One this leak is stopped, most of you will go back to your lives and your chief worry will be about how much this disaster will affect oil prices and thus the price of a gallon of gas at the pump. And, of course, that’s the problem, the real reason that these things happen. Too few Americans feel any need to concern themselves about environmental issues, or about the other consequences of our addition to oil.

Every time you use some oil, whether it’s as gasoline in your car, plastics in consumer goods, electricity generated by oil burning plants, or even adding a can of lubricant to your car, you contribute to a host of problems that at first seem unrelated. But just for fun, lets consider them.
Here’s a brief list. It’s not comprehensive. When you use oil:

• Much of the money you spend goes to governments that are hostile to the U.S. The money behind 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia, a country that is supposed to be our ally, but also the country from which most of the funding for Islamic terrorists originates. We also get oil from several African countries run by brutal dictators.Most of the big oil companies are so coddled by our government that they pay little or no taxes. It makes you wonder why we allow such cozy relationships between the safety regulators and the oil companies when these companies put us at risk for catastrophic environmental damage but pay no taxes.
• You contribute to green house warming, now called Climate Change. Recent evidence indicates that the changes we’ve already triggered in our climate may take place far faster than anyone wants to believe. We could see sea levels start to rise rapidly and see a transition to much warmer temperatures in as little as fifty years. There is evidence of such rapid climate transitions in the stalagmites found in blue holes in the Bahamas.
• You help set the stage for ecological disasters like the Exxon Valdez and the Gulf spill. Like it or not, all of us who use gasoline are as much part of the problem as BP is. We’ve known for forty years that it is foolish to depend on fossil fuels and foreign governments for our energy, but we’ve done little or nothing to correct the problem.
• You use up a finite resource. Eventually, we’ll run out of oil. Long before that, it will become far too expensive to use for energy production.

There are tens of thousands of oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico. There is no reason to believe that any of those wells are run any more responsibly than this well was. That means we are at immediate risk for more spills just like this one or perhaps worse. In fact, it is inevitable. There is no way to predict and allow for every possible eventuality. Sometimes, you just have to make the decision that the cost to our environment has to be figured into these decisions and we have to say no.

Contrary to the right-wing alarmists, shifting away from oil isn’t going to cause some horrible catastrophic economic downturn. There’s no reason for that to happen at all. In fact, if we can simply start to reduce our dependence on oil by two to three percent per year, we can stave off much more expensive problems, and possibly even avoid the worst of the possible Climate Change scenarios.

There are two ways to reduce our dependance on oil. We can conserve, and we can use renewable sources of energy.
Conservation is much easier than it used to be. Simply getting everyone to shift to Compact Florescent bulbs will save lots of energy. If you want to do your part, that’s a great place to start. Getting a plug-in hybrid, pure electric, or even just a very efficient automobile will also help our nation make the transition. Recycling aluminum saves enormous amounts of energy. Extracting aluminum from ore is a very energy hungry process, while recycling uses only a tiny fraction of that energy.

There are many people who are terrified of change, or so heavily invested in the status quo, that they refuse to acknowledge what’s happening. They claim climate change is some kind of liberal conspiracy. But even if Climate Change were not an issue, oil is still a bad idea, because the supply is finite and because the oil industry bleeds money out of our pockets and puts it in the hands of people who have no loyalty and no love for us or our country.

It doesn’t take much on your part to make a difference. Recycle, Conserve, and let your elected representatives know that reducing our dependance on polluting fossil fuels is important to you.

I’m going to try developing some apps for the Android. So I’ll be writing more once I’ve had a chance to try it out. The charging light just turned green, which means I can play!

—

Well, I mostly love my Nexus One and Android, but with any open system, there are some issues. The most annoying of which is the infamous FC or Force Close, which happens when there is an unrecoverable error in an application or when the system runs out of resources. Your phone can be working fine, then you load a few new applications and all of a sudden you can’t do a thing because of the constant Force Close messages.

I’m not as frustrated as I might be with another phone. For one thing, I can hook up a debugger and see what’s going on, making it a bit easier to figure stuff out.

Since Android runs on lots of different phones, it has to deal with a lot of different configurations. Android developers don’t have the luxury of knowing the exact hardware configuration their software is expected to run on.

Another contributing factor to some of the problems people have been having is the comparative ease with which you can develop Android apps. That might sound contradictory, but the ease with which you can develop and publish an application is deceptively easy. There seem to be a lot of first-time developers who are writing applications for the first time.

– more later –

A fellow writer, Jennifer Rogala, asked me to help out on her latest project, a writing contest for local school kids. She asked me to do the artwork for the award certificates. I agreed, figuring I’d do something simple, but when I heard the theme for the contest, “Facing Your Fears”, I had all kinds of ideas.

Heather has been doing some really nice work with colored pencils and digital photography where she composes an image from digital photographs and uses that as a guide for the colored pencil rendering. It’s painstaking work. What I liked about it was that it was perfect for my idea, because I wanted the certificate artwork to have a handmade feel. So I asked her to help me out and she generously agreed.

The idea I settled on was a scary bedroom filled with childhood fears. In the center I placed an empty bed with the shadows of two long arms coming out from underneath. A huge spider is dangles over the bed, and there is a scary clown in a poster over the bed and peeking out from the closet.

I spent about two weeks modeling the room and composing the shot. Once I was done, I produced a rendered image twice the size it would be on the certificate. Heather took that, desaturated it, and printed it out to use as a guide for her work. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the image got clipped when it was printed for her, and now the proportions were off a bit.

Heather worked furiously for the next two and a half days to turn my digital rendering into the hand drawn bedroom in the end result, fixing many small mistakes I’d made She makes it look easy, but it’s a lot of work. When she was done, she scanned the image back in and gave it back to me.

While Heather did her part, I worked on the lettering for the certificate. I fired up Open Office Writer and created a document which would be the template for the final certificates. I put in all the lettering and added input fields for the name of the student and the name of the story.

Here’s the artwork:

Finished poster

Background art for certificate, by Heather

Finished Certificate

Peacock Valley, Pavonis Mons, Mars – 2589 A.D.

A hole in the sky.

That wasn’t what Jake Carpenter expected to encounter when he’d set out flying that day. He’d just wanted to enjoy the sensation of riding the thermals over Lake Burroughs, hitching a free ride until they broke against the top of the sky at the membrane that covered the Pavonis Mons Caldera and protected Peacock Valley from the frigid temperatures and near vacuum normally found at the summit of the third largest volcano in the solar system.

He was just reaching the top of a thermal, almost eight kilometers above the valley floor, when he noticed a strange cloud off towards the northwestern wall of the valley. The cloud was right up against the sky membrane, and it looked like it was pinned in place, roiling and squirming like a trapped thing. He’d never seen anything like it in all his years of flying.

—

Hope to post more later.

What happens when you take a small town in Maine and surround it by an invisible barrier that prevents anything from passing except tiny amounts of air and water? That’s where King starts. The fictional town of Chester Mills, Maine becomes a pressure cooker in which ordinary small town people are reduced to their essential natures. Some rise to the challenge to become heroes, and others, who would have been nothing more than petty scoundrels are forged into monsters. King shows how the sins of the past can define an individual for the better or the worst.

I really enjoyed this novel. I think it ranks up there with The Stand and the Gunslinger Series as one of King’s best works.

My first thought was that this had something to do with the digital changeover, since the problem seemed to start about that time. I first tried the usual stuff, like resetting the cable box and the TIVO, but neither of those seemed to do the trick. I googled the problem, looking for TIVO, Comcast, “This channel will be available shortly,” but didn’t find anything right off that suggested a solution. So, I sent emails to both Comcast and TIVO technical support to see if they had heard of this problem and how to solve it.

I went back to googling and found a couple of forums where there were active discussions. One guy suggested that Comcast might be sending updates to the cable boxes on the hour, and if I started recordings a minute early, that might fix it.

I tried the record early fix and it didn’t work.

By this time, Comcast got back to me with a formula answer. From what it said, it was clear that once the tech saw TIVO, her brain shut down and she just copied in some boilerplate text that said they didn’t support TIVO … blah blah blah.

Another suggestion was made on the forum: try switch to the IR Blaster for channel changing. That made some sense, so I tried it. No joy.

Finally, I stopped including TIVO in my search criteria, and found that lots of people who’d just installed cable splitters were having these problems, and it seemed that when the signal was a little weak, for some reason the channels that would go out were all low numbered, just like what we’d been seeing.

My wife, Heather, spent some quality time with the nest of cables in back of the TV, and came out of it with several loops of cable she’d eliminated plus a splitter and amplifier she’d managed to eliminate. She’d also tightened all the connections up. That solved the problem.

So, bottom line is, if you encounter this problem, try making sure that all your cable connections are secure, that all unused connectors have terminators on them, and that you don’t use any more cable or splitters than you absolutely have to. Hopefully, you’ll find the problem easier than we did.

Right now, health care insurers work like a virtual monopoly. They simply don’t compete in many areas. That’s because they are afraid that if one of them starts to clean up it’s act, they’ll all have to follow suit, and that would me lower profits for themselves and their share holders. So you don’t seem them advertising about how they’ll drop pre-exisiting condition clauses, or guarantee that you don’t lose your insurance when you get sick. The best way for them to make profits is to collect as much money in premiums as they can, without paying any of it out. That way, money can be paid to stock holders instead of paying for patient care.

I love the idea of insurance co-ops, and it’s one of those things that should have happened a long time ago. In a co-op, just in a banking co-op, the insurance company will actually be owned by the customers. If you are paying in on an insurance policy, you are a part owner of the co-op. There are no share holders, so all the money, in theory, can be used to run the company and pay medical bills. The problem is that co-ops will be under exactly the same pressures as the private insurance companies. They will quickly realize that they will have lower costs if no one is sick, and since healthy members will outnumber sick ones, it is easy to see what could happen. Insurance co-ops might become even more draconian than the private insurance companies when it comes to trying to keep sick people off the rolls.

The public option would give us an insurance plan run by the government that would never refuse someone, and could provide good basic care at reasonable prices. In order to be attractive, private and co-op insurance would have to beat the public option.

Just by having the option in place, a lot of waste will go away. We won’t have hospitals constantly trying to shuffle poor and homeless people out the door. The hospitals won’t have their emergency rooms crowded with people who may or may not be able to pay. Since people will have insurance, hopefully they will go to doctors before they get so sick they need emergency services. That might actually make it easier to get care

There are a lot of details to be worked out, but I believe that the best system right now would include a public option and insurance co-ops and that they should be given as much freedom to compete against private companies as possible. There also need to be provisions that will keep private insurance companies from just dumping expensive patients into the public and co-op systems. But I think we have a good start here, as long as we hold onto the public option.

Unfortunately, the option I think is the best, a single payer system where we can choose between a number of insurance companies, including public and co-op, but it’s all paid for by the government, is apparently off the table. You don’t hear about this much in the press, but if you look at the boards of directors of media companies and those of pharmaceutical companies, it’s not hard to figure out why. Take a look at this article for more: Single-Payer & Interlocking Directorates

There is a lot that can be done directly, but the various special interest want to cloud the issue so as little as possible is done. For instance, we could simply pass a law that says that insurance companies can not pick and choose. If an applicant can pay the premiums, the insurance company must accept them. No forcing people with pre-exisiting conditions to wait a year or two before they are covered. As long as you make the rules the same for everyone, it would work just fine.

When you don’t have insurance, what do you do? You don’t go to the doctor. You keep hoping you’ll get better. Sometimes that works. Sometimes you just die. But too many times, you wait too long and then you wind up going to the emergency room. By then, what you have is very serious and it costs a whole lot of money to fix it.

How do I know? Because it happened to me when I was twenty. I got sick but had no insurance. If I had gone to the doctor and been properly diagnosed, it would have costs less than ten dollars a month to treat my disease. Instead, I didn’t go in until I was nearly dead and had to be carried in by friends. I had to spend two days in intensive care and another twelve days in a ward. It cost over twenty thousand dollars, and that was almost thirty years ago. I’m sure it would have cost a lot more now.

I’ve talked to other people who have the same disease I had, which is chronic, and many of them didn’t have insurance. They also couldn’t afford the medicine. So, in one man’s case, he would be back at the hospital every couple of months. He’d use up resources and take up a be for several days before he’d be well enough to leave. He couldn’t hold down a job because of his frequent absence due to his illness. He had to get by with day labor. If he’d had insurance, his disease could have been managed as mine was after my incident in the hospital. I only went into the hospital because of that disease one more time, and that was fifteen years later, and it was to have the offending organ removed.

Treating that poor gentleman probably cost far more than my insurance premiums. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that treating him cost more in a single year than my insurance has cost myself and my employers that whole time.

I suspect that the man I’m refering to is probably dead by now, even though he was the same age as I was. Had he had insurance he could have worked a better job. He would have been a productive member of society. Instead he wound up having a miserable, and probably short, life. If I’d not been very lucky, that could have been me. It could have been you.

My father did some work for a hospital down in Florida. He was a marketing consultant. They asked him about a problem they had. They were a private hospital, but they were the only game in town, and never turned anyone away who needed care. They had just invested in a couple of birthing rooms.

Unfortunately, because of the way the county was zoned, everyone was either VERY rich, or VERY poor. The very poor women in the comunity were coming in with premature labor, underweight sick babies. The hospital often had to use the birthing rooms for these indigent patients. It was costing them a great deal of money.

My father made a simple suggestion: he told them that the best way to solve this problem was to send a van out to the poor part of the county once a week. The nurses in the van sought out pregnant women and taught them about proper diet, excercise, and the need to refrain from drug use. The nurses also handed out pregnancy vitamins and helped the women have full term pregnancies, which resulted in healthier babies.

The hospital was able to go back to charging an arm and a leg for the birthing rooms. The poor women in the community were taken care of and had healthier babies. The van and the nurses cost the hospital some money, but far less than the profits they were losing on the birthing rooms.

Good community healthcare just makes sense and it saves money.

The first thing to do is go to the documentation for your motherboard and see what standards your power supply must meet to be compatible. Usually this is only a problem if you’re trying to re-use an older power supply.

Next, you need to figure out how much power you really need. The best way to do this is use a power supply calculator. If you google for one, you’ll get a lot of links to the eXtreme PSU calculator, http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp , which charges for advanced features. The advanced features include amperage requirements for each voltage, so it’s probably worth the $1.95 they ask for.

Antec has a free PSU calculator at http://www.antec.outervision.com/ which will let you list your CPU, video cards, etc.  Unfortunately, it calculates a very low value for my configuration, only 509 watts. It actually takes an 800W PSU for my system, and even that is somewhat borderline. The biggest problem is that it doesn’t tell you what amperage you need on the various voltages.

The key value, lately, is the 12V requirement. High end video cards have enormous appetites for power and most of it comes from the 12V line. Often, a single graphics card will demand more than the common 20A limit on most 12V rails. You can usually find this number listed in the detailed specifications for your video card. For instance, the latest nVidia video card, the 295, nVidia recommends a 590W PSU.

The nVidia GeForce 295 demands a whopping 289W all by itself. That means at least 24 A on the 12V line, and since you can only be sure of 80% efficiency, you want at least 30 A. (I got this number by taking the wattage requirement and dividing by 12 volts to get amps.) If you were to select a PSU with multiple rails, you’d have to make sure that at least one of the rails could carry 30 A.

A single rail design shares the power among all the users of the 12V line,

TERMINOLOGY: Many PSU vendors divide up the 12V line into multiple “rails,” often four or more.  Each rail has it’s own individual capacity and is isolated from the rest of the system. That means that if you have one device that needs more power than it’s rail is rated for, it’s out of luck, even if there are several unused rails. For this reason, it’s generally best to go with a single rail system. (Single rail does not mean there is only a single cable, just that all the cables draw from the same 12V source.)

PC Power & Cooling has a great page on terminology: http://www.pcpower.com/technology/terminology/

Modular cables are also attractive but can introduce noise and power fluctuations. I haven’t tried one yet, but probably will, despite the dire warnings, because of how difficult it can be to work with the huge mass of cables that come out of most PSUs.

Also, make sure that the wattage being reported is the power delivered for continuous, full-load operation. Often this isn’t reported, or the testing is done at artificially low temperatures, like 80 F when a more realistic temperature is 104 F .

Another consideration is the efficiency of your new PSU.  These days,the better PSU are certified as being 80% efficient or better. Typical PSUs of the past often didn’t get into the high seventies. That can make a big difference.  A 750@ PSU at 83% efficiency really gives you 662 Watts. At 70% you get only 525 W.

Enthusiast System Architecture

nVidia has come out with something called the Enthusiast System Architecture, or ESA, which is meant to enable PC components like the chassis, PSU, and water cooling systems, to communicate their state in real time, making it possible to react to changes rapidly. This is a real boon for people who want to try overclocking, or just those who want to build a super reliable system. But it has to be supported by your motherboard, too.

 Recommendations

In the future, I’ll be buying PC Power and Cooling power supplies because they have an excellent reputation and everyone I talk to who has had one has sworn they’ll never go with anything else.

I hope this rambling helps someone. I’ll try to find some more good related links and post them.

LINKS:

I found a great PSU calculator that also figures what you need for your backup UPS:

http://web.aanet.com.au/SnooP/psucalc.php