It has been a very nice holiday for my family and I. My wife bought me two books that I have been wanting for a long time. They are both by Tom Brown Jr. AKA "The Tracker". I have bought and read both books before (more than once) and liked them so much I "loaned" them to other people. Of course when you give books away they never return. C'est la vie. Well the problem in this case was that these books went out of print. To make matters worse all of the used copies to be had online were exorbitantly priced. I'm talking ~$50 for a paperback. Yeah, he's a popular author.
Anyway my thoughtful wife got them both for me, and for a decent price. This probable because Tom Brown has bought the rights to both books and has published one of them himself just recently. This one is called "The Journey" and the other is called "The Quest". Along with "The Vision" these three books make somewhat of a spiritual trilogy, although all of his books have spiritual themes.
Anyway I love these books and am already half way through "The Quest". Of course that got me thinking about getting outdoors again and resuming my nature studies. I still have Kamana 2 ready to go on the shelf. Kamana is a great program and if you are interested in Tom Brown Jr.'s stuff it is like having a Tom Brown Jr. home study course. It was originally created by Tom's first student Jon Young.
* * * * * *
Happy New Year All!
Monday, December 31, 2007
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Nanosolar, FISA, Dodd and Democrats
A press release from Nanosolar, makers of one of the most promising new solar technologies. You'll probably be hearing a lot more about them in the near future:
"After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.
We are grateful to everyone who supported us through all these years and the many occasions where there appeared to be mile-high concrete walls in our path; the unusual intensity and creativity of our team deserves all the credit for achieving this major milestone today.
Our product is defining in more ways I can enumerate here but includes:
- the world’s first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;
- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;
- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;
- the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;
- an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included.
Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.
As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:
Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.
Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.
Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.
[These are obviously not the first three we ever produced – we have produced loads for testing – but these are the first three of what we consider our commercial panels.]"
* * * *
Also a great article over on Harper's magazine's website about the ominous implications of the FISA bill. Fortunately, thanks to the outstanding courage and vision of Senator Chris Dodd the FISA bill was defeated yesterday. Thank you Senator! It has been over a year since the Democrats gained control of both Houses and only now does it feel as if the first step has been taken to fight the criminal actions of the Bush Administration.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
* * * * * * *
Now some advice for the other Democratic contenders: emulate Chris Dodd. Chris Dodd just did what the American public (or at least ~70% of us) have been looking for someone, anyone, to do. He led the fight against the Shrub regime. He played to win. He didn't play "not to lose" as so many Democrats have done since being elected. We know the MO: complain about the war and the terrible Shrub but when the time comes rubber stamp the money for his wars, make his crimes legal after the fact, and sell our republic down the river and into the gaping maw of an ever encroaching fascist state.
Play to win. If they accuse you of playing politics you just tell them that you will do whatever it takes to preserve this republic. If that means playing politics then you tell them you will be the most ruthless, hard-nosed politician in history.
Clinton, Obama, and Biden all missed the boat on this one. They are seriously misjudging the mood of the populace if they could not see that defeating this legislation was not only a partisan political victory but would have been a huge victory for them on the campaign trail.
America wants a leader not a politician with their wetted finger in the air and their nose shoved firmly up the arse of big business. Chris Dodd may not be that leader, but he sure acted like it yesterday.
Over and out!
"After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.
We are grateful to everyone who supported us through all these years and the many occasions where there appeared to be mile-high concrete walls in our path; the unusual intensity and creativity of our team deserves all the credit for achieving this major milestone today.
Our product is defining in more ways I can enumerate here but includes:
- the world’s first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;
- the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;
- the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;
- the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;
- an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included.
Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.
As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:
Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.
Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.
Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.
[These are obviously not the first three we ever produced – we have produced loads for testing – but these are the first three of what we consider our commercial panels.]"
* * * *
Also a great article over on Harper's magazine's website about the ominous implications of the FISA bill. Fortunately, thanks to the outstanding courage and vision of Senator Chris Dodd the FISA bill was defeated yesterday. Thank you Senator! It has been over a year since the Democrats gained control of both Houses and only now does it feel as if the first step has been taken to fight the criminal actions of the Bush Administration.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
* * * * * * *
Now some advice for the other Democratic contenders: emulate Chris Dodd. Chris Dodd just did what the American public (or at least ~70% of us) have been looking for someone, anyone, to do. He led the fight against the Shrub regime. He played to win. He didn't play "not to lose" as so many Democrats have done since being elected. We know the MO: complain about the war and the terrible Shrub but when the time comes rubber stamp the money for his wars, make his crimes legal after the fact, and sell our republic down the river and into the gaping maw of an ever encroaching fascist state.
Play to win. If they accuse you of playing politics you just tell them that you will do whatever it takes to preserve this republic. If that means playing politics then you tell them you will be the most ruthless, hard-nosed politician in history.
Clinton, Obama, and Biden all missed the boat on this one. They are seriously misjudging the mood of the populace if they could not see that defeating this legislation was not only a partisan political victory but would have been a huge victory for them on the campaign trail.
America wants a leader not a politician with their wetted finger in the air and their nose shoved firmly up the arse of big business. Chris Dodd may not be that leader, but he sure acted like it yesterday.
Over and out!
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Morgan Spurlock Found Osama Bin Laden
Believe it or not this could be a future headline in the New York Times. Morgan Spurlock's forthcoming documentary is called "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden" and the initial reports seem to indicate that he actually found him!
You can read the story here. I found it on WhatReallyHappened.com
You can read the story here. I found it on WhatReallyHappened.com
Information Security -- a friendly message
A lot of us are updating our Operating Systems regularly with the latest security patches. Unfortunately we are not as vigilant about the applications that have become such an integral part of our experience of the internet. Many of these applications have had critical security flaws exposed in recent months and new flaws are revealed regularly. With this in mind here is an "off the cuff" list of applications that you should update if you haven't done so recently:
- Apple's Quicktime
- RealPlayer
- Flash Player
- Java Virtual Machine
If I get really motivated I might post some links for you. Most of the updates are pretty easy and can usually been done through the browser if you go to the company's page for the software. Also some of this software includes settings that can prompt you when updates are available. In the past I considered these upgrade prompts as annoyances and the memory resident programs running them as nothing more than performance killers. To a certain extent that remains true but I believe the value of the little pop up reminder when upgrades are available now outweighs the performance hit that your system will take if you leave the program running in the background.
- Apple's Quicktime
- RealPlayer
- Flash Player
- Java Virtual Machine
If I get really motivated I might post some links for you. Most of the updates are pretty easy and can usually been done through the browser if you go to the company's page for the software. Also some of this software includes settings that can prompt you when updates are available. In the past I considered these upgrade prompts as annoyances and the memory resident programs running them as nothing more than performance killers. To a certain extent that remains true but I believe the value of the little pop up reminder when upgrades are available now outweighs the performance hit that your system will take if you leave the program running in the background.
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