Thursday, July 29, 2004

Ummm... Ahem.... Hi!

Well, I'm back. I don't have a real excuse for not blogging in the last two weeks or so. I've just been caught up in other things. I could have found time for an entry or two, but I didn't. I'm hoping to crack my mental indifference here.

As far as the leak from last week is concerned, it turned out to be even weirder than I thought. Essentially this is what seemed to have happened. High humidity, combined with someone accidentally setting the AC way too low, caused the condensation drain pipe to overflow. This overflow ran down the side of my AC unit into the catch pan(this is supposed to happen), and from there it should have drained away down a second drain pipe. Instead, some brilliant person decided to drill a hole in the drain pan(and the pressboard flooring underneath). Thus, the overflow fell down onto the ceiling sheetrock, and from there it creeped down my upstair's hall's wall and then down to the kitchen ceiling. Our temporary solution is to simply make sure no one ever cranks the AC down that low again. I will attempt this weekend or next to get something to patch that pan with, although exactly what I'm going to use I haven't determined. On the positive side of things, I didn't have to replace or fix any plumbing, and nothing seems to be actually broken as far as the AC is concerened.

At work I am finally seeing some light at the end of this database tunnel. Without getting into too many details, I figured out how to match data from the switch to it's type in the parallel database. This fix was crucial, because without it I was continually updating forms that didn't need updating(for example: a customer has a PIC of 222(MCI) which is stored in the switch as 0222, the update process was continually trying to update the 222 in the database with 0222. so every time I bashed my switch data against my db data I was coming up with thousands of updates). I am now sitting here waiting for the updates to complete, which is apparently going to take a while.

Driving Gripes
I'm not a huge fan of driving. I don't get much chance for recreational driving anymore, so most of it is just going to work or going shopping. There are a couple of things that really tick me off about traffic, so I thought I'd list them:

  1. When you're pulling into a turn lane, get right on in there. People seem to want to slowly drift into turn lanes, while at the same time slowing down, this causes traffic to back up behind the you.
  2. If there is space between me and the car in front of me, that space is brake space. No one likes tailgaters, and I don't like to tailgate. But, if I leave so much as 5 feet between me and the car ahead, this seems to be an indication to others that they can come right on in. I wish they wouldn't do that.
  3. If you accidentally miss you're turn, or you get into a turn lane mistakenly, just live with the mistake. You can always turn around in a safe manner a ways down the road. Why should the rest of us have to stop and wait for you to squeeze you're way back to where you should have gone?
I have many more, but that's enough complaining for now.

Thermal Depolymerization
This is an old technology which seems to be developing into something practical. Essentially, this is a method by which organic material(rubber, plastics, sewage, people, etc.) can be converted into oil. The trick has always been that it's not energy efficient enough to be practical.

A new company called Changing World Technologies claims to have solved these efficiency troubles. They have, in fact, constructed a plant to turn the unused turkey bits from a turkey processing plant into oil. The amount of oil isn't much, but so far the process seems to work.

A point I'd like to make about this technology is that even if it turns out not to be as efficient as promised, it still could to a world of good. First of all, as this article says, it completely decontaminates virtually all types of waste. Thus a real problem of society, what to do with all of that garbage, would be fixed. Secondly, a system like this should work well with other types of fossil fuels, so that a coal rich society(such as ours) should be able to convert the coal directly into oil, hopefully reducing the carbon output to the air.

Finally, even if the advertised efficiency of 85% isn't true(15% of the garbage's energy content require to process said quantity of garbage) even half this efficiency could be turned to great use. The main problems with alternative energy sources are cost and availability. The Wind doesn't always blow, and the sun doesn't always shine. However, there are places like Arizona ,where the sun shines most of the time, and North Dakota, where the wind blows most of the time. The problem has always been how do you store that energy in a manner that it could be moved to places where it can be used. I see Thermal Depolymerization as a way of transporting it. In the midwest, you could grow the densest fastest growing vegetation you could find, and then ship it to the Depolymerization plant. Harvesting would be easy, because you would simply rip up the entire plant. The Depolymerization process would be powered by Wind(which would be abundant here, and which is also currently the cheapest of the alt. sources). You could also ship in garbage from all over the country to feed the plants. The net result would be abundant fuel, as well as a cleaner environment. This would even close the carbon cycle, since all fuel would effectively be bio-fuel.

I'm sure there are lot's of technical reasons why this is a long shot, but I just thought it was a cool idea.

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