Two new blogs I’m going to add to my Netvibes RSS feed: Diego Rodriguez(metacool)’s Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness and Mister Jalopy and Mark F.’s Dinosaurs and Robots. I hope I don’t need to explain Mr. Rodriguez’s new place to you; Dinosaurs and Robots says about itself, “Rather than focus on the newest trend, we will seek authentic, handy, rarefied, disgusting, illuminating, delicious, mysterious, intoxicating, commonplace, historic, intensely personal, entertaining and enlightened objects, both priceless heirlooms and exquisite trash.” Sounds good to me. Uniting both new blogs – a certain, shall we say, augmented, Ford product.
Category Archives: random stuff
WordPy
I’m testing micro/mobile blogging from the N810, using WordPy (an offline blogging client). Still thinking about the best way to get pictures from my good digital camera to Flickr – without a PC – but I know I can email from the camera in my cell direct to Flickr…
I know it’s a sign of my advanced age, but every so often I just fall over in amazement. Five years ago, posting to the web from just about anywhere in the developed world using a phone and a gadget that’ll fit nicely in a pocket? Right.
Technorati Tags: moblog
A good day for it…
I’m trying to wrap my head around the whole Bear Stearns thing. While I’m doing that – and trying not to see it as a precursor to a financial apocalypse – happy St. Patrick’s Day!
JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed to buy Bear Stearns Cos. for about $240 million, less than a 10th of its value last week, after a run on the company ended 85 years of independence for Wall Street’s fifth-largest securities firm. *
Value of the office building BS owns?
The 1.2 million-square-foot, 45-story structure built in 2001 is worth about $1.2 billion, based on the average $1,000 per- square-foot that comparable office space in the city is currently fetching.
Um. Wow. So the rest of Bear Stearns assets are worth in the neighborhood of -$960,000,000?
Update – Nouriel Roubini:
The response of the Fed to this run has been radical and in the form of the extension of the lender of last resort support to non bank financial institutions. Specifically, the new $200 bn term facility allows primary dealers – many of which are non banks – to swap their toxic mortgage backed securities for US Treasuries; second, the Fed provided emergency support to Bear Stearns and following the purchase of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan, is now providing a $30 bn plus support to JPMorgan to help the rescue of Bear Stearns; finally, now the Fed is allowing primary dealers to access the Fed discount window at the same terms as banks.
This is the most radical change and expansions of Fed powers and functions since the Great Depression: essentially the Fed now can lend unlimited amounts to non bank highly leveraged institutions that it does not regulate. The Fed is treating this run on the shadow financial system as a liquidity run but the Fed has no idea of whether such institutions are insolvent. As JPMorgan paid only about $200 million for Bear Stearns – and only after the Fed promised a $30 billlion loan – this was a clear case where this non bank financial institution was insolvent. *
Trash to gas to steam to electricity and heat
A recent BLDBLOG post gave me the motivation I needed to do some photography and (brief) posting that has been on my ‘ought to get to that at some point’ list for six months. Last fall I noticed a lot of digging and pipe laying near home and on my drive to work. I was curious, but didn’t figure out what was going on until a story on the radio clued me in. The University of New Hampshire and Waste Management are collaborating on a project: EcoLine.
In 2008, UNH will become the first university in the U.S. to use landfill gas as its primary energy source. In partnership with Waste Management of New Hampshire, Inc., UNH launched EcoLine, a landfill gas project that will pipe enriched and purified gas from Waste Management’s landfill in Rochester to the Durham campus. The renewable, carbon-neutral landfill gas, from Waste Management’s Turnkey Recycling and Environmental Enterprise (TREE) facility in Rochester, NH, will replace commercial natural gas as the primary fuel in UNH’s cogeneration plant in January 2009, enabling UNH to receive 80-85% of its energy from a renewable source and sell additional power produced to the grid by mid-2009. Construction began in 2007 on thelandfill gas processing plant in Rochester that will purify the gas and on the 12.7 mile underground pipeline taht [sic – glad I’m not the only one taht does taht] will transport the gas from the plant to the university’s Durham campus.
I took some pictures this morning between deluges as I ran some errands – slide show is below. UNH’s cogen plant’s website is here. In a laudable bit of transparency (way to go!) they allow you to log in to a guest account on their monitoring system – the diagrams in the slideshow are screencaps of the monitor that I grabbed. If you’re really curious – I’ve mapped the pictures on Flickr – you can click through to see where this is happening.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
Mixed media
- Observations on books as display items (yes, I’m thinking bowerbirds again) and on the fact that romance novels are not appropriate for this purpose – here. A hat tip to two writers of romances and a personal observation: unread books on my shelves are the result of a collision between bibliomania and the work week.
- Netvibes have just rolled out a new release (review here). One of the things the new version allows me to do is publish a public version of my portal – a ‘universe’ in netvibes-speak. I’m putting up a new category on the right margin; Alt Tentacles (yay DKs) will collect pointers to other debris I’m cluttering the web with. Flickr and Twitter get their own widgets – because they can.
- A musical interlude:
Monday morning potpourri for $500, please, Alex
…as I argued a few weeks ago, before the monoline crisis fully blew up in public, no business that requires a AAA rating in order to be viable deserves a AAA rating in the first place. – Nouriel Roubini * (N. Roubini:macroecon::J. Kunstler:energy policy – h/t Tom)
- Friedrich von Blowhard has an interesting analysis of the ratings theater surrounding the monoline insurers here.
- John Robb posts on MEND, Henry Okah and 4GW in Nigeria.
- Reclaiming the concept of the go bag.
- Obsolete skills. Some are funny, some are (IMHO) just plain WRONG. Funny: Swapping floppy disks. Wrong: Starting a car that has a manual choke (my ’85 LandCruiser had a manual choke – fabulous vehicle), Map Reading (tell the S&R team that map reading is an obsolete skill).
An aside – I have this cranky-old-man theory that an entire science and math curriculum could be built around teaching/learning/doing celestial navigation. (sticks head out door – “Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!”)
Book Meme
I’ve been tagged!
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.
This
The Andronovo cultural zone covers an enormous portion of western Asia. Its western flank constitutes a contact zone with the Srubnaya culture in the Volga-Ural interfluvial and extending eastward to the Minusinsk depression (Fig. 3.5). Sites are found as far south as the foothills of the Koppetdag, the Pamir, and Tien-Shan mountains, whereas the northern boundary is unclear when it reaches the taiga zone. *
I tag HGP, M and/or D, Whimsy, Lex10 and Xtin (let’s see if this will cause her to emit signal).
Signs
More alt history
Via The Reality-Based Community, a link to this overview of the work of Onken and Jones. It ties in to a question I’ve always had about the way events work – are there really pivot points, or are there broad trends that force thing in certain directions and we retrofit the specific causes (or – as things seem usually to be – a bit of both)?
The researchers also found that assassinations have no effect on the inauguration of wars, a result that “suggests that World War I might have begun regardless of whether or not the attempt on the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 had succeeded or failed.â€
In other news, my friend Ray seems to have been involved with early efforts towards a transatlantic cable, discussing same with a favorite steam-vicky – Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
From above
A few pictures from the local métropole, taken from a vantage point I rarely experience. There was a vendor presentation today at a nice private club atop a local five-story skyscraper – nice lunch and very useful info (if you care about 802.11n and mesh networks). Win.
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BTW – I think Flickr’s been infiltrated by Mainers (compare where Flickr says the pictures were taken with where I placed them on the map)!
What kind of mutant?
You are a: DIPROSOPIC PARAPAGUS
You have one head, one body, but two faces, partially merged, with a third eye in the center, two noses, and two mouths.
*
From a distance, you look like anyone else. It is only those you allow close enough to look into your eyes who will see your true nature, which is emergent. You are neither one thing nor a different thing, but rather the difference just emerging from within the one. Walking down the street, you seem to hear other footsteps keeping pace with yours. Speaking, you hear your every word echoed, but so quickly you cannot be sure it is not your imagination. Reading, you see double; every word seems out of register. Never at ease, you are haunted by a feeling that something is about to happen. It never does; or rather, when things do happen, it is evident that they do not exhaust the sense of imminence that bothers you. When you close your third eye, and try to look at things as others do, you see all the more clearly the fissure in the heart of things. Maybe because your ordinary eyes are farther apart than theirs, you can tell, as singletons cannot, that the fat and friendly world they see as one is really the forced marriage of two parts that are already sliding apart—product of the binocular point of view. And when you close both ordinary eyes, and look at the world through the third eye that partakes equally in both parts of you, you begin to glimpse the world as it truly is: a scatter of sequins, a broken mirror. Your literary form is the off-rhyme.
You are related to…
The Two-Headed Lamb in Walter Potter’s Museum of Curiosities, who was born at Beeding Court Farm in West Sussex, around 1871.*
Quiz here, via Whimsy, Cabinet and ineradicablestain.
A little open water swimming
Gary Sredzienski – local accordion celeb and polka maven – recently took a dip in the ocean. He swam the 6 miles from Odiorne Point to Appledore Island to raise money for the Krempels Brain Injury Foundation. Lest anyone think this is a one-time thing, Gary swims daily, year-round, in the saltwater creeks and back channels round here. I like open water swimming as much as (just about) anyone, but it’s a little too brisk for me this time of year.
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Full disclosure – I’m at 1 (2?) degree of separation from Gary – the Serf’s drummer is a friend of mine.
