Ernest

Ernesto put a kink in our travel plans. We had planned a trip to Tampa this week but yesterday the forecast track was directly to Tampa so we put things on hold. The forecast track has steadily shifted to the east. I think the high pressure area out in the Altantic keeps weakening allowing it to curve more to the east. Today I think we will continue to prepare to go. If it continues to shift to the east and looks like it will travel the SE coast then we will head out early in the AM for Tampa. I put up a few more shutters this morning. I already had about 80 percent of them up. I just cannot be taking them up and down all season.

Business 2.0: How Australia got hot for solar power - Aug. 2, 2006

Business 2.0: How Australia got hot for solar power - Aug. 2, 2006

Interesting that this appeared in the CNNMoney.com site as one of the best business ideas in the world.

Thunderstorm Bubbles

Thunderstorm Bubbles
Originally uploaded by rbrown3rd.

Check out these giant bubbles that were percolating in the atmosphere of South Florida today. It is on such a grand scale. Makes one feel rather insignificant. Be sure you read the comments under the image and click on the animation link to see the action.

Brugs

Summer is here. The high temperatures and humidity have made at least some of our residents happy. These are our Angel Trumpets or Brugmansias which have been blooming their little hearts out. We have to keep them well fed while they are so productive. So, we fertilize every other week. Some of these were cuttings just a few months ago.

Docked

The Mothership is back in her docking station. We arrived yesterday around 4 pm. At the same time a severe thunderstorm or squall line arrived. We could see it ahead of us when we were about a mile from home, a big, black, fast moving, nasty looking cloud. We even heard a few spatters of hail as it swept across our path. We stopped on the street in front of our house waiting for the storm to pass by. Connected to our wirless network in the house we were able to use the laptop to check out the radar at Wunderground.com and could see that the squall line would move out over the ocean soon so we waited. Stay tuned for more of our adventures in getting a new throne installed in the Mothership.

Zohowriter

I recently ran across this online word processor. It is pretty nice in that it allows collaboration and access to documents anywhere on any computer. It even works on Webtv and MSNTV. Now you can have a full featured word processor on your set top box. Here is the information that I got after signing up. For more information go to Zohowriter.com.

Hello bob,

Welcome to ZohoWriter, your friendly on line word processor!

• Create, format, & edit documents online with a powerful WYSIWIG editor
• Access & share your documents from anywhere using just your browser
• Lock your documents while in shared mode
• Post to your blogs (Blogger/Typepad/LiveJournal/WordPress) from within Zoho Writer
• Export your docs in word, pdf, sxw, odt, txt, rtf & html formats
• Periodic auto-saving of your documents to prevent data loss
• Spell check, tag your documents for ease of use

and do much more....

Air France 747 Landing

Here's another neat Princess Juliana Airport landing video. This time a 747.

St. Maartens Landing

This is still my favorite Google Video. The guy taking the video hits the dirt as the Air France flight passes overhead. The Princess Juliana Airport at St. Maartens in the Dutch Antilles is probably the most famous spot for plane watchers.

Back at "The Cove"

The Mothership is parked at Tranquility Cove again. We took our time and made the trip in our usual casual two day pace. See this link for a map of the last leg.

49.9 Miles Per Gallon

Automotive News

Interesting road test by Automotive News. Jeep Commander, Chevrolet Corvette, Hona Accord Hybrid, Toyota Prius and VW Jetta TDI. Can you guess which one got the virtually 50 mpg? The hybrids? Guess again.

To read an interesting discussion thread on this topic go to this link.

For an interesting discussion of why diesels are better than hybrids go here.

The Standard - China's Business Newspaper

The Standard - China's Business Newspaper

This is an interesting article addressing trends in diagnostic medicine. Researchers are developing tools that can analyze your breath to identify disease or health problems that you might have. This combined with the research actively underway to engineer new drugs based on the human genome or DNA paints a picture of the amazing things that under development in medical science. Maybe Ray Kurzweil is on target in his book "Fantastic Voyage" in which he discusses ways to stay in good health to take advantage of these developments. By staying as healthy as possible we will prolong our lives which will allow us to benefit from these new developments.

Get Firefox

Ethanol: A Tragedy in 3 Acts

Ethanol: A Tragedy in 3 Acts

Ethanol is not the saviour that everyone thinks it is. It is only being promoted because our political leaders have decided that it is a good option. The reality is that it is probably not the best option after all. There are many negatives to choosing it to replace fossil fuels. It truly upsets me that our lives are being run by uninformed people in power who make decisions that affect our lives without consulting with the experts before diving into a huge public relations campaign for an option that seems to be a poor one.

I have not read enough to have a good perspective on this but to begin with ethanol fueled vehicles get a 25% to as much as 40% drop in mileage. The governments calculations of savings are based on ethanol fuels selling for 37 cents a gallon less than gasoline whereas in reality right now it is selling for around 13 cents a gallon less. The estimated annual operating costs of vehicles actually is higher using ethanol. Personally, I am going for a VW TDI Diesel next time around. They are far simpler than the hybrids, get better mileage, and last longer. The problem with hybrids that I see is the battery replacement a few years out. That might cost thousands of dollars. If you really look into it the simpler diesels are better and actually get higher mileage than the hybrids. The moves to find alternate fuels is good but everyone seems to be rushing head over heels down the slope dictated by hasty governmental decisions and ad campaigns.

VW to drop 3 diesel models for '07

VW to drop 3 diesel models for '07

Since the US standards for emissions are the strictest in the world, VW will not be delivering its diesels to the US as options for their 07 models. They plan on having the diesels back in the 08 lineup with engines that meet the US standards. Read the article all the way through. Very interesting. This is going to make used TDI Jettas even more valuable.

PBS and Credit Card Banking

This PBS show gives a new perspective on South Dakota. The Marquette Decision by the supreme court allows loan conditions to be exported to another location. For example, if a loan is made in South Dakota at 25 percent interest then that interest rate can be exported to Florida at the same rate. This transferrable "usury" rate resulting from South Dakota and other state laws opened the door for credit card loans. If you have a credit card you should watch this show. Are you a "revolver" or a "deadbeat?" The meanings of these words are upside down in the credit card world. Worried about the NSA monitoring your phone calls? That is nothing compared to the data that the credit card companies are mining from us.

The Scientific Activist: Reporting from the Crossroads of Science and Politics

The Scientific Activist: Reporting from the Crossroads of Science and Politics

Good grief. If we can't determine that a candidate for an appointment to a government position has false claims on his resume's how can we find terrorists?

Hansen is really on to something here, and instead of the story being about a 24-year-old lying, it should be about this: how did this guy, who already had dubious qualifications, make it into NASA with such an obvious lie on his resume? To work for a federal agency, including NASA, extensive background checks are usually required. If I was able to uncover the truth about Deutsch in one phone call, then he must have been placed in his current position without any investigation, due to his loyal service on the Bush presidential campaign.

Do I feel good about having this administration doing wiretaps on people while telling me to "trust them?" I don't think so. I guess by posting this I will have Men in Black knocking on my door. Well, if they do we will just serve them some fresh banana bread and ice cream.

Remember this?

I know you all remember these famous Terry Tate commercials. Ouch!

Latest News

The grandparent role has been a major focus for us. We also have some work going on revamping our landscaping and irrigation system in our front yard. We have eliminated most of the grass and are creating a tropical look and feel with masses of ferns and other tropical plants. I have, for a long time, realized that I can no longer do major jobs such as digging, moving large plants, etc. due to my arthritis. One of my neighbors runs a landscaping service. I talked to several of my neighbors who use his company and they had high praise for service So we let our old "Mow and Go" service go and hired him. In effect, we now have a gardner and the yard is beginning to show that. Once the major revamping is done, he will go back into maintenance mode and that frees me up for doing special things such as fertilizing, trimming, and planting of detail plants. That is the stuff I enjoy and can do and the new service will take care of the mowing, major edging, and weeding.

I have been working very hard on administering two of my websites, http://fs-freeflow.Com and http://fs-odg.Com . These sites as you can See are techically based flight simulator sites and I am the technical administrator by self assignment. I have been developing automatic database backups for the two sites as none existed until now. They are driven entirely by databases and those databases contain all of the site info.

One of the sites had a major catastrophe in which they lost the entire site and I had to rebuild the database as well as implement the backup routines. I don't enjoy this work as much as other aspects of the effort but it had to be done.

At the same time I have been revamping our personal web site as you know to convert it to a database driven site. The main reason for that is that in the long run it will be easier to manage. In the process of converting it over I am trying to make it more coherent while transferring a lot of the info from the old site to the new. I am using a software package that once fully implemented makes changing the content a breeze.

I have restored about 75 feet of our 175 feet of fencing that got blown down in the hurricane. I feel that I am getting old after wrestling With 8 foot fence sections and fence posts. I was able to use much of the old fencing on the side yard but the back was totally destroyed and must be built back from scratch. Home Depot cannot keep prebuilt fence sections on the shelves because they are in such demand due to the hurricanes.

Google Cube a Rumor or Reality?

This is one of the more interesting rumors floating around about new products. This one is regarding a supposed new product that Google is developiing, the Google Cube. This sounds very much like the Webtv and MSNTV devices that are out there now. Those set top boxes were the result of an interesting concept many years ago to produce an easy to use and inexpensive device that allowed browsing the internet, sending and receiving email, and displaying digital photos and playing music files. The development of this device has been slow. The potential of the concept is great. It sounds as though Google may pursue something that could inject new life into this small niche market. Read the article below from CNN for a very interesting discussion of the rumored, "Google Cube."

Tracking the elusive Google 'cube' | News.blog | CNET News.com

2005 was a full and active year for us. Bob continued flying his radio controlled helicopter through the spring. Bob also became very involved in a flight simulator scenery development project. You can see the results at http://www.fs-freeflow.com. We had the usual hurricanes to run from. One of them, Dennis delayed the big trip we had planned to drive out west and up into Canada. Dennis was a close call for us causing power outages and the usual wind and rain but it passed far enough south of us that we did not evacuate. That trip did take place and if your browse the Blog archives you can find a lot to read about our adventure. We had to cut it short because our new granddaughter, Amanda, was due to arrive and she did on September 29. We went through the eye of Hurricane Wilma, a category 2 storm. There were major power outages and structural damage throughout South Florida. We are thankful that all we lost was our fence. The house came through ok although inspection revealed that we almost lost our screened pool enclosure. Contrary to our storm plan we stayed put and moved the Mothership up close to the house. After the storm we evacuated to Dunedin, Florida for a couple of weeks until power was restored in our home town.

Today, the first one of 2006, we are thankful for good friends and family and all of the adventures that we have been on. We wish all of our readers a Happy New Year!