James Chamberlin

There’s not much going on these days. The weather is about the most interesting subject to discuss, strangely enough. After a couple of days near 50 degrees, we’ve dipped back to 30 or below. This means any precipitation is going to be in the form of snow.

Although I love snow, I’m not a fan of it when I’m on the road for the simple reason that people don’t take precautions when driving. It’s too bad we can’t limit drivers licenses by requiring IQ tests. We allow far too many idiots to drive.

I’m afraid there isn’t much to report right now. I’m just busy working.

Regarding the title of this new entry, I had an old post about blog spam which is suddenly attracting you guessed it: blog spam. It’s getting 5-10 spams a day right now. It’s hardly a big problem thanks to Akismet, but I just found it to be ironic that that specific post was getting 95% of my blog spam.

In the last few weeks I’ve briefly read over several articles about a possible solar power station being built in space by the Japanese. The proposed 1-gigawatt power station will cost an estimated $21 billion, a huge expense for such little power. The station would only be able to power ~300,000 Japanese homes. The last time I checked, there were many millions of Japanese homes and businesses.

Why would you want to invest this kind of money in a space project to begin with? Think of all the space debris out there… not just the stuff we put out there like satellites and whatnot, but all of the comets, asteroids, etc. I’d hate to be the pilot(s) trying to adjust the enormous panel to avoid such debris.

All of this brings me to one question I’ve always had regarding solar panels: how much would it cost to put panels on every house and business in any one country? The price would be enormous, but very few countries are actually doing anything about their power needs. It’s infuriating sometimes to see that my own country still has no plan for this. We’re be stuck on Saudi (and other) oil for ages before we get our act together. I don’t like the “putting all of our eggs in one basket” approach when it comes to solving energy independence. And it’s these solar power stations that make me cringe. 100 and 200 megawatt stations are popping up across the world, but if they get damaged, that’s a big loss.

To top it off, there is the fact that our electrical grid is woefully outdated. We don’t have nearly enough of the unsightly high voltage towers and wires to meet future demand. The way I see it, the future of energy starts with us and our very own roofs. If we can generate our own power, there would be no need for those ugly, dangerous, loud high voltage towers and wires. I would love to see a world where we generated enough energy to meet our own demand and be completely off the grid, insusceptible to those wishing to hack our electrical grid.

Every once in a while I feel like watching something an older movie or tv show and last week I popped the first two DVDs of season one of MacGyver in my DVD player and was instantly taken back to the 80s, a time which looks makes things so much more simple than they are today. I was born in the eighties so I likely didn’t see the first few seasons when they originally aired, but I do remember watching this show as a kid, waiting for Mondays to come around.

It’s unclear what it was exactly that I liked about the show… probably the action because as a kid, I also enjoyed Dukes of Hazzard and professional wrestling, so it goes hand in hand with the action on those shows.

However, as I grew up, I think one of the attractive things about the show is the fact that one man can use his mind to overcome just about any obstacle. Sure, it can be said that many of Mac’s creations were completely fake or greatly exaggerated as to their effectiveness, but many of his creations were real.

The show is quite tame to today’s standards. The blood and gore was much more family friendly.

And then there’s the simplicity of life. Imagine a time when having an unlisted number actually meant you wouldn’t be called all day by the robo-telemarketers. MacGyver show does a great job of showing how far we’ve come with the advancements in computing power.

I hope MacGyver creator Lee David Zlotoff doesn’t go through with his plan for a movie if Richard Dean Anderson isn’t involved. RDA was everything to this show. I can’t imagine watching Mac being played by anyone else. Burn Notice is darn close to a modern successor. There’s no need for a “MacGyver II” series featuring his son or something silly like that.

On a side note, can we not let the “MacGruber” finish filming. It’s ridiculous that SNL has allowed that sketch to go beyond the first two or three. They aren’t funny anymore and I can’t imagine what they’re doing turning MacGruber into a feature film. Keep them as terrible SNL sketches, not a bad feature film.

My workout at the gym was pretty exhausting this morning. Although I was only there for 50-55 minutes, I managed to wear myself out with those exercises I mentioned earlier.

My arms are tired, my legs are tired, and when I left the gym, my clothes looked like they were just taken out of the washing machine. There wasn’t a dry spot, from head to toe. I think this is going to be a new favorite workout in the future. I know it’s burning calories. Checking my heartrate after each set of exercises tells me how much it’s making me work.

Finding something new that works is always exciting.

Update: As the day wore on, a muscle in my leg started hurting a bit. I don’t know if it’s technically my groin muscle or something right next to it. Whatever it is, it’s hurting in my right leg.

OK, so the monitor didn’t die, but it might just as well have. I can’t turn the darn thing off now. The power button on the front doesn’t seem to work properly anymore and the monitor is stuck on.

I unplugged the monitor, but I’m not exactly loving this idea as an everyday way of using the monitor. The other option would be using the energy savings options within Vista to turn off the monitor after being inactive for a while. I’m dubious of Vista’s power saving options. Would this work?

Since the warranty on the monitor has expired, I’m thinking of just buying a new monitor. However, there isn’t anything wrong with the monitor other than the fact that I can’t turn it off… no ugly clusters of dead pixels or anything like that.

Hmmm, what to do, what to do…

Now that that one PC of mine has been cleaned out, it’s running much cooler. The fan above the heatsink has yet to spin up while doing something strenuous. In the past, anything that made the CPU work at 50% for more than a few seconds would cause the fan to spin up. It’s because the heatsink fins (or whatever you’d like to call them) were clogged with a layer of dust. Now that the dust is gone, the fan and heatsink are able to work much more efficiently at removing the heat from the CPU and I know that this will give the entire system a longer lifespan.

On the exercise front, I tried something a little different. I try to do leg workouts as often as I can because they can really get the heart racing and burn calories and fat. So the new exercise I did came from an idea I saw on TV and it’s certainly nothing revolutionary. It’s just something I’ve never tried.

There’s a padded chair intended for guys who want to do sitting shoulder presses (video) and I decided to use it as a temporary seat. I’d sit down and quickly stand up and either do a standing shoulder press or a bicep curl. Either way, I was working out my upper body, while also burning a ton of calories with the repeated sit-stand-sit-stand motion. It wore me out within an hour and I was done. Kaput. Throw my ass on a cart and wheel me out.

I intend to do this exercise more often now that I familiarized myself with it. It’s always interesting trying new exercises. Sometimes they prove to be awkward and some end up being less strenuous than you expected. This one was in fact strenuous, but I know it was good for my weight loss efforts.

One of the things, actually, the number one thing I hate about life is maintenance. I hate having to maintain everything. It doesn’t matter what it is. Something is always breaking down or getting dirty, requiring attention.

Maintaining electronics is one of those things that I’m pretty good with, but blowing the dust out of my PCs is something I don’t do often enough and I got worried when I noticed my main PC was blowing a lot of hot air out of the back. What surprised me was that it felt like it was coming exclusively out of the power supply fan and not the case fan below it.

I was instantly worried about a dead case fan because my Dell is no longer on warranty and I figured that Dell likely uses a proprietary connection to the motherboard. All of their equipment is proprietary, after all.

After taking the side panel off, I blew out all of the dust. Most of it was in the front, blocking each and every one of the holes in the front of the case, meaning little to no fresh air was coming in from the front to cool everything.

I then turned my attention to the fans in the rear of the case. All of the fans seemed to spin fine when I blew a little compressed air in them.

At this point, I turned on my PC with the side panel off to see which, if any, of my fans spun up. And to my delight, they all came on.

I’m not a very big fan of Dell’s design of this case (Inspiron 531). There is no fan in the front to suck in air. Adding a second hard drive blocks off a portion of the side panel which has holes for additional fresh air. It kind of makes those holes pointless. And then that back case fan doesn’t spin very fast. I’d rather deal with the noise than overheating issues. I haven’t gone into the BIOS to see if there is a setting for increasing the fan speed. I don’t know how much configuring Dell allows these days. If memory serves, they prefer to lock down their systems for the most part.

The power supply is still blowing fairly warm air, but it’s not as hot as it was, so I’m pleased by that. I wish Dell would spend more time and money researching case designs with good airflow.

Just when I get my blog updated, WordPress has to come out with another security release. You’d think they would learn to be a bit more thorough before putting out a release which fixes security holes.

There isn’t a whole lot of news to offer up this week. The tomatoes aren’t looking good this year. It looks like they’re suffering from some sort of blight. The plants really look sad. I don’t believe there’s any hope for them to last through the summer, sadly enough.

After dragging my feet, I upgraded my blog’s version of WordPress. It didn’t take too long, but it would have gone a little quicker if I hadn’t unnecessarily deleted the upload and theme folders. I quickly had to re-upload those. Remember, kids: back up your data.