NOLA.com: The Parades Have Already Started in New Orleans
Just one of the reasons I love that town.
A Glimpse of the Future in Midwestern Wind Farms
I’ve long lamented the fact that “the future” seems to be such an incremental affair. As we approach the year 2010, we have handheld communicators, swept and angular electric and hybrid automobiles, a world-wide electronic information network — even books and newspapers can now be delivered over the airwaves to a flat panel electronic device you can carry on a train with you. And yet, it all seems somewhat pedestrian, because it just crept up on us.
So it’s with great excitement that I personally experienced the sweeping wind farms of Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa this week. Driving along I-70 toward Denver and then I-80 from Colorado to Chicago, I was absoutely struck by these large, graceful, futuristic vistas. The best way I can describe them are to reference the wormhole-creating gadget in the movie Contact:
I even love the moniker — wind farm — as if nothing would be more logical to marry up with the soy beans, wheat and corn of these farm-heavy states. (I happen to know there’s still a lot of farming going on in these states after about 20 hours of combined driving through them in the past week. If it weren’t for wind farms, XM radio and the world’s largest truck stop, I might not have made it.)
Depending on the wind farm and the date it went into service, each turbine seems to generate between 1-3 megawatts of power, enough to run 100-300 households per windmill. The devices themselves are big and tall — each blade of the three-bladed turbine is hauled on its own flatbed truck, as we witnessed on the Interstate — but the base doesn’t seem to take up terribly more square footage on the ground than would a large inner city highway light post.
Of course, such windfarms aren’t without their controversy — one being that they require a great deal of investment and management in order to build the farms and pipe the electricity around — which is exactly the sort of thing that keeps big utilities in business. The alternative — tax credits and incentives for smaller, microgrid investments (solar and wind per household, with the ability to sell the excess back into the system) — might ultimately make more sense.
(And, of course, the microgrid would be more of that incremental future-creep again.)
But, whatever the end result, the wind farms are quite a sight. I’m impressed!
‘Showcase, Dank Showcase’
I was logging in to moderate comments this afternoon and accidentally clicked on the link to Dave Johnson’s blog in my blogroll where I found that sometime in the past year — much to my amazement — he had actually published a page of old audio clips from the “Peak Computing Hour,” a call-in radio show that he and I did ten or so years ago in Colorado. I hadn’t heard the clips in a quite a while and it was a fun little trip. (He was smart enough to keep the clips rather limited.)
We did have fun on that show, despite the fact that — to this day — Dave suspects that I “never really liked” him. Well…I’ll leave the answer to that question to your imagination.
Let’s just say the pay was good.
(Oh, and gas was only like 8 cents a gallon at the time, so I was more than happy to commute up to Denver from Colorado Springs for a two-hour radio show once a week. In a Jeep Cherokee. Can you imagine?)
Dave focuses on old clips of “Dank Showcase, Cyberspy” because, well, he wrote them. (So, BIG surprise there.)
Truth told, though, Dank Showcase was the best part of the show…that single experience has caused me to occasionally yearn to do a little “real” radio theatre at some point in my life. The fact that no one would listen it — just as they did then — is somewhat beside the point.
But he captured the high points — the megadingos, the callers, the silly stuff we would do. Almost makes me want to do it again.
Hmmm.
Whatdaya say, Dave? We could use uStream or similar to put together a show like TuesdayNightTech, but not so…juvenile. Heck…using Skype or something we could take callers. (Do you still know anything about computers? I might have to brush up a bit on PCs. Yuck.)
Maybe you could get us a sponsor from up there in the techie Northwest? If we got enough of a following, we could write books together again. Maybe they’d even put us on ZDNet. TechTV. TechTV G4. PBS!
Dave?
No?
You never liked me, did you, Dave?
Disk Doctors Re-animated
A guy named Ryan, who describes himself as a fan of the KnowledgeTV show Disk Doctors (of which I was co-host) wrote today to let me know that he’d uploaded some old episodes to YouTube. This is awesome! I haven’t seen the show in years. (Yes, I’ve got a few tapes on my shelves, but it’s not like I bust them out often.) It’s funny to (a.) see how little gray hair I had (b.) listen to the computing topics of 1997-2000. Wow. Ancient stuff. And the running gag about me being a Mac guy even when the Mac was “dead.” Har de har.
Thanks, Ryan. Now that I no longer get recognized in airports (actually, I don’t know that I was ever recognized in an airport if I wasn’t standing next to Steven Sashen, who was recognized all the time) it’s nice to know those episodes will have a second life toiling in obscurity on YouTube. 
True Entrepreneur
What’s the Pimp House? Somebody took a boring 4/2 rancher near Vegas and turned it into the Vegas Pimp House by painting it in bright colors and putting a pool table in the living room and a big screen TV in the “media room.” (Don’t know if a true pimp would be watching Scooby-Doo, but I’m sure stranger things have happened.) Price: $400 a night for weekends. Sweet. Gotta love that entrepreneurial vision. My only question — what self-respecting pimp has boring Sear-lookin’ white appliances? Where the sub-zero?
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