Linkery

As Oso mentioned in a comment bellow, Kamp Kanuckistan (representing the “stateless state” of the Free United Cartel of Kanuckistan) will be at 5:20 on Fetish at Burning Man this year, and will feature the second annual road hockey tournament – The “Xeni Cup”. Pete and I were there last year, and had a lot of fun.

The UT has a write up on the long-planned redevelopment of the Navy Broadway Complex in downtown San Diego – It would provide residents and tourists with new views and routes to the waterfront while allowing the Navy to move its headquarters from old warehouses to modern facilities at no cost. (PDF of the proposal)

MSN Money looks at costs and savings by replacing stuff with EnergyStar in your home: When’s the best time to buy an appliance? If you�re waiting until yours breaks, don�t. As you put off the decision, you’re likely paying much higher utility bills because of the inefficiency of old appliances.

Thousands of commuters in Lyon, France, are renting bikes from public racks at low cost. They seem to have thought it out well:

Attempts to steal bikes from a rack set off an alarm, while a built-in lock secures bikes during rentals… A microchip exchanges information with electronic bike racks, identifying the bike, the subscriber and when it was rented and returned. Bikes even have sensors that check the brakes, lights, tire pressure and gears every time they are parked. If there’s a problem, the station won’t rent the bike… A control center keeps track of the data, sending out mechanics or a shuttle to move bikes from one station to another as needed. The bikes are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, though currently weekday rush hours see the greatest demand, indicating that people are using the service to commute.

Lastly, if your day didn’t have enough crazies in it, don’t worry. Pat Robertson is here to help as an example to us all – Pat Robertson suggested on-air that American operatives assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to stop his country from becoming “a launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.”

Gallery update

Better extremely late than never, right? I finally finished adding comments to all of my photos from three weeks in Peru last December.

I also put up some random photos of last Sunday.

Update:
I haven’t been happy with the RSS album feeds from Gallery, and Oso’s question sent me digging for info. You have to display full albums with gallery, and there seems to be no way to list by upload date, or limit the number of photos returned. After fighting with trying to configure gallery’s RSS files, I found a better way – someone else had already done it. Jeff of bovine.net rewrote the rss.php of Gallery to produce an RSS feed of individual photos (not albums), sorted by upload date (not last-modified).

I wanted to add it as an additional feed to Gallery, but it wasn’t going to happen easily. Gallery doesn’t let your templates access the head, so you have to mod the code, and re-mod every time there is an update. With a new release coming up, I wasn’t game to bother with that, so I just replaced the entire feed with this new one. It is based on earlier versions of gallery, but seems to be working so far. Please let me know if you have any problems with the new feed.

I also have been toying with the Album list from discobug. There is no way to kill off the highlight pictures on the main page of gallery, so it isn’t easy to do an album list without using a lot of bandwidth and screen real-estate. I loaded the file up here, but have yet to do much other than format it. I will probably put it in as a link within Gallery, so people can view the albums (and timeline, though I have to fix some of the albums) without painfully clicking through the list.

Update: This is no longer working with my move to Gallery2

Baja Wine

(All photos for this entry are posted here)

My newest sister, Kim, has been taking wine classes at MiraCosta College. Wines of the world, California wines, you name it wines. Each semester they have a field trip to some wineries. Temecula, central coast, etc. This time it was Baja, and she asked Anna and I if we wanted to go. As we had never been to Guadalupe Valley (in San Antonio de las Minas) or seen any of the Mexican wine industry, we happily agreed.

It was an interesting trip. We boarded the bus at Kings Inn in mission valley – man, that place is a real slice of time. The field trip group was mostly middle to late aged folks that were pretty happy about wine. It didn’t take long for people to start passing around bottles of vineo in the bus with fruit, bread, cheese, etc. This was at 9 am. A wee bit earlier than I usually start. It was a lot of fun though. It felt a little bit like school trips taken as a kid, but with more alcohol and grey hair.

I always enjoy driving down the coast of Baja. Passing by the skeletons of a chapels, grandiose entryways with nothing but dirt lots behind them, Foxploration, the naked lady house at Puerto Nuevo (we were told there was a full sized house by the same guy in TJ), and the giant tuna farms near Ensenada. I wonder what part of Baja attracts such an eclectic mix.

At Ensenada we turn off the road towards Tecate and the bus grunts up the hill. This is the first time I have been in this part of Baja, but it all seems very familiar. The scattered rock hills and the vegetation is exactly the same as east San Diego/Ramona area. There probably isn’t as many Tecate beer signs in Ramona though. We pass by 4 restaurants and stop at the first winery. For the life of me, I can’t not remember the name of the place. It is a small place, and we crowded into the tasting room. The first white was decent (I bought a bottle) but the rest wasn’t so great. A bit too young and muddy for me. Everyone hits the bus and we rumble off, past the Russian community, to the next spot.

Monte Xanic is one of the bigger wineries in the valley, and quite modern. First up, we have a tour of the wine storage area. They blasted out 2500 truck loads of granite out of the side of the hill that the winery sits on to build a store room for the barrels. Once blasted out, they put an insulated roof and front wall on the hole to make a great storage area. They have left the rock faces intact on the inside of the building, making the whole thing very impressive to look at. The rock and insulation helps them keep the temp around 13c year round, except for 2 months when they have to run the AC. The wine is piped down by gravity from the winery and filled in barrels in the store room.

Next up we got a tour of the winery itself and learned about the different labels and blends they produce. Then it was on to the tasting. Their premium line was pretty good, but the rest was just average for me. We could only bring back a limited number of bottles (1L alcohol per person), and nothing grabbed us here, so we didn’t buy.

Back in the bus we rumbled up the road. Next up on the tour was Bodega de las Misiones – I know they have a different name now, but I’m at a loss. This was one of the first big wineries in the area (70’s) and had changed hands a couple times (now owned by a French company). The interesting thing about this place was the extent of it’s underground storage. There was long underground hallway filled with bottles, and one main room with barrels. It was really interesting to explore, and felt a little like catacombs, but in a good, historic way. Not a bad, dead body kind of way. Hah. The wine here was decent, but again, nothing standout, so we clutched our change purses tight.

It was about two in the afternoon when we finally rolled up to LA Cetto Winery for lunch. It was a really great experience. It seemed to be a familly operation – I was served by a kid in cowboy boots and an anime shirt. Lunch was at a fantastic location overlooking the winery, vines, olive trees, and the rest of the valley. A really spectacular view. The food was also great. Squab, carne asada, beans, rice, chips, and hot salsa. What more could you ask for? How about some wine? Well, we also had some really nice wine with the meal. There was a petite syrah and a sweeter white wine (can’t remember the type) that went very well with the meal. After exploring the area (this place has a bull ring!) we were back on the bus to head to the tasting room.

I was quite impressed with LA Cetto, they had the best wines of the four we visited. Their prices were also quite good – the petite syrah was $7, and we splurged on one of their higher end wines for $20. They also have some nice olive trees – we picked up a few bottles of tasty extra virgin olive oil and a jar of olives.

The bus ride back to the US was definitely a bit more down tempo than the ride into Baja. It was hardly unexpected, but my body didn’t quite enjoy the amount of wine I had ingested. I was never inebriated, and made sure to drink water, but I guess the sulfites wore me down. I was dragging by the time we hit the border lines at eight. An hour and a half wait in the bus line later, the border agent let Anna and I through with 4 bottles of wine (supposed to only be 1L per person). Some of the other people had to toss bottles they had bought on the assumption they could pay duty for extra items. It turns out you can pay duty on everything except alcohol. Or so the agents said that particular day. It seems to depend on who is working. Something to keep in mind when you go tasting down south.

It was a pretty good day. For $80 I had bus transport for 12 hours down and around Baja, went tasting to four wineries (with commentary by the teacher), and had a great lunch. Not a bad deal. Even though this was a touristy visit, Baja encourages me to explore more. I need to make it over to the Sea of Cortez, or perhaps hunt for pictographs…

Misc links

Some interesting news: World’s largest solar installation to use Stirling engine technology. 20-year purchase agreement between Southern California Edison and Stirling Energy Systems, Inc. will result in 20,000+ dish array, covering 4,500 acres, and capable of generating 500 MW — more electricity than all other present U.S. solar projects combined.

News.com also profiled the company and its CEO, David Slawson: Start-up sees new dawn for old solar tech. It is interesting to note that they say their technology is about three times as efficient as silicon-based photovoltaic solar cells. If true, that might be putting it into the efficiency range of wind or nuclear.

National Geographic magazine has a good story on the challenges of alternative energy in this month’s magazine – Powering the Future.

While not really practical for every day driving, it is interesting to note what can be done – Pulse And Glide – Getting Maximum Fuel Economy In A Prius – On August 7, 2005 five men took an unmodified Prius nearly 1400 miles on a single 12.87 gallon tank of gas. That’s 109 mpg! They did it by using a technique called “Pulse and Glide”.

Wired has another story on DIY plug-in hybrids.

Hah, I love it: A research team in Singapore have developed a paper battery that is small, cheap to fabricate, and which ingeniously uses the bio-fluid being tested (urine) as the power source for the device doing the testing. This should be a great thing for bio monitors, but I can’t wait until I have to pee on my cell phone to charge it.

Sunset mag has some pictures and a profile of the newest glide house

Very cool: The old man and the tree – Fearing boredom during retirement, Jack Barnhart nears completion of his dream treehouse after five years of work.

This is a depressing read: Four Amendments & a Funeral

“…To understand the breadth of Bush’s summer sweep, you had to watch the hand-fighting at close range. You had to watch opposition gambits die slow deaths in afternoon committee hearings, listen as members fell on their swords in exchange for favors and be there to see hordes of lobbyists rush in to reverse key votes at the last minute… In the first few weeks of my stay in Washington, Sanders introduced and passed, against very long odds, three important amendments. A fourth very nearly made it and would have passed had it gone to a vote. During this time, Sanders took on powerful adversaries, including Lockheed Martin, Westinghouse, the Export-Import Bank and the Bush administration. And by using the basic tools of democracy — floor votes on clearly posed questions, with the aid of painstakingly built coalitions of allies from both sides of the aisle — he, a lone Independent, beat them all. It was an impressive run, with some in his office calling it the best winning streak of his career. Except for one thing. By my last week in Washington, all of his victories had been rolled back, each carefully nurtured amendment perishing in the grossly corrupt and absurd vortex of political dysfunction that is today’s U.S. Congress…”

Science links

I saw some of these in Peru, interesting that they are just now starting to figure them out – Cryptic string-based communication system used by ancient Incan administrators may at last be unravelling, thanks to computer analysis of hundreds of different knotted bundles.

The permafrost of the world’s largest peat bog (size of France and Germany combined) in Siberia is melting. It is estimated that the west Siberian bog contains some 70 billion tones of methane, a quarter of all the methane stored on the land surface worldwide. This could unleash billions of tones of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Positive feedback loop, our old friend.

Guns, Germs, and Steel’ Reconsidered. Inside Higer Ed follows some of the discussions taking place on savageminds.org about Diamond’s methodology. I enjoyed the 3 part PBS show on his work, check it out if you haven’t already.

I thought this was pretty interesting. Mosquitoes seem to be more attracted to people already infected with malaria. The malarial parasite might be orchestrating its own onward transmission from within the human body.

Now onto the topic du jour – Bird Flu. New Scientist says that if Asian bird flu mutates into a form that spreads easily between humans, an outbreak of just 40 infected people would be enough to cause a global pandemic. And within a year half of the world’s population would be infected with a mortality rate of 50%.

It is also spreading across Asia. And even the Freakonomics guys think you should think about bird flu.

Bah you say, there is a vaccine for it! Well, yes and no. Bird flu vaccine? Taking the (very) long view.