Germany and clean energy

I often wondered why Germany is a world leader in solar photovoltaic production and installations. After all, it’s a country that doesn’t get much sunlight, right? Then I learned about Bitterfeld, an industrial city in the former East Germany.

Bitterfeld is an ecological wasteland: a city where its former communist leaders paid no heed to the dangers of pollution. Instead, the state planning committee would deliberately poison rivers and streams to cash in on pollution fines.

With that kind of shocking, wanton destruction going on in the name of energy independence, I have a better understanding of Germany’s strong commitment to clean energy.

Warm, spring-like day!

A warm, spring-like day rolled into Raleigh today, pushing the temperature to a record level. Today’s official high at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport was 78°F, breaking a record that had stood for 68 years. The weather station at MT.Net was even warmer, reaching 79.2°F! The normal high for today is 55°F.

This warmth has been a nice reprieve from the dreary, cold winter we’ve been having (especially since I spent last week in below-zero temperatures in Chicago). We’re going to pay for this warmth, I’m afraid, by increasing our drought. The dry air and winds have also increased the fire danger this weekend. We were considering going camping tomorrow night but the fire danger might snuff our plans.

This taste of spring gives me hope that more comfortable days might be ahead.

ISS fades over Raleigh

ISS fades over Raleigh

I took this photo tonight of the International Space Station as it flew over Raleigh shortly after sunset. As the space station headed northeast it passed into Earth’s shadow, making it grow noticeably darker until it was almost completely invisible. It was pretty amazing to watch it fade out as it passed halfway through the sky.

The next, potentially spectacular pass is Sunday around 6:40 PM. Right now the weather forecast calls for partly-cloudy skies but we may get lucky with another good view.

Using DSLRs for video

Canon consultant Patrick Reese demonstrates shooting video with a Canon EOS 7D

I went to a conference last weekend that was being video recorded. Instead of the typical DV cameras I’ve come to expect, though, the videographers were moving around the room with DSLRs. Curious that they were doing this with what I thought were still cameras, I went up to ask about their equipment.

It turns out the higher-end DSLRs (also known as HDSLRs) from Canon and Nikon are now being widely used to shoot high-quality HD video, often to the chagrin of more traditional HD camera manufacturers. A DSLR’s relatively small size and its ability to make use of exceptionally high-quality lenses makes it ideal for shooting HD.
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One Call draws a crowd

Interesting. I put in a North Carolina One Call request to mark utilities so that I could bury a satellite dish cable in my yard. On the same day the marking contractor came out, coincidently so did a Time Warner Cable truck. There was no technical need for TWC to be here: the marking contractor marks TWC lines along with everything else.

It looks to me like TWC smelled competition from the One Call report and wanted to see what provider might be moving into the neighborhood. I wonder what TWC would do if the whole neighborhood put in marking requests?

Cheap thoughts: cell phones in prison

I’ve read about the problem of cell phones in prison for the past year or so and I’m not sure why this is such a difficult problem to solve. If prison officials don’t want prisoners to access the outside world, and the FCC won’t let them set up jammers, why not do the next best thing? Why not set up a small, low-power cell site in the prison itself, and lock it down?

Any phones inside the prison will automatically register themselves with the bogus cell site because the local site will have a stronger signal inside the prison. Then the prohibited cell phones could be easily identified, flagging them for later confiscation. Also, the repeater site could either monitor any transmissions from the prisoner’s phones, or block those transmissions completely. All of this would be playing by the FCC’s rules and the cost would be less than $10,000 per prison.

Why hasn’t anyone tried this yet?

Update 1:27 PM: Looks like several states are implementing the “managed access” solution I’ve suggested. (Thanks, Guus!)

Feedback from the airport

Like many people, I like to pass the time while waiting for my flight to board by doing a little people-watching. Where is this person going? Where’s home? If home’s not here, what brought them to the Triangle? I find it fun to speculate on these things.

What’s really insightful is to hear departing visitors talking into their phones. Last week I overheard a man apparently describing the Triangle area to the person on the call. “You’d like it,” he said. “There are lots of trees. It’s really beautiful. Lots of trees.”

I smiled, because that’s not the first time I’ve heard a traveler rave about our area’s beautiful, abundant trees. We tend to take that for granted, I think.

Raleigh and Durham invested a lot of money in renovating RDU Airport’s Terminal 2, knowing that for many travelers their impression of Raleigh and Durham starts right there. The airport can also be a great source of feedback, too, when those travelers depart. Just listening how they describe their trip can show where we’re doing well and where we can improve. It can also show what assets we possess that we could be better in publicizing.

As a proud citizen of Raleigh I love hearing others’ impressions of the place I call home.

Satellite delight

I saw an ad on Craigslist a few weeks ago for some Free to Air satellite receivers that were being sold. The price was right and I’ve long been interested in seeing what I could pick up freely and legally from the skies, so I bought the receivers and later went back for some bigger dishes.

I had the day off Friday, so I set it all up, tuning in Galaxy 19 at 97°W, which is a satellite that carries a few hundred mostly-international channels. After some brief fiddling with the aim of the dish I was watching Al Jazeera straight from space. It was actually the moment I first heard that Hosni Mubarak had resigned.

This is really cool stuff, though there isn’t much in English worth viewing on this particular satellite. I plan to set up other dishes to pull in other, more interesting satellites, but for now I’ve proven that it works. In time I should be enjoying all types of radio and television beamed freely from space.

Witnesses, survivor gather to remember B-52 crash

I’m reading a book about the Cold War right now and found it interesting that this reunion took place yesterday. The book, At the Abyss, An Insider’s History of the Cold War by Thomas C. Reed, discusses this Goldsboro B-52 incident and other events.

Pikeville, N.C. — Eyewitnesses, firefighters and a survivor of a 1961 crash in Wayne County involving a plane equipped with nuclear weapons gathered Tuesday to remember the day."No one knew what was happening outside," said Adam Mattocks, who was among the Air Force crew members in the B-52 plane. At the time, the plane was carrying two nuclear weapons, each one containing more than 200 times the power of the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Military officials have since said the weapons came close to detonating during the crash.

via Witnesses, survivor gather to remember B-52 crash :: WRAL.com.

Pheasant Run Resort

Pheasant Run's indoor New Orleans

I’m in St. Charles this week to conduct training for my company. This trip, I decided to roll the dice with a Hotwire hotel: the Pheasant Run Resort. I’d read mixed reviews of the hotel on the Internet, with some really hating the hotel and others really liking it. After a few days here, I have to say I really like it. The place certainly has some character!

I arrived Sunday evening (what some call Super Bowl Sunday), and was shocked to find the hotel practically deserted. Expecting to find guests in the hotel bar, watching the game, instead I found one couple – and I almost overlooked them. My coworkers pointed out that greater Chicago in February isn’t exactly a vacation destination.
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