everyday

via: Digg

Google has created a page where you can see the results of the ginormous solar panel project. Kudos to Google for making such a huge effort!

Google Solar Panel Project

I have been giving some thought to sustainable living recently. While not affluent enough to make major changes in my lifestyle, I have done a couple of things that I think help out.

I have completely eschewed the use of traditional light bulbs in favor of Compact Fluorescent (CFL) light bulbs. This may not seem like a big change, but if everyone did this the amount of energy saved in California alone would be staggering. In addition to their energy savings, CFLs have a much longer life expectancy, so the damage done to the environment during production of the lamp and it’s packaging should be significantly less than an ordinary light bulb.

I have recently become the proud owner of a Honda Civic, which I lovingly call my “Ferrari”. The 2007 Honda Civic LX gets 32 MPG in the city and 38 MPG on the highway (mine get slightly less than that as I did not get the automatic transmission). While not anywhere near the MPG ratings of a “hybrid”, I think that this was a very green choice for me. I have some reservations over hybrids due to the manufacturing problems associated with their large batteries. Also, when the car eventually reaches the end of it’s service life there will be an additional problem with the batteries. I think hybrids are a step in the right direction, but I am not ready to support them yet. They also have a rather high price penalty at the moment.

The final act in my quest to live greener is the act of simply living in an apartment, although this isn’t necessarily by choice! I would certainly prefer living in a single family home, as it provides benefits for raising a family that cannot be had in higher density housing. For now though, I am satisfied with our choice of apartment living.

What’s next? Well, I am not sure. I have recently investigated the use of public transportation for my commute, but found that to be woefully inadequate.

Formula 1 racing returned to the United States this weekend. While always enjoyable, this race typically leaves quite a bit to be desired. The design of the track forces the teams to set their cars up for high speed runs through a portion of the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway. While it is great to see these marvels of engineering hurtling down the track, I prefer to watch them battling through the infield. Unfortunately, the infield racing at Indy is less than spectacular. The trade-offs the teams have to make to achieve high speeds down the straights mean that they have to remove a majority of the aerodynamics that provide the necessary down-force for high speeds throughout the rest of the track. I think it would behoove the FIA to find a track in the United States that better lends itself to the spectacle that is F1 racing. They need a more balanced track. If I wanted to watch cars going fast in straight lines, I would watch an IRL race, or even NASCAR, but I don’t care about that kind of racing. I want to see cars slicing and dicing through tight corners and high speed arcs, not flying down a straight road.

Ruby Quiz is a weekly quiz on Ruby that is used to flex your Ruby muscles, or in my case prove how completely ignorant I am on the subject entirely

The FizzBuzz quiz was one that I was actually able to accomplish in a relatively short amount of time. Unfortunately, my original solution was not very elegant at all. (more…)

I recently took a trip up to the central valley of California to visit some family. While the trip was altogether pleasant, the drive was not. Apart from the semi-trucks consuming more than their fair share of the available lanes, the condition of the highways was atrocious.

One would think that with the advances in technology over the last few thousand years of road making that we would be able to enjoy a relatively smooth surface on any of vast number of highways in California. This is, however, not the case. Potholes, debris, dips, humps, jumps, undulations, outdated markings and grooves make for a ride not unlike one you would experience at an amusement park. The primary difference being that driving on these highways is not amusing. While I can almost excuse potholes due to a lack of funding in recent years, there is no excuse for poor engineering and even poorer construction quality.

The worst aspect of the experience for me is the entrance and exit ramps for overpasses and bridges. I say ramps, because that is exactly what they are. I imagine that on many of these entrance ramps, my car was completely airborne! I truly hope this isn’t what was meant by everyone having a flying car.

The next most egregious flaw in the roadways is the unexplained undulations that appear to exist solely for the continued financial success of the shock-absorber and spring industries. It seems that every few miles along an otherwise flat and smooth roadway there is a dip or bump, some of which are so extreme that, again, I feel as though my car has aspirations to fly. These dips and bumps are almost always accompanied by gouges caused by the undercarriages of vehicles that are probably only slightly closer to the ground than my own.

One would think that with the enormous amount of money that we all pay in taxes to build and maintain these roads, that they should be of the highest quality.

I have just now signed up for FeedBurner. I have been remiss in my studies of what is going on with this blog. In an attempt to remedy that, I have switched the feeds over to FeedBurner and I have included this site in my Google Analytics account.

FeedBurner takes care of tracking who is reading my weblog with a number of the vast variety of feed readers. I am using the plugin “FeedSmith” that was recently acquired by FeedBurner from Steve Smith of Ordered List.

Google Analytics tracks who, what, when and where people are viewing this weblog from. In the early days of everday I used Google Anayltics and had a few people view this site from every continent, except Antarctica.

Hopefully these tools will help stoke the newly ignited flames of blogging within me.

via: SimpleBits

I just watched a fascinating video from Blaise Aguera y Arcas (via ted.com) on some new technology from Microsoft Labs. This new technology is called “Photosynth” and it aggregates the collective memory into a model of reality. If that doesn’t make any sense, check out the demo: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html. This software takes a collection of images from a social networking site (Flickr in this case) with common metadata (tags). It then puts all of these images together into a model of that metadata, amazing!

Consider that every person’s memory (photo, video or textual) is placed into a collective via the various social networking services. Consider that this collective is accessible through APIs. Consider that you can aggregate the entire collective. Consider that you can take the aggregated memory of everyone and categorize, filter, extrapolate, correlate and relate it. Consider that you can now model the world based on the aggregated memory of everyone.

Once this happens, virtual models will become real models. Instead of animating the world to model it, you will model the world based on the collective memory of the world. Every picture ever taken of a giraffe will allow for a model of a giraffe to be created from real pictures of giraffes. Every picture taken of a Nissan Skyline GT-R can be used to create an exact model of a Nissan Skyline GT-R. Amazing stuff!