Business has been steady

All this post means is that with the holidays coming on and the old house hasn’t sold yet, I’ve been too busy to get one of my longer posts out. It’ll get there.

I wonder if this doesn’t extend to the music Industry

I saw this post by tech guy Steve Gillmor.

I think this extends to the music industry as well.

(Hat tip: Instapundit)

Another Bogging Test

I’ve been working with Google‘s Docs & Spreadsheets web pages, which allows you to create documents and spreadsheets, and save them in various formats. The other nice feature is that you can publish to your blog. So you can have the features of a word processor without having to actually starting Word, or such.

It also allows you to collaborate with others on documents and spreadsheets. I’ve been putting some Emmaus docs in here so that I can get to the information from multiple computers.

Snow, snow, and more snow.

Well, winter has arrived early in northern Michigan. We had what our hydromet prediction center (HPC) an anomalously low 500 mb heights of the 4th to 5th standard deviation. What this meant was there was a big area of low pressure in the upper atmosphere. This usually translates into lots of cold air moving into the region. This air was cold as snow has been falling over the interior of the northern lower Michigan. At the new house in Boyne Falls, we are about 300 feet lower in elevation so the we haven’t received as much snow, but in Gaylord (elevation around 1300 feet) there has been about 5 or 6 inches in the last 24 hours. In fact, there were a few places that received 10 to 11 inches in the last 24 hours.

I’ll see if I can’t get some pictures uploaded.

This makes a big challenge to drive around here. This is a heavy, wet snow that makes the road pretty greasy. I had trouble going up hills and one time on the way into work, spun and ended up perpendicular to the road. Luckily, no one was around on M-32 so I quickly got the van moving the right way. I would normally drive the truck, but the 4 wheel drive isn’t working at the moment, and I didn’t want to drive a rear wheel drive on a light back end of the truck.

Otherwise, we have had Kaleb and Karlie at the house for the last week. This has been fun, and has taken a bit of getting used to. Mary and I have to make sure that rides to and from school are in place. Kaleb usually can get a ride from his girlfriend, who is 16 and has her license. She usually stops by and picks him up or drops him off after school. Karlie, however, needs a ride more often from us. Karlie goes to Concord Academy (Boyne) and Kaleb to Boyne City Public. Because of Mary’s new job (well new as of July), she has the flexibility to go into work later and come home earlier, not to mention she can sometimes work from home. With my rotating shifts, I can help out depending on my schedule. So we are getting used to having meet our new responsibilities, however, to me, they are good responsibilities to have.

How not to chase, but the pictures are great!

I can be my own reporter

When I was younger, I briefly thought about being a reporter. Part of
this was due to watching Dad as a freelance reporter for a couple of
newspapers in the area. My only problem was that I was a little on
the shy side to ask people questions. I have since gotten over that
issue, as far as it is concerned with finding information.

With the new media that has been popping, mainly due to RSS and the
explosion of electronic devices that make it easy to record stuff, I
realized that I can be my own reporter. How is this possible? Here’s a
rundown of things you can do.

Do you own a digital camera? A camera phone? Do you have a blog?
Do you own a wireless device that allows you to get on the internet?
Do you own a digital voice recorder?

Say you see something interesting that you think people would be
interested in like a fire. You can take pictures of the event with
the camera, take notes with your PDA or even record and interview with
the Fire department or owner of the building. With a little editing,
you can go to your nearest WiFi hotspot to upload the pictures and mp3
files and post the story that updates your RSS file. Anyone who
subscribes to your feed can then see the story.

With Flickr’s new email capability, allowing you to send pictures from
your camera phone and posting to your blog as well (Blogger has this
capability too), you can do this from almost anywhere.

I find this exciting. In a way as Mom and Dad post pictures to their
Flickr site and Dad updates his blog as well as Mary and I, and Amy
and Brendon, we can report our own stories that our families find
interesting. I report stuff for Mom and Dad, and everyone else who
reads my blog, provide my opinion and analysis, and just provide
pictures for people to see.

I have been debating on starting my own podcast (i.e. my own radio
show for people to download). I always liked doing radio when I
worked at AccuWeather, so I always to see how I can get back at it.
My biggest stumbling blocks are time and what to podcast. Well I have
the latter figured out. I look at what kind of weather information
people would want here in northern Michigan. Most of it is available,
but a lot of people don’t know how to interpret some of the weather
data to apply it to their situation.

Here, the main thing is recreational weather. Outdoor activities here
are one of the main economic forces. So I have been toying with the
idea of doing recreational forecasts for here. The only problem that
I will run into besides time, will be that as a federal government
worker, I have to be careful about doing anything that is related to
my field of work and using the tools or the appearance of using the
tools and my government time to do a personal thing, especially if I
could make money with it.

So what am I saying here? You can do almost any type of reporting and
you don’t have to work through the traditional media. I subscribe to
several different types of news services, some of which are not
traditional, but are blogs and podcasts, and I find that I am just as
informed as anyone else.

Fennville, MI gets mentioned in an NPR story

I was listening to the most emailed stories for Friday, August 18, 2006 on NPR (this is a podcast, but it was an article that was on All Things Considered, I think). Low and behold, a series that they have been doing called, “A Hundred Bucks of Gas,” briefly mentioned the town I grew up in, Fennville, MI.

Elizabeth: I make it a whole hour before I need a bathroom break. So we take advantage of the stop -– and a shiny-clean restroom -– to gas up at the Fennville, Mich., Shell Station. A tank of gas costs 44 bucks.

Very Interesting, read or listen to the whole thing.

I have to show this video!

I have seen this video floating around on several of the youth ministry sites that I frequent. Check it out!

When it comes to Global Warming are we focusing on the wrong thing?

I’m starting to see the problems of the two sides of the global warming issue. I’m not talking about the technical issues per se, but the human issues. As I have looked at it, I’m not a firm believer in human beings cause global warming, but I’m not a firm believer that we don’t cause it. I still maintain that we do a poor job at taking care of this planet that God put us on and that it is our stewardship of this planet and the inherently sinful (i.e. we are separated from God) nature that leads us into being blinded by our own ambitions. I read a few blogs recently and came upon these two groups:

1. Dr. William Gray, who developed the seasonal forecasting technique for hurricanes, that NOAA uses. An interesting fact that since he was a global warming skeptical and decidedly old school (observationally and conceptually model driven)
2. Real Climate scientists – This is a group of climate change scientists who have studied this in depth, using computer models that emulate the atmosphere.

Both think they are right. I think both are blinded by ego. They won’t admit the flaws in their arguments to actually get at the truth, and if you add the other skeptics of global warming, you can see the consumerism rears it ugly head. Consumerism is easy to see on the Skeptic side with the money that the oil companies have poured into funding research about how fossil fuels don’t contribute to global warming. It is a little harder to see on the pro-anthropogenic side, but people and institutions get paid to do their research and if something is the “thing” to study the money will flow. I’ve seen this happen while working as a contractor for the government years ago.

The flaws on both sides are these:

1. Dr. Gray’s observationally and conceptual ideas may be right, but if he ignores the some of the data that the modeling groups have been doing then he runs the risk of being wrong due to the help and guidance that models can give.
2. The Real Climate scientists seem to rely so heavily on the models that they have forgotten the thing that I deal with day in and day out in operational meteorology, the farther out in time that you are prognosticating into the future the more that the model succumbs to chaos (more about chaos here) and the inherent low confidence of predictability.

Either side could be right, but like I said, we are focusing on the wrong thing. To me, global warming is immaterial. It’s the fact that we are to take care of the planet. We know that too much of one thing can be bad. Addictions take all sorts of forms, and when President Bush said in his state of the union address that America is addicted to oil wasn’t off the mark. Most of the world’s economy is based on petroleum, but should it be? With most of the oil in politically unstable areas of the world, and there is only a finite amount of oil there has to be cleaner fuels, and energy sources that we can use to develop economically.

Again, it’s a consumer mentality that most of the world has. I get tired of hearing from conservatives that it will cost too much to convert to something else. I ask why should it or so what? When new technologies come out to help out the situation we need to share it with the developing nations. To me that’s why Kyoto was doomed to fail. The developed countries that need to cut back wouldn’t because the undeveloped countries got a free ride to use. How was that to help the environment? As Christians, we are taught to meet each other’s need no matter who the person is, so why not in trying to take care of the planet?

Google, Gmail and new stuff

Recently, I was exploring Google and the new extras that are available. This has been pretty cool. I was add some cool gadgets to my personalized Google page. While doing that, I was exploring Google personal pages (i.e. Web space) and found out I needed a Gmail account. I looked at Gmail and found out that I didn’t need anyone to send me an invite anymore, but I could invite myself. So I signed up. I now have a Gmail account. That has taken a little to get used to. The one thing I really like about it is the IM on it. I don’t have to download software. I just have to add Gmail Contacts and they appear. This will be good for when Mary need’s to ask me something at work. So I have been playing with it the last couple of days. The nice thing is that some of this carries over to the Google PDA page. So I can check email, look at my RSS feeds, and my personal Google page with my wireless connection, whether at home or on the road. Very nice.