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November 22, 2003
Zippity Do Dah
I want to be as happy as this guy.
Posted by gene_wood at 02:55 PM | Comments (1)
MP3.com get's destroyed
So, mp3.com has 250,000 Artists and over 750,000 songs. These are mainly independent artists, not on a label, and often times with no other channel for distribution of their art besides mp3.com. Vivendi Universal bought mp3.com back in 2001 for $372 million cash-and-stock. They've just sold the domain name to Cnet but have retained ownership of all of the music on the site. On December 3rd this archive of staggering proportions describing what I feel is an important and significant part of our modern culture will be destroyed. I'm not sure this is on par with past destructions of this type however it is another instance, illustrating the basic problem with the corporate owned world we live in being that corporations cannot make decisions based on human ethics because they exist in an entirely discreet evolutionary world with completely different rules (shareholder returns are kind) than the rules in our organic evolutionary world which shapes our ethics. This is true, even though this corporation (like all corporations) are run by humans (theoretically) with ethics driving decisions in their own lives.
The old CEO of mp3.com is pleading with vivendi not to destroy the archive but to no avail.
So if you've ever found anything that you liked on mp3.com, you better download it before December 3rd or it's gone for good.
UPDATE : Here is Michael Robertson's plea to Vivendi
Posted by gene_wood at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)
November 19, 2003
WAPA : History of power in the western United States
WAPA (Western Area Power Administration) has fantastic documentation of their existence since 1978 detailing all of the huge projects they've worked on including :
- The Pacific Northwest-Pacific Southwest intertie providing long distance energy transmission from the Pacific Northwest to Los Angeles (specs)
- The Dalles Dam (Ever wanted to know how to help protect fish from going through massive turbines in dams? Just use Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes computational fluid dynamics of course)
- The installation of a phase-shifting transformer at Glen Canyon to deal with loopflow problems. It's 624.7 tons, 46 feet long, 40 feet wide and 24 feet tall. What's loopflow you may ask?
Power physically follows the path of least resistance. Problems occur because this may or may not be the same as the contract path. Loopflow stems from the difference between scheduled power (the amount intended to flow) and the actual power (the amount actually flowing) on a transmission line or system.
There's tons of other interesting information you can find over at the WAPA site :
Hydropower comes in third among sources of electric energy production, behind fossil fuel with 73 percent of the market and nuclear at 14 percent. Energy drawn from the sun, wind and biomass (agricultural or municipal waste materials) accounts for less than 1 percent.
Now all I gotta find is a high res map of the major transmission lines for the US. I also want to head out to tracy and check out the intertie. I'd like to see a cable speced to carry 800,000 volts direct current. I think I'll also head over to Sylmar next time I'm in LA to see the termination point of this thing.
Posted by gene_wood at 06:46 PM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2003
Problem : Spam in weblog comments Solution : MT-Blacklist
Comment spam is becoming more and more a problem each day. Fortunately there is a way to deal with this. Jay Allen has written a Movable Type plugin called MT-Blacklist. This plugin will block new incoming spam and clean existing spam in comments. He is also maintaining a constantly updated spam database, called the Comment Spam Clearinghouse, for use in identifying comment spam. Anyone who ends up using MT-Blacklist should submit new spam to the clearinghouse to increase the quality of the list. Once MT-Blacklist is installed a great way to stay up to date with new spams is to subscribe to the Blacklist changes RSS feed. The clearinghouse is not specific to Movable Type, it can be used by any weblog software, someone just has to write the plugin.
Posted by gene_wood at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)
November 10, 2003
A's lose to Detroit in the Spring of '03
Relive the game through imagery or through your own imagination.Posted by gene_wood at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)
November 07, 2003
Reminisce about summer
Enjoy some pictures all the way back in July.
July 4th 2003 in Berkeley.
Posted by gene_wood at 01:51 PM | Comments (1)