On Monday, George W. Bush urged Americans to conserve energy. In a related effort, thermostats were turned down in Hell.

Bush asking people to conserve? I mean, that is soooo Jimmy Carter. What’s come over this man? Have his poll numbers convinced him he has nothing to lose?

An entry in my alter-ego blog, Mindblogging has been featured on the N&O’s Tar Heel Blogwatch web site. This is the second time my scribblings have attracted such attention, for which I’m grateful. (For full disclosure, this particular story came to me from my buddy Matt, by way of Metafilter.)

For those of you unfamiliar with Mindblogging, its a blog which covers ghost stories, psi phenomena, and other really interesting stuff on the edge of so-called accepted science. I’m looking to expand Mindblogging soon, opening it up to other contributors. If you’d like to become a contributor, drop me a line describing yourself and your interest. And as always, thanks for reading!

[Update:] Looks like this is the third time I’ve been featured. I didn’t realize until today that the Blogwatch joined us on our Italy vacation. Sorry, readers, but we had more fun. Alas, there is only so close a blog can take you.

By popular demand, MT.Net has updated its blogging software to Drupal 4.6.2. This is a major upgrade. Things may be out of place. If you find something that is broken, please let me know.

Another weekend is wrapping up. Like most it had its good points and bad points. Kelly and I began Friday night on a high note, courtesy of our new Netflix membership. This week’s movie was The Aviator, a biopic about Howard Hughes. I didn’t expect it to be as good as it was, but it really was good. Hughes was a tortured man in many ways. He was a neurotic. The movie didn’t shy away from Hughes’s erratic behavior. While Hughes was a high-flying, starlet-dating millionaire, he was also human.

Kudos to Leonardo DiCaprio. While I once considered him a chump, he’s shown time and again that he really can act. I’ve long held that actors prove their mettle when it comes to Southern accents. DiCaprio’s Texas accent never got old throughout the movie.

Saturday brought the NCSU-UNC football game. Right from the start, my beloved Wolfpack didn’t look up to the challenge. State lost 31-24 what should have been our payback game for last year. Give credit to the Smurfs and turn up the heat a bit in Casa Amato.

Once the game was over, we packed up the kids and headed to Jordan Lake for some camping. We set up our tent right next to our friends Marnie and John and their daughter Susanna. We didn’t have electricity at our campsite, but we had plenty of quiet. In fact, Hallie and Susanna – best friends if there ever were any – generated the most noise around. They ran squealing around the campsite until their bedtime around 8:30. Travis had a ball as well, though it took a little work to get him settled in the tent.

After chatting until around 10 PM, the adults retired to their tents. The night was peaceful, with crickets and other insects providing a comforting lullaby. As I climbed into my sleeping bag, a dozy Hallie looked up and whispered “I’m so glad you came back, Daddy.” Man, I live for stuff like that.

Travis woke at 2 AM and began to wail. I’m sure we woke up other nearby campers. He didn’t seem hungry, so we parked him on our air matress. He promptly fell asleep, which is where he stayed the rest of the night. Once we were all settled, we slept until 7 AM, watching a nice sunrise over the lake.

We got home around noon, had a Char-Grill lunch, and bathed and dispatched the kids for their naps. The kids took long naps, while the adults got in just a few winks. A fun dinner preceded a very happy bedtime for both kids. All in all, a good weekend.

Kelly and I both know how lucky we are to have such adventurous, adaptable kids. They’re always up to whatever challenge we throw at them. How does life keep getting more fun?

Today is the first full day of fall and the thermometer just topped 96 degrees! Will this miserable heat ever go away?

Maybe there’s something to this global warming stuff after all.

[UPDATE at 2:20 PM] It’s now 98.1 degrees. Bleh.

If this isn’t an argument for why we need passenger rail service in this country, I don’t know what is.

During the ice storm of 2002, an icy branch obliterated our deck furniture. Tonight a gust of wind offed another set of deck furniture.

I was brushing Hallie’s teeth when I heard an awful clattering outside. I knew right away what had happened. When Kelly and I ventured out later, we found the umbrella and patio table had been completely lifted off the deck and flung upside-down into the yard. The glass tabletop had shattered into thousands of pieces.

The weather station clocked the gust at 11 miles per hour, though at the umbrella probably got more of it. Anyone know of any patio furniture sales? Or sails, for that matter?

I’ve kept a USB flash drive or two handy for a while now, using them as glorified floppy drives. I’ve kept small files on them, not really exploiting their flexibility. Today I taught my flash drive to sit up and do tricks. I’ve now got it booting!

Before when I’d format the drive and attempt to boot it, nothing would happen. Now it works fine. The trick is to partition it to look like a ZIP drive, which most BIOSs understand. ZIP drives use drive geometry of 64 heads and 32 sectors, and vary the cylinder count based on their size. The tools in the SYSLINUX package clearly spell out the process in the README.usbdrive file.

Now I’ve got a flash drive which boots to SYSLINUX, provides me with a menu for booting a System Imager diskette, a Red Hat kickstart, or a Norton Ghost diskette, all on one drive. I’ll soon be adding some rescue CD-type tools to this list, too.

This will give me the ability to load and install software on systems with no CD or floppy, and to do it on a drive that easily fits in my pocket. If I wanted, I could even boot a full operating system from it, like Windows 95 or Knoppix (well, okay. Maybe Damn Small Linux instead).

Even though not all PCs will boot USB flash drives, I’m having lots of geek fun with this new tool.

In the article Making Tracks, Fast Company profiled Richard Carpenter, a railroad enthusiast who has hand-drawn a railroad atlas in awe-inspiring detail. A Railroad Atlas of the United States in 1946 shows such features as long-since-demolished steam locomotive and manual signal tower installations, towns that functioned solely as places where crews changed over, track pans, coaling stations, and other rail-specific sites.

For a guy like me with an intense interest in where those old tracks went, the book would be just the ticket. Volume one covers the Mid-Atlantic states. I can’t wait for the Carolinas edition.