This year, a Massachusetts company, FloDesign, won a couple of Clean Energy prizes with their new windmill design. Instead of huge, fragile prop-based windmills, they have much smaller ones, based on jet engines.

Put those together with the electronically-switched generators from ExRo which Slashdot linked to last night, and we could be seeing major changes in the wind power industry soon.

This summer, I read two chapters of Les Miserables for Librivox.org. Last month, they finished and posted the collection: tracks 23 and 24 are mine.

Heh. I’m “on” the NPR website…

From “Bill in Portland Maine”@Daily Kos:

Closing Appeals

Dear America,

Mine.
Mine mine mine.
Me Me Me Me Me Me Me!
Mine mine mine mine mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine!

In conclusion: Fear fear fear fear. Very scary fear!

Sincerely,

The Republican Party

P.S. If you liked Joseph McCarthy, you’ll love us!

Dear America,

We.
Us. We. Together. Americans. United States.
Hope compassion equality inclusiveness competence.
Brains common sense community respect hard work accountability.
Action change responsibility. More viewpoints, smarter solutions.

In conclusion: Yes we can.

Sincerely,

The Democratic Party.

P.S. Vote.

Damn. I’m still undecided.

Lately, my external editor of choice has been Notepad++. It’s flexible, highly configurable, and supports user-defined syntax coloring. Of course, it doesn’t ship with a syntax coloring file for VFP, so I came up with my own. After a while, I got tired of typing in commands as I got to them, and wrote a program to generate the whole thing.

Read the rest of this entry »

The website Obama for a Sound Economy has testimonials from a fair number of people who will be paying more taxes under an Obama administration — and are voting for him anyway. For example:

I will pay more taxes under the Obama administration, and like Warren Buffet and Adam Smith, I think that is not unreasonable. In return I get a country that: invests more in basic science research (which will grow the economy faster), understands the need for a transformative switch to a new energy economy (which gains jobs, decreases oil usage and alleviates climate problems), and regains respect on the world stage (bettering all of us in the USA, and all of us on earth). I call that a bargain.
– Peter Norvig, Ph.D., Director of Research, Google, Palo Alto, CA

My Google Agent which searches on my name pulled up this post on SFFAudio today. It lists the stories in the H.P. Lovecraft Public Domain Works audiobook collection from LibriVox: I read “Celephais”. Also included are “The Music of Erich Zann” and “Herbert West: Reanimator”.

Diane Duane points us at the following fairly-timely quotation from The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis.

What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals.* Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks….

We, in Hell, would welcome the disappearance of democracy in the strict sense of that word, the political arrangement so called. Like all forms of government, it often works to our advantage, but on the whole less often than other forms. And what we must realize is that “democracy” in the diabolical sense (I’m as good as you, Being Like Folks, Togetherness) is the fittest instrument we could possibly have for extirpating political democracies from the face of the earth.

For “democracy” or the “democratic spirit” (diabolical sense) leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first sign of criticism. And that is what Hell wishes every democratic people to be.

Edit: sorry, the quote actually dates from an article post-dating The Screwtape Letters by about 20 years. Screwtape is the speaker, though.

I wasn’t keeping track of when the domain renewal was due, and it caught me between paydays. All fixed now, fortunately…