Cell Phone

When I moved to the bay area I switched cell phone companies from Sprint to Cingular. I wanted a fancy new phone at the time: big screen and all sorts of web integration so I could play with things like google maps mobile. I got a Motorola Razr for it's big screen and small size. Sadly, it's volume only went high enough that I could hear the other person in near silence, and it's sound quality and reception, while not bad, were not anything to write home about.

I recently needed a new phone after destroying my razr, and this time all I wanted was the best possible phone for calling - meaning sound quality & reception. The winner I think that I found was the Sony Ericsson Z520a which has this ugly "handle" that encloses a ring antenna for great reception. It's also loud enough to hear. If you are looking for a phone(not a gaddet), so far so good - check it out.

Tux Pumpkin

I tried and failed to create this pumpkin - i ended up with a big hole in the side of a pumpkin that was roughly shaped like tux. Cristin helped me with my second try. You can see part of the hole I made in the back side of the pumpkin through tux's left foot (right side of the photo).

Greendimes, Terrapass, and CarbonFund

Some pointers to a few personal environmental websites.

Greendimes.com claims that for a dime a day ($3/month) they will hound direct marketing organizations and keep you off of their mailing lists, even as they change policies and re-add you repeatedly. In addition, they will plant 1 tree for you for every month that you are in the program. I'm always trying to get off of mailing lists, so this sounds pretty good to me, I don't know how well it will work, but it can't hurt to try. Here is what they say:

Well, we’ll call, email and write these companies to make sure they leave you alone! This isn’t easy. These companies change their policies and their contact info often. And even if you do go through the effort of validating every company’s policies and contact info and write to each one, you could still get junk mail from them. Why?

Because when you move, donate money to charity, buy something from a catalog or do one of a hundred other seemingly innocent things, your name gets sold! That’s why we’re a recurring service – we’re going to contact these companies on your behalf a LOT, just to make sure you’re kept off of these lists and people stop selling your name and address.

We keep you off.
Just because you’re off doesn’t mean you stay off. Just about anything you do –– refinance, move, get a new credit card, etc. –– puts you back on. So, we will regularly request your information be removed from existing lists and we add new junk mailers to our list regularly.

I donate money to charities around the holidays. Last year I gave $1000 to Heifer to help sustainably solve poverty. A good organization, but I received so much mail from them in the following year asking for more donations, it really puts me off donating again. They are worse than my alma mater who I repeatedly ask to stop sending me ads for $200 "Alumni desk lamps" and sending me on $5000 "Alumni Study Abroad Trips". I doubt greendimes can do anything about charity mailers, but anything helps.

On the other side of things is carbon neutrality. It is a big phrase where I work, and I kind of like the idea. It turns out that going personal carbon neutral by purchasing credits is not that difficult. There are two common websites where it can be done:

Terrapass: A for-profit entity (not necessarily a bad thing) that sells 20,000lbs of CO2 offset (SUV for a year) for $80. They also send you a cute bumper sticker and window decal to promote visibility.

The first step you can take to fight global warming is to reduce your carbon footprint through conservation. Drive less. Turn down the thermostat. Buy locally produced goods.

Then use TerraPass to reduce your carbon footprint all the way to zero.

When you buy a TerraPass, your money funds renewable energy projects such as wind farms. These projects result in verified reductions in greenhouse gas pollution. And these reductions counterbalance your own emissions.

CarbonFund: A non-profit entity that sells 20,000lbs of C02 offset (SUV for a year) for $50, and it is tax deductable. They also give you a bumper sticker and decal if you are interested, or let you opt-out to support more projects. Lastly, they let you choose if your donation should go towards Renewables, Energy Efficiency, or Reforestation Projects with prices per lb for each. Currently this seems like a slightly better deal than terrapass.

We hear you. We know some people prefer renewable energy, while others prefer trees or efficiency. We also know some people have issues with various offset types. So we figured: It’s your carbon. It ought to be your choice where it goes. From our contribution page you’ll have the option of supporting renewable energy, energy efficiency, reforestation projects, or a combination. You can also leave it blank and support our basket of projects. That gives you a lot of options—which is exactly how it should be. Carbonfund.org ensures the projects meet the highest standards of verification so you can feel confident with your choice.

Other options I haven't looked into much:
http://certifiedcleancar.com/
http://www.sustainabletravelinternational.org/
http://www.futuroforestal.com/english/co2ol_eng.htm

Tracking Life

Cristin has been frustrated with my utter lack of memory. Its not that I can't recall things, its that something in my brain doesn't trigger me to think about things in the first place. If someone mentions, "didn't you have to meet someone tonight?", I'll remember that I was supposed to meet X for dinner. If nothing triggers me, I will completely forget until I get a call from X 20 minutes late. I have this problem with meetings at work as well.

A medical solution to this problem eludes me, so I started trying Google Calendar. It's pretty decent - and I know there are potentially better calendars, but at least I can trust that the service will always be accessable, fast, free, etc for some definition of "always". I can't trust a start up for pretty much any definition of "always".

The one really nice feature that makes this the killer app for me in particular is that I can get the calendar to send a text message to me minutes before the meeting/event. This is the trigger - I almost always have my cell phone.

Of course, for this week and next, I'm in dublin ireland and my cell phone has zero service. I've already shown up for one meeting 10 minutes late, so I can see the problems already.

Bell's Theorem

I've been curiously interested in Bell's Theorem for years now. To get a laymans view, read this well written article on the subject. Basically, there is a trick in quantum mechanics where two particles can communicate with each other over an infinite distance literally instantaneously. Unfortunately, there a properties of this trick that make it appear impossible to harness for instantaneous communication.

The reason that this is interesting is that instantaneous communication would change the world as we know it. Right now we take communication as instantaneous because light can loop around earth in less than a second and we can communicate virtually at the speed of light. But this is still a huge limit.

Latency between networked computers make it nearly impossible to build general-purpose supercomputers that operate in multiple places in the world. These constraints even cause issues when the computers are talking to each other across the room.

Communication off planet - to satellites, astronauts, mars rovers, you name it, is delayed. To talk to someone on mars, it takes a 6.5 minutes minimum to get a message to them[link].

Even terrestrial communication is limited by non-instantaneous communication. As long as there are wires (or fiber, or whatever) between two points that are communicating, communicating at the speed of light is relatively cheap. If you try instead to use radio communication: satellites, wireless internet, cell phones, radio, the expense of communicating in terms of energy quadruples every time you double the distance you are trying to communicate. This is why cell phones only have a mile or two range from a tower and wireless internet only works for a hundred feet or so. Imagine every cell phone or computing device having communication without wires, with long battery life, and no towers. That cell phone then works anywhere, whether you are in an airplane soaring miles in the air over the pacific, in a cave, or in a submarine on the bottom of the ocean. The communication would also be undetectable, untracable.

An exciting idea. And Bell's Theorem tells us that quantum particles do this all the time. Too bad nobody has figured out how to harness this.

Kite Videography

Ok, this might be just weird, but Dan and I launched a kite into the sky with a digital camera attached by a string running on continuous video recording. Warning: It has sound, but except for the first few seconds that sound is just wind.

Catching Up on Links

Next I need to catch up on a couple links.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ggrothau - my photos
http://grouthauspearl.com/ - my sister's gallery (physical gallery, not photo gallery)

What is this?

My old blog resided at poked.net. That domain name was selected because it was a short (5 character) single word domain name available in the wild. That was and is still rare to find. I thought poked was a cute name that brought to mind an image of the pillsbury dough boy. Little did I realize at the time that that "poked" has sexual connotations as well. Well, I am betting that "gregable" is a pretty safe, politically correct, name. Hopefully it is fairly easy to remember too.

Anyhow, expect more soon.