Links for August 1, 2006

Normally I'd do these in delicious, but that system has been pokey of late with my thousands of bookmarks. So this will be an old fashioned link dump.

The power grid was in Energy Emergency Alert 2 status for the region covered by the Midwest ISO. Lovely real time load charts and grid congestion and real time pricing maps detail the mess the area is in.

I scored a few dollars (about $20) in Amazon gift certificate money due to my recommendation of the Omron HJ-112 pedometer (about $20) which is the pedometer of choice among Walker Tracker walkers.

David Bloom is growing an exceptionally hot crop of Capsicum frutescens (Purira) this year, though he thinks it might have hybridized. A-hoo-ah!

My UP informants tell me that the blueberry crop in Gulliver, MI is good this year, but they lament the loss of the local Michnet dial-in. In world berry crop news, there are excellent raspberries in North East Scotland.

Loisontheweb has a WunderBlog hosted on the Weather Underground from her UP vantage point of Crystal Falls.

This week's TidBits (#840) has a feature on "Getting Things Done with your Macintosh", which links back to my summary of the Noguchi Filing System.

Tim Berners-Lee gives presentations using Slidy. No need for powerpoint, just fire up a browser.

Fidel Castro is in the hospital. See the Cuban News Agency for official details from Havana, or Radio Havana Cuba via Internet or shortwave.

Sustainability in a Post-Apocalyptic Ypsilanti involves solar cooking. I like the umbrella styled one.

Bruce Sterling reviews the Voltaic Solar Backpack. His teenage daughter calls it an "instant boy magnet", but it doesn't charge your laptop and it doesn't have twinkly LEDs scattered all over it to show off.

August 8 Ann Arbor elections. Ron Suarez is running (and blogging his efforts); his signs are one of a kind and hand-made.

Getz's Department Store (Carhartt, North Face, Hudson Bay) in Marquette was paying 10-14% of revenues for Adwords for their online store back when the NY Times interviewed them last November.

Gopher is not dead, reports Jason Kottke. I was there for GopherCon '92 and gave the presentation on the World Wide Web to that crowd. Prentiss Riddle wrote the trip report.

On the hottest day of the year, the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant near Monroe, MI was down. Amazingly, the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press totally missed the story, and they were scooped by the Monroe Evening News. The plant restart was interrupted by a low-level emergency when a fire-supression unit triggered in a cable-tray room in an auxiliary building at the plant. DTE did not issue a press release on the topic.

Chelsea, MI Comcast cable network subscribers had a Comcatastrophe today, taking out service.

The West Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library was down due to a power outage on the west side of town.

No one went to the cooling center at Eastern Michigan University set up for the heat emergency, reports the Ann Arbor News; I'll bet they were somewhere more interesting like Meijer or the mall.

Google is looking for a site in town for their Adwords unit, not enough details to report than anything has been ruled out yet.