Things that are a pain in the a$$

Apple and Google (Picasa) take the honors today... First, the scenario. I purchased an external hard drive to put my iTunes and Photos on as my puny 38GB drive was consumed and I could barely bring up the machine without bizzare disk related problems. The biggest culprits were iTunes and Picasa (photos) so I thought to my self, "self, why not move the big stuff to the BIG drive?"

Woe is me... Two days and many hours later, I finally got iTunes move, while Picasa files are still not complete... I cannot believe something this obvious to want to do is SO HARD!

Damn all software people... :-(

My, this is depressing. The guy is sitting out earth day. But, I totally get his lament about ethanol and wonder why the goverment is not getting real here?

http://www.news.com/8301-10787_3-9925556-60.html

Is ANYONE aware of a good reason for ethanol?? Hmmm...

Go see Leatherheads - George Clooney

I was reading that Clooney's new flick, Leatherheads was not doing all that well, which is a crime if you ask me. The movie was outrageously funny and well acted by all involved. Neat premise and original... C'mon people! They'll stop making movies like this if we don't go see them!!

My Favorite Quotes

I thought I would share a few of my favorite quotes! Enjoy

============================================

The nicest thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
Ken Olsen (1926 - ), founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be."
-- Lord Kelvin

"Once is Happenstance. Twice is Coincidence. The third time its Enemy action". -- Goldfinger

‘all models are wrong, some are useful’ -- George Box, the industrial statistician

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will do.” – Chinese Proverb
“If you don’t know where you are at, a map won’t help” – Watts Humphrey

“Take the thing WITH wheels, to the thing without” – unnamed staff sergeant chastising two airman hauling huge crates to a truck across a field while on a deployment

“Warning shots are NOT authorized” - sign on an airfield near the flight line

“People are just DYING to get in there…” – Lucy Busken (rip), when driving past cemeteries

“I was wrong once, I thought I made a mistake…” – anonymous

“A fool with a tool is still a fool” – common process improvement wisdom
“Buying Microsoft Project DOES NOT make you a project manager” – Moser’s corollary to above

“Anything worth buying once is worth buying twice” – Tom Cornell, Digital Equipment Corporation

“What part of NO don’t you understand?” – Tom Cornell lecturing customer VP asking repeated stupid questions, shortly before being asked to not return to the account…

“The consultants dilemma – if the customer is always right, what do you do when they are wrong?” Tom Cornell – Digital Equipment Corporation

“Pounds of paper and time on site” – two most important metrics for a consultant

“Must wear a suit, have a briefcase, and arrive on an airplane” – qualifications for being a consultant

Black Hole Destroys the Universe?

Want interesting, here's one: http://techfreep.com/worlds-largest-supercollider-could-destroy-the-universe.htm

According to this, the new supercollider being put in place in Switzerland could produce a black hole that would eat the entire world, and perhaps even the universe! :-)

How's that for an EndGame...

Shell Oil weighs in?

Well, we've heard from Mr. Jensen, and now that my Ad-sense thinks I'm an energy nut I'm seeing all kinds of stuff. Most notably stuff from Shell Oil. They had a bunch of information about their scenario play, one of which is the SCRAMBLE scenario where we do a crappy job of dealing with energy, and the other called BLUEPRINTS which implies we do something reasonable. I have not read through it all yet, but I plan to and will make a post about it when I get the chance. In the meantime, this link is kind of interesting: http://realenergy.shell.com/?lang=en&page=homeFlash

More later...

Are we in the EndGame?

OK: Long time no blog... First let me say I'm going to pass on waxing too eloquent on this... I did some browsing around on this and found many eggheads far more intellectual than I on this one... (Disclaimer... I'm not some psuedo-liberal arrogant intellectual... I'm just a blue collar guy with a white collar job who likes to read and finds this stuff "interesting.") For example, this guy http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2006/08/10.html knows how to save the world... What can poor old me say to that! Hell, he actually digested all TWENTY premises!

Or maybe this guy (http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/engel08122006/) who is a TYPE A pessimist and thinks a few million, maybe even a few billion gotta die before humanity comes back into equilibrium with mother earth.

So what's my bottom line on all this... Mostly, its "but of course it about the oil" silly... I always find it amusing when my liberal friends tell me that the damn war is about oil like its not entirely obvious. Of course its about the oil, what the hell else is it about. And while I don't claim to have access to the numbers, its certainly my gut that the oil is running out and fast... I thought that BEFORE $4.00 a gallon gas, and I figure if our esteemed government isn't working on Plan B, then we are in a world of shit. But I also realize that whatever plan B is, it is not here now and unless we are willing to roll over and die we better be doing whatever we can to ensure that the places that are delivering up the oil aren't run by nut-jobs or people who would like to spit in our eye. You come into my house and try and turn out the lights and take all my food and leave me without the means to exist (or in a far worse state) then we have a problem. Whatever lunacy led us to put ourselves at the mercy of these people is almost irrelevant at this point, because put ourselves at their mercy we did. So we fight and we better hope we win, not retreat back with our tails between our legs. In the meantime, we better hope like heck that the Chinese and the Indians and whomever else is hostage to the oil addiction don't notice we are setting up camp because I suspect its going to get worse before it gets better...

Which then brings us to the end of civilization... I'm enough of an optimist to hope that science will come up with some reasonable solution to the energy problem, or we will figure out how to exist with a lot less of it, but if we aren't working on that problem right now, then we are deep kimshee... The alternative probably is the ENDGAME, but if anyone thinks that a bunch of pinko activists blowing up dams is going to bring that around in an orderly fashion while a few billion people disappear, then those guys got more problems than us industrialists... So while Derrick and crew are blowing stuff up and trying to figure out how to live on nuts and berries along with 250 million of their closest friends, I'm hoping there is SOMEONE in this crazy country looking into hydrogen fuel cells or better solar or something...

So to sum it up... Mr. Jensen clearly sees the problem... Civilization is killing the planet and its pretty obvious that the abundant and cheap energy that powers our economy and way of life is going to be in short supply, and if we don't have a plan B, we are in a "hurtin' status" ... War and chaos or rolling over to die will be our choices. While I like camping on occasion, I'm not sure there's enough "landbase" around to support us all going camping at once, so we better hope Mr. Jensen and his ilk are too pessimistic about this whole thing...

Oh well, I'm off to plant a garden in my tiny backyard... *sigh*