I finished the mowing I had started earlier, showered, ate, had a swim, ate dinner, and the power washer was still on my mind.  I decided to look at the wand again to see if I could figure it out. I thought maybe a rubber seal ring had somehow become dislodged or something. I decided to look carefully at the area where the spray tip landed in the grass and voila, I found a rubber o-ring! Took me half an hour to figure out how to install it (goes completely inside the wand coupling) but I knew I had it. Put the tip back on (SECURELY!), fired it up —– YAAAAAAAAAY!!!!!!

Another maintenance mystery solved. I was so pleased I didn’t have to buy parts or deal with warranty or get someone to fix it that I power washed her horse’s stall.  Just another of life’s ups and downs on the farm.

To me it contains parts of many science fiction books and movies, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, all of Isaac Asimov’s amazing robot books, even Rendezvous With Rama, my favorite book by Arthur C. Clarke.

The movie’s web site is also amazing.  Here’s a free embed they provide:

He goes on to say that efforts to save arctic ice will likely save 1 polar bear a year, a popular cause among environmentalists.  He said humans SHOOT 400 polar bears a year, so maybe stopping that would be more effective!

His new book “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming” will be available in August, and I’ve pre-ordered it.  Finally a cool head on a hot subject!

Their original plan appears to have been:

1. Raise a bunch of money from a few rich donors
2. Make speeches carefully worded to pander to voters without saying anything substantive that might be used against her
3. Put an organization in place to go after the big primaries, and ignore those annoying little caucus states for the most part
4. Be so far ahead after ‘Super Tuesday’ (Feb 5, 2008, a day that will live in infamy) that money will continue to roll in for the general election and coast to the nomination and crowning!

So what went wrong? Well everything really! Obama won the first ‘event’, a caucus, in Iowa. I’m sure the Clinton team thought “pfft, it’s a caucus, big deal, and we only just lost (well, ok, third), and we’ll be ahead shortly, stay the course”. She wins New Hampshire and they must feel like they’re back on track (remember ‘comeback kid’ in 1991?). February 5 comes along, and she doesn’t get the big lead. Money is POURING into the Obama campaign and the organizations are getting put together in EVERY state. Maybe they realized team Clinton had ignored the caucuses and went after those. Edwards doesn’t drop out which probably hurt Clinton further.

After a string of losses in caucuses and small state primaries, despite winning some HUGE STATES (CA, NY, PA, TX sorta, etc.), she still found herself behind, but the strategy had STILL NOT CHANGED except perhaps by highlighting her ‘experience’ over Obama’s message of ‘change’. ‘Experience’ came across as “more of the same” and “old”. Meanwhile Obama got a GIGANTIC push from Oprah Winfrey. “He is the one” she said, over and over. The crowd went nuts. Even I got goosebumps.

After it was already too late, her stump speeches began to get more specific, less boring, and less condescending and self-congratulatory. After agreeing that the results in Florida and Michigan, two HUGE and IMPORTANT states, wouldn’t count because they moved their primaries before Super Tuesday, team Clinton THEN decides they want to fight for them. Everyone saw through this as typical Clinton old school spin. But it was too late. Despite Obama scandals and distractions, he would not be denied. CNN, NBC, MSNBC, most bloggers, and idealistic twenty somethings had already fallen madly in love with him.

And then there’s Bill. The ex-President who is loved by so many as the creator of peace and prosperity in the 90’s. Well he quickly reminded people he has a temper and a mean streak too, and, like Hillary, is astoundingly arrogant. He did his wife NO FAVORS in this campaign, and without question cost her a ton of votes.

Other nails in the coffin were Hillary and Bill’s ‘flubs’, probably the most notable was her claiming to have landed in Bosnia under sniper fire when video showed she was greeted casually by smiling children with flowers! Unfairly or not, I think in people’s minds this might have subconsciously become linked to Bill’s “I did not have sex with that woman…” finger wagging bold faced lie. So she faced a credibility gap too.

And so today she finally conceded. Ms. “Inevitable” barely smiled. She wanted the speech to be historic, but it was still painful for her to deliver. She now clearly wants the VP spot, and I currently think it WOULD help Obama win the Presidency, BUT once he’d won it, then he’d have to put up with Hillary AND Bill for 4 or 8 years, a prospect he is no doubt thinking about.

It’s incredible that she and her oh so talented team blew this perfect opportunity. It just shows… you never know.

I have conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand I am glad she lost as I don’t like the calculating, cynical, manipulative, poll-driven way the Clintons operate. On the other hand, I’m sure this loss is very painful for Hillary Clinton and I feel bad for her. I do believe she was treated VERY poorly by the media.

Loads of good sounding info, but I decided to go to the budget, as that’s where things usually reveal themselves (follow the money…).

I had no idea how much money the DoE spends, but for ‘09 they’ve requested $25 BILLION. Now I’m sure govt lovers and Bush haters will come right out and say “that’s cheaper than Iraq in a week” or whatever, but ignoring that bogus comparison, how much is $25 BILLION?

Well if there’s 300 million men, women, and children in this country, that equates to about $83 EACH, a year.

So, are you happy, that you, your relatives, friends, children, everyone, is paying $83 a year for this fine organization?

Their budget “highlights” document is 113 pages. Yikes.

It says they need that money to “address the growing demand for affordable, clean and reliable energy; preserve our national security; and enable scientific breakthroughs that could have significant impacts on our quality of life and the health of the American people.” Yeah, right. But what do they actually DO?

This is their mission/strategy page: http://www.doe.gov/about/index.htm

On their strategic plan page it says:

By implementing DOE’s Strategic Plan, we are enhancing America’s energy security and sustaining our economic vitality.

EPIC FAIL! Oil is what, $139 today????

So I looked under achievements and awards to see what we might all be getting for $83 a year.

What’s this? Part of their funding went to the human genome project. What has that got to do with energy?

So then I find that their ‘researchers’ helped with research on Climate Change that lead to the IPCC winning the ‘07 Nobel Peace Prize. And this is about energy and not weather HOW? This research was done at Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee which has 4200 people and is entirely funded by DoE. Facts about ORNL.

Your tax dollars at work folks.

Little point and shoot digital cameras in decent light situations (i.e., outdoors) take great pictures in most circumstances. But they’re still slow, cannot do shallow depth of field, often don’t have a very wide angle field of view, and to me at least, are generally irritating (except for their size)! Once you’ve seen the quality of pictures and enjoyed the flexibility and range of options and control with an SLR, it’s hard to go back. I know, I tried. Got tired of lugging the Canon 20D and lenses around, sold the lot. But less than a year later, I was ready to throw my Canon point and shoot camera in a fire pit.

With my 20D though I felt EVERY photo file out of the camera needed some, and often a LOT, of post processing on the computer to look decent. I was often a little embarrassed to show people the shots out of the camera. “Yes I know it’s dark, but see how easy it is to fix?” “I know the color is kind of washed out, and it looks a bit out of focus, but see, upping the saturation and a little unsharp filter… makes all the difference… gee aren’t I clever?” I concluded, no Paul, you’re not clever, you’re just spending far too much time having to mess with shots many would consider boring no matter what, just to get something that I could print at 4×6 to stick on the refridgerator.

To get files out of the camera ready to use, that means JPEGs. RAW files can be converted but that’s an extra step. But the 40D lets you save a JPEG and a RAW for each shot, which is great for me. If the JPEG is good enough, use that. If not, use the RAW. The 40D also lets you save large, medium or small JPEG (small) at various quality (compression) levels, with a small or large RAW file. I use the RAW + high quality SMALL JPEG. ‘Small’ is STILL 1936×1288 pixels which is larger than most computer monitors and still a 1.5MB file!

Next is ‘Picture Styles’ which lets you tell the camera what sharpness, contrast, saturation, and color tone to apply to JPEGs. I set Sharpness to 6, Contrast to 0, Saturation to 1, and Color Tone to 0 and save that as a user defined picture style.

Next is exposure compensation. I think in order to protect against ‘blown highlights’ the camera (in my opinion) under exposes just about every shot. So I bump the exposure compensation by just 1/3 a stop.

Finally, I have turned on Highlight Tone Priority (Custom Function II: Image, setting 3, set to 1). This tells the camera to try to preserve some dynamic range (different shades) in bright regions of a picture by adjusting the interpretation of exposure and color. The only trade-off of this is it then makes ISO 200 the minumum ISO, but that’s never a problem for me with a fast lens (the amazing EF-S 17-55/2.8 IS).

Here’s an example of the results - this is unretouched, right out of the camera (click on this to see the actual picture):

U.S. gas prices have doubled and more in the past couple of years.  It must be hurting millions of people directly (getting to and from work or school for example), and hurting many businesses too, which must deliver things and have things delivered to them and so they must raise prices on everything in turn to make up for it.  It seems the U.S. government has totally distorted how it reports inflation because gasoline and food prices alone are skyrocketing.  Maybe the drop in house prices is counteracting that some!

The politicians are arguing over causes and remedies, but while they do NOTHING, quietly, millions of people are driving a little less, maybe trading in the old clunker or big SUV for something much more efficient, sales of hybrids have skyrocketed, and the American people are being very sensible about all this.

We’ve all heard it’s ‘greedy oil companies’ that are the cause but that really isn’t the case - they process crude oil and refine it, etc., and pass along the costs they must pay.  Now global demand for oil and gasoline has been climbing and is projected to climb a great deal more as prosperity increases in China and India in particular, as they hold almost half the world’s population!  U.S. gasoline consumption has not increased significantly in decades.  Increasing overall demand puts upward pressure on prices if supply is not increased.

With producers (particularly OPEC) choosing not to dramatically increase supply, and with constant worries of wars in risky parts of the world, those who actually BUY crude oil and related products in huge quantities for their customers (refiners, power companies, plastics companies, airlines, etc.) have been bidding up the price of future oil purchases, trying to lock in prices, but there’s also some hyping as well, all causing crude oil prices to jump in the last year in particular (to now over $130 a barrel).

But there’s another, bigger, underlying reason oil and gasoline prices are climbing fast: environmentalists.  For decades they have rabidly pushed an agenda to stop any and all efficient energy production, claiming initially it might poison us all or pollute everything, but now, in a much bigger campaign, they have convinced millions that energy production, particularly oil and gasoline will actually destroy the whole planet.  Al Gore declared the oil product powered automobile to be the greatest threat to the planet.

Al Gore is clueless.  Perhaps because the most ‘dire’ climate models predict the planet only warming by about 1 degree Celsius this century, the ’cause’ was renamed ‘climate change’ from ‘global warming’.  Well newsflash: the climate has ALWAYS and will ALWAYS be changing.  Ice ages and HOT spells predate human existence.  There’s many underlying causes, including varying solar activity which even Al Gore has no control over.

So the U.S. has banned itself from developing known vast oil reserves in the so-called ‘continental shelf’ and many other areas.  This ‘policy’ is finally coming back to bite the U.S.  I have no problem with developing ‘alternative fuels’ but to not seek additional oil sources in one’s back yard, and instead rely on oil from tyrants and Kings in unstable regions is madness.

With still no coherent and viable energy plan, the U.S. economy is being seriously hampered by increasing oil prices.  There is no end in sight.

I’m still wading through “Dreams of my father” by Barack Obama, a dreary, depressing book so far.

Maybe it will get more interesting when the Obama/Clinton battle is officially over and the McCain vs. Dem. debates occur.

You can see his last lecture here: google video or visit his web site at the above link for this and other videos and information.

http://www.gdanmitchell.com/2007/04/12/sharpness-and-aperture-selection-on-full-frame-dslrs