Julia Child has cooked up her last meal. She lived a long, 91-year life, though. Shows what good eating can do for you.

With the Frugal Gourmet, Jeff Smith, dying last month, it’s not been a good summer for TV chefs.

Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of the Northeast Blackout of 2003. As Hurricane Charley closes in on Florida, it’s apparent lessons of the blackout haven’t been learned. There wouldn’t be this mad scramble for power crews to repair storm damage if this country had gone with Thomas Edison’s model for electric power use. That is, every house has its own generator. Such could be reality here with the increased acceptance of fuel cells.

During the Northeast blackout, the NYC police station in Central Park remained fully-lit, thanks to a fuel cell. Widespread fuel cells would prevent storm blackouts. Natural gas lines are prevalent and storm-proof, for all practical purposes. Fuel cells are whisper quiet and enviromentally friendly, even generating water and heat as a byproduct.

There are fuel cells already available with capacity to power whole houses, but they’re still prohibitively expensive. How many times will our power grid get ripped up before we try something new?

I followed a link from a website today to a Bittorrent link of a TV show. Twenty minutes later, this show was copied onto my laptop. And once again, I appreciated the power of this means of distribution.

It’s not like I haven’t used Bittorrent to transfer files: I’ve known about it for over a year. But I forget about how dadgum cool it is to use it for things other than operating system iso’s.

It reminded me of my idea to build an ad-hoc network of Bittorrent hosts, where anyone could become a network producer. Got a story to tell? Create a video file and let it sail the world’s networks. The cost of getting your video “voice” heard has dropped to near zero.

I’m now itching to get a used Xbox that I can turn into a Linux media machine. With it, I hope to build a media revolution.

Today, Kelly made an appointment for us to meet our son. She scheduled his birthday for October 27th. While I’m looking forward to meeting the Big Guy, the thought that we can schedule his birth kinda wigs me out. Can’t we leave something up to nature? I don’t want The Boy to be a slave to the clock before he’s even born. But such is the world we live in, I guess.

Of course, he could arrive earlier than that. As long as he doesn’t arrive too much earlier. Either way, though, we’ll be quite happy to meet him.

The outlook around the Gulf of Mexico isn’t so good. Right now there are two storms vying to ruin my vacation in Panama City, Bonnie and Tropical Depression Three (to become Charley if it reaches Tropical Storm status).

Both should be long gone by the time we’re there. The only question is, what will be left? Their tracks aren’t guaranteed, but they bear watching. Especially Charley.

Every now and then, someone comes along who is truly one-of-a-kind. Legendary firefighter Paul “Red” Adair was one of them. He revolutionized the art of putting out some of the hottest, meanest fires anywhere: oil well fires. Adair died Saturday at the age of 89.

His daring reputation for never having met a blowout he couldn’t cap earned him the nickname “Hellfighter.” That inspired the title of the 1968 John Wayne movie based on his life, “The Hellfighters.”

Mr. Adair, who never showed fear in life, joked in 1991 that the hereafter would be no different.

“I’ve done made a deal with the devil,” he said. “He said he’s going to give me an air-conditioned place when I go down there, if I go there, so I won’t put all the fires out.”
Continue reading →

Kelly was telling me how he’s starting to feel enormous from the pregnancy. “I’ve got three months left!” she complained.

I thought about how early Hallie had been. “Well,” I said. “I hope you get much bigger.”

She agreed. Then we both realized that this is the last time I can get away with saying that.

I installed the Googlebar into Mozilla yesterday. It seemed to have worked fine until this morning, when I realized all my bookmarks are now gone. Oops.

I think it had to do with my not being root when I installed it. Instead I sudo’d, which dorked up the paths when it upgraded, it seems.