I read a blog about a cool new service called Fon. You use it for your Intenet connection. If you sign up, it's cheap, but you must offer up half of your Internet connection to let anyone connect to your router. Once you subscribe, you can travel and use others' routers to get your connection. Pretty good idea. You can even make money by selling bandwidth. They'll need a lot of subscribers to blanket enough area to make it really work though.

CNET review
Fon website

The other day I responed to a mass email saying that I thought electric cars are still not very green because our power plants are still not very green. I got a response from one of the recipients saying the following, which I found useful:

I think you are wrong to condem all plug in vehicles however. A typical battery electric car, whether fully electric or a plug in hybrid is very efficient. Our electric vehicles generally use about 0.3kWh for each mile travelled. From a cost perspective this means less than $.04 per mile in fuel cost, (about a quarter the cost of gasoline), create no local emissions when driving, and are refueled from the solar panels on the roof of our home.

Even when fueled from a coal power plant the emissions, from a plug-in car are far less than gasoline in almost every category. Check out the following presentation from Mark Kapner at Austin energy who has studied this at length.

http://airquality2005.tamu.edu/presentations/Plug%20In%20Hybrid.pdf

I beleive strongly that Plug-in vehicles are a very important part of our transportation future for both environmnental and economic concerns. You can find more information on the web-site for a group that I'm involoved with

www.pluginamerica.com

Please drop me an e-mail if you'd like more information or to discuss in more detail. mikewkane@yahoo.com

Ever wonder why we say "bye" as a farewell message to others? I did. What is a bye? You can have a good bye, but no one has heard of a bad bye. Well, here's the answer from an online dictionary:

ETYMOLOGY:
Alteration (influenced by good day) of God be with you

WORD HISTORY:
No doubt more than one reader has wondered exactly how goodbye is derived from the phrase "God be with you." To understand this, it is helpful to see earlier forms of the expression, such as God be wy you, god b'w'y, godbwye, god buy' ye, and good-b'wy. The first word of the expression is now good and not God, for good replaced God by analogy with such expressions as good day, perhaps after people no longer had a clear idea of the original sense of the expression. A letter of 1573 written by Gabriel Harvey contains the first recorded use of goodbye: "To requite your gallonde [gallon] of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle of howdyes," recalling another contraction that is still used.

Goodbye!

Office 2007 is looking pretty cool. A lot of new features are being added. It's not a lame update that Office 2003 was. I know there are a lot of Microsoft haters out there, but you should check this out if only to know what other vendors and open source projects (like OpenOffice) should be adding to their products:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/ui/demo.mspx

So I was thinking about buying a hybrid. I love all the technology, but I still fear that because there are two engines to maintain, and batteries, that in the long run, it will cost much more than a "regular" car. I was thinking maybe I should get a great fuel economy car like the new Toyota, Yaris. It gets 39 vs the Prius which gets 51. I know both are actually lower most of the time.

But then I got to thinking about biodiesel. It seems like such a great technology, and it's very green. It's more expensive than gas, but not a lot more. If you created a hybrid diesel car, then you could use biodiesel and be the greenest guy around. Unless of course, you are taking public transportation instead.

So I searched Google, and thank goodness, someone is doing this. Unfortunately, it's mostly done on buses and mostly in Europe.

Diesel-electric hybrid cars now

This guy claims we could easily achieve 80 mpg, which I doubt. But even 60 would be amazing. And the best part is we wouldn't have to invent anything or create a whole new system to deliver energy that we would have to do with hydrogen fuel cells.

Another cool idea. Use HHO gas. It's like H₂, but less volitile. Guess what the source of this fuel is. Drumroll please.... H₂O. Yes, water. This guy created a car that is a water-gas hybrid. It gets around 100 miles using 4 ounces of water. I don't know how much gas was used. Crazy. Just know that it takes a lot of electricity to make water into HHO gas. In the end, this is not a cost efficient method at this time, but with green power plants (solar/wind/tide) and solar cars, it could become more viable.

Water Fuel - HHO Gas
Also: Water Fuel is used in Canada

I just hope in 20 years we are not allowing the oil/energy companies to convince us that we need to keep buying fuel from them. There's more than enough using biodiesel, maybe water and the sun. Speaking of the sun... how about a solar-enhanced Prius? This guy made a prototype that got 10% better fuel economy.

Solar-enhanced Prius

Aaaarrrgggg! UCLA lost, but what a season! I'm bummed, but I have to remember that our team ended up being the 2nd best in the tourneyment. Guess I'll have to wait until next season to get my fix! I wonder if Farmar and Afflalo will come back...

So I took Ken's suggestion and looked up orthopedic on etymonline.com. It looks as though orthopedics started as the correction of bones in children. Maybe for things like scoliosis.

orthopedic
1840, from Fr. orthopédique, coined by Fr. physician Nicholas Andry (1658-1742), from Gk. orthos "straight, correct" + paideia "rearing of children," from pais (gen. paidos) "child.".

More sort-of-bad news. Christina went to the doctor on Tuesday last week, and he said that things don't look as good as he hoped they would after 5 weeks of having a cast on. There are three things he looks for:

1. Alignment of the bones at the ankle
2. Splintering has improved
3. Bone density has increased

Unfortunately, Christina only passed the test for the first two. The doctor took off the cast and asked Christina to try and "shock" her foot into increasing bone density. Basically, he thinks since she wasn't using it, her body decided not to allocate resources to her ankle. So like the way you beat a tree to get it to be stronger, Christina is very gently putting weight on her foot at times throughout the day.

Her next appointment is in a week. Hopefully, everything will have improved. Since she doesn't have a cast, I suppose her alignment could get worse (it was "perfect" last week). If things don't look good enough, she'll have to have surgery late next week. Let's all hope that doesn't happen.

Went to the orthopedist for my wife again. Everything's looking good, so she should have the cast off for good in 4 weeks. I was thinking about the word orthopedic. It seems that it would have to do with feet because of the "ped" in it, but it doesn't. The definition is:

The branch of medicine that deals with the prevention or correction of injuries or disorders of the skeletal system and associated muscles, joints, and ligaments.

Ortho must mean bone or something in Latin. I wish I knew someone who took 4 years of Latin in High School who could help me out... :)

In other news, I got back to working on my online game, Yacht Race Online. I've got it working slightly better than it was before. I already found a big bug, but I'm pretty sure I know how to fix it.

I hadn't seen the code for a while, and it was pretty bad in parts. I was just learning .NET at that time, and wasn't sure how I wanted to write some of the objects, but I definitely would like to change some of it now. Maybe I'll get to change some more code soon.

Here's a picture of my Dad signing Christina's bright pink cast. He is writing Tickle Tickle on the bottom.

My parents, my sister and Flex came over for dinner a week ago to help out and to give us some news...

Brenda and Flex got engaged! He proposed to her on Thursday, February 9th, I think. It was after dinner.

My sister has a date in mind already: 7/7/07. Apparently it's a pretty hot date, because we called the Mission Inn in Riverside and they have a 6 person waiting list for an evening wedding on that date.

Here's a photo of Brenda and Flex from that night.

I've got some bad news. It's actually kind of old bad news too. My wife broke her left ankle on Saturday, February 4th. It's been pretty bad. I mean from everyone whose broken an ankle, they say it's the worst. I might agree. I suppose breaking your back may be worse. And breaking your neck means wearing that goofy head gear. But at least you can walk. My wife's been hobbling around on crutches and doing simple things like going to the restroom can be a big ordeal. Taking care of our son is basically impossible for her, so we've been enlisting the help of family to help us out.

My work is letting me work from home, but I think they are letting me do it mostly because I said that I thought I was going to have to go on medical leave for 6 weeks.

So the way it happened was this. We were at our nieces 2-years old birthday party, and the birthday girl was playing up high on some dirt behind a 4-foot retaining wall. My wife was afraid she'd fall, so she went to help. The niece jumped into her arms, but my wife wasn't quite ready for that. My wife was on a 5-inch planter bed wall, and when she stepped back and turned... snap crackle pop. A few people heard the break, but no one thought she had broke it.

My brother-in-law happens to be an x-ray technician, so we went to the hospital where he works. We took x-rays of both of her feet and found the fracture easily. Her other foot was injured as well, but not broken.

She will be on crutches for 6-8 weeks total. Right now has a pink cast for the first 4 weeks. Pink because of Valentine's Day... of course.

Wish her a speedy recovery!

Found a couple websites today that offer you a look at pictures of meals... one shows you airline meals, and the other homemade meals. They both offer more than you think they would:
http://www.airlinemeals.net
http://www.bluetablemeals.com

The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you're in a hurry or it's a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require a key, others can be put into "Express" mode by pressing the "Door Close" and "Floor" buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor. This seems to work on Most elevators that I have tried! Most elevators have the option for this to work,but on some of them the option is turned off by whoever runs them. This is a rather fun hack, so the next time you are on an elevator, give it a try, you have nothing to lose.