The pissed off cardinal is back. It's really whacking at the window next door.

Kathy, I'm glad you are all moved and the cat approves.

Hooray for moving, Kathy!

Cable guy's coming by tonight to hook me up for basic cable (digital has to wait a week--yes, it's a "WTF" situation, mostly dealing with Comcast paperwork issues), so I'm going to end up missing Friday's Doctor Who (damnit!), but I'm checking with a co-worker to see if he could tape it for me.

I record it, if you can't get it taped let me know and I can send you a VCD or something.

I was just checking public transit to see if it had imporved or not. Hard to tell becuase the trip planner part of the website doesn't work, but it looks like I can't get from home to work. The only bus route that comes close doesn't transfer from any other routes. Maybe I could swing it through using two different bus services but that looks like it would take 2 - 3 hours of commuting instead of the 20-30 minutes of driving I do. Looks like it's less viable than ever.

The pissed off cardinal is back. It's really whacking at the window next door.

I love it. One of my favourite Washington DC memories is of a cardinal indignantly defending his territory against the rival male inside an SUV's rear view mirror.

So it seems there was an 8.0 magnitude earthquake in the Pacific Ocean, and a tsunami may strike Fiji and New Zealand within hours.

Nature freaks me out.

Kathy, I am so unspeakably jealous of your laundry right across from the elevator I can barely lift my fingers to type. But yay with the all-moved-in-ness and the peaceable kitty!

This is, like, the funniest thing I have ever read:

An Open Letter to My Cat, Abbie at McSweeney's

OMG, that was beautiful. And now I don't know how I ever got by in life without the pleasure of their open letters. You hardly even need to read the letters themselves; just wandering down the list of titles is a glorious feast.

Hi Gud. Yes Butanol is a good way to convert biomass to fuel - though this improved process is still experimental; been demonstrated in pilot plants but not commercially.

However efficiency remains the key. There is only so much biomass that can sustainably be converted to energy. Variable wind is competitive with fossil fuels but when you add storage to make it fully dispatchable, it becomes expensive. Solar thermal with heat stoage is about three times the cost per kWh of conventional electricity sources. The glamor king Photovoltaic electricity is that price without storage - with storage more like six times.

Even nuclear electricity (which there are other reasons to be against) is more expensive than coal and (for the moment) natural gas.

So if we are going to switch to carbon neutral sources we are going to be dealing with expensive (in the case of solar and wind and possibly nuclear) an and limited (in the case of biomass) sources. So what we will need to do is increase efficiency to squeeze more results out of a unit of energy.

Kathy, I am so unspeakably jealous of your laundry right across from the elevator I can barely lift my fingers to type.

Hee! This is the best laundry-room situation I've had since my first apartment back in 1993, which was a "garden" apartment (meaning, in the basement), so the laundry room was just down the hall. The second apartment had its laundry in another building entirely, the third had none at all (but a laundrymat was a few blocks down the road), and the last place was down the alley, so I'm enjoying this thoroughly.

But the best thing about the new apartment is that it's only five miles from work (as opposed to 30, before I moved). Gas should have to be refilled every month or so (my new Civic gets 30 mpg/city), and my insurance just dropped $20/month!

I would be so very happy to have a laundry room with a working washing machine.

Kathy, I am so unspeakably jealous of your laundry right across from the elevator I can barely lift my fingers to type.

After four years in a Philly apartment with the laundry room around the other side of the building, I have vowed never again to live in an apartment which does not have its own laundry inside the apartment.