Productive Day

Wow! productive day blogging.

Here's the reason why. I'm playing hookie from a school dance performance that I'm supposed to at. My son (who goes to the same school I teach at) is supposed to be there, so I have to hang around.

I got so absorbed getting down my anti-music industry rant that I lost track of time. Now I'm sitting in my office keeping my head down.

Mike

Coal Plant To Test Capturing Carbon Dioxide

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/environment/2008-02-26-coal-co2_N.htm

A Wisconsin coal-fired power plant operated by We Energies is scheduled to launch a pilot project to capture a portion of the carbon dioxide produced as the coal is burned. It will be the first time a U.S. power plant has corralled CO2, the main greenhouse gas, before it floats out of the smokestack.

I know that many will know this idea and the environmental gurus will poo-poo the idea and say we just need to get off of fossil fuel period, but I really do believe that this could be something we will be having to do.

Electricity demand is going to do nothing but go up - sorry, all you conservationists, but that's reality. If you look at the other big contributer to carbon in our atmosphere - the way we get around - every realistic alternative involves electricity. Hydrogen you say, where do you think hydrogen comes from? Electrolysis, and the first six letters are not a coincidence.

Realistically, where is all this energy going to come from? Consumer demand for convenient transportation will not go down, only up. This is even after some of our coastal city streets begin being under water. This is to say nothing for the various other electronic gizmos that we will continue to surround ourselves with.

Our fossil fuel resources are limited. Give use another century (at the most) and they'll be gone. In the meantime, they will continue to be a major player in energy production. We've just got to find a way to make it work environmentally.

Mike

Nokia Morph Concept

It's an exiting time, and this is coming from the guy who still refuses to carry a cell phone around.

Mike

Could $5 a month save the music industry?

http://www.thestar.com/article/305082

The Songwriters Association of Canada proposes a $5 monthly fee on subscribers’ Internet bills that would make it legal to download music and hopefully save the failing music industry.

I find myself disagreeing most strongly with this idea.

This proposal seems to basically make the assumption that everyone on the Internet is downloading pirated music. Nothing could be further from the truth and making all of us pay this arbitrary amount is unfair. Some of us do pay for our music (I do when the option is available) and some don't download music at all. Add to this that the money is only proposed to go to Canadian artists. How many of us download $5 worth of Canadian content a month - that's sixty Canadian songs a year at the 99 cent iTunes price? Yeah, I thought so.

Second, the system for downloading music sucks, period. Peer-to-peer (P2P) sources like the most popular Limewire, are riddle with malicious software -
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/58511.html.
A study conducted in 2006
(http://www.imconf.net/imc-2006/papers/p33-kalafut.pdf)
found that 68% of executables, archive and MSOffice files downloaded from Limewire contained malware (viruses and adware) mostly in the form of exe and zip files. Since then it has only gotten worse. This isn't really Limewire's fault. They've just spilled over into popular culture (especially with young people) to the point where everyone under the age of 20 is going there. I know there are people that feel that anyone dumb enough to download an exe or zip from an unknown source deserves what they get, but the truth is, when the population downloading is as large as it is, a significant number will not be knowledgeable enough to know the risks that they're taking. I teach computer science to grade tens. Almost all of them download from Limewire and most (at the beginning of my course at least) do not know what P2P or file extensions even mean. They also don't read Windows alerts, so when they get a pop-up telling them this is risky behavior, they click okay without even registering that Windows was warning them to stop.

In my opinion, this is not the fault of those that provide P2P services. iTunes has shown that people are more then willing to fork over some dough for their songs, yet the music industry has yet to capitalize on it. Instead they whine and complain about how no one is buying CDs anymore because of music downloads, and governments should do something. Know what? This isn't the governments' problem, it's the music industry's. Markets shift. Deal with it, and learn to make some money off it.

Here's an idea. In Ontario we have something called the Brewer's Retail which sells all the beer in this province. They are completely run by a consortium of brewers. Their stores are clean, convenient, and EVERYWHERE. Customers are happy and well served so whenever there is a call that the monopoly given to the Brewer's Retail should be broken, it never gathers any steam. Quite frankly, most people are pretty happy with how things are.

Alright music industry. If megacorp brewers can do it, so can you. Become the Brewer's retail of music. Create one place where we can go to buy music. Make it clean, convenient and cheap and we will come. iTunes sells for a dollar a song, well sell for 50 cents. A new album comes out, here are two songs you can download for free, the rest will cost. No one can convince my this wouldn't be a license to make money.

Also, you folks are sitting on vast libraries of material - sell it! I want to rebuild my vinyl collection digitally, but it's not available on iTunes. There is no reason that in this age I shouldn't expect that to be available, legally, on-line. If I want the entire collection of The Nice for my mp3 player, you should make it available. Hell, the overhead is virtually zero and right now you are making nothing on the material anyway.

So, here is the biggest reason I am against this proposal - it takes the responsibility of the current situation away from where it belongs, with the music industry itself. Common guys, get the collective pickle out of your ass and make some money out of this.

Mike

Model Ship Update

I've been in a bit of a holding pattern with this. Part of it has been that I have been pretty busy since Christmas but perhaps the bigger reason is that I was getting a bit discouraged and needed to take a break.



The problem was in the planking. The instructions with the kit are not nearly clear enough and I should have spent more time doing some research at the start. I figured I could just fit each piece on the fly and any imperfections could be sanded away. What I should have done was some careful measuring and calculating at the front, tapering and twisting each piece as necessary. Doing this by look, on the fly, just had the pieces not fitting together as they should, with small errors compounding by the end, especially around the bow.

I tried filling in with wedge shaped pieces and then sanding the whole thing smooth, but the close-up of the bow in the last shot shows what I ended up with. I'm going to varnish as it is when ready and then try mixing coloured, MinWax, wood filler to match the finished colour. This stuff is made for finishing furniture, so hopefully I can get a satisfactory result.

In the meantime, I've begun working with smaller trim-like work, like the water way that can be seen on the sides of the maindeck in the above pictures. Next is the railing and trim. There is also a double width of planking right at the boundary between the light and dark wood that runs the length of the ship. It can be seen best in the third picture. This will eventually be painted black. This work is certainly more enjoyable then the planking, so I think I'll be working on it more for the next while.

Mike