North Carolina fines someone for making cleaner fuel
From a North Carolina newspaper earlier this week comes an
article about state government penalizing a citizen for making his
own biodiesel. His biodiesel is made from soybeans, is cleaner
burning than fossil based gasoline and reduces reliance on foreign
oil.
Bob Teixeira decided it was time to take a stand against U.S.
dependence on foreign oil.
So last fall the Charlotte musician and guitar instructor spent
$1,200 to convert his 1981 diesel Mercedes to run on vegetable oil.
He bought soybean oil in 5-gallon jugs at Costco, spending about 30
percent more than diesel would cost.
His reward, from a state that heavily promotes alternative
fuels: a $1,000 fine last month for not paying motor fuel taxes. He
has been told to expect another $1,000 fine from the federal
government.
newsobserver.com
| Driver ticketed for using biofuel
From devx.com tips comes this antiquity
This is in response to the original "Escape Sequences in .NET
Resource Files, by Boris Eligulashvili.
There is actually another way to insert escape sequences, such
as newline characters-or actually any Unicode character, directly
into the Resource string-without resorting to Replace or similar
manipulations.
First, place the cursor at the insertion point. Next, hold down
the Alt key and enter the decimal value of the Unicode character,
starting with 0, using the numeric keypad.
For example, to insert a newline character (\u000a), hold down
the Alt key while pressing 010 on the numeric keypad.
As another example, suppose you want to insert a registered
(\u00ae) trademark symbol. You can either use the Character Map
utility or hold down Alt while entering that value in decimal from
the numeric keypad (0174).
How many of you remember using this technique in DOS to create
inaccessible and obfuscated filenames?
Another
Way to Escape Sequences in .NET Resource Files
Weapons of Mass Destruction Found!
Just what are people thinking? I thought I couldn't understand
smokers casually tossing those foul toxic half smoked cigarettes
into storm sewers. But this? This is just fucking insane. The US
army has admitted to dumping horrifying amounts of arsenic,
cyanide, mustard gas, nerve gas, white phosphorous, lewisite and
phosgene in coastal waters all around the U.S!!!
"The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds
of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000
chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500
tons of radioactive waste - either tossed overboard or packed into
the holds of scuttled vessels."
I just came across this site today and it looks quite
interesting. I am going to subscribe to their abridged feed (the
main feed is huge) for a bit and see what other great information
turns up.
Deep Sea News : Munitions Dumping at Sea
The Complete Guide to Short Term Blogging
From the socialmediatoday.com comes this interesting
article about short term blogging. The article is clearly aimed at
the corporate blogger and presents some useful tips and
tricks.
The Complete
Guide to Short Term Blogging
When bike helmets are way too geeky...
Brent introduced me to Make magazine a couple of years ago and
the daily posts have lots of creative and inspiring ideas. When I
cam across the headline
LED Bike helmet I was quite excited. Suffice to say, the
first image scared the crap out of me :) It's a bit like Dork
meets Tron (which in itself might be considered a tad dorky by
some).
MAKE: Blog: LED Bike helmet
Asus stuns Computex with 100 laptop
$189, runs linux, has a 2Gb flash drive and weighs 900g!
Apparently it will be available world wide shortly. Sure it's only
a 2Gb drive but think about using it as a portable web appliance
for accessing all those internets. It would be great for people
like my parents that run primarily web based applications and have
little need to store local data.
Asus stuns Computex with 100 laptop
CityNews: Plane Carrying Donor Organ Crashes, Killing Team Of Surgeons
This is a truly sad moment and I am sure the indirect losses
will be far greater than the tragic deaths of the surgical team.
As the article points out the intended recipient may well be the
next to succumb. However, the death of the surgical team means
less skilled doctors to carry out transplants and increased waiting
time for OR resources.
This is terrible news at time when organ donation awareness is
on an upsurge. I hope it does not discourage those of you
that have not yet have signed your organ donor card.
CityNews:
Plane Carrying Donor Organ Crashes, Killing Team Of
Surgeons
Visual Studio Shell to bring configurable IDE to developers
It looks like Microsoft is starting to get worried about OSS
IDEs such as Eclipse. The article here indicates that Microsoft is
readying a stripped down shell to ship with Orcas that can be used
freely by anyone to host their own languages and tools.
Visual Studio Shell to bring configurable IDE to developers
Proposing Another Traditional Annual Carrot Ride
This morning I had a great ride in the Don trails. That in
itself is not completely unusual, unless you take into account
today was the annual Becel Ride for Heart. But wait, the Ride for
Heart runs along the Don Valley Parkway. Why would that make a
trail ride so great? Well, the Becel Ride for Heart involves
shutting down the Don Valley Parkway to regular vehicular traffic.
When you remove thousands of cars from a narrow strip of tarmac you
also remove an incredible amount of white noise.
What made today's ride so great was an entirely different
noise. The noise that is omnipresent in any forest. The noise
that comes from birds, squirrels, wind, trees and leaves. The
natural noise of the Don Valley green belt that is usually
overwhelmed by the sound of gasoline engines and rubber tires.
It is very rare that we get to experience this amazing sound.
Only on those few days each year that the DVP is closed to cars.
Most of those days revolve around construction and are thus
inconsistent each summer. However, one we can count on (hopefully
for the foreseeable future) is the Becel Ride for Heart.
I propose that we make the Becel Ride for Heart Sunday a second
Screaming Carrot traditional ride date along with the existing
NP2A.
Oh, if you need any further encouragement consider this. I
passed three other cyclists so the trails were devoid of their
normal congestion. I saw a groundhog sleeping on the rail line as
I crossed to the flats. And finally, I saw a deer feeding in the
bush just south of Don Mills!
New RealPlayer to rip YouTube video streams
And more importantly (for adbeast possibly) it will support
QuickTime. Depending upon how they implement the interface and
the uptake on browser plugins this could have a major impact on
the internet video space.
Real Networks announced today that it will be launching
a new version of its dying video player this June. Unlike previous
versions of the player, the new version will support file types
other than just Real files, including Windows Media, Flash, and
QuickTime. The new version of the player will also allow users to
download video streams onto their computers. This means that users
will be able to save their own copies of videos from sites like
YouTube, MySpace, Soapbox, Revver, and more with a single click
instead of relying on more convoluted methods.
New RealPlayer to rip YouTube video streams