I am always amazed by the quality of my friend's video productions.

Some time yesterday a MASSIVE file was leaked to the internet, supposedly full of emails from the hadley climate center.  The emails are very damning.  At least some of the data has been verified as authentic.  You can see more info on this WattsUpWithThat.com article.  If you want some other sources you can find them at many of the skeptic sites listed on the bar on the right side of the website.  I downloaded the actual file and uploaded a combined version of all the email texts (for the time being anyway) if you wanted to look at them yourself.

Each ton of coal can produce 1.5-2 barrels worth of oil equivalent.  If we did this with as much coal as we use in the US every year for power generation (1 billion tons per year) we would be producing 2 billion barrels per year, about half US consumption.

The proven US coal reserves contain could be made into 400-500 billion barrels worth of oil...more than the guestimated reserves of Saudi Arabia...and at an estimated cost of $15-40 per barrel.  

I was just reading this article and one of the quotes just perfectly sums up my opinion.  "The environment is too important to be left to the environmentalists." You see the problem is that first and foremost, environmentalists are people.  Unfortunately being people...that means on average, environmentalists are just passionate dipshits.  They have a romantic ideal about this and that but like all such idealized concepts...its complete bullshit.  They basically aspire to create a world that's about as realistic as a teenage girl's wish list for her first love

Environmentalists pushed for an increase in the use of biofuels to help (among other things) save the people of the developing world decades down the road and what did it do?  It drove up the price of foodand hurt he people in the developing world NOW.  Greenpeace bitches about carbon dioxide so how do they rate France with 70% of it's power from nuclear?  They count all of France's nuclear plants as being the natural gas fired equivalent...and they consider this GENEROUS (gas is the lowest CO2 emitter of the fossil fuels).  Yes, environmentalists bitch about saving the environment but they want us to use diffuse "renewable" power sources like solar and wind...while at the same time they'll likely bitch about the fact that such power plants would take up about 2% of the land in the US for more for wind.  Heh, to power the UK with wind power it would actually take 1/2 of the UK's land area (BTW, people cannot stand to live within a quarter of a mile of a wind farm).

It turns out that what I had was a migraine aura without the headache (and I'm obviously very happy about its absence).  At first I was worried I was having a stroke.  While watching TV last saturday I noticed a small spot in my field of vision where I couldn't see.  It got bigger and bigger.  It wasn't light or dark colored, it wasn't blurry.  I simply had no perception there.  Then I noticed a faint, brightly colored area around the central spot.  The whole anomaly grew a bit until was big enough to cover a person's face at about 5-10 feet (although it was just right and down from the center of my view) and then for a few minutes I lost about 20% of my peripherial vision on the right side.

and...this is about what my migraine aura looked like

Windows 7: Well, I had been sidetracked from my switch to a 64bit OS but with the release of Windows 7 I'm finally there and FINALLY...my OS sees all 6gig of my RAM.  I haven't had any issues with Windows 7 its self so far.  The main thing is availability and quality of drivers.  The old drivers for my onboard sound used to let me pick more types of output when I plugged something in...which meant I could plug my headphones into the line out port and just define it as headphones.  No such luck with the new drivers.  Thankfully I had a memory card reader with USB and front panel sound outputs (my case is too old to have them) and that MOSTLY solved the problem.  Oh, I also had a problem with video crashing but after installing the card mentioned below I found that there was some pretty significant dust buildup on my old card's heatsink, so it was just a coincidence.

Sorry I haven't been posting anything, not that it's terribly unusual.  Anyway I've been doing battle with a personal file server project.  Basically I just kept having odd little side problems and instabilities with two different motherboards...it turns out both motherboards had issues.  Thankfully they were both pulls, so it's no big loss.  Anyway it seems to be working just fine now and I've transfered about 500gig back and forth to the thing without any issues.

A secondary issue was transfer speed.  The whole reason for me trying different setups was to get more than (usually) 130 megabits over my gigabit network.  With the new setup its finally going a good, solid 220-280 megabits (27-35 Mbytes/sec).  It's not the fastest in the world but it's fast enough for anything I need it to do (you could burn DVD/CD images off of it at full speed).

For the last few years as everyone else has upgraded to fancy, schmancy LCD's I've basically been fishing theirs old CRTs out of the dumpster and using them.  Seriously...ALL of my CRTs are second hand or (mostly) from dumpsters.  But things finally went right and I picked up a nice, new LCD.

Ahhh, so nice.  My old 19inch monitor was a little fuzzy but perfectly readable.  I tried using the 19inch for a secondary but no dice.  When placed next to the super-crisp LCD it makes me keep trying to refocus and gives me a headache.  Odd considering I never had troubles when it was my primary monitor. *shrug*.   Anyway, the new monitor is a 23inch Acer X233Hbd. It has fantastic contrast.  It was pretty cheap too, $170.

Disposable tattoos: I wonder how easy it would be to come up with a family of dye for tattoos based on the same compound (with different groups that change the color).  If they could come up with several families of tattoo dyes like that they might actually be able to simply immunize you against the whole family of dye.  Don't want your tattoo?  No problem, one shot and your immune system destroys them in a matter of days.  Obviously you could never get another with that family of dye after the shot.

Food prices: I do wonder what the food prices are going to be like this year.  We've had extremely late snows (snowed in June in Canada and some of the Northern US) and colder than normal winters.  It's similar to what happened last year (biofuels only made matters worse).