Solar-Hydrogen Fuel Cells

Okay, I'm taking advantage of Google's Notebook application to search for, note and document what I've managed to find on a personal interest of mine. Creating a personal Fuel Cell power generator. The idea is collecting rain water from my roof into a barrel, using wind and solar power to electrolyze that water and running various appliances with a Fuel Cell using the hydrogen collected during the day and during windy conditions.

The question I am trying to answer in the public Google Notebook is a) Can this be made to be efficient and worth the investment, and b) Is it as or more cost effective and efficient than some other solution, such as one using rechargeable batteries, or some such.

Wired News: Google: Don't Not Be Evil

Now this is a business model to envy. Here's a summary of potential business ventures for our favorite Search Engine company, Google. There are some good ideas, here. The writer has a few modest proposals on how Google can expand its mission to organize the world's information.

I can see its stock rising already!

Wired News: A Sixth Sense for a Wired World

WTF??? Now this article brings back memories of my role play gaming days, specifically the GURPS CyberPunk module which allowed the gamers to play in the post-apocalyptic world of William Gibson (I'm going to have to read some of those books, one day).

But this one, well..... Boy and howdy. In the CyberPunk world, there was always talk of installing hardware in one's body. Being able to connect to computers, or to fire a weapon out of your finger is dark, sexy, mysterious in that scary future of the CyberPunk genre. But implanting the sliver of a magnet in your finger tips? Eerie, odd, gross, stupid, and coooollllll.......

I'll wait until the tattoo parlor can figure out how to keep it safe.

Anybody up for Recursive Existentialism?

Read the paper at this link: Self-Reference in ``Self-Reference in `Self-Reference in . . .' '' I've had this on hand for a while, shared it with friends, slept and worked, and went about living my life. Just came across it again and decided I had to share it here.

If you are into the paradoxes of existentialist thinking, you'll enjoy reading this through to the end. It'll do a wonderful job of twisting your brain!

Stephen Colbert's White House correspondents Dinner on Google Current

I wasn't a huge fan of Stephen Colbert, not that I disliked him. He just never really hit high on my list of things to follow. But each time I see one of his faux essays or see him talk, I find I love his subtle digs and humor more and more.

Current TV is another thing I have been following more and more since I learned of Al Gore's purchase of it. It's an experiment in media that is worth following. I'm not a huge fan of it yet. I usually shy away from first drafts, and the idea of creating an Internet/TV hybrid seems very experimental, especially with the user-driven aspects of it. But I think I will be following the GoogleCurrent thing a bit.

I hope Current comes on a cable provider in my area soon.

Now this.... this is cool.

Cool Honda Commercial Flash on Metacafe

I've always been a fan of Rube Goldberg machines, so when I came across this link in an Experts Exchange mail blast, I had to check it out.

I was flabbergasted. This video footage of a sort of knock-down-the-dominos using car parts grabbed my attention and practically made me drool. An impressive piece of film work!

superpixel subscripts

Here is a link to a friend's blog site. Much more intelligent than I am, and very devoted to regular blogging, I think you'll enjoy his insights and humorous asides.

Be smarter at work, slack off

Be smarter at work, slack off - Mar. 17, 2006

Well thank goodness. At last someone notices my ahead-of-my-time leisure time is billable!

My robot - The Boston Globe

I've been wanting to get one of these Roombas for a while, now. And look, according to this article, now you can hack it to do more.

"Everything but the kitchen sink."

Network drives

Meant to publish this a year ago (or more). Just noticed I never got it past draft status.

Too bad I didn't have it in a virtual drive on a network folder somewhere. I would have noticed it and done something about it!

Came across an article about a network drive system from Google (read this: Going for a GDrive with Google News). If it is true, and that is far from certain, since Google took the information off-line, it suggests that Google is attempting to provide for a single file system that users can access regardless of which machine they are using at the time, so long as the user has network access to Google's servers.

Geeking with Greg: In a world with infinite storage, bandwidth, and CPU power has a PDF of the original slide presentation, and I'll tell you... it's quite startling to see Google, a company I watched within month of its creation, suddenly showing itself off as a boardroom-ready corporatin.

I heard about a related site on NPR a couple of weeks ago, and then came upon a link to this site: Overheard in the Office: The Voice of the Cubicle. This so reminds me of little snippets of conversation I have during my typical work day. There's some really funny stuff here!

Decided to create a second blog here, one specifically devoted to the topic of software development and the challenges of development in a business environment.

I just shared with my project manager today that I don't think the act of development in itself is necessarily a challenge. There is a reason that so many coding tasks that used to be developers-only tasks ten years ago have become tasks for graphic artists and business analysts today.

HTML design, used to be coders only.

BizTalk is a tool that can be done by non-programmers and still be relatively useful.

SharePoint allows you to manage many functions like standards and document management, as well as scheduling and basic database needs, without wasting your programmers' time.

The biggest challenge for most developers is often less to do with actual programming, and more to do with dependancies with other software resources, with configuration of web servers and networking, with managing security against usability, with designing software so that it serves its purpose in the company while still being easy to maintain.

These challenges are not always so simle to solve, and are often very effective in solving one class of problems while exacerbating other problems.

These are the kinds of topics I'll cover in that blog. So visit the CodingBlog: http://www.pandorasdream.com/blog/CodingBlog.html.

V

I have been enjoying this site -- The Daily WTF - Curious Perversions in Information Technology -- for about a month, now. Each day, they add some piece of insanity actually found "in the wild", in the source code of the world.

Having been in the industry over 11 years, myself, and having reviewed a good bit of this site, I am a bit chilled when I consider that hundreds of millions, billions, even, of dollars are being managed by some of the most terribly designed, practically congealed code you could imagine.

Enjoy!

Introduction

This is just my first Blog. I have finally decided to join the mob.