Power Hour

The joy of living in a four season location means that I always have variety. The weather even varies within a season which can be interesting, but also dangerous and annoying for some. Recently the Midwest has been hit with several winter storms including ice and what they call a "winter mix" which consists of ice, rain, sleet, and snow. The great part about this is that it is our first winter in a house (that we own) so we get to shovel, chop, and scrape. I'm not sick of it yet, but I will mention that we had ice an inch and a half thick on our driveway. We finally got it all off after three weeks thanks to some warm days.

So getting to the point of this post is the hazards of storms like the ones we have seen this year. Not only are the streets and sidewalks dangerous to drive and walk on, but the heavy ice and rain that freezes can cause power outages. We have been quite lucky and haven't lost power yet (knock on wood), but several of my relatives and co-workers have not been so fortunate. A few weeks ago we had a particularly crappy day weather-wise and very few people actually made it in to my work. I was able to make it in safely thanks to the awesome bus drivers here, but I kept an eye on the weather the whole time I was in. The tools that I used to keep up on the latest status included the following:

1) weather.com - the radar is pretty awesome and accurate. That day in particular was pretty scary seeing the long path of white (snow) and pink (mix/ice). The thing I really like about this map is that it moves with time so you can see where the storm is heading.

2) KCRG - This is our local news channel, not extremely helpful, but I can count on them listing announcements if things get really bad (read: "news worthy").

and finally,
3) Alliant's electrical outage summary - this doesn't say exactly where or which customers in each county are out of power, but if the count is particularly high in your area, it can alert you to the possibility of your house or business place being affected.

Also note that Ryan pointed out the "Report your outage" link at the bottom of the page. If you don't have electricity, how in the world are you going to have the ability to use that link? Just call it in yo!

So what other sites are useful in these situations?

The holy grail of Bluetooth mice

This past year my loving husband decided to get me a Bluetooth mouse for my birthday. I work with Bluetooth every day, so it may be surprising that I didn't already have my own, but I guess I was just content to use his "unacceptable" castaways. I have grown to love my MacBook track pad (the pawing action is to die for), so I don't use a mouse with my laptop very often, and I certainly wouldn't travel with a mouse, at least I haven't crossed that line yet. These details put me in a more relaxed quest to find a Bluetooth mouse than my husband whom, I have found, is quite particular about his Bluetooth mouse preferences. Anyway, this birthday present "promise" happened in January, and, until Thanksgiving night, I still had not received the perfect mouse.

You may think that this ideal mouse would involve ergonomic design or perhaps the right amount of buttons or controls, oh no! My husband had two simple requests in a Bluetooth mouse:
1) It must be rechargeable. Who would want to have to replace batteries... ever?? Ok, I can agree with him here. Rechargeable is the cheaper and potentially more environmentally sound solution.
2) It must have an on/off switch. This is where I lost interest. My needs don't require an on/off switch. My use case would be to have a recharging station that would keep the mouse charged until I used it and all would be well. Since my husband travels with a mouse, he was looking for the additional benefit of turning the mouse completely off while it sits in his laptop case so that he doesn't have to carry extra cables just to charge a mouse. These exist as you can easily find Bluetooth mice with an on/off switch.

Now the obvious problem occurs when you combine these two requirements; rechargeable and on/off switch. His arguments were valid and the technical point of view was even in line. Being able to charge your mouse and then ensure that it was ready at a moments notice was ideal, and "it's only an on/off switch, that doesn't require much engineering". But I was more pessimistic. I countered that there would be very few users as picky as him and even though it may not be a lot of extra cost, what company would add a switch if they didn't have to?

Well I am proudly announcing today that I was proven wrong. After standing in line at CompUSA for the Thanksgiving night sales, bringing home my birthday present, opening it up to charge for me to use in the morning, and then excitedly realizing that this wonder of wonders Bluetooth mouse was not only rechargeable, but (gasp!) also had a power switch, my triumphant husband trucked back to CompUSA to fight with the morning crowd and buy one for himself. We now own two Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000s.










There may be others out there with these features since ours had no documentation on the box that proclaimed the power switch, but this was a story with a happy ending so far.

Picture This

I was recently married and we have been "combining households". One of the things that we have a lot of are pictures. Digital ones are pretty easy. Most of them are already organized into folders and, given that we've only owned digital cameras for no more than the past 6 years, we can remember details to file random ones. The organization problems start with hard copies, especially hard copies that were given to me or are my husband's. These in particular tend to not have descriptions written on the back and therefore will someday be lost to the WTF? pile. Some of them we can remember the people, but not the location and here is where I would love to have a tool.

We have been able to search for information for many years . We can also search for images and videos now, but each of these searches is initiated by text. What I need is the ability to search via the image itself! How awesome would that be? Scan in and upload a picture to a search engine that could analyze the picture and at least tell you the location. "Did we take that picture in Colorado or Utah?" Even better would be an approximate date or information about the location. "When did Pepe's Pizza close? Sometime after this picture was taken, but what year?"

The algorithms and time needed for this go way beyond my patience, but I'm sure it will happen some day. I just hope I'm still around so I can finish categorizing our pictures!

You Decide

So this "Global Warming" thing gets a lot of attention from both sides of the fence. There are those that believe we are a main cause for the climate changes and there are those who believe it's just part of Earth's natural cycle with or without us. I'm not going to debate that now because there is enough of that going on. What I am going to do is post several links to sites that have information about how to cut down on energy and ideas to improve our lives. This has become very important to me and once I move into my new house, I hope to make more positive choices. No matter what side of the fence you're on, this information can help save you money, if not give you a good feeling about your actions, and who doesn't like saving money?

A site that I found recently focuses on improving bicycling in communities throughout the United States. I like it because they have great resources for helping out cities and counties to create better environments and opportunities for biking. This encourages exercise, cuts down on car traffic, and can be positive advertising to people looking to move into the area. Not only do they focus on construction efforts, but they also suggest training traffic engineers, motorists, and bicyclists about mixed traffic with cars and bikes living in the street together. I'm hoping to get something like this going in Cedar Rapids.

The next area I have several bookmarks in is alternative energy. This is important because we all know that non-renewable resources are being depleted and we will have to find better ways to maintain our standard of living. Some links to sites I like include projects with wind and manure and solar. I was also impressed to hear that the US government is actively looking into nuclear energy plants and several plans for building them are on the way.

One way of dealing with CO2 that is growing in popularity is consumer carbon offsets. Here is an independent study done to compare the many carbon offset providers to help consumers understand what they are paying for more and encourage the programs to become transparent to provide the best solution for everyone. The provider that I have used so far is NativeEnergy. This type of program is used to help offset the amount of "unclean" energy you are using and usually put it towards "clean" energy projects. Most sites will also have a calculator to add up how much energy you spend.

And lastly for this post, if you're looking to get a new car here is the government's fuel economy site where you can find all sorts of information.

So you decide on what you believe and what you want to do, just do something.

Poof! Blog Reading

Blogs have revolutionized the way we disperse information. Blogs can represent a personal diary, a list of tips, a way to publicize a cause, a means for companies to reach out to investors and a slew of other uses. I previously used Wizz RSS Reader to check on my favorite sites. I say previously because as of this past weekend I have started using Google Reader. There are lots of goodies so I'll try to talk about what I have noticed so far.

First of all appearances. If you like the look of GMail, then you'll like Google Reader. They fit together like they're in the same family as it should be. There is a "List View" which displays the blog entries just like emails show up in GMail and you can star entries just like emails. And if you like the backgrounds and themes of various blogs, you can open up a new tab or window to view a post from the original site by clicking the double arrows at the end of an entry.

You'll also notice the simple navigation on the left of the window. Choose how you want to sort posts, subscribe to blogs by adding the feed url or searching, view only updated blogs or all, and categorize your favorites. This portion was, for me, to be expected from Google, now on to the ooey gooeyness that made me want to switch.





First, I am a Google Homepage user and Google Reader has a widget that can be added and lets you see what new posts you have to read in a
glance. I don't have any new posts in the picture, but if I did they would be listed similar to emails in the GMail widget. This tidbit made it easy for me to try it out. What I really like about it is that I don't have to click on every blog feed link to see if there are new posts and I don't have to open up a new page either. I just open up my web browser and right there on my homepage it tells me if there are new items to read and what blog they're for. This also allows me to take my blog history with me. What I mean by this is that no matter what computer I'm on, Google Reader knows what posts I have already read and has them marked accordingly.

I have to say that my favorite part of Reader right now is the expanded view. This shows all of the posts in order so that you can scroll right from one to the next and the best part is that as you scroll past the posts, Reader marks them as read... niiice.

The auto marking may be my favorite right now, but there are several features that I'm excited to dig into more. Reader's settings even has a section called "Goodies" that several of these are in. One, like most web tools, is that you can read from your phone. The bookmark link is one that I haven't noticed anywhere else before. It allows you to bring up the next unread post by clicking a single bookmark. This would be a very simple way to move through new posts without even going to your homepage or navigating to Reader. I think I will continue to prefer seeing my new posts listed, but this is a cool idea. The next goodie listed is "subscribe as you surf". Simply, if you're chugging along popping through new blogs and find one that you want to add to Reader, you just click this bookmark and it gets added to the list. I'll definitely be using this one.

The last feature I'm going to mention is one that I'll also be using. It's the Share option. This can be seen in the left navigation area and it lets you share posts with friends, family, and the world. One thing some of my co-workers were discussing today was the lack of searching or saving in Reader. While this isn't the best solution, one thought I had was to share posts that had information I wanted to remember or use again, or posts that I wanted to save. This would make them easily available and "save" them for future reference. Again, not the best, but I think I'll give it a try when I'm playing around with this feature.