Uninterruptable Power Supply, that is. My mom said it was making a screeching noise, so she turned it off and back on. Ironically, it only affected the machines that had been plugged into the battery backup side of the UPS, and not the surge protector side. Maybe it was that there was too much drain on the battery, so I moved everything but the modem, router, and server to the surge protector. I hope it doesn’t happen again. This problem ruined my 202-days-and-counting uptime on my BOINC zombie.
Ethanol
This is why we need to ban corn-based ethanol. It’s wreaking havoc with food prices everywhere. (Edit: Link dead.) (Farmers switch from food to field corn for ethanol, perhaps?) Why are we bothering with another liquid? I believe the way to go is solar electricity farms in the southwest, and an electricity backbone to get it to the northeast where it tends to be used.
Liquid fuel is harder to transport, and requires burning of fuel to transport. What’s so bad about electric cars? We saw from the EV1 that the auto industry certainly has the technology. Electricity is the way to go. It can be completely carbon-neutral in the way it’s generated, it’s easy to transport, and it can power far more than what we use it for today.
EDIT: Time Magazine has an article on this. It’s amazing what the will of giant industries can do. The automobile servicing, repair, and creation industries, along with the oil industry, all don’t want electric cars to happen, because if it did happen, they’d be out of business. Electric cars are too good of a solution for them, because it cuts them out of the loop. What would mechanics do if we all used electric cars? No oil or oil filters to change – their most common service would most likely become rotating tires. The oil industry would be reduced to making plastics.
Computers For Sale!
The school is selling their computers! Their old ones – Pentium IIIs at 566MHz with around 512MB of DDR (I think) RAM – are being sold for $20 each! Mrs. Blasey asked me if I’d also need monitor/mouse/keyboard, which might also mean those are availible as well. Her extention is 3150.
I’m going to get four and turn them all into BOINC zombies. 🙂
Ubuntu!
The Ubuntu Hardy Heron beta is released!
I’ve lately been enjoying the musical stylings of Zhaytee, who I came to know after the magnificent tracks for Minerva. Free official downloads of all songs, and even a zip of all of ’em at once is offered. I was pleasantly surprised.
Buildin’
The motherboard for the machine I’m building is set to arrive today. I’ll be able to finish up the hardware and start on the software. The first motherboard wasn’t compatable with 45-nm. :\
EDIT: The machine’s done. I like ASUS boards. They have a nicer I/O plate.
Al-Qaeda
Here’s a BBC video that just shakes the foundation of my understanding of global terrorism. Al-Qaeda is a myth!
Interesting…
On Thursday after the choir concert I started losing my voice, so I stopped talking in an effort to not lose it completely. It worked, and was maybe even a bit fun. I still prefer talking in the long run though. I also noticed something interesting that happened: I could hear better. I’m not sure if it was just because I wasn’t talking so it was quieter, but it seemed I could hear everything more sharply. In somewhat related news, I’ve noticed that sometimes when there’s something artistically beautiful or significant, a single tear will roll out of my left eye. It’s weird, yeah, but maybe it has something to do with the creative right side of the brain controlling the left side of the body.
Gloom and Doom
The order of the day.
California and Florida fight local fruit + veggie growers.
Scientist predicts global warming is past the tipping point and we’re all doomed.
EDIT: ISPs and other non-regulated communications industries are providing insufficient service. Many staple ingredients’ costs are skyrocketing due to high transportation (read: diesel) costs. PBS has a piece on the suppression of whistleblowing as well as telecom companies getting immunity for what they insist was simply their patriotic duty. Whoever becomes president will have one heck of a mess to clean up.
State of the World
Wow. We’re just sinking further and further. When will we hit bottom?
Police killed a lady, then said she choked herself to death with a 2-inch handcuff chain. Link.
The war in Iraq will soon be going on for 5 years, longer than either of the world wars. It’s now conservatively estimated to cost the United States alone $3 trillion. Link.
There’s also a study out saying that Daylight Savings Time costs more energy in heating and cooling than it saves in lighting. Link.
Wine
The Ubuntu packages for Wine version 0.9.56 were taking a while to reach the repositories so I could upgrade with just two apt-get calls, which is rare. I got impatient, which is not rare, and just compiled my own version. I uninstalled the repository’s version with apt-get get, checked running wine to make sure it was uninstalled, and ran a sudo make install after ./configure and make && make depend in the source directory. Easy. The problem was that then wine refused to run, saying it could not be found. I tried running make install after su’ing (changing to root) just out of desperation. It worked! So did sudo wine. That was weird. I tried a sudo whereis wine, and found it to be in /usr/local/bin/wine instead of the /usr/bin/wine that my bash was complaining could not be found. I hopped on the IRC and thought out loud, which I guess was a pretty annoying thing to do, but whatever, it helped. I linked /usr/local/bin/wine to /usr/bin/wine, which fixed the problem. This person in the channel told me I shouldn’t do that, and said that bash just needed to restart. I removed the link, (with the logical unlink) logged off my terminals, then logged back in, and it worked! Yay! Well, now I know what to do if I ever run into something like that again. You learn something every day, huh? 🙂