Saturday, March 24, 2007

Is It Worth Being Wise?

An interesting essay by Paul Graham: Is It Worth Being Wise?

Friday, March 23, 2007

North Cascades National Park

I thought that there were only three (US) national parks near Seattle - Olympic National Park, Mount Rainier, and Crater Lake.

The other day I stumbled the North Cascades National Park online. According the its website it is very scenic and has lots of camping and hiking with mountains and glaciers. It's only two and half hours away from Seattle too. I going to drag my friends there in the summer to go camping.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Daylight Savings

Leaving work while the sun was still up was a nice feeling. Dragging my ass out of bed in the morning was impossible though. I want my hour of sleep back! Somehow I'm really tired despite it being "really" only 10 pm... :-(

The good news is that after a ridiculous amount of work to prepare for starting daylight savings earlier and patching what seemed like a zillion systems, nothing broke a work.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

The End Of Suburbia

Last night I watched the documentary The End Of Suburbia. It's been in a Netflix queue for a long time, but its availability was always "Very Long Wait". I can understand why after seeing it; the film was quite thought provoking. It covers the emergence of the suburbs in North American society then discusses Peak Oil and how it will affect society.

Because so many people list in the suburbs, they are dependent upon cars (often gas-guzzling SUVs) to travel for work, shopping, leisure, etc. Moreover, most of what they consume (food from far away places such as California, Florida, etc.; cheap goods from China; etc.) is also transported long distances by transport trucks (as the North American rail system is not much to speak of). Consequently, when the supply of oil drops in the next few years, the economic upheaval will be massive due to the fact that our way of life requires an unsustainable of energy. Moreover, most homes are heated by natural gas and the electricity for those homes (air conditioners, etc.) often comes from burning natural gas. However, the production of natural gas will also undergo a collapse in supply at some point in the near future, exacerbating the pending energy crisis that has the potential to cause another Depression.

[For more information about Peak Oil, see my post nine months ago, Peak Oil? about an Australian TV documentary that's available free online for viewing].