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Flex Your Power signs off; coincidence?
The other day, I wrote about the highway signs saying "Flex Your Power" and using energy. Someone from the company that runs the "Flex Your Power" campaign (they're a marketing/PR firm) commented that the signs served a valuable purpose. In my opinion, stating the obvious isn't valuable. In any case, neither my wife nor I saw the signs lit up yesterday. Is it a coincidence that after my post they were turned off or was it that the energy usage dropped? While the energy usage did drop (drop in temperature), shouldn't people still conserve energy?
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Mandating Safety
I'm not a huge fan of the government mandating anything, but now, more than ever, believe that the government needs to start mandating more safety in cars. Specifically, I think that a) all cell phones must come with Bluetooth and b) all cars should come with Bluetooth for handsfree cell phone use. People argue that it isn't the act of holding a handset that causes accidents, it is the distraction. Well, that may be true, but I'm sure that if people weren't holding phones, they would have better reaction time in case of an accident and be able to navigate cars better. This won't solve everything, but the cost is pretty minor; several years ago Jeep/Chrysler announced the UConnect system for many of its newer vehicles at a cost of something like $300 as a dealer installed option. Now if this was standard on all vehicles, the cost would be lower (less labor involved in installing it when the car is open and the number of units purchased would cause the cost to go down). If we say that the kit costs $300 and someone purchases a vehicle over 5 years at 7% interest rate, the extra cost for this would be $5.94 per month. Is that a lot? No, it is the cost of a few cups of coffee.
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I miss the Newton
My history with the Apple Newton goes back to the summer before my senior year in college. Apple's PIE (Personal Interactive Electronics) group (before it got renamed as simply Newton) wanted to license my NotifyMail program and I negotiated a deal that I thought was excellent. I received a Newton MessagePad 110 and the Newton Toolkit (developer tools) which was valued at over $1600 at the time in exchange for a site license. People at school poked fun at me, especially after the Simpson's episode where one of the characters wrote "Beat up Martin" and it came out as "Eat Up Martha". I played around writing some programs for it and when I joined Qualcomm full time the following year, I started work on Eudora for Newton (my boss lobbied to let us do it) and over the course of the next year, I got to work with some great people at Apple who were working on their TCP/IP stack. I got early access to Newton 2.0 and was amazed; when Apple killed the Newton, it was a small part of my life (a few years) sort of disappeared. The Newton had so many things that was ahead of its time; handwriting recognition (in the last OS, it was good), flexible data stores (it was easy to expand the address book), flexible applications (I could patch an application in no time flat), and a convenient form factor. I used to travel with the Newton and a keyboard instead of a laptop.
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Energy conservation
In this time of high energy usage, the big buzz is on conservation. So much so, that CalTrans has lit up the freeway billboards with something like "Flex Your Power. Converse Energy." Hmmm...how much energy does it take to light up those signs? Brilliant. The media and energy officials are saying to keep the thermostat at 78 degrees if you can. I'm thinking, if I put the thermostat at 78 degrees, the temperate in our house would drop by 6-10 degrees! People really need to use fans and suffer to some degree. We have air conditioning, but have never turned it on. Why? Cooling our house for just my wife and me with our dog is a complete waste. Others should follow suit, in my opinion. Our electricity usage is lower, I think, in the summer than in the winter despite the heat. In the winter, we run our heat in the early morning and in the evening; it is gas forced hot air, so the fan on the furnace runs to blow the hot air around.