Another Mega Post

Going back through the archives on Blogger, I noticed I seem to wander back and forth between making long, rambling posts once every few days that cover dozens of topics with no theme or organization, and making several short, to-the-point posts daily or near-daily. Not sure why that is. I think I prefer writing the long rambles, but when I'm on other people's blogs, I prefer to read the shorter, to-the-point posts. I'm sure a shrink could prescribe a pill to fix that.

Anyway, a group of American companies are joining forces to compete with Asian companies making lithium-ion batteries for cars. A fine idea, but I worry for the success of the project when I read this:

The National Alliance for Advanced Transportation Battery Cell Manufacture said lithium ion batteries "are anticipated to replace gasoline as the principal source of energy in future cars and military vehicles."

Um, no they won't. A battery is not a "source of energy" any more than an empty gas tank is a source of energy. A battery is a storage device for electricity generated by things like coal-fired plants that our next president wants to tax out of existence. It is precisely this sort of muddled thinking that forces me to bet on the Asians.

Crude oil futures are below $40. So much for my $100 floor, my $75 floor, and my $50 floor for oil prices. Maybe a $25 floor? Good thing I don't make investment decisions based on whatever is rattling around in my head when I write this stuff, and just shove our money into CD's instead. In any case, I still maintain that this is temporary and our future will look more like what we saw this summer. Probably not next year, but certainly by 2010. And best of all, no one will remember this post by then, including me. Sweet.

I missed the fourth anniversary of this blog, and the 1,000-posts milestone. We've been doing this on Blogger since September 21, 2004 and this is something like post number 1,145. The original web journal that we started out with begins on April 1, 2000. I had intended to transfer some of the more meaningful posts here, but have never gotten a round tuit. I may still do that. All the entries are on my hard drive, although the vast majority of them are "Work and school." Probably what most of the entries here will be from January through May.

And no, there was no point to that paragraph.

Central Athens is still a cloud of tear gas. This all started over a teenager killed by a police "warning shot." I'm not sure that the people rioting even remember that, or what, exactly, setting the town Christmas tree on fire has to do with protesting police brutality. I guess you need to be Greek. The police could probably end this with a few more well-placed "warning shots."

The NewTek TriCaster looks to do the same thing to video production that we saw with music about a decade ago. The current version is $4,000. Moore's Law will halve that in 18 months, putting it in the same price range as a decent PC. Content delivery over the internet can now be considered a solved problem. Anyone care to predict how long before the internet does to cable TV what cable TV did to broadcast TV?

The Trek universe has lost another of its icons. The voice of the Enterprise is now silent.

At work yesterday, we only had about 20 customers all day. I still don't have an actual job that I do while I'm there. I spent seven hours cleaning out and organizing storage areas, refrigerators and freezers, and talking about what exactly it is that I'm supposed to be doing while I'm there. Yet-another line cook was supposed to be the answer, but it looks like they will need a full-time prep guy. Hopefully, when we come back from our Christmas Las Vegas trip, my hours will change to something like 5am to noon and I will be rolling meatballs, making soup, slicing, dicing, chopping, and generally getting things ready first for breakfast, then helping with the transition to lunch, then I'm gone for the day. That will certainly help with the college thing by consolidating my free time into a single block instead of my current three-hours-in-the-morning, scamper-off-to-work, few-more-hours-in-the-evening mode of operation.

We had dinner at the restaurant I worked at way back at the beginning of the year. They are still hanging on, with with less than half the staff they had when I was there. There were only four other tables while we ate. When I worked there, Thursday night was the busiest night of the week. (It's a Prescott thing; don't ask.) They are now open only four days a week. I haven't been by the bakery lately, but based on the rumors around town, nothing has changed there, either. Every prediction has next year being pretty much more of the same that we have seen this year, so Prescott may start looking like Flint did in 1982.

Time to scamper.