I've mentioned before in this blog that I'm searching for the perfect phone. I've related my problems with the Palm Treo and with my current phone. Out of all the phones out there, my son's LG EnV remains the best all around phone. Good music player, stereo BlueTooth support, decent camera, and a QWERTY keyboard. It also supports custom ringtones, wallpaper, etc.

Well LG has just announced the LG EnV2! It has all the above in a smaller package! "Great," I said. There's just one problem, they took out the flash!. What's the point in having a camera if there's no flash? Thus they took a great phone, made it better, then blew the whole thing by taking out the flash.

Why can't I have the phone I want? Music with stereo BlueTooth, ringtones, wallpaper, camera (with flash!), QWERTY keyboard, (and no, I seldom text, but a QWERTY keyboard is still nice when you're entering addresses and so forth) removable memory card, and a calendar that supports weekly, biweekly, and triweekly appointments? (And no, the EnV doesn't have that either, (Apparently that's a Palm thing) but it should!)

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Labels: cell phones

  ¶ 7:46 PM 0 Comments

  Here's yet another article supporting global cooling!

CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. ...

Read the rest at the Australian News: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23411799-7583,00.html.

I recently read the Popular Science editorial where the editor said "The threat of human-influenced global warming is no longer in serious debate," (April 2008) and I wrote him an email refuting that statement. Of course he did not reply. Hey Mark Jannot! You edit a magazine called Popular Science. You know, science. Not politically correct non-science.

I once subscribed to Science Digest. One article told about a volcano in the Antarctic that has been erupting for hundreds of years. A letter to the editor pointed out, (this was when the ozone hole was big news) that chemicals from the volcano must be contributing to the formation of the hole more than man-made freon. The editor replied that of course there was no mechanism to move the chemicals from the lower to the upper atmosphere. I was outraged! If there was no mechanism to move chemicals from a volcano spewing them high into the air, what was the mechanism to move freon from ground level to the upper atmosphere? It was such a stupid, politically correct response from the Science Digest editor that I canceled my subscription. I told them I thought I had subscribed to a science magazine! Oh, my mistake!

Unfortunately scientists and science writers can be just as self-righteous and opinionated as anyone. This has always been the case, sad but true.

Richard's main page  ¶ 8:26 PM 0 Comments

  It is now official: there is not only no global warming, but we're actually entering a cooling phase. All the major climate centers (the legitimate ones that are not corrupted by political correctness) agree that there has been no warming for the last few years and that the cool temperatures have more than erased the warming we've had before that. The arctic ice has more than recovered this winter and the nation has suffered under a particularly cruel winter.

Thomas Sowell sums it up well with his article that I read in the Las Vegas Review Journal, but I'm linking to Jewish World Review's version, since the LVRJ's is on a subscription site.

Jewish World Review Feb. 28, 2008 / 22 Adar I 5768 Cold Water on ‘Global Warming’ By Thomas Sowell http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | It has almost become something of a joke when some "global warming" conference has to be cancelled because of a snowstorm or bitterly cold weather. But stampedes and hysteria are no joke — and creating stampedes and hysteria has become a major activity of those hyping a global warming "crisis." They mobilize like-minded people from a variety of occupations, call them all "scientists" and then claim that "all" the experts agree on a global warming crisis. Their biggest argument is that there is no argument.

Richard's main page  ¶ 8:12 PM 0 Comments

  We had a huge windstorm on Wednesday. I was in the cellar when the power went out. I felt my way out (not thinking about the cell phone I was carrying that could have lit my way!) and went towards the garage where I knew there was a flashlight. Something huge swept past me and there was a huge crash. I decided to go in the house to get a flashlight instead. The flashlight told me I was probably lucky I wasn't killed or injured, since it was a huge chunk of my garage's roof!

Though it's not obvious, that's four pieces of roof steel in the picture. That's heavy gauge steel and the sheets are 13 feet long. It came off as one piece then the wood holding it all together splintered so the pieces separated. I had to replace many of the wood runners before I could reattach the steel sheets. This time I bolted them down instead of just screwing them into the runners. The photo shows the roof with some of the runners already replaced.

I started yesterday afternoon and got up early this morning and worked all day. I'm pretty much done except for the cap at the peak. I'll have to go to the city to get that.

The roof steel must have been accordioned in because the roof is now two inches shorter than before. If I had noticed earlier I could have stretched it but it was already attached except the last piece, so it'll have to do.


Richard's main page  ¶ 8:47 PM 0 Comments

  The abiotic theory of oil formation says that oil is not a fossil fuel, but is continually being produced in the earth. this of course upsets the enviro-loonies who insist we're running out of oil.
The following article has more evidence that the theory is correct:

BLACK-GOLD BLUES
Discovery backs theory oil not 'fossil fuel'
New evidence supports premise that Earth produces endless supply

---

Posted: February 1, 2008
1:00 a.m. Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com

A study published in Science Magazine today presents new evidence supporting the abiotic theory for the origin of oil, which asserts oil is a natural product the Earth generates constantly rather than a "fossil fuel" derived from decaying ancient forests and dead dinosaurs.

The lead scientist on the study – Giora Proskurowski of the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle – says the hydrogen-rich fluids venting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the Lost City Hydrothermal Field were produced by the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in the mantle of the earth.

The abiotic theory of the origin of oil directly challenges the conventional scientific theory that hydrocarbons are organic in nature, created by the deterioration of biological material deposited millions of years ago in sedimentary rock and converted to hydrocarbons under intense heat and pressure.

While organic theorists have posited that the material required to produce hydrocarbons in sedimentary rock came from dinosaurs and ancient forests, more recent argument have suggested living organisms as small as plankton may have been the origin.

Continued at World Net Daily: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59991

Richard's main page  ¶ 9:09 PM 0 Comments

  I put a funny greeting on our voice mail, but my wife said that she'd like something that identifies us. So I played with Audacity a bit and inserted a little clip identifying the Bush house which then leads into the funny greeting. Audacity is a powerful audio editing program. I'm still learning its features though. The voice mail supports appending to the message, so I could have recorded it that way, but Audacity was a more elegant a solution.

Richard's main page  ¶ 11:21 PM 0 Comments

  I've made the decision to retire my ancient answering machine. It was a great answering machine, a PhoneMate 4300, and I've never found anything that I liked as well. The problem was that the tapes were wearing out. Now I could have replaced the message tape, but the continuous loop greeting tape is impossible to find. Although mini-tapes are still available if you look hard enough, my machine used full sized tapes.

What finally made me make the switch was the phone company began offering packages of features that gave me more for less money. Who can resist that, right? Even more irresistable was the 50% increase in my broadband speed. Another part of the package was voice mail. I decided to try it and found to my delight that my Uniden phones (TCX 805's) have a blinking light when there's a message waiting. If I glance at any phone I can see that there's a message. Really cool!

Of course what I need to do now is to record one of my pre-recorded gag messages onto my voice mail. The one on my answering machine went like this: "Hello, I am a digitally enhanced answering unit. Who are you? Please leave a message after my obligatory tone and we will respond as soon as humanly possible. Chou baby."

Yeah, I've got to have that back!

Richard's main page  ¶ 9:20 PM 0 Comments

  A few years ago I went to see SpaceShipOne and its carrier the WhiteKnight fly. It was great! SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo are about ready for roll out. Here's the article.

Entrepreneur Unveils New Tourist Spacecraft

Burt Rutan took the cloak off of his new spacecraft on Wednesday.

Mr. Rutan, the creator of SpaceShipOne, the first privately financed craft to carry a human into space, traveled to New York to show detailed models of the bigger SpaceShipTwo and its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo.

The rest is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/science/space/23cnd-spaceship.html?ex=1359003600&en=462bf8c769b65f6c&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss

Richard's main page  ¶ 7:25 PM 0 Comments