Silicon Valley Redneck

Yes, we're back.

Two weeks ago, Joy and I set out on an Adventure.  There was a gathering of the clan planned for Tower City, ND, and, given my aversion to commercial air travel (even before the post-9/11 security theater escalation), and Joy never having been to those places in between the coasts, we made a road trip of it.

There will be a trip report, with photos, as time allows (including the answer to the whatziss).

Points along the way: Incline Village, Twin Falls, Craters of the Moon, Idaho Falls, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Bozeman, Billings, Bismarck, Fargo, Wall, Mt. Rushmore, Devil's Tower, Rawlins, Timpanogos Cave, and Elko.

There was way too much to see along the way... trying to visit a lot of places on a 2-week trip doesn't really work.

Middle America is still there, and what I had a chance to see of the culture hasn't changed much.  I'll have some commentary on that, in among the bits of trip report.  It makes the return to California rather disorienting (especially returning by way of North Tahoe).

The tourist attractions were busy, but not horribly crowded (high fuel prices may have something to do with this), with no signs of crowd rage.

Now I have lots of bloggable material, but this had better be a weekend for catching up on stuff... and, on Monday, it's back to work.  I've got one definite live project and another probable one, and that's a Good Thing, 'cause the travel bills kinda add up.

Oh, and there's a potential project on the horizon for which I may need to go to cow college, or at least cow boot camp.  Anyone know where a technonerdboy can go for a crash course in modern cattle management?

Questioning biofuels, yet again

Insty links to an article claiming that biofuels have driven world food prices up by 75%.  It's the Grauniad, so take it with an agricultural-sized block of salt.

Still, as noted in yesterday evening's post, adulterating gasoline with biofuel caused a substantial increase in my car's fuel consumption (and cost per mile).

It's kinda amusing to note the promotion of biofuels, which I guess may work as long as not too many people keep fuel logs and run the numbers (and not too many cars calculate MPG for you).  Passing from ND to SD on I-29, one encounters a string of billboards singing the praises of ethanol.  'Cause, you know, The Ethanol is From Corn.

(No, I didn't photograph the billboards.  I was busy driving at the time.)

14 days, 4880 miles, 106 gallons of gas.

Sundry notes from the Fargo trip:

Stuff that works

• The Prius
  It's a fine vacation car for two people, or maybe three who pack carefully.  Fuel economy is great (note the numbers: 48 MPG for the trip, despite a couple of tanks of gasohol).  Not good for offroading nor hauling large/heavy stuff.
  It passed the 100,000 mile mark a couple of days ago, out in the middle of nowhere, and is still working fine.
  ... Except for the air-conditioner drainage.   It's drooled on the floor (under the dashboard, passenger side) a couple of times before, when I ran the defogger in horribly humid conditions.  On this trip, it started making small lakes when running in warm, humid conditions, i.e., when I really want air conditioning.
  (I'd been guessing the drain tube was somehow getting skrunkled and obstructed, causing overflow into the passenger compartment.  After a significant swamp formed on the way to Wall, I removed the mat, used one of the hotel's trash towels to remove most of the water, pulled up the carpet, and extricated the drain tube.  I found no evidence of skrunklage, but it seems maybe it had gotten dislodged, and was simply draining onto the floor instead of through the little drain hole.  It's been fine since.)
• Verizon
  Pretty decent voice coverage - with some gaps along the highways, and no coverage in national parks - and surprisingly good EVDO coverage.  Just about any settlement with a lunch counter also has an EVDO signal.  Not so much EVDO in between towns, but, really, should you be surfing the Net while driving?  Even the Tower City Cemetery has a solid EVDO signal!  (For those who surfed while driving, I suppose.)
  ...Except for approximately 0845~0930 July 4th, in Incline Village.  The EVDO signal was there, and the phone would connect, but the data rate was pathetic.  Then the EVDO signal went away completely for a couple of minutes, after which service was back to normal.
• FreeBSD on commodity hardware.
  The Gumbyware server hummed happily along the whole time.
• Checklists
  I didn't leave anything important behind... and, arriving at "turn off water heater" on the checklist, I noticed that the inlet fitting is horribly corroded.  I have a feeling that water heater is going to die within the next year... and it maybe could have done so during the trip.

Stuff that doesn't work

• T-Mobile
  OK, so it's a big-city cellphone company, but why is there only spotty coverage in Fargo?  There's no coverage at all in between cities, which makes it completely useless for emergencies while on the road.
• Gasohol
  Cruising along the freeway at a reasonable speed, the Prius normally gets around 45-50 MPG on California gasoline.  On the sort of real gasoline they sell in Nevada and Idaho, it gets around 55 MPG.  Into North Dakota, fill up with "regular", and... oog.  Around 40 MPG.  The "regular" is cheap, but it's Enhanced With Ethanol! and thus has low fuel value.
  Apparently the "premium" gas, for right about the same price, is a genuine petroleum product; too bad I didn't hear that before filling up twice with the corn squeezin's.
  Being charitable, let's call that a 20% decrease in fuel value per gallon compared to Montana gas.  Dakota gasohol costs about 5% less per gallon than Montana gas, so... no, that's not a bargain.  10.4 MP$ for Dakota gasohol vs. 12.3 MP$ for Montana gas = 15% less value for money.
  (For future research: learn how fuel with 10% (?) ethanol can have 20% less fuel value than real gasoline... and how it manages only an 85 octane rating.  Isn't ethanol supposed to boost the octane number?)
• Taking work along
  I managed to check my e-mail almost every day, but most of the Work Stuff (and personal projects) I'd so carefully packed went untouched.  I did manage to put in a few hours on some documentation a client needed for their customer, during the weekend we were in Fargo.  The rest of the time, we were just on the move too much.

Stuff that has its place, I suppose

• McDonald's
  It's the triumph of mediocrity: McD's is the place where a traveler in a hurry can get a meal of predictably acceptable quality, cheap.  Now, of course, it has several competitors - Burger King, Carl's Jr., Wendy's, and so on.  Any of these will do if you're in a hurry and on a budget.
  I note that Denny's (a step up, and not really in the same fast/cheap pattern) is somewhat less predictable.  A Grand Slam breakfast in Billings was pretty good, except for the bacon.  The bacon looked rather unpromising, but tasted fantastic.
  Of course, if you have time for lunch, it's generally worth checking out local eateries, as there's a fair chance of finding a better combination of quality and price, as well as more interesting food and local character.

Stuff that has lost its way

• Motel 60
  Once upon a time, Motel 6 was the McDonald's of lodging: cheap, and predictably mediocre.  Within living memory, the name was the price: $6/night, all locations, all seasons.
  It's still an acceptable place to crash for the night, but the price has increased by an order of magnitude, making it seem rather less of a bargain, especially with significantly nicer accommodations being available for maybe 20% more money.

Stuff that's just... odd

• Time zones on the Garmin c330
  Calculating trips from Yellowstone to destinations in Montana, the GPS gave ETAs that were optimistic by an hour.  Turns out the time zone is set manually, not determined by the current location nor the location of the destination.  Wouldn't you think that'd be automatic, or at least that there'd be a setting for "determine the time zone automatically"?
• While we're on the subject of time zones...
  How come the Central / Mountain boundary runs through North Dakota, instead of following the state line?  Is it because the west end of the state is lumpy, and thus gets classified as "mountain"?  And how come the AAA map of Idaho shows the time zones at the state border, but the map of the Dakotas doesn't show the time zones running down wherever-it-is?

Driving on rural highways?  Oh, yes indeed.

Teaser

Border war between North Dakota and Montana escalates!

(It's sort of a whatziss.  Answer next week.  We passed a few more of these things on the road.  They travel in pairs, one pointing forward and one backward on a flatbed truck.  The blunt end appears to be open.)

Stray thought...

El Reg has an article regarding a detailed analysis of what it would take to meet the UK's energy needs sans carbon, taking various approaches.

I seem to recall Steven Den Beste having done something similar with regard to the US, several years ago, but I'm not finding it right now.

I've often wondered how it is that hardly anyone seems to pay attention to the downsides of photovoltaic power: the extremely poor lifecycle energy efficiency (with current technology), and the effect of putting up large areas of black material, thereby creating heat islands.

Anyway, while looking at Prof. MacKay's estimates for wind farms, I had this thought:

What effect would large-scale wind farms have on the climate?

Wind turbines work by slowing the wind that passes over them.  Doing this on a significant scale has got to have some effect on the climate.  Anyone know what that effect would be?

It's the zeroth power failure of summer!

Summer doesn't officially begin until tomorrow, so that power failure this evening must have been the zeroth.

It was just long enough - more then 10 seconds, less than a minute - to remind me that, what with the datacenter still being in a temporary configuration, I hadn't gotten around to plugging Perdita (nor the monitor) into a UPS.

Reboot, put things back the way they'd been before the outage, and along comes Power Failure 0.1, of similar duration.

OK, so this time, before turning the workstation back on (old Vetinari, the server, is happily running all this time), run out to the garage for a nice long orange extension cord, and plug workstation & monitor into the second UPS, which is over where things are supposed to go after I build the new cabinet / thermal defenestrator.

Since then, naturally, there have been no further disruptions.  So far....

Y'know, when I was your age...

In technological terms, I'm definitely an old geezer.

That new cellphone?  I got a flash card to go with it.  Micro SD.  Two gigabytes in a fingernail-sized package for $12.

Why, I can remember... back in the mid 1980s, two gigabytes, if anyone could have afforded such an extravagance, would have been the size of half a dozen washing machines, and taken huge amounts of power.

(This is based on a vague recollection that the 1980s washing-machine disk drives took about 300 MB packs, so six of those would be around 1.8 GB.  The disk drives we used, being of 1970s vintage, stored 5 MB per 14" platter, which density would mean maybe 60 MB per washing machine.)

Not too impressed with today's download.

OK, so in observance of Firefox Download Day, I grabbed and installed a copy of the official Firefox 3.0 release.

This time I got smart, and made a backup copy of my ~/.mozilla directory first, so I can switch back easily should the need arise.

A bunch of plugins weren't compatible, but some of them I wasn't using anyway, and for some there were (possibly better) substitutes.

The most unimpressive thing so far: the hangs.  It'll just go away, from time to time, and not respond to user input.  It's not using significant CPU time when it does that; it just kind of dozes off.  Sometimes it wakes up again, after several seconds or a minute; sometimes I have to kill it and start over.

Perhaps it's not ready for prime time?

Oh, and on my Debian-unstable system, it kept waking up in "work offline" mode.  A bit of Googling turned up a magic edit to /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf to fix this.

I think the print dialog (under Linux) is maybe an improvement, but takes a bit of getting used to.

Update: back to FF2.0 until further notice.  The UI freezes are just too frequent.  I'll have to give it a good workout on the laptop, too, while that's tethered to my fast net connection, and see if the same thing happens there.

When allegories attack

I can see it now... the truth!

Alex Kozinski is a member of T.H.E.Y. - The Horde of Ecumenical Yodelers!  He's secretly one of the top world leaders!

His personal server was an extension of T.H.E.Y.'s secret vault in the back of the Dairy Freeze - the one where they hold the key to world domination!

While the vault contains the world's most complete Three Morons film collection, Kozinski's server contained more modern material in the same vein, accessible to T.H.E.Y. members everywhere via the Internet.

That probably makes Cyrus Sanai some sort of disgruntled lab mouse.

Neep!  Neep!  Ri-co-laaaaa!

The things you miss when you drop off USENET...

That quiz in the last post?  I happened across it while following up on, well, not exactly a disturbing search request, but a search request that turned up some disturbing old news.

Checking my referrer log this morning, I saw that someone had found one of my old blog posts while doing a pipl search (pipl is some new search engine for looking up pipples, er, people) for a talented artist I'd mentioned the last time I saw him, a bit over three years ago.

Looking at the referring page, I found my post, his home page, and an announcement by a neighboring state government, a few months after I'd last seen him, that he'd be wearing striped pajamas for the next decade after being convicted on child pornography charges.

Wha...?

Had I stayed connected to USENET, I would have read about this at the time.

I'm not at all familiar with the details of the case, so I can't comment on how guilty he might really be, but apparently the investigation started, as they so often do, with the discovery of illicit photos on his computer.

And now I'm thinking: there's at least one image in my browser cache (and thus in the archives of my home directory) which some people are calling child pornography, and which might legally fall in that category despite the lack of pornographic intent.  I got this image from a prosecutor in L.A., who got it from a lawyer, who claims he got it from a federal judge.  Regardless: if it were held to be child porn, I'd be automatically guilty.

...

Pinky - are you pondering what I'm pondering?

I think so, Brain, but surely that's impossible without at least one live chicken and a rabbi.

No, Pinky.  We plant malicious code on Google's home page to load child pornography into the browser caches of everyone who visits the site, without them ever seeing it.  Soon, everyone in the world will be a felon, and disqualified from holding office, and then I can take over the world!