Major retail chains Target, Wal-Mart and others announced today they will end the so-called war on white people that had resulted in most stores posting signs welcoming "shoppers" or "customers" instead of "white patrons", even though white people represented a considerable majority of their business.
In the summer we did a road trip in the northwest, up to Calgary, through Banff in the summer and then to Oregon Country Fair. The photojournal is not yet ready, but I have prepared some of the panos. First, here is the Montana section, which means the Going to the Sun road through Glacier National Park. Truly one of the world's great roads, I'm afraid the panos don't do it justice.
Ok, so this story is almost surely just an unconfirmed rumour, but the graphic I designed below still makes a nice ribbon.
I don't know how many times I've gotten a scrape or cut from hitting a dishwasher door, while it's down, with my leg. It's very annoying how the sides are always sharp. They don't make the seal, that's on the front, so there's no reason these sides couldn't be soft, or even hard rubber that won't cut you. Perhaps some dishwashers I haven't owned do this, but I have yet to get one!
Millions now use PCs for VoIP and online audio chat, and you soon realize the quality is vastly better if everybody uses a headset.
But there's a problem on PCs. If you plug in headphones, it usually disables the regular speakers, often in hardware. So if you leave a headset connected, the system can't play a ring sound when somebody calls you.
I just got an invitation to a new event series that I was told would take place on the First Tuesday of the month. However, I already go to two different dinners that take place on the First Tuesday, and I suspect that was no accident. For social events, people use the weekends, and for other events people prefer the weekdays. They have a psychological desire for the first week of the month.
So I ran a quick set of yahoo queries to find out how many hits there were on the web for "first monday" and similar strings. I figured that would tell when the most events do occur, and help people pick a day that is likely to have the least conflicts.
The results are below:
I've been thinking more about environmental economics since I blogged about retail carbon credits. I was surprised about how cheap (some would say unrealisticly cheap) wholesale credits are -- about $2.20 per tonne of CO2. (Update: This price keeps changing. The U.S. price is clearly out of whack down to just 25 cents per tonne in 2009. The European price has declined too, from $20/tonne when I wrote this to $14/tonne in fall 2009.)
Today, many of my friends have bought a car like the Toyota Prius, feeling they are doing their bit to help the environment by burning less gas. The Prius costs around $3,000-$6,000 more than a comparable old-style engine car (in part because high demand keeps the price high), and the savings on gasoline don't justify it on a financial basis unless you do nothing but drive all day. So the main reason to buy it is to help the environment and to make a statement before your peer group. The Camry Hybrid, which gets 32mpg instead of 23mpg costs about $5,000 more than the regular Camry.)
Problem is, there's an argument that you're hurting the environment, counterintuitive as that sounds. And no, it's not just the unanswered questions about recycling the fancy batteries in the Prius when they fade, where fairly positive results have been returned so far. Read on...
This is an idea from several years go I've never written up fully, but it's one of my favourites.
We've seen lots of pushes for online identity management -- Microsoft Passport, Liberty Alliance and more. But what I want is for the online world to help me manage my physical identity. That's much more valuable.
I propose a service I call "addrescrow" which holds and protects your physical address. It will give that address to any delivery company you specify when they have something to deliver, but has limits on how else it will give away info from you. It can also play a role in billing and online identity.
You would get one or more special ID names you could use in place of your address (and perhaps your name and everything else) when ordering stuff or otherwise giving an address. If my ID was "Brad Ideas" then somebody would be able to send a letter, fedex or UPS to me addressed simply to "Brad Ideas" and it would get to me, wherever I was.
(Read on...)
I have been quite behind in processing my photo galleries and panoramics.
I have just now put up the gallery of panoramics from the Death Valley Wildflowers trip from March of 2005. Interesting scenery, and when you get close enough lots of fields of flowers. Of course, on most of them the flowers are so tiny that they are resolved well only when the panos are seen printed at full resolution, not when shrunk for a computer screen.
On the wall now near desks are plates with power and ethernet (and phone until VoIP takes over.) I've been wondering if we shouldn't add another jack -- air, and plumb our walls with pipes to move air for cooling electronic devices.
This idea started by reading about a guy who attached a plastic vent hose from the output of his PC fan to a hole he cut in his wall. This directs much of the heat and some of the noise into the wall and up to the attic.
I started wondering, shouldn't we deliberately plumb our houses to cool our devices? And even more, our office buildings? And can we put the blowers at the other end of the pipes, to move the noise away from our devices? How much would we save on air conditioning?
Read on...
