If you’re looking for an rpm of preupgrade wit Fedora 9 as an upgrade target then look no further than here:
Enjoy.
Overheard in a bar
May 12, 2008
Customer: Do you have PBR?
Bartender: No, but if you’d like I can piss in a glass of water and sell you that for $4.
weekend update
May 12, 2008
Drove to my parents’ house on friday. Reassembled bikes (a beater for the little brother(logan) for college next year and my bike). Went out to dinner. Came home, worked on logan’s road bike to fix the brake and marvel at the oddness of the downtube cable routing (apparently there is a method to the madness but it sure seems hooky to me). Loaded bikes in car. Crashed.
Got up at a ridiculous time of the day, showered, got in car, drove to dorey park.
Checked in for 50 miles of the cap-to-cap ride - from Richmond to Jamestown. It’s a full century from richmond to jamestown and back, but I only rode half of it. Rode the first 25 w/o any problems at all. Comfortable, wet outside but not slick and not actively raining. Parted ways with my brother so he could do the next 75 and I could do the return 25. Started really feeling it at about mile 42 or so. Finished out the rest of the 50, had some oranges that tasted much better than they should have back where we started from. It was a lot of fun and it was also funny to me seeing some of the bikes. I was the only one there that I saw with fenders. The fenders were great considering how wet things were. They kept a lot of mud/water off of my legs.
Came home. Crashed into a nap. Had some dinner, stretched a bit, but generally felt really good.
The disk on my laptop half-way crashed. I was able to get around the problem using a bit of sneakiness which may or may not end up lasting. I need to start thinking about a replacement for it sooner than later, I think. I’m debating one of the dell outlet 420 or 430 latitudes at this point. Worried that the keyboard will drive me nutty, though.
Got up on sunday, showed Logan a few things about maintaining his bike and we cleaned his gears/chain and cleaned up his bike in general.
Dinner at my grandparent’s house for mother’s day full of good things: Kale, butterbeans, sweet potatoes, yeast rolls, potato salad, deviled eggs. A very nice meal.
That was the long and short of my weekend.
greenindex
May 9, 2008
taking a look at tim’s blog. I took the survey. My greenindex comes out to be 66.
Why Librarians rock
May 9, 2008
In case it was unclear: this is why librarians rock:
This goes out to Heather and Molly and Thelma (a librarian friend of old):
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/05/internet-archiv.html
and of course:
industrial retooling
May 7, 2008
As I think about the need to come up with other plans for US transportation infrastructure to get us away from cars, I immediately think of pushing better rail infrastructure. With that in mind, what would be the complexities with getting the automotive industry to begin retooling their production lines and retraining their workers to produce train engines/train cars/etc? It seems like the skill set to construct a large metal box with many living-room-like accoutrement internally would be similar between automobile manufacturing and rail-car manufacturing. Additionally, in order to provide a large-scale rail infrastructure the US would require a simple MASSIVE number of engines and rail-cars in the next decade.
I’m sure there are difficult things with this idea, but it makes sense, conceptually, at least, to me.
music and books
May 2, 2008
If it a type of synthesia if when listening to a particular musician you always think of a particular author?
Whenever I hear Mark Knopfler I think of Neil Gaiman.
Odd, yes, I know.
fudcon boston 2008 travel stuff
May 1, 2008
We’re coming up pretty fast on fudcon in boston this year. I just wanted to remind folks (as I am figuring everything out for me, too) to book hotels, travel, etc soon.
Here’s the info you need:
And I’d like to add - if you’re in a location that makes it feasible, take the train to Boston instead of flying. It’s much nicer.
In a nutshell
May 1, 2008
The girl im’d me this article today. There are two very good quotes:
Vaclav Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba, calculates that without nitrogen fertilizer, there would be insufficient food for 40 percent of the world’s population, at least based on today’s diets.
Initially, much of the increased production of fertilizer went to grains like wheat and rice that served as the foundation of a basic diet. But recently, with world economic growth at a brisk 5 percent a year, hundreds of millions of people began earning enough money to buy more meat from animals fattened with grains. That occurred at the same time that rising production of biofuels, like ethanol, put new pressure on grain supplies.
So, we made our own mess with the worldwide food shortage. The bizarre tradition of being wealthy means eating meat and our need to fuel our cars above all else is going to mean MANY of us (and by us I mean humans, not any particular nationality) are going to starve. We’ve wed ourselves to fossil-fuel based nitrogen fertilizers. But surely we’ll find a way to feed everyone right?
“This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people,” said Norman Borlaug, an American scientist who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries. “Without chemical fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.”
Hmm, No. I guess we might not. Not without easily available energy resources.
I know what the economists in the crowd are saying “Yes, but the market will adjust and provide a solution.” And if you look back through history it does, sort of, seem that way. Seeing the evolution of sciences and industries to provide for the required goods of the consuming population. The issue is, of course, from the perspective of the present the past always looks like a series of fairly smooth progressions. While, in the present, things are actually a good bit bumpier and less progressive. People starve, revolutions occur, bread riots, wars, things get messier.
The market may actually engineer a way around the problem, or it could be that resource depletion creates massive starvation, epidemic due to insufficient nutrients and resource wars. There are two ways to deal with a supply and demand problem, right? Increase supply or have the demand drop off. Now, when that comes to shiny plastic things that play music, that’s reasonably fine. When it comes to food demand only falls off when there are fewer people or there is a glut of food. You don’t stop being hungry just because food gets more expensive.
Sounds pretty doomy and gloomy doesn’t it? Well, it sorta is. But there are things we can do to help the situation:
1. Stop eating so much meat. Give it a try, cut down the meat in your diet to 3 meals once a week. Out of 21 meals in a week, eat meat at only 3 of them. The other 18 eat a vegetarian meal. I stopped eating meat my junior year in college and I’ve been fine almost 12 years later, now. It’s not that hard. Hell, you might not even lose any weight. I’m still a big fat guy and I consume a lot little leafy things (well, and tomatoes, mmmm tomatoes.)
2. Stop using fuel where you don’t need to. Turn off unnecessary draws of energy. Cars, lights, computers, whatever. Shut it down if you don’t need it. Take a bus or a train to work. Don’t fly unless you have to. Ride a bike (it uses vastly less fuel than a car and less calories are burnt than walking). In general use less fuel. If it wasn’t clear from the article fuel equals food. And while you might not have any trouble buying food right now, other people are having problems.
3. Stop having children. If you feel you have to have a child, keep it to one. Gradually scaling back world population is possible. With planning we can get the world back to a more sustainable 2 billion in about 150 years if we can keep reproduction down to one child per woman. If you think it’s a horrible thing to suggest that people not have kids then ask yourself this question: Is it more horrible for a child to starve painfully over months in squalor until finally dying or to have not been born/conceived at all? Remember, in the time it has taken you to read this post the world had roughly 300 humans(net) added to it. 147 people a minute.
This is not an issue of saving the environment (though it could be), this is not an issue of stopping climate change (though it could be), this is not an issue of saving any particular endangered species or cleaning up a polluted river (though it could be). This is an issue of making the next few decades not the worst ones we’ll EVER see. And I can say ever because our population has never before been this badly in overshoot of what our resources will support. Never. The world will not be like it was before. We need to give up that memory. It’s gone. There are better and worse places we can end up. If we continue acting like nothing has changed then we’ll end up worse-off. We can make it better.
making other plans - again
April 30, 2008
I liked this comment from a uk journal:
Instead of driving miles to the supermarket to load up on food just in case the shelves are cleared, or whingeing about strikers’ ability to cripple the country, we would be better advised to start looking at alternative ways of doing things, based on human energy, ingenuity and appropriate technology. Put simply, our default programmes need to be reset. We need to relocalise our lives.
It means more adjustment than merely declining the offer of yet another oil-derived plastic bag. Affluent middle classes in urban areas have to get over their hang-ups and use public transport, not just during the dispute, but thereafter.
Unless we want an ever more monstrous chunk of our budgets to be gobbled up in spiralling fuel bills, then it’s time to think about selling the second, even your only car.
If we can’t walk, bus or train it to work, then employers must start developing schemes that liberate us from environmentally-ruinous commutes, and allow more people to work from home, exploiting all the benefits of email and telephone conferencing.
Businesses need to understand that it is no longer acceptable to fly staff up and down the UK to attend meetings when they could perfectly well take the train.
I’ve had two interesting conversations this week. One with some neighbors about the cost of commuting 60 miles each way for work. Another with a co worker who commutes 37 miles each way for work. Both of them are concerned about the spike in the prices of everything. I’ve tried to help them find alternative routes/transportation to get to work. Both of them saving a good deal of money (and energy). Something I forgot to mention to them is what is said above: We need to get used to things being like this. It is not going away.
