chickensox.org

Recently finished:
Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer by Philip Carlo

Still on the night stand partially read
The Code Book by Simon Singh

Up next:
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond

Oh no!  Our gas price just jumped from $0.638 to $0.859.  Gotta love CNG

I know quite a few Democrats out there, I’ve lived with some of you, I’ve worked with some of you, I’ve gone to school with some of you. Here we are in an election year, after 8 extremely divisive years, where this country is ready to elect a moderate from either party. On one side we have John McCain a moderate Republican, war hero, electable, yet beatable by the right candidate.

On the other side we have Barack Obama, a young Senator, excellent speaker, no voting record to run away from and very much a moderate, fiscally conservative, socially liberal. And then we have Hillary Clinton. HATED by the right, more skeletons in the closet than clothes and appears to want to continue this left vs right crap and is pretty much unelectable.

And then we have democrats who appear to be just dumb enough to nominate Hillary anyway.  At least if the dems are dumb enough to nominate Hillary and give the Whitehouse to McCain,Obama will be in a great position to run again and likely beat McCain in 4 years just like he could now,  if only democrats weren’t so dumb.

So Amber and I went to see Jumper tonight. I figured something out, Hayden Christensen is the new Keanu Reeves.  Think about every movie you have ever seen Keanu Reeves in.  Now imagine it with Hayden Christensen instead.  Yep they’re exactly the same actor.

Here we are in an online MBA program full of “adults” where we have homework assignments due each Sunday. Personally I don’t really feel challenged by the program so I usually end up doing the homework Sunday afternoon because I can without too much worry. I could probably do better work and make the program more challenging to myself, by myself but let’s be honest, doing the minimum is just easier.

So we come to this week. It’s an odd enough week with Thanksgiving in the middle of the week and then to top it off, our school decided that this would be a good week to have a group project due. Now as everyone with a brain knows, people travel over long holiday weekends but our school doesn’t seem to understand that. So here I am attempting to finish my “group” project when I’d much rather be testing out the snow up at PCMR after working on it on Thursday morning and spending the last two days hoping someone else in my group would voice an opinion or do something to move the project forward.

I’m pretty tired of this school and the crappy students they let into it.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks
The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh

The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

The New York Times has an interesting article about how Google is working with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) on some plug in Hybrid technology.

Plug in Hybrids allow you to charge up the batteries overnight when power is generally less expensive as opposed to the regular hybrids that only charge via the internal combustion engine. This allows users to get up in the morning to fully charged batteries and run on them for the first bunch of miles. They say thanks to that initial charge they can get 75mpg out of a Prius instead of the usual 50-60. At the same time you’re moving CO₂ production from the less efficient car engine to the more efficient electric plants.

Now what Google has done is lined portions of their parking lots at HQ with solar arrays which could allow employees to plug in their cars to charge the batteries via “free” solar power. If these plug in hybrids take off, we’re starting to look at a world where businesses could find it more cost effective to replace fleets of vehicles with their own plug in hybrid’s and solar panels. It’s a pretty cool world ahead.

Check out the article above for a better explanation.

Someone on Jaiku asked if there was a firefox plugin to post. I thought hmm, I can do that via an opensearch plugin, so here it is.

Linky, Linky.

Save this into your profile’s searchplugins directory, in Windows this is usually C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profile\{random}\searchplugins