One of the most overlooked, yet most promising forms of potential alternative energy is ocean wave power.  When you consider that currents and waves in the ocean are very constant, far more so than solar or wind, there are few reasons not to harness it.

The key reason why wave power is difficult to harness is the potential harshness of rough weather and storms.  At any given time, a storm could damage devices that harness wave power.

Alan Burns, and his CETO system looks to fix this problem by placing low-cost balloon pump devices on the sea floor.  By positioning the device on the sea floor, arranged in “wave farms” where hundreds of balloons can bob in unison to the current, CETO is protected by the surface storms that have hampered the development of wave power.  And since the device will not have to be built to survive storms, it can be built at a lesser cost.

Burns envisioned large wave farms with potentially hundreds or even thousands of CETO balloon pumps offshore, where the seabed is vast and not crowded.  The wave farm will systematically pump seawater towards shore under high pressure, where it can be used in desalinization plants, or pumped through turbines in a power plant, generating electricity.  The design is brilliantly simple, and answers virtually all the problems that plagued wave power in the past.  Here’s a rundown of the roadblocks that CETO has solved:

1. Storms – The turbulence from potential storms is nearly non-existent at the sea floor, when compared to the ocean surface.
2. Durability – All materials that will be used in constructing CETO are proven for decades of use on existing oil rigs already.  Expensive and delicate devices are kept on dry land, as the wave farms only work to pump sea water toward the surface.
3. Production – The simple balloon and piston design allows CETO pumps to be manufactured in one factory, and shipped (deflated) to anywhere in the world, with less manufacturing costs overall.
4. Aesthetics – By being placed on the sea floor, CETO wave farms will not cause public criticisms over use of space, unlike wind and solar power.  Nobody will even know the farms are there.

The first major wave farm is slated to be off the coast of Albany, Austrailia.  It will have 300 balloons and produce approx. 50 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 30,000 homes.  And this energy will come from the Earth, in the limitless fashion of wave power.

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My first generation Macbook Pro (MBP) battery has been dead for well over a year.  After it wasn’t able to hold a charge for a minute, I threw it in my ‘drawer of despair’ and left it for dead. 

As a result, I purchased a new non-Apple licensed battery that was suppose to hold 6 hours + battery life.  And for the first two weeks, it did a great job!  However, if you don’t cycle through the battery a few times, the battery charge won’t be as substantial as when you first received it.  So, my second battery is about to die, and I am very hesitant in purchasing a new $100 battery.  There has GOT to be cheap way to revive my dead and dying batteries.

Google: dead battery, laptop, fix.

Ding!

Okay, here is the point to my article.  I was looking up ways to bring back to life my battery.  And I found a number of articles talking about ‘freezing laptop battery’ and how it ‘won’t’ hurt if you battery is already dead.  So, here is my how to article that brought my battery back to life…

(*Please note that if you have a decently working battery, don’t try this out.  My battery was completely dead.  It only could hold battery life for about 5 minutes)

1. Find your dead battery, wrap it in some newspaper, and then a freezer bag so that it doesn’t have too much condensation.
2. Put your battery in the freezer for 4 days or so.
3. After the fourth day, remove the entire package and allow it to come to room temperature in the newspaper and freezer bag.
4. After about one to two hours, you can take it out of the packaging and wipe away any extra condensation or debris.
5. Plug into you turned off laptop and proceed to charge.
6. Charge for a 24 hour period.
7. Be patient.

At this point, if you battery holds a charge you can get anywhere from 30 minutes to one hours worth of battery.  Which, for my situation, is great!

You should try to cycle your battery once or twice (cycling, is letting the laptop turn off because your battery is about to lose all of the energy and then charging it until full before you use it) so that you can start using it normally.

Good luck!  Let me know if it works for you.

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Okay, I’ve been inspired to write an article about things you can do to make sure that you not only get your work done, but doing it in a way where you don’t stress yourself out.

Since high school, I’ve been pretty good doing ‘just enough’ to get by.  Now, by no means I am I proud of my self-proclaimed ’slacker’ title, but I can honestly say that because of this unusual skill, I get a lot of work done. 

Here is my thought, I do not like to do any more work than I have to.  It doesn’t mean that I do incomplete work nor does it mean that I do sub-par work, I just do the work so that it doesn’t have to be done twice.  Who likes to make revisions on a task that could have been completed on the first time? Not only do you look foolish for submitting work you thought was done, but you end up giving yourself more work.

In addition, I setup goals accordingly.  Often, people go into work with very very ambitious goals.  Now, this is a great quality to share with your manager, but if you frequently fail at your goals because they are too ambitious you might be doing yourself more harm than good.  Try and set realistic goals and make sure that you stick to your schedule.

A Slacker’s Tips:

• Do the work correctly the first time.  Heck, ask questions so that it gives you the ability to work on something and finish it the first time.
• Schedule you work and stick to it.  Don’t answer an incoming email just because it’s there.  Schedule a time and stick to it.
• Do not give other people work that you could have finished.  This is hard to explain, but if you know that the work you are doing will cause problems for someone else, please discuss it with them first.  Or else you will be wasting both of your time.
• Leave a good part of your day for ‘unscheduled’ work.  Setup a time in your day for ‘free work time’ where if your manager tells you he has something important he needs from you, you can pop it into that slot and save the day.  (Hidden reward: if you have an easy day, go ahead and start researching your next purchase on Amazon.)
• Be an over-achieving team player.  Okay, everyone knows that you work hard.  But keeping to yourself and not joining in on water-cooler conversations about the current deadlines on hand doesn’t show your ‘team work’ attitude.  So what your part is easy and you can breeze through it, if the conversation is about how difficult, share your story in an non-threatening way.
  • Something like “I know what you mean Paul, I had similar trouble with that one line of code.   I had to step away from it for an hour before I could figure what was wrong.”  And NOT like “You still aren’t done yet Paul? I’m already working on my football picks, I hope you get a chance to submit your picks, you were last place last week.”

There are a lot more little things you can do, so that you can be the most efficient slacker at work.  But I’ll save that for next time.

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I believe I am a tech savvy person.  I spend time reading my technology blogs like Engadget and other technology blogs.  With all the improvements we have made in the technology industry, I still wonder why we don’t have a more well-rounded web-browser?  In the day and age where we have quad-core, 1TB, GPU, Snow Leopard, Android OS, and digital 3D we still can’t come up with something as simple as a well working web-browser for everyday use.

Firefox or Internet Explorer 8? 

I am a big fan on Firefox.  However, on a slower system, the memory it takes to keep Firefox running is insane.  Aside from System and iexplorer.exe in my Windows Task Manager, Firefox is usually within the top 5 applications that consumes the most memory.  Holy bejeebus!  (Fact check: iexplorer.exe has about 7 instances running 56k of memory each.  Firefox.exe is at 86k by it self).

And yet, IE 8 (reluctantly installed into my Windows XP) doesn’t even take a fraction of what Firefox does.  My only grip about IE is that it is not ’smart’ enough to smooth out all the html and code that Firefox can.  Often programmers code html so that it looks good on all major web-browsers; but because not every browser is made the same the html code doesn’t look perfect.

I wanted to strictly use IE 8 today and to see if I could feel a difference between IE 8 and Firefox.  I have grown accustomed to Firefox over the years, so I wanted to see how IE 8 would hold up during a days work.

Here are my findings:

• Aside for aesthetics, IE 8 can do almost everything Firefox can do.  I don’t regularly visit sites that spam the web-browser with hiding windows underneath the main window, but for the most part it’s about the same.  No clear winner:  Tie.
• Okay, ironically enough, I am using Firefox right now to type up this blog post.  IE 8 could not log me into the administrators part of this blog, so I had to use Firefox to write this.  Now, since this blog is hosted and maintained by a International Studies major (yours truly) there are probably some bugs.  But in Firefox, it works!  Point: Firefox.
• Often when I browse the internet, Firefox does a great job ‘hiding’ or ‘omitting’ html code that doesn’t work.   This is good for the average user, but sometimes when I want to make a web page look good on IE 8 and Firefox code in Firefox goes MIA.  However, there is a button called “Compatibility View” near the address bar and the refresh button.  This allows ‘website designed for older browsers’ to look better.   Cool.  Point: IE 8.
• Tabbed browsing is not new to Firefox users, but it is for IE.  Comparing the two, there is definitely a learning curve.  They both function about the same.  There is no clear winner: Tie.

Honestly, the list can go on and on, but unless you have a well ‘geared’ computer IE 8 has already come a long way to satisfy the average user.  My preference is still on Firefox simply because after using Firefox more, I haven’t had any issues with mal-ware and viruses from clicking on random links that pop up NSFW links.

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