MISSING PERSON… help find my friends sister!

I just found out that the younger sister of a friend and former colleague is missing. Her family is obviously doing everything they can to locate her, and so hopefully by spreading this website we can get the word out, and get her home.

Please tell everyone you know.

Marilyn Bergeron
http://www.findmarilyn.com

If you have seen Marilyn, please call 418-641-2447

Nuclear Power and Obama

I read a very interesting article in this month's GQ magazine on nuclear power, titled Meltdown, by Wil S. Hylton (GQ March 2008, p 306, and online here). I found it so interesting and enlightening that I immediately logged on to www.barackobama.com to see what Obama's position was on the issue. It was mostly encouraging but buried deep (I had to download a PDF of his energy plan to find the information I wanted), so I interpret that to mean it's not high enough priority to put on his Energy & Environment page.

I encourage you to read the article, and read his position on it in the PDF (just search for nuclear). And if you feel strongly about it, write him a letter. I did.

NUCLEAR POWER

I recently read a very interesting article on Nuclear Power and its state in our country in the March 2008 issue of GQ: Meltdown, by Wil S. Hylton, p304. If Senator Obama has not yet read the article himself, I strongly encourage him to do so.

I will preface this letter by saying that virtually the entirety of my "knowledge" of nuclear power comes from this one article, but it was a compelling enough article to get me to write.

This article discusses the fear around nuclear power, but compares it to the reality of its safety, including the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl incidents. It compares the cleanliness of nuclear power (zero carbon footprint) to coal and oil. It compares our general mistrust of nuclear power, along with that of most other nations, to those who continue to use (and profit greatly) from it, such as France and the United Kingdom (France profits $4B per year from sold nuclear energy). It goes on to discuss storage of waste, and what it deems "waste", or spent uranium which can be easily converted (extracted) into plutonium and put back to work as additional fuel - but is inexplicably illegal in this country (even though the UK actually cleans spent uranium from other countries and profits from it). And of course it discusses Yucca Mountain, the heavily disputed but most viable solution for long-term nuclear waste storage.

After reading this article I immediately logged onto barackobama.com to see what Obama's stand on this issue was. I had to dig into the Energy Plan to find what I was looking for, but I was encouraged to read that he is a supporter of nuclear power and believes that it has a great future, albeit with some important issues to address. Unfortunately I also read that "Barack Obama believes that Yucca Mountain is not an option". From what I've read in this article, there seems to be NO other option even close to the viability of Yucca Mountain, and it seems that before nuclear energy can be put back on the table for voters to support and get behind, a solution to the storage needs to be solved quickly. And Yucca Mountain appears to be that solution.

Between changing the law so that plutonium can be extracted from spent uranium, virtually turning all of our waste into fuel, and only then storing the true waste in Yucca Mountain, we have the solution to power staring us in the face.

We can radically reduce our dependency on foreign oil, reduce our carbon emissions massively, and lower energy costs. When Obama is president, he could well be the man to get our nation behind nuclear energy again and make up for nearly 30 years of lost time.

Sincerely,
a supporter and donator,
-Joseph Linaschke

Bled, Slovenia

Kurentovanje

Ptuj, Slovenia

LHR, T3 to T4, whaaaa?

What happened to Heathrow? When I lived in London, I seem to recall quite liking this airport. Terminal 3 looked in shoddier condition than the Nairobi airport, which was one of the more unpleasant airports I've flown through in recent memory.

I have a longer story to post later, but for now, I'll leave you with this… to get from Terminal 3 to Terminal 4, because the Heathrow Express was out of service, I had to take the Tube from T1,2,3 to Hatton Cross then back to T4. It only took me 90 minutes to change Terminals. No big deal.

Chicago... brrr!

Stop one on the way to Slovenia!

My Pokot family in Kenya, safe so far

I've been in SMS contact with my friends in Kenya since the start of the violence. When the clash was restricted to Nairobi it wasn't much of a concern to most of them, as they live out in the Rift Valley (except for the students in Nairobi, and I can only hope they are safe).

I grew more concerned as I saw that the violence has spread to Nakuru. Those of you who followed my trip may recall that Nakuru is the last city on the edge of the Rift Valley, and is also home to the amazing Lake Nakuru National Park. IHF (the organization I was shooting for) had purchased a building on the edge of town, for the children to live and learn in. Many from the orphanage had been moved there over the last several months, and as soon as I heard that the violence had reached Nakuru, I started to worry.

I'm happy to report that there is good news. The clashing tribes appear to be primarily the Kikuyu (generally the ruling tribe in Kenya, and the tribe of President Kibaki -- the one who is accused of stealing this election), the Luo and the Kalenjin. My friends are Pokot, and their tribe is considered savage by many Kenyans (tourists in Nairobi or Nakuru who say they are traveling into the Rift Valley are usually warned not to -- told that they will meet a brutal death at the hands of the Pokot and never be seen again). While the Masai have the spotlight as the warrior tribe, the Pokot are the ones who are truly feared.

Reportedly all the buildings surrounding the children's new home have been burned to the ground. But the IHF buildings have been left alone. The Kikuyu and Kalenjin know these are Pokot children, and know to leave them alone.

custom iPhone icon

'cause I'm just a geek like that, I had to add the custom iPhone/iPod Touch icon to this blog. So now if you navigate here on an iPhone or iPod Touch, and make a webclip (choose "Add to Home Screen" with latest iPhone/iPod Touch updates installed), you now should get this custom icon:

Please let me know if it doesn't work for you. The iPhone/iPod will automagically round the corners and add the glossy sheen. Cute.

For the 411 on how to do this, everything you need to know is here and some additional info is here (although I got what I needed off the first link).

Basically you simply add a graphic to the root level of your server, or if you don't have access to that, then add some code to the <head> of your site pointing to the graphic elsewhere.

You can add that code in the blogger by clicking [Layout] from the dashboard, which takes you to the [Template] tab (yeah, the names don't match, I know). Click [Edit HTML] and add the code after the <head> line. You need to host the icon image somewhere to link from, so what I did was upload it to this blog as a custom picture, note the URL of the picture on the page, then remove the page element. Blogger doesn't delete the image from the picasa album it loaded it to (FYI if you didn't realize, all your photos you post on your blogger blog are added to a picasa album).

Convoluted but it worked! (And it actually took more time to write this post than it did to create and add the icon)

m-Qube a scam?

Just a little Public Service Announcement… I noticed a recurring $19.99 charge on my cell phone bill from m-qube and got AT&T to reverse it, as they had no idea what it was for. A little sleuthing turned up this website:

http://www.classactionconnect.com/cell_phone_issues/2007/08/30/m-qube-complaints/

Check your phone bills folks!