green building concepts

green energy provider

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when choosing a green energy provider you have several choices. i prefer all solar, all wind, and all biomass. hydroelectric, nuclear, and natural gas are too large and devistating to warrant extra attention. how many salmon have died, societies and natural wonder buried, and lives ruined due to hydrolectric? go solar. go wind. go biomass. i guess you can also go hydrothermal, but is much harder to find.

hydroelectric options

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when it comes to renewable energy, i prefer the smaller project to the global scale project like dams (hydroelectric). so many wonderful areas of this planet are capped due to a hydroelectric dam. societies have died due to hydroelectric. if i bought into a green power system, i would look exclusively for either an all solar, biomass, or wind driven turbine to reduce the dam destruction. i also like natural gas as the fossil fuel over coal or oil. nuclear is also very good, but in light of 9-11 and other events, maybe it’s not the best 22nd century energy source.

NSF approved textbooks

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while i teach my computer class in lancaster, ruth has asked me to help her with elizabeth’s science course too. the first step will be trying to find an age appropriate study guide and textbook. doing a brief 15 minute search with google i’ve found several NSF approved textbooks. if you have any opinions on these or other middle school books, send them along. the complete list in in the PDF.

other resources

bscs
crdg
stcms

anaheim auto show

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today in anaheim opens the earliest auto show in north america, as i enter 2003, it’s time that i become responsible for my own tranportation. i need a way to get from home to the train station, be it the metrolink or the simple subway. if i take connecting bus transit the 12 minute trip takes 60 minutes. the show is near disneyland, so all i have to do is take the red line to the blue line to the green line, and transfer to the 460 bus line. it should take around 2 hours on a good, day and who knows on a bad day.

imovie lesson

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yesterday i had my most successful lesson. this week i am covering digital video, and using the 604e chip at 250 MHz, elizabeth was able to not play, but run the playhead over a sequence of DV footage, combine with transitions and clips a simple four scene movie. leave it to apple to make a simple video editor. i’m encouraging the lancaster clan to get a new powermac or even an imac before the bootable OS 9 disappears. all of us have all these old educational and document programs tha still run, but will never run under OS X or even in the classic environment. i have several thousand dollars of software that will not work if apple moves then entire hardware line to OS X. help her out with financial contributions, so ruth can get a modern G3 or G4 machine. prices are dropping weekly, as are the bundles. now you can get a free edition of adobe indesign with any powermac purchase.

disc burning

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the burn. it’s quite a pleasure to prepare a disc image for burning. in OS X, disc burning is transparent in the OS, so when you place a blank disc into the burner, it just goes. i like using disk copy, first creating an image, adding media, and then unmounting and burning from the app. so far I’ve delivered four discs and zero coasters. for higher end CD-R i would like to get roxio toast, which can talk to DVD+R discs along with the standard flavors of CD and DVD. did you know sony just released the first ever combination DVD burner? it can record to all formats including DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, CD-RW, CD-R, and some other flavors.

computer school

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in the fall of 2002, i took it upon myself to begin to develop home home school lessons based on computer applications and basic computer skills. each week i’ve been traveling to lancaster CA to try out the latest teaching methods on my two test subjects, ruth and elizabeth. now three weeks into the course, everything is going well. before class i gather up from around the internet and my hard drives critical system updates and applications for that week. this week we’re covering digital video, so i have the latest versions of quicktime, along with some legacy versions like 6, 5, 4, and even version 3.

green power

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i’ve been asked if buying green power makes a difference. here in los angeles we get almost 65% off all our electricity from coal fired power plants. thought that coal did not exist in CA, you would be correct. while most of the locally generated power is from natural gas, los angeles bought long ago into the intermountain generating station power plant in utah, which is coal fired, and thus produced a lot a acid rain, deforestation, and mahem. would it make sense to buy green wind and solar power. absolutely.