I recently upgraded my blog software to WordPress 2.1 via the DreamHost one-click installer (an awesome service!), just to get improvements and bugfixes. It ran well for a while until some time Tuesday. I noticed the problem when I attempted to enter some comments at various other blogs, referencing some of my posts, and needing to look up the permalinks. To my surprise, I couldn’t open them. And I couldn’t open the main website either.

I wrote up a support ticket with DreamHost and got a reply back mentioning something about too much memory being used by my site and that this is usually due to badly written plug-ins.

So I dug around the log files, searched the DreamHost support area, searched the WordPress support area and finally typed this into Google: “Wordpress 2.1 internal server error”. That led me to http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2006/12/site-down-36-hours-how-i-fixed-internal-server-errors/. There I found a description of exactly the same problem, and how it was solved by restoring the default configuration for wp-cache and then leaving it turned off. That’s what I did, and now the blog is back up and running again.

I never suspected wp-cache to be the culprit, especially since DreamHost encourages you to turn it on right away after installing WordPress to improve performance. I think this is something that should be looked into, DreamHost!

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Categories: Personal
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This is something I’ve had stuck in my mind ever since I read the book “Stuff: The secret lives of everyday things” (or was it “Natural Capitalism”? I’ve lent out both books right now).

Take a wild guess at how much of the energy in the gas you put in your car actually goes towards transporting you. Don’t be afraid to lowball it. Write it down.

How did you go about it? Did you use the fact (which is fairly common knowledge) that car engines are about 30% efficient? Good. But 30% is not the answer. Did you pay attention to how the question is worded? “Towards transporting YOU”?

How about idling, energy lost in the driveline, energy lost on powering accessories in the car? With all that, about one-eighth (12.5 %) of the energy reaches the wheels. Around half of that heats the tires, road and air that the car pushes aside. That leaves about 6% or so applied to moving the car forward. When you figure in that your mass compared to the car’s mass is about 5%, that leaves less than one percent of the energy in the fuel for transporting YOU. Let’s be generous and say it’s actually one percent. Here’s a little visual of that number for you:

That’s a scary waste in my book.

Here’s more to make you think: A friend of mine, Stan King, did some calculations based on a discussion we had at a recent simplicity circle meeting at our house. I had wondered how bicycling compares to driving in terms of energy efficiency. He took on the task of figuring it out. When you convert the amount of energy needed to bike a mile and convert that to the car’s miles-per-gallon equivalent, riding a bicycle has a “miles-per-gallon” of about 650. That number makes hybrid cars pale in comparison.

When you consider that 99% of the energy in the gas is wasted on things other than transporting you, the passenger, riding a bicycle has a “miles-per-gallon” of over 6500.

Compared to that, hybrid cars seem almost like stone age technology.

This is the thinking behind our family’s decision to stick with one car, even though it creates some inconvenience. It’s also why I bike to work practically every day.

And just so you won’t think I pulled these numbers out of thin air, there’s a Wikipedia article that states a 653 mpg for bicycling, which matches Stan’s number well. The calculation on the efficiency of cars can be found in this article by Amory Lovins from July 2006. The journal this was published in can be downloaded here (3.17 MB PDF).

Categories: Environment, Personal, Sustainability
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Doing some research for an illustration I wanted to post on this blog, I typed the following search terms into Google: aluminum can volume. What do you think a search like this would bring you? Try it out yourself. You’ll be as surprised as I was.

It’s this:

Almost every result talks about how much energy is wasted when you don’t recycle a soda can! It’s the equivalent of filling the can halfway with gas and pouring it out. If that idea won’t make you think more about recycling aluminum cans, maybe this calculation will:

Half a soda can is 6 oz. A gallon has 128 oz. So 21.333 empty cans thrown away equal a gallon of gas wasted. My car has a tank capacity of about 15 gallons (I think). So it would take 320 non-recycled cans for me to waste a tank full of gas. My car can travel about 300 miles on a tank of gas. I certainly don’t want to waste energy like that. Especially energy coming from our dwindling oil reserves. We’ll need that oil for lots of other things besides burning it for transportation. For example, most plastics are based on oil, and I wonder how many cool and wonderful gadgets and gizmos (needing plastic enclosures and parts) we won’t be able to produce in the future if we run out of oil. Pardon the digression.

Anyway, now I’ve used my illustration and even given it a little surprising Google story to go with it.

Categories: Environment, Personal, Sustainability
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On my last night at Bloghaus, I ended up sitting next to Dwight Silverman from the Houston Chronicle. He’s had some nice things to say about the HP TouchSmart PC.

When I mentioned my “plug” (that I worked on the SmartCenter software), he said “Congratulations. Well done.”

Thanks Dwight! I appreciate it.

And, by the way, I can relate to your sentiment about the bloghaus. I had some great and interesting converations (with Graeme Thickins, Hans Veldhuizen, Sparky from gearlive.com, Jason Fields from  snap.com, Kristopher Tate and Thomas Hawk from Zooomr, Dave Alpert and Chris Coulter from PodTech), and overall I really, genuinely enjoyed the bloghaus. But I didn’t quite feel “cool enough” either. I guess that’s what can happen when you visit a gathering where there are lots of ”blogebrities”.

Categories: Personal
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Check out the pictures I uploaded via the connection in the bloghaus today. These are almost all the pictures I’ve taken over the course of the four days I’ve been in Las Vegas so far.

http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/geektieguy

Categories: Personal
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Thanks to the incredible bandwith that bloghaus has provided, Kristopher Tate from zooomr hooked us up with the Macworld keynote. He even got it up on the giant flatscreen TV.

The iPhone looks really exciting. I can’t wait for it to come out to play with it. It sounds a little pricey, but considering it’s a full iPod as well as a revolutionary phone, I guess it’s not too bad.

I’m really impressed with the bloghaus. There’s food, conversation, bandwith and tons of geeks. Thanks to Podtech, AMD and Seagate for sponsoring this thing!

Categories: Personal
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I don’t even know where to begin with this one. After the Bill Gates keynote, where the HP TouchSmart PC was unveiled officially in a video clip, an actual unit appeared in the suite, seemingly out of nowhere.

I was flabbergasted. When I first saw it, I blurted across the room to Karsten Januszewski “Hey, there’s one of the things I’ve worked on!” (during the development phase I had some good help from Karsten.) Turns out Microsoft and AMD had arranged for a unit to be unboxed at the BlogHaus after Bill’s mention of it.

Being the geek that I am, I mentioned to Scoble that I worked on one of the applications on it (yup, I work for HP). He says, “Does everyone here know about that?” I say, “No”. So he tells everyone, and next thing I know I have lights, cameras and microphones in my face and am awkwardly talking about the product and the program I was involved in. Scobleized!

There’s something about lights and cameras that makes you very uncomfortable when you’re caught off-guard like that. Still for some reason you agree to being interviewed and showing off the software you’ve worked on. I guess we’re all drawn in by whatever “fame” can come out of being on camera.

Anyway, I hobble through four or five of these nerve-wracking question-and-answer sessions feeling incredibly self-conscious and cotton-mouthed. By the last one I think I finally said something coherent, and I’m sure the guys who got me first are now regretting it.

I’m still all mixed up about this. Can’t sleep. Oh well, whatever happened happened. Can’t change it now. It’s on tape. I thought all that would happen this evening would be Bill Gates talking about the PC, and me getting a little conversation starter out of it. Oh boy was I wrong!

But it’s good to finally be able to write about this thing that I’ve been a little part of on since before PDC05.

So I’ll leave it at that for now. Let me know how much of a fool I made of myself once you see footage. I don’t even remember who all I talked to. I guess Google will be my friend.

Oh, and one more thing. I think this was the first time I’ve seen a “connector” in action. One loud sentence from Scoble into the room started it. And then he just slid back (and watched me make a fool of myself, I’m sure). That’s a connector for you.

Thanks for my 15 minutes of fame, Robert! Let’s see what happens next.

Categories: Personal
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I’m sitting here at the Seagate / PodTech / AMD bloghaus after having run around all day setting up printer drivers and other good stuff at our booths.

I tried getting into the Bill Gates keynote, but didn’t make it. What a waste of $20 on cab fare. Robert Scoble even told me before I left that there would be streaming video of the keynote at the bloghaus. I guess since the product I worked on for so long is going to be featured in Bill’s note, I wanted to be there.

Anyway, it should be exciting to see the product unveiled along with whatever Bill is going to say about Vista.

I got my first glimpse of “The Strip” on my way back and forth to the Venetian, and even saw a little of the Bellagio fountain show.

Well, the keynote should start in about five minutes, so I better get this posted.

Categories: Personal
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Robert X. Cringely says that what Microsoft is doing with the Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology in Vista is help the media companies reselling us stuff we already have. He talks about how the media companies have been successful at this once already: when we bought CDs to replace our vinyl records, and when we bought DVDs to replace our video tapes.

True.

Then he goes on to saying that all the new Vista DRM technology will form the basis for selling us the same stuff once more, but this time protected from piracy.

I would add the following: The original “re-sell” happened to work because we saw value in going from analog to digital. No more worrying about scratches on the records and deteriorating magnetic tapes. We got better sound and picture quality to boot. Deep down though, I think, we wanted to make sure that we got content that would survive “forever” and be ours “forever”. Well, the transition to digital accomplished that.

So what can possibly drive this next wave of reselling us the same stuff? High-definition digital video (I think Robert Scoble said something like this a while back too). It’s the last chance the studios have to resell us the same stuff once more. And this time they want to get it right: no piracy, hence all the DRM technology.

I can’t wait for the mass market to wake up and find out how buggy, error-prone and restrictive the whole high-definition-with-DRM thing will be. It may not happen until it’s too late. I’m almost hoping that things will be so bad that everyone will just say “I don’t need to own those stinkin’ movies or the expensive equipment to play them. I’ll just invite some friends over and we’ll make music together or tell stories”.

Nothing beats the high-definition of your imagination.

And maybe we should worry less about “owning” hollywood-generated content. Maybe we should focus more on generating our own.

Categories: Opinion, Personal
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Inspired by the manifestos at gapingvoid.com, here’s my Voluntary Simplicity manifesto:

——————

The free market economy of boundless growth is unsustainable, since we live on a planet with finite resources.

Future generations have just as much a right to enjoy life as the current generation.

Future generations have just as much a right to enjoy a life of the same quality as the current generation.

Conspicuous consumption, as demonstrated by American consumers, will destroy our natural resources if adopted by countries such as India and China. A lot of people in India and China are already aspiring to the lifestyle of American consumers.

The only way to change things in the world is by changing personal behavior.

Once you’ve changed your personal behavior for the better, get others to follow.

The only chance you have for getting someone to do what you want, is to demonstrate that you do it yourself.

Voluntary Simplicity is about living more purposefully with a minimum of needless distractions.

People who practice Voluntary Simplicity realize that more material possessions do not equal increased happiness in life. Often, the opposite is true. More material possessions can actually diminish happiness in life.

Voluntary Simplicity does not dictate how or how much you simplify your life. Only you can decide when you’ve reached the point of “enough” in your life.

Voluntary Simplicity is not about depriving yourself, living in poverty or lowering your standard of living. It is about living more consciously, focusing more on “inner life” than “outward appearance”.

By practicing Voluntary Simplicity you can become a role model for a new lifestyle that will enable future generations to enjoy life.

By practicing Voluntary Simplicity and spreading the word you can help change America’s conspicuous consumption philosophy. You can help people in other countries see that there is another way to live besides consumerism.

——————

To find out more about Voluntary Simplicity, check out the links in the sidebar on the right, and also take a look at these links:

• Excerpts from the book “Voluntary Simplicity” by Duane Elgin (http://www.awakeningearth.org/books_bvs_excerpts.asp)
• Soulful Living (http://www.soulfulliving.com/voluntarysimplicity.htm)
• The Northwest Earth Institute (http://www.nwei.org/)
• Simple Living America (http://www.simplelivingamerica.org)
• The Simple Living Network (http://www.simpleliving.net)
• Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska (http://www.simplelivingtv.net)
• Simple Living Resource Guide (http://www.gallagherpress.com/pierce/index.htm)

Categories: Environment, Personal, Sustainability
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