Dieselization? The devil's in the details

As a fan of diesels--the cleaner ultra, ultra, low sulfur diesels--I thought this was an interesting article on the dieselization of Europe, written circa July, 2007. Quote: "Europe has been moving towards a majority diesel fleet since the European Commission encouraged lower taxes on diesel fuel to encourage its spread at the pump. This is because diesel engines are more fuel efficient and therefore more economical burning less CO2."

This is the point at which some 'greens' will jump in and shout about diesel pollution and soot and carbon black, but I just don't buy the argument that Europeans are blindly killing themselves with diesel cars while states like California and New York are saving lives by preventing their residents from owning diesel cars. Just doesn't add up. Why aren't Calif-orkians pushing to ban all diesels, including semis, which are almost universally diesel? Probably because a. those trucks truck in many goods and foods that the Calif-orkians consume, and b. diesels really are more efficient and, overall, less polluting.

Furthermore, while it is possible to argue that a person who needs a car to get from A to B should choose an electric or hybrid over a diesel, it is NOT possible to argue that a person who needs to haul a couple of tons of stuff from A to B over hilly terrain should buy a hybrid, because there are no hybrids than can do that (yet?).

There is no escaping the fact that diesels extract more power from fuel than gasoline engines. You only have to compare the two on a hilly country road. A diesel can maintian speed with fewer revs and fewer downshifts than a gas engine of comparable displacement. It is simply more powerful. Articles and blog posts in the US that compare a big Mercedes sedan with a teeny gas or gas/hybrid car are missing the point, largely because they are written in the absence of small diesel cars for comparison. The big Mercedes is hauling around a lot more weight. The real comparison is the sort of small diesel family car people buy by the millions in Europe, regularly getting 50+ miles to the gallon (like the Citroen I bought in 1992--great performance, great handling, a smooth and quiet highway cruiser at better than 50 mpg).

That is why, according to PSA, the collective Peugeot and Citroën brand, "the percentage of the European fleet [18 EU countries including France, Germany and the UK] of new car registrations has risen from 22.3% in 1997 to 50.8% in 2006."

Note that the country with the highest percentage of diesel cars is France with 71.4% of new cars registered in 2006 being diesel (over 1.4 million). According to California green thinking, the French must be hell bent on mass suicide.

Steve Donnelly and the Soaring Seventies Guitar Solo

Last month's post about guitarist Steve Donnelly [Great Guitarists Never Die--My roomie from uni lives on] was perhaps a little too cryptic even for a blog post. So let me explain, Steve was my first year room mate at the University of Leeds. The day that I arrived at the flat, assigned to me by university housing, Steve was practicing on his Fender Telecaster, feet up on his Marshall amp, surrounded by every cup and mug in the place, all of which contained various amounts of coffee dregs (to his credit, Steve quickly rounded the mugs up and set about washing them).

The point is, he was a dedicated guitarist, even back then, and already very good. He had been playing the pub scene in London for several years and when he told me that Mick Fleetwood had asked him to be in the new line-up it was not hard to believe. But Steve found that being in a band has its downsides, like getting paid in relation to effort. So he does session work, paid for every hour of his time. Over the years he has developed a reputation as the go-to guy for great guitar work, appearing on albums by Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, John Wesley Harding, Nick Lowe, and Sheryl Crow. He was also a member of Suzanne Vega's stage band on the Nine Objects Of Desire tour.

One of Steve's specialties is the soaring seventies guitar solo and so when the late Brian Gibson decided to make a movie that revolves around a mythical seventies super-group, he turned to Steve for the guitar work, and the job of teaching actors to look like they are playing great guitar. The result was Still Crazy, a very enjoyable movie, particularly if you are a fan of Billy Connolly, Jimmy Nail, or the quietly brilliant Bill Nighy. In some reviews I have seen various musicians from Foreigner and Squeeze credited with the music, but there's no doubt Steve created the film's musical centerpiece: Brian's Theme. Check it out on Amazon.

We Are The Knights Who Say Ning?

I don't think of myself as easily impressed, so please check out this social networking site and see if you agree with me that it is awesome: ning.com.

I used this site to create a social network in about 15 minutes, complete with custom colors, video and audio uploading, slide show, forums, and membership invitations.

Did I miss something or is this not an amazing bargain (it's free) and a great leap forward for people who want create content rich communities to serve their needs?
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1-20-09 License Plate Says It All

January 20, 2009 is the last day that President Bush will be in office (barring any sweeping changes to, or suspension of, the Constitution).

I have it on a license plate on the front on my ride. A great parking lot conversation starter.

Q. "What's that mean on your license plate?"
A. "That's Bush's last day in office."

What happens next is interesting. Most often the person says something like "Can't come quick enough." So if you happen to think Bush is one of the worst American presidents ever, you have found a kindred spirit, without having to nail your colors to the mast. After all, if the person says "I'll be so sad to see him go" you can react accordingly.

Ding Dong Gonzales is Gone: But Bush continues to insult his critics

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has resigned. But President Mr Bush apparently thinks there was no reason for him to do so, saying Gonzales had been subjected to "months of unfair treatment" and that "his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons."

So Bush thinks that objecting to an AG who tries to strong-arm people who are in intensive care is unfair and political. Funny, it struck me as all about fairness and thus the opposite of political. I mean, Gonzales made me feel sorry for Ashcroft, a guy for whom I previously had little respect.

As reported by the Washington Post: "On the night of March 10, 2004, as Attorney General John D. Ashcroft lay ill in an intensive-care unit...White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales and President Bush's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr. [went] to the hospital to persuade Ashcroft to reauthorize Bush's domestic surveillance program, which the Justice Department had just determined was illegal...Ashcroft, summoning the strength to lift his head and speak, refused to sign the papers they had brought."

I would say I am delighted that Gonzales is gone, but Bush is still there. He has the power to say who the next AG will be. After Ashcroft, a guy who lost a senate race to a dead man, Bush gave us Gonzales, who was so bad a lawyering I wouldn't have him defend me pro bono on a parking ticket. I dread to think who the next Bush AG will be.
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Penelope Draws Near: Prepare to beta test!

And now Penelope's time is drawing near! As of 8/9/2007 the first public beta was reported to be "a few weeks" from release. This release will be a great way for lovers of Eudora to pitch in and help the developers by providing feedback.

If you're not following any of this, check my previous posting on the retirement of the Eudora email client and the evolution of the Penelope replacement.

And some readers may be asking "Why all the fuss about Eudora?" Let me try to explain. As an email client Eudora is fast and efficient. It lets you filter messages into mailboxes very easily and it lets you search any or all of those boxes in a flash, using as many criteria as you can imagine. Furthermore, it stores all of your mail and attachments in a very logical manner. All attachments go in the Attachments folder. All messages for a particular box go into an indexed text file named after the box, readily readable in an ASCII editor. I cannot recall losing a single message in 15 years due to the program 'eating' it the way Outlook is apt to do. The simplicity of file structure lets me move Eudora from one machine to another (or to a new one) without any fuss.

Eudora also does a great job of not losing or scrambling messages when a connection is dropped mid-POP. And there is a very good Junk filter. And Eudora will check all my different addresses at once. I don't think there is anything else out there that does all of that. But if there is, please let me know. I can compare it to Penelope as she enters beta.

Bluetooth Turn On: Mystery solved for Sony Vaio SZ360P and others

Over the last 30 days or so I have been breaking in a new Sony VAIO. As I have done several times in the past, I purchased one of the not quite new models (in this case, the SZ360P). This strategy lets you get a pretty decent feature set and price without paying an excessive premium.

One of the reasons I chose this model is the built-in Bluetooth. I had a Bluetooth dongle that I used on my previous Sony VAIO, but the performance was quirky at best.

When I say breaking in, I mean the process whereby you remove all the built-in rubbish that you don't need and add the programs that you do need plus the data from your previous machine. (Yes, yes, I know, if I bought an Apple Macintosh I wouldn't have all this work to do, but that is a bit of us an over-simplification, as any truly honest Mac owner a would acknowledge.)

One of the things that annoys me on any Windows machine these days is the proliferation of icons in the tray in the bottom right-hand corner. In an effort to clean this up on the new machine I apparently removed a control for the Bluetooth radio. Little did I realize how difficult it would be to get my Bluetooth capability back. The past few days I have been experimenting with voice recognition software and was considering using a Bluetooth headset to do my dictation. When I came to mate the Bluetooth headset to my Sony VAIO I kept getting a message that a Bluetooth radio was not turned on. Seeing no switch by which to turn on the Bluetooth radio I was perplexed. I went online to find out if anybody else had this problem.

Isn't it wonderfully comforting to find other people posting messages about a problem? Apparently the Bluetooth radio switch is so non-obvious that some folks had been doubting whether or not their machine actually had Bluetooth installed.

So, in the hopes of helping anybody else who has questions about the Sony VAIO Bluetooth radio switch, the following pictures are posted, starting with the Vaio Central utility seen here (this can be accessed from the Start menu or the Vaio Support Central app.

Warning! Every Sony VAIO comes with a host of built-in utility programs which clog up the Start menu. I am in the habit of either removing these from the menu or bunching them all together in their own folder. In the past some of these utilities have turned out to be quite frivolous, however, the one that turns on the Bluetooth radio is quite essential, as there is no hardware switch to do this.

What you need is the Wireless Switch Settings. This brings up a dialog which is pretty obvious. If you "Enable the Bluetooth device" you turn on the Bluetooth radio. But it would help if it actually said that, and if the "Bluetooth settings" applet which you access from the Control Panel explained that.

Success in this endeavor is at least rewarded with a cool blue light on the keyboard, just above the mechanical switch that turns on/off the Wi-Fi radio. (I guess that one extra switch for the Bluetooth would have broken the design budget).

As you exist this dialog you are treated to another, which alerts you to the addition of the new icon in the taskbar. Despite my dislike for the clutter these icons create, I am leaving this one in place. Otherwise I might have to search my own blog for instructions on how to get it back.

Note: as with Bluetooth on other devices, it is a good idea to check your settings whenever you have Bluetooth active. You don't want your notebook to be discovered and access by an unauthorized user.
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Naturally Speaking I'm Blogging

This is my first attempt to write a blog posting using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I have only spent about an hour using Dragon NaturallySpeaking. So I don't think the program is fully trained yet. However, what the program is able to achieve so far is quite surprising. Everything that I have dictated up until this point, has been correct.

I am having slightly more trouble using the commands, however, they promise to be extremely useful, if for example, I am able to dictate a blog posting, copy it, then paste it into a blog post. At the moment, I am using the DragonPad application to do my dictation. It seems that the DragonPad is optimized for taking in spoken dictation. Later on I will try dictating directly into the blogger application.

The ideal situation would be to sit looking at the screen surfing the web with voice commands, and then using the Google toolbar to send webpages to my blog where I can add text and then post.

One of the things that I am interested in finding out is whether or not some of my recent reluctance to do typing is related to the pain it generates either immediately or after the fact. (Ever since the end of last year, my left shoulder and upper on inheriting during an off to typing.) Whether or not the pain has been a deterrent to typing, I am more determined than ever to pursue computed dictation as an input method for my writing.

I have tried this several times in the past, using previous editions of Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the main competitor, IBM ViaVoice. (Interesting to note, Dragon NaturallySpeaking very easily recognizes both its own name and that of IBM ViaVoice.) Each time, I eventually gave up.

In my recent reading about voice recognition software, which I can remember testing at least 10 years ago, I noticed that several people stressed the need to persist with a voice recognition program in order to get the best performance from it. Apparently, Dragon NaturallySpeaking continues to learn as you use the program. The more you use the program, the better it works. This added incentive may be enough to keep me going through some off the rough patches.

There are several surprising side effects to using voice recognition software. Personally, I am getting quite a kick out of making the computer do something with just my voice. Having something, albeit an inanimate object, obey my every come on, well it's just rather satisfying.

(Notice that in the last sentence I used the phrase "obey my every come on" but in fact what I said was obey my every command, so you can see that there are some interesting wrinkles to be worked out.)

To review, I have now dictated thus far with only one or two mistakes. Not bad for $89 (at Staples) with fairly comfortable headset included.
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Great Guitarists Never Die? My first year roomie fron uni lives on

One of the greatest guitarists of our time is someone you've probably never heard of, Steve Donnelly. Here he jams with another excellent player, Elliott Randall. Might seem a little slow to start with, but watch those fingers warm up, until Steve's pick goes flying!

Chey's Xtreme Flowers "Today's Best" on Zazzle

Chey's amazing image called Extreme Azalea's was selected as one of "Today's Best" on zazzle.com!

In fact, she has been getting a lot of favorable comments on her latest direction in digital imaging, taking her photographs of flowers and 'shredding' them into various levels of abstraction. Like Xtreme Sunflowers: