I won’t be posting much for the next couple of days I think. I’m in a VMWare seminar all day at work, so when I come home it’s mostly the regular work I couldn’t do during the day, plus some commitments I have regarding photographs I took at The Academy’s Miss Gaye Universe DC Ball. No…not the ones in that link…those were taken by the working photographer for Metro Weekly. Look closely and you’ll find a rare sighting of Bruce Garrett in a Tux. I was invited by some friends to play paparazzi at the event…my first ever Drag Show. Ironically, I had to wear a tux as it was a black tie event. So in a sense I was in drag myself. But my friends all said I looked good and I had a great time. But now I have hundreds of photographs to sort through and get ready to show some people and that’s taking much of my free time this week.
I’m also working on getting a bunch of my old Woodward photos ready to send to one of my classmates on the reunion committee. We’ve been promising the folks who attended our 35th reunion a DVD for months now and we need to get it out to them.
And on top of all that, I’ve been working on creating a CD of some old photos I talked a certain someone back in high school into taking. He gave me the roll of film back to develop and I gave him back a contact sheet and some prints but somehow the actual negatives never made it back to him and I’ve been waiting for years, decades literally, to do that. Some of the shots he took turned out very good and I wanted to give him a nice CD with the scans in it along with the negatives so he could print them out on his computer if he wanted to.
So…I’ve been a busy photographer lately, which is rare for me. So posting here is going to be sporadic…I think…for a little while. I have hundreds of photographs of some amazing, just amazing, drag queens to sort through..one of whom made my jaw just drop to the floor and I never thought that would ever happen. Let’s hear it for gender bending…
Economists say home prices are no where near hitting bottom. But even in regions that have taken a beating, some neighborhoods remain practically unscathed. And there’s a pattern emerging as to which neighborhoods those are.
The ones with short commutes are fairing better than places with long drives into the city. Some analysts see a pause in what’s long been inexorable—urban sprawl.
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Realtor Danilo Bogdanovic surveyed two rows of neat new brick town homes on Falkner’s Lane. "These were selling for about $550,000 at the peak, which was about August 05, and they’re selling right now for about $350,000," Bogdanovic said."So $200,000 in a year and a half and fifty 50 of this community has been ether foreclosed on or is facing foreclosure.
For residents who work in the city, their commute is around an hour on trouble-free days. But that could extend upward toward two hours very quickly.
…
But construction in town has held steady. Goldberg sees other cities rebounding too, including Baltimore and Philadelphia."Philadelphia was loosing downtown housing and in town housing until very recently," Goldberg said. "And now that’s the hottest part of their market."
That’s my experience so far here in Baltimore. In the neighborhood I live in, the houses going up for sale still don’t stay on the market for more then a few weeks. Prices aren’t soaring like they once were…if anything they’ve gone down a tad. But just a tad. Prices are still more then double what they were seven years ago.
I can walk to work from where I live. For most folks here in my neighborhood who work in the city, the commute can’t be too bad because we’re close to I-83 which goes right into the heart of downtown Baltimore. The Light rail is nearby too.
Traffic congestion plus the rising cost of gas is already having an effect. The housing market collapse isn’t happening where people can live close to where they work, or close to rail transport. One of the biggest booming housing markets in Baltimore, still is around Penn Station. Which just also happens to be close to our gay neighborhood too.
The Travelodge hotel chain have conducted a survey of 2,248 Brits to find out what helps them go to sleep.
According to Reuters Coldplay topped the list of music that acts as the perfect sleeping pill replacement. James Blunt, Snow Patrol, Take That and Norah Jones were also high on the list.
Sleep inducing music wasn’t the only topic polled. Reuters reports, "But those who prefer to be tucked in with a book at night judged celebrity autobiographies as the most effective sleep aid, with the life stories of glamour model Jordan, soccer star David Beckham and Sharon Osbourne ranking at the top."
White noise generally puts me to sleep. No, that’s not the name of an Easy Listening orchestra. At least I don’t think so.
You Knew The Parts Would Be Expensive When You Bought It…
So…yeah…gasoline for Traveler is just going to be expensive. It has about the same size tank as the Accord, but its V-6 is thirstier, so it gets emptied sooner. And it requires premium. I knew this when I bought it. A Mercedes-Benz is just going to cost me more to own then a Honda Accord. I went into that with my eyes wide open. For weeks before I bought it I stressed over whether or not I could afford it After I’d bought it. Once I’d satisfied myself that I could, I went to the dealer and put my money down. I admit I didn’t expect the price of gasoline to rise so…rapidly. But there’s no getting around it. So I’m more careful nowadays in planning my trips to the hardware store or the post office. Is there anything else I need that I can get along the way? Better one long circle then two or three trips back and forth.
Recently, the original equipment wiper blades on Traveler started streaking ever so slightly. Most of you probably know how it is after that. At the first sign of streaking it just gets worse really quickly. So I figured today I’d go buy myself another pair. Traveler came with a spare set, and my plan was to put the spare set on the windshield and make the new pair the spare. And because I am such a Mercedes-Benz fanboy and I don’t want anything on my car that isn’t factory approved, I went to my dealer to buy the new blades.
I had a hunch they would be a tad pricey when the parts department guy behind the counter whistled under his breath when the part number came up on his computer display. Sixty bucks. That’s right…sixty dollars for a pair of wiper blades.
Maybe it’s the falling dollar. At least they’re lasting me about six months. And I’ll say this about them…yes, they actually do their job better then the blades on any other car I’ve ever owned, including the Accord, yet their design is simple and elegant. I’m a geek…shoot me…but one of the subtle little things that told me I was in a different world now was trying out the wipers and seeing how smoothly and thoroughly they cleaned the windshield. Partly that’s the odd little articulation Mercedes puts on the passenger side wiper to make it get more of the window. But also it’s the design of the blade itself, which distributes pressure more evenly across its length then any other design I’ve ever seen. In the package they’re actually curved inward. When flattened out on the windshield every point along its length is exerting an even steady pressure against the glass. I can swallow the extra cost of something if it gets me a better made something, and that is in fact the bargain you make when you buy into the brand; the theory being that a Mercedes-Benz costs more because it’s over-engineered a tad and that costs money. But that means the maintenance is going to cost more too.
Here’s a lesson for all of you dreaming of that supercar you want to own one day. Don’t buy it until you can afford the maintenance too. Even if you see one in cherry condition on the used market and you can afford it. Investigate how much the upkeep will cost. I was reading on one of the Mercedes forums about a guy who bought himself a very nice "previously owned" ‘S’ class, only to discover that when it needed its next routine servicing work it was going to cost him close to a thousand dollars.
The breakdown was this: the service schedule on the model ‘S’ class he bought called for the plugs to be replaced, and the oil and gas filters, really close to the mileage it had on it when he bought the car. That’s something you have to consider when looking at a used car: when is the next maintenance due. It had a V-8 engine with two plugs per cylinder and it used the most expensive plugs Bosch made. The oil and gas filters were equally state of the art, precision made and just as expensive. But that’s what you buy when you buy a high end car like a Mercedes-Benz. I’m sure the top of the line BMW or Audi are just as expensive to maintain, and I don’t even want to think of what it costs to do routine maintenance on a Bentley or Rolls. Between the parts and the labor the scheduled service on that guy’s ‘S’ class was getting close to the thousand dollar mark…
…which you figure someone who can afford one of those things new can also afford. But not necessarily someone buying on the used, excuse me, "previously owned" market. You may have bought the car for half of what it was worth new, but you still have to pay full price for the maintenance. Unless you get it done in Butthead’s garage and junk yard emporium…and do you really want your lovely ‘S’ class worked on by Butthead? Oh sure…a I can fix that…a little duct tape and glue and it’ll be good as new…and hey…sorry about the greasy shoe stains on your carpet there…
I could have held out for an ‘E’ class…barely. I hear the new one coming out in 2009 is going to be really nice. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that maybe after I’ve paid off Traveler I’ll trade up to one. But if you can just barely afford the car, you probably can’t afford the maintenance too. Unless I jump a few more rungs up the income ladder, a ‘C’ class is probably all I’ll ever be able to afford. But that’s okay. Every day when I go out for my after dinner walk I stop and just…gawk…at my car. My neighbors are all probably getting the biggest kick out of seeing me standing out there nights just staring at it. But there was a time in my life when I couldn’t even afford a car.
Throw Vista away. That’s what my colleagues at our fellow IDG publication InfoWorld have now argued that Microsoft should do. Give it a dignified resting place, as a stepping-stone OS, and come up with a replacement that’s more sensible for enterprise IT.
Why? Seriously. Why should Bill Gates do any such thing when he owns 90 percent of installed PCs and Office Software Suites? You gonna go somewhere else pal? Where? If your data is in one of Bill’s software products, then Bill owns your data too buddy.
You can’t just ask Bill to please be nice to you. He won’t. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a shit about you. You need to take your destiney into your own hands. Or you will never own it.
But Then Again, Just Putting Gasoline In It Might Cost You More Then Having Bodywork Done Someday…
Today I just paid nearly seventy bucks for gasoline. And that was at the Costco gas station where the price is about 25 cents a gallon less then it is most other places. That amounted to just a tad under twenty-one gallons: About sixteen gallons for the car, and another five in the spare gas container I bring along so I don’t have to make the drive to Costco as often.
According to the owner’s manual, Traveler has a 17.43 gallon tank with a 2.11 gallon reserve (that probably works out to some nice round figure in metric…), and I’d run Traveler’s tank down to the last 1/8th. The fuel reserve warning came on around the 1/8th mark, but as I only had to put a bit less then 17 gallons in I’m not sure where they’re drawing the line at the reserve, unless there’s almost a half gallon of it that doesn’t get filled when the gas pump clicks off, which is possible. Anyway, figure since it’s a Mercedes when the gauge reads empty it probably means it.
The rising cost of gasoline is of course, why this all matters to me. The more gas I buy in one go at the Costco, the more I save because I have to figure in the gas I use getting there and back. It’s about eleven miles, so figure about four-tenths of a gallon spent, in order to buy gas at twenty-five cents a gallon less then the local stations charge. At 3.26 a gallon, which is what the Costco gas cost me, let’s say that’s a buck-thirty I spend going to and from Costco. I paid sixty-eight dollars for twenty-one gallons. Around here that would have been about 3.50. So my bill would have been 73.50. I saved five and a half dollars. Subtracting the buck-thirty it was only 4.20 I saved. But that’s another gallon and four-tenths if I use the local price per gallon. Or another way of looking at it, is I get about an extra forty miles. In a year’s worth of local driving, I reckon looking at an extra two-thousand miles roughly, but depending on all the slop in my figures it might be closer to fifteen-hundred. But I have to practically empty my tank before I refuel, to see that kind of savings. If I don’t do that, and I can’t always it just worked out that I could this time, I don’t see nearly that much savings. If I refuel at the half tank mark, the drive to Costco and back eats up the amount of money I saved buying it there.
I’m going to keep on doing this for a while, and watch the numbers, but you know…it might not be worth my doing this, even at twenty-five cents a gallon less.
The powerful winter storm system that swept across Central Europe this weekend nearly caused a massive air traffic disaster on Saturday in Hamburg. A Lufthansa jet struggled through 90 kilometer-per-hour (56 miles per hour) crosswinds on its approach into the Hamburg airport. After skidding dramatically across the runway in an aborted landing, the plane’s pilot opted to take off once again.
I’d have to say that was a good decision…
Video: SPIEGEL TV
Okay…when I go out to the Open Source Conference in Portland again this year…I am definitely driving. My brother wants to see my new car anyway…
Travel experts at the Gay & Lesbian Travel Pavilion at the world’s largest tourism fair have said the a new niche market for heterosexuals has emerged.
"Apart from gay and lesbian cruises, we have noticed a clear rise in hotels and resorts that are not only gay-friendly but targeted mainly towards gay men.
"Straight people are, in most cases, allowed to stay, too. The magic word is straight-friendly," said Robert Kastl, Managing Director of Publicom GmbH, the organisers of the Pavilion.
ITB Berlin, the world’s largest tourism fair, is being held in Berlin from March 5th to 9th.
He claims that destinations that have already established a gay-friendly image are increasingly putting their bets on explicitly gay and lesbian events, which are open to heterosexuals too.
"The range of special travel products has increased and even within the gay and lesbian travel market we are noticing more and more diverse sub-niches," says Kastl.
The reason I prefer to go to gay friendly places while on vacation is because it’s nice to be able to actually relax and let my hair down and enjoy myself and not have to worry that some asswipe is going to bash my skull in to prove how manly he is and/or much he loves god. But what I would really like is to be able to enjoy a mixed and diverse crowd of folks who all get along and just want to have a good time wherever we all happen to be.
You have to figure that a heterosexual who goes to a gay friendly resort goes knowing that they’re going to be in the company of gay people and will likely find themselves witnessing PDAs between same sex couples, if not being the recipient of a cruising glance or two themselves. If they’re the sort that doesn’t faze then far as I’m concerned I’d love to share a vacation space with them. Be really nice to, at least for a few brief vacation days, imagine you’re living in a world where being gay (and for that matter, the color of your skin, or the country you’re from or the specifics of your religion) is no more an issue then the color of your eyes or your hair. It’s hard to believe in that world if everyone around you is the same…even if that sameness is something you need to make you more comfortable. Especially if, actually.
Yet Another Weather Report, For My Family In California Where They Don’t Have “Weather”
As I write this it’s a sheet of ice out on my front porch and sidewalk, and street. We got some sleet that turned into freezing rain here in Baltimore city. And if the city got it for sure the suburbs did too. So when you hear them report that Maryland extended its polling hours this election day because of bad weather, they weren’t kidding.
I’d rather have three feet of snow then a eighth of an inch of ice. If it’s like this tomorrow morning I may have to take the day off. You can’t even walk to work when the streets and sidewalks are iced up.
So some guy is tinkering with magnetic motor design, when suddenly his magnets go flying everywhere around his workshop. He thereupon concludes that he’s invented a perpetual motion machine.
First…let’s review: The three laws of thermodynamics are:
The total energy of a closed system neither increases nor decreases.
The entropy of that system always increases.
The temperature of that system cannot ever reach absolute zero, because entropy cannot decrease.
That last one is a little tricky, but visualize it as, the heat has to go somewhere and it can’t go from a colder body to a hotter body.
It all began back in 1985, when Thane Heins, having studied electronics at Heritage College in Gatineau, Quebec, started thinking about how magnets could be used to improve power generators.
…
Heins tinkered away, making what seemed like good progress, until one day in early 2006 he stumbled on to something strange. As part of a test, he had connected the driveshaft of an electric motor to a steel rotor with small round magnets lining its outer edges. The idea was that as the rotor spun, the magnets would pass by a wire coil placed just in front of them to generate electrical energy – in other words, it would operate like a simple generator.
The voltage was there, but to get current he had to attach an electrical load to the coil – like a light bulb – or simply overload it, which would cause it to slow down and eventually stop. Heins did the latter, but instead of stopping, the rotor started to rapidly accelerate.
"The magnets started flying off and hitting the wall, and I had to duck for cover," says Heins, surprised because he was using a weak motor. "It was like, holy crap, this is really scary."
…
Days later, Heins realized what had happened…
Uh, oh…
…The steel rotor and driveshaft had conducted the magnetic resistance away from the coil and back into the heart of the electric motor. Since such motors work on the principle of converting electrical energy into motion by creating rotating magnetic fields, he figured the Back EMF was boosting those fields, causing acceleration.
But how could this be? It would create a positive feedback loop. As the motor accelerated faster it would create a larger electromagnetic field on the generator coil, causing the motor to go faster, and so on and so on. Heins confirmed his theory by replacing part of the driveshaft with plastic pipe that wouldn’t conduct the magnetic field. There was no acceleration.
"What I can say with full confidence is that our system violates the law of conservation of energy," he says.
Ummm, probably…not. At a guess, the current he was trying to overload the rotor with shorted back into the motor causing it to spin faster. The plastic pipe after all, could not conduct electricity either. But I’ll leave it to the engineers to explain some day, if this guy ever tries to sell his idea to investors. Look…the fact is that people have been trying to invent perpetual motion machines for millennia and the reason why they never work is because the very fabric of this universe just doesn’t function that way.
There’s another way of expressing the three laws:
You can’t win.
You can’t break even.
You can’t leave the game.
I’ve always found it more then a little amusing, that at the heart of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there is a perpetual motion machine. It’s really amazing how often the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps free-the-marketplace right tries to get its free lunch.
I’ll bet White Castle never thought of this. Supposedly you warm the can in boiling water and then just pop it open and eat. Here’s some snapshots posted over at Something Awful, taken by a guy in Germany who tried one out…
Note that they sell for a mere Euro 3.95, which currently works out to about $5.87 as I write this. Just the thing for your urban apocalypse survival kit. It comes with the usual mix of condiments apparently. But just in case the tiny little pickles aren’t to your liking, there’s always this…
Yes…what goes better with Cheeseburger-In-A-Can, then Pickle-In-A-Can!
Take that McDonalds. Looks like the U.S. is loosing the junk food war. Damn. And that was the one thing I thought the rest of the world could never do better then us.
…taken just a few moments ago while I strolled around the area by my hotel just before dawn. And brought to your computer through the magic of digital photography and the World Wide Web. Seriously…an old friend of mine called me on his cell phone late last night as he was driving south through Wilmington Deleware, and there I was chatting with him on my cell phone while I was strolling around U.S. Route 1 in Key Largo and you have to appreciate that we both grew up in an era when telephones had wires connecting to them to the wall and a long distance call to just the next state over was a lot of money, and there we were chatting to each other with little devices that just fit in our pockets, he in Wilmington and I in Key Largo. And we haven’t really lived all that long.
I’m taking a holiday break with my new car, and we’re driving south, hopefully to enjoy a warm beach somewhere before winter really sets in here in Baltimore. So posting will be lite and random, but may include some photos.
Enjoy your holidays. Have fun…eat recklessly…make the ones you love smile…
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