Pandora is in stereo on broadband, it does run in Mono on the iPhone. However, that may be necessary to fly below the 115kpbs Edge network limits. 128kps or 160kbps mp3's in stereo won't fit, so 64kbps or 80kbps mono mp3's are used...see 160 > 115 while 80 < 115 so mono streaming works well generally, depending on Edge signal quality.



I tried going for a 4 mile walk the other night with Pandora playing on my iPhone (using the dedicated Pandora app). Walking around with Pandora on the iPhone is a surreal and wholly modern experience.

Walking around with Pandora on the iPhone is a surreal and wholly modern experience.

I realized I could not watch any marketing messages they might deliver while the iPhone was in my pocket.

I think Pandora offers a paid service, though to support the free service I could stand a 20-30 second audio ad every 3 songs or so. I think Pandora is a great evolution from traditional radio, though its very nature creates enormous licensing costs.

While Radio can pay one ASCAP fee for broadcasting a song to millions, Pandora is probably stuck with a fee per stream per user. There should be some middle ground license to allow Pandora's brilliant service to be more viable.

I get into Pandora, and who knew how much 80's hair band music made into my memory when I was a teenager. I can kind of tolerate it now, amazingly.

=sw

Captive Marketing

In Las Vegas flying US Airways I discovered that I would be hit up with credit card marketing from the gate to the plane.



When you pay an airline more than you would pay for a 4 star hotel room, then pay them extra for baggage and they still have to hit you up for a coke and market credit cards to you...you know they were not managed properly.

They all want to be listed first on the travel web sites as the cheapest. Though, you quickly learn, that despite having paid hundreds to be canned up and exposed to irradiating microwave radiation from space, you still can't get even a 1/2 can of soda if you didn't bring cash!!!

Baggage, drinks and good service should be included. Just show us the real prices for fuel and proper service!!! I predict US Airways is going to be gone or fail, if it hasn't done so already. It's a ridiculous flying experience. Maybe Delta will fix them.

From now on, Southwest and Delta have provided a good experience for me. I hear Virgin America and Continental are good options for being treated well for your investment in travel.

Marketing to me while I am confined to an airplane is so over and gone.

=sw

Things I hate about...

my iPhone:
Why can't my iPhone do picture messaging? Whatever political reason they have not to support it, it is not worth it.

What I get is a "viewmymessage.com" link with a cryptic, awful, impossible to memorize username and password. THEN, the viewmymessage site sometimes doesn't even work on the edge network!

What AT&T need to do is program the authentication info into the link they send me so I can tap and view the multimedia message immediately!

What is all this anyway? The iPhone should be the definition of multi-media mobile life. If picture messaging is not supported, the least they can do is make it easy to access in Safari!

I think AT&T and Apple need to get their show together. All the nice features of the iphone can easily get forgotten when something so obviously flawed and so regularly irritating happens. I am a hardcore Apple fan and I miss my Motorola Razor sometimes. It could shoot video, send and receive picture messages...and I could hack it to play any mp3 as a ring tone!

I want on my iPhone:
* Any ringtone from any mp3!!!
* Picture messaging!!!
* The ability to shoot video!!!

As it stands, these features are represented by a symbolically blank screen:


My iPhone is a computing device I have purchased. I want to be able to use it how ever I like.

These improvements are software, not beyond reasonable and I believe they are necessary to keep any reasonable person from wishing to dump their iPhone.

=sw

Why Drilling is Not the Answer

There is no doubt that I would board a yacht if a pretty brunette promised me there would be offshore drilling.

Our nation seems to be stuck in a similar trance. Even Democrats are approving more drilling.

Well over a decade ago, Carl Sagan warned that the climate consequences of human caused emissions would be vehemently denied, simply because the changes required would be so great.

The last thing we need to do is drill for more oil.



If we all had electric cars, they would emit less carbon dioxide even if we charged them on coal fired power. Also the coal is domestic not shipped from foreign sources often with destabilizing influence. Even this is a "step one", not a long term solution.

Solar Thermal power can spin turbines in the day and even store heat in molten salt at night. We could use Solar generated electricity to electrolyze and compress hydrogen for storage.



Bio fuels can be made from plants other than corn that can produce more alcohol per acre, more harvests per year and not compete for food growing lands. Swamp reeds like cat-tails have such benefits.



Wind power can be increased and a portion of it used to make and compress Hydrogen.

Even T.Boone Pickens makes a great point about switching to domestic natural gas. Driving a Honda Civic GX (Compressed Natural Gas model) is both cheaper (in terms of fuel costs) and emits far less CO2 than any hybrid. It is a cleaner way to use domestically sourced fossil fuels that is available now. That is a far better choice than finding more oil. Eventually, we'll want to get out of the fossil fuel business.

We could then clean the atmosphere using new carbon capture technology and renewable energy powered methods to store it in solids like sodium carbonate. There is already too much CO2 for us to contend with that we will not be able to avoid future serious impacts such as extreme weather, dust bowl droughts, sea level rise, cold snaps in places not adapted to them etc.

We don't need cheap oil now. We need to get off the oil! We need to invest in and develop what is at hand and already apparent and available.

Sometimes the debate in this country seems to legitimize the needs of those who would rape the planet and trod the less fortunate under their feet to enhance their own wealth before doing what is best for the ecosystem we all share and upon which we all rely. Such corruption is growing in big businesses of all kinds, though particularly in the energy sector.

I will vote for the candidate that supports renewable energy and rejects sacrificing the biosphere for the profits of a few.

=sw

On the Books

I see that these two sections are alphabetized. I also see a delightfully subversive message in this aisle title at the Salt Lake City Library.

While I was there I was thinking about the "New Powers" the government has. They can compile a list of what you check out and draw conclusions about you without taking a compelling interest in who you are and why you were curious about whatever you decided to check out or even perhaps "pick up" and read.

If you choose simply to expand your knowledge by reading books within the library, making the wrong choices of just what to read could get you branded negatively which could lead to being imprisoned or even executed for treason if the impression of you is blown out of proportion enough to get the attention of the President of the United States who could declare you an enemy.

We should be able to read and learn any knowledge our society concedes may have place in the library for increasing our knowledge without creating a record of what we read and without any obstruction or interest whatsoever by any other person.

Should someone commit a crime, such as conspiracy to do harm, certainly they may be accused and prosecuted. We should not all start out as criminals. I am sick of feeling I cannot use the library, internet or other sources of knowledge without being watched over.

Some rationalize "I have nothing to hide". This is not what it is about. It is not freedom to be so observed. It is unacceptable.

I feel the same way about bank account reports, despite the obvious usefulness for finding criminal behavior. If criminal behavior is suspected in a specific case, the law enforcement agent representing the people of this country may seek a warrant to investigate that individual. How have we tolerated that our accounts should automatically light warning lamps in government offices?

Can someone explain to me where the civil liberties of the law abiding citizen have gone? I will have privacy and the presumption of innocence. I will not quarter soldiers within my home, accounts or computers. These are my constitutional rights.

Where is our America?

=sw

SMS Price Gouging

I am tired of the SMS price Gouging.

SMS, or Short Messaging Service allows you to send text to other cell phone users whose phone's support text messages.

Companies charge $5 for 200 or 20 cents a message. These kinds of prices figure at about a THOUSAND DOLLARS per Megabyte....$1000/ MB.

That is ridiculous. I have unlimited data on my iPhone for $20/ month. That could be many megabytes even gigabytes of data transfer. This awful price gouging for short text messages should not be tolerated. I am paying for access to the data network. I wish they would just figure out how to price that right and stop trying to scrape and gouge customers using small amounts of data that can simply be marketed differently. I am tired of being told how to use that access to the network and that some uses are more costly than others. Especially when the costlier uses have a very small data footprint but simply have a larger marketability.

The cell phone vendors need to remember what their product is, interconnectivity, not tying to fake us out and control how we use data. I want to be able to make a ring tone of what ever I want to as well. Presume I paid for the CD or digital download!!

And my rant is spent.

=sw

Test of Basic Skills

Passing through Iowa I had a "What the Fuck is this!?" moment.

I know truck stops hear what people are willing to spend for specialty coffee drinks and they decide they can "pull this off" and the following happens...This is going to read a bit like "How it's made" but believe me...it's how it's not made.

I order a Latte from the menu for between 3-4 dollars. I ask for a double shot.

The server gets a waxy 20 ounce soda cup. She reaches for a coffee globe with drip coffee in it...fills the cup. She grabs the vanilla flavoring...administers exactly 2 shots of that into the cup then begins to mix in the flavoring with what looks like a milkshake blender machine. I realize there is no espresso machine nor espresso in sight.

The lid-less beverage IS slightly bubbly on top and looks a tan color, until after a few sips it is black coffee again.

They have cardboard hand protectors, at least, but no 20 oz. lids to be had. The server...one could never call her a barista until some steam or milk entered the scene... jams what looks like a clear domed slurpee cap with a big hole in the top onto the cup.

Voila!

And I think to myself...WTF is this? What planet am I on? I don't even have the patience or stomach to inform them how clueless they are...which is why they will never learn, as I am sure others feel the same way.

Latte...does mean "Milk" in Italian right!?

I was dismayed. When you are aching for a Latte...entered a building with a giant red Cafe sign...you dream of getting what you want. I learned...in some states...Cafe means "bacon and eggs at all hours" and trendy coffee drinks have a high profit margin, but are cheap fakers. It's amazing they have caffeine in them at all. It sure makes Salt Lake seem cosmopolitan by comparison.

WTF did I just say?

=sw

Managed Fusion Power

The wild and free Sun, our local deep space campfire, is powered by condensed hydrogen atoms that as they get mashed by gravity, they heat up and merge (or fuse) to form Helium atoms.



This process releases a photon each time.

All that Hydrogen, which was really about all there was before the Universe condensed into stars, galaxies etc., creates a lot of energy and light as it fuses into Helium. The Sun is also, to use a scientific description, frikken huge. Its diameter is 68+ times that of the earth. So the way we get our life sustaining energy is from a big wild roiling explosive ball of nulear fusion.

The Sun is an entirely unmanaged resource. Or it seems about as well managed as an energy source as a BP Texas oil refinery. So much of the energy of the Sun just jets into space in random explosions.

It would be amazing if we could use Hydrogen to make a star that was carefully managed from the start. It could be steadily fueled and waste products somehow safely purged. We could maybe even design a star to live far longer that our Sun.

Our star, SOL, is among the longer lived star types. Some are so massive that they explode and die far sooner compared to other stars. The solar sphere is so vast and yet only a comparatively small bit of that energy strikes the Earth. A carefully designed, planned and managed star could be a stable reliable source of energy for many worlds for billions more years than the 5 billion our star will burn.

The work of replicating the Sun's energy system is in progress in the study of Fusion reactors

We need the supernovas and red giants of the universe to manufacture elements of higher atomic number in their violent death throes.

It just seems to me that if the Sun were an engine, that has a lot of torque but randomly backfires and blows seals, we'd see it as needing design improvements.

Not that I am complaining about my current solar-powered existence.

=sw

Killer Cover

I can trust the Killers with Joy Division covers. That is saying a lot. They made it "poptastic" as Stephen Morris (Joy Division / New Order drummer) would say while keeping the feel of soldiering jangly guitars and the driving bass line. I simply love it.

It even has a nice instrumental that is really New Orderish for a Joy Division cover.



Yewchube rules...though it is in MONO...which is lame.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIe3IgmdSlI

=SW