don’t panic

I’ve never been a big fan of James Dobson, nor his group’s sappy “Family” bumper stickers and simplistic solutions to parenting, but lately he is really starting to sound a lot like Pat Robertson.

It’s not evangelicals, even conservative evangelicals, but rather treading that fine line between a preacher of the word of God, and a public figurehead that could care less about anyone who doesn’t hold the same exact views. It seems like every time there is some public issue that mentions “God”, poof! there’s the name James Dobson tied right along side it. Well, James, there’s your reward. Enjoy it, because you’ll get no other, especially from me.

Latest rant – Let’s pick on a two year-old speech by the current Democratic presidential candidate. It’s not like there are any more important issues to focus on… at least none that will generate as much publicity. We are quick to comment on an “atrocity”, and even dump tons of money on the issue so long as it stays on the media front-lines. But as soon as it’s third page news, we dump our support like a used condom.

Ask yourself this question, James. Would you be making these statements about Obama if Hillary Clinton had won the presidential nomination?

With 216 days left in office it seems President Bush has finally realized that he might as well forget about leaving with any sort of positive legacy at the end of his term, and is instead trying to bolster up his ties with his old buddies in Big Oil.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/18/bush.offshore/index.html

Ever since he came into office he’s been trying to bully his way into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and this is no different. Using whatever crisis is currently available to justify his actions, he has consistently pushed for something that will have a negligible impact on our foreign oil dependency, but would be a great boon for his pals in oil.

There’s a reason it’s called a “refuge”.

For the last seven years (actually a lot longer) our country has been doing nothing but putting out fires, and poorly at that. We saw it on 9/11, and again with Katrina. Now we are seeing it again along the Mississippi. We are the most technologically advanced country in the world and we can’t find a way to fill enough sandbags to keep a dozen cities from flooding?? Why not just send bunch of troops over there to divert the disaster… oh, that’s right, they are all in Iraq.

Sure, we could drill the hell out of the last major wildlife zone, and put up hundreds of offshore drilling rigs, and we might just increase our domestic oil production by 5-10%. But for what? So we can be even more dependent on a rapidly dwindling resource? And it’s not like our consumption rate is going down any time soon, let alone the rest of the world. But it looks better to people who are driving huge SUV’s and paying $500 a month for gas. It looks better to the hurting family of four who needs every penny they can get because their house is about to be foreclosed on. And it looks better to Big Oil, who has been trying to skirt the law and bulldoze their way into those areas for decades, all while making record profits year after year after year.

It’s not like we’re going to get those areas back if we give them up. Once they are opened, they are gone. Forever. The White House and the oil companies will all proclaim their love of the environment and “promise” to only use “environmentally friendly offshore oil drilling”. What could possibly be environmentally friendly about an oil rig dumping toxic petroleum products and garbage into the ocean and air?

You can not simply do what looks good today when it comes to making a decision that will effect the entire human race, even the whole ecosystem, for centuries. We live in a symbiotic relationship with every other form of life on this planet, yet we consistently view ourselves as though we are somehow above that, as though we can survive by will and hard work alone. It’s our supreme vanity, our arrogance that has us believe that the rest of the world is simply some collection of resources waiting to be used.

But we live as part of a great and finely balanced system; a self-regulating creation that works because each part does it’s job. Take out a part, and the system will try and compensate. Sometimes it’s successful, and sometimes it’s not and the whole system dies. Everywhere we look, we are seeing massive changes in both the life and climate on our planet. We see the Earth trying to compensate for a part of the system gone amok. We see one part of the system removing itself and literally attacking all the other parts in wholesale destruction.

But lets go ahead and open up the coasts and the arctic so that Joe SUV can save a few bucks and give Big Oil another record-breaking year in profits.

There was an article on the Wired Blog Network about how the major auto makers have finally given up on the SUV and large trucks in favor of smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. The author says –

“What’s surprising isn’t that SUVs are dead, but how quickly they fell.”

Really? This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. I think that it’s only the obviously overpaid marketing executives at these companies who are surprised. And why?… Because they have been living in a dreamworld of “high oil prices are just a fad”. No one who does even a cursory daily perusing of world events would have any trouble at all seeing where the world is going from an energy standpoint, but car companies don’t want to change. Their model has worked for a very long time and they just don’t want to let go. Now, with gas prices closing on $5.00 a gallon in the U.S., those oh-so-fickle consumers are finally saying “no thanks” to vehicles that get 10 mpg. Duh.

If I were a researcher for a major car company, trying to figure out where to put our focus for the next decade, I would tell the execs the following:

1. Build a better battery. Simply put, cars are going electric. Oil is not going to become more plentiful anytime soon, nor is the issue it creates with greenhouse gasses. Electric cars need batteries, and right now, those batteries are expensive, short lived, heavy, bulky, and don’t hold a large enough charge. I’d put huge research into finding ways to store electric energy more efficiently.

2. Put solar cells on the roofs of electric cars. The roof of most cars is a big fat waste of space. Why not stick some panels up there and give your car a 25% milage boost. Dang, in SoCal, you could probably get most people home from work for free on the charge they could get off the top of their car while it sits in a sunny parking lot. Free energy is pouring from the sky and so far, we are mostly ignoring it.

3. Stop making “performance” cars. Like the SUV, people are are going to wake up to the fact that being able to go from 0 to 60 in 6 seconds kills your milage, so does being able to haul your boat, or a top speed of 180 mph. I think people would settle for a lot less if they could get 50 mpg. You could make cheaper, more efficient cars and everyone might actually drive a little slower. 80 mph on the freeway is not only dangerous, it’s a massive waste of gas due to simple aerodynamics.

4. Kill the curve. Tell your designers to stop cutting corners… literally. This idea flies in the face of what researchers are saying about increasing milage for electric cars, but we’re talking about what people want here. More and more, the shift is away from big, powerful vehicles with lots of room, to small, efficient vehicles with barely room for a picnic basket. But it’s not the size that’s wrong here, it’s the cost to move your life from point A to point B. I say “life” because it’s often not just us in the vehicle, it’s also our kids, a load of groceries, a new chair, a big dog, whatever! Square cars have more useful room. Period. This is why truck beds are a big flat square, not a rounded pool. The perfect example of doing it wrong can be seen in the latest version of the Toyota Scion xB. When we bought our car at the very end of 2006, we got the model that was basically a box on wheels. No curves here, and we love it! We fit in our car, easily. It’s a joy to ride in, and my wife and I constantly comment on how un-claustrophobic it is, even though it is considered a “compact” car. We actually have room over our heads, and I’m six foot two. But the latest version is all rounded, killing the internal cargo space. They also lowered the roof to make it more sexy… and ruined the most appealing aspect of the vehicle. Somehow, all those “efficient” curves also managed to lower the milage from 30/35mpg to 22-/28mpg. Dumb. Kill the curves. Find your milage boost elsewhere.

5. Use geek technology. Why does my car not have wi-fi? Why am I not able to have my home computer upload music to an onboard, built-in iPod while it sits in the garage? For that matter, why can’t my car upload stats and maintenance notices to my home computer? Why hasn’t anyone put in a simple, clean, inverter power source so I can plug in my laptop without buying some lame cigarette-lighter adapter. Are there that many smokers still driving around without a lighter in their pocket? On-board GPS would be nice, but I would much rather have a real-time milage readout (with the ability to enter fill-up statistics) and a built-in bluetooth link to my phone for hands-free communication (now that it will be a requirement in California come July). Don’t tell me it’s expensive… My five year-old PDA does most of this stuff. Peanuts.

So, to the marketing executives at the big-five, there you go. The future revealed today. Now go do your job and stop waiting for the people to tell you that you blew it. Get ahead of the game and give folks what they will want, not what they wanted yesterday.

One of the great things about having a laptop is that you can actually sit back on your comfy couch and put the thing on your lap. And while I love my MacBook, it has one issue that literally burns me… It gets freaking hot!

Most laptops will generate a fair amount of heat when they are doing anything processor intensive, but the MacBook really does seem to put out the BTU’s, especially on the bottom where the cpu lives. Unfortunately, this is also where my thighs live. There have been times when the bottom of my laptop gets literally too hot to keep my hand on. I can’t imagine it can be all too good for my legs either. That 16th of an inch of denim isn’t a good enough insulator to keep my flesh from slow-roasting during an especially long gaming session or video edit.

The natural response is to throw something like a pillow under there, and while it will insulate you nicely from the heat, that same insulation prevents heat from escaping your laptop. This is a sure-fire way to fry your computer. MacBooks also have the air exit ports at the back, so a nice fluffy pillow is very likely to block air circulation and heat things up even further.

Next I tried a thin flat book. This worked a little better for the laptop, but I was surprised to find that heat slowly worked it’s way through the book and into my legs. Besides, a book is hard. After a couple of hours, the tops of my thighs were hot and chaffed. I added that pillow under the book, but a fluffy pillow isn’t a very stable platform and I had to hunt down a one-inch thick piece of foam rubber I had. This worked a lot better. But even with all this I still saw that my poor laptop was running hotter than it should.

I chalk it up to bad design, but the little rubber feet on the bottom of the laptop really aren’t thick enough to allow adequate air-flow under the MacBook itself. So even on a flat hard surface, it would heat up far too easily. I tried making the feet taller with limited success, but short of super-glueing some rubber feet to the bottom, I just couldn’t keep them on. I was playing “blocks” with my daughter when it occurred to me that I could affix the higher feet to the platform instead. So I “borrowed” a few of my daughter’s toys for an experiment.

They result was that my laptop faired a bit better, and the heat reaching my legs was greatly reduced. It seems even a little airspace nullified the radiant heat that was toasting me. But a book and some blocks are not “convenient,” so this weekend I took advantage of the fact that my pop has a fantastic woodshop right in his garage and Frankenstein’ed myself a simple but effective laptop platform.

It’s entirely utilitarian, but it was cheap (as in free!), and easy to put together (provided you have the materials and a shop handy).

Basically a piece of plywood with some glued-on blocks, I cut a couple of L-shaped brackets from a pre-formed piece of aluminum lying around (don’t we all have random building materials stored up for random Saturday projects?) to keep the laptop from sliding forward. I never sit with my legs flat so even though the feet under the laptop are rubber, my MacBook would slowly inch off the blocks.

My mom was only too happy to whip together a make-shift pillowcase for the piece of foam rubber which I then affixed to the bottom with velcro.

The aluminum brackets are screwed into the bottom.

Now there’s a good quarter inch of air space under there. It would be even better with a fan, but that’s another Saturday…

UPDATE – I made another one of these for my Macbook Pro, as it had the same problem and generated even more thigh-blistering heat.  It was a little wider and had a shorter bracket on the right-hand side to accommodate the front-loading CD drive.  My wife got one of those fancy Belkin cooling platforms with the fan that runs off your USB port, but it certainly isn’t designed for a Mac, and I didn’t see any real benefit from the fan.  She likes my lap-stand better.