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Wednesday, June 03, 2009

post://2302350923508456804/

The baby is coming in two months (give or take) and I'm feeling a bit... stressed?
I'm excited for the actual situation, but how I'm going to turn everything around in that short of time is a bit daunting.

I have until the beginning of July to finish everything for school. Once class is done and I think I'm in good shape there but the other one I've fallen quite a bit farther behind. I'm just starting on a paper that should have been done a week or two ago and I don't even know where to start.

We've got the baby's room started. It's primed and painted but needs another coat of paint and then I've still got to do the floor. After we pulled up the carpet there was a nice wood floor underneath, but the previous owners went all fuckall with the ceiling popcorn so it's got to be sanded and refinished and since I was going to rent a sander for the occasion I figured I might as well do the office too while I'm at it, since that floor has certainly seen better days.

On top of all this the bathroom is still being redone downstairs. At least we've got the upstairs one so we're not without during all this, but it's taken some time. They're doing good work thus far so I'm not complaining but there are additional concerns and decisions to approve as far as things we need to replace now they've got everything apart or the allotments for improvements to the items we've budgeted for.

I'm worried I can't get everything baby-ready in time, and in order to do all these pending items I kind of need to be home but we keep making ourselves busy. VT was last week, and NY this week - Pregnancy: Get it While it Lasts! (The Mom Tour)

I'm currently ready to head to our last birthing class, so once Nicole's lab is done at school we'll at least have Wednesdays back to normal. I might not be able to squeeze all the house stuff into a weeknight, but it might help me catch up on my school assignments. It's a great class, really interesting, but I'm so not getting what they apparently think I should be getting out of this because I read the materials but have NO idea what they're talking about in the writing assignment that's based on them. "wait... what do you mean 'all the different views?' I can name one... I think"

It all builds on itself so I'm starting to get a little tense. Work has been well, at least. Everything finally settled down, but apparently today was "nothing based on Access will work properly and needs to be fixed" day. There's a potential good thing coming up in the prospect of a trainee at work. They shuttle college graduates on a "fast path" to management - sending them to various areas a few months at a time to get as broad of a perspective as possible. We're getting one in my area and I'm going to be the mentor, so it'll be a little practice and I'll see how I do. I don't really want to get into the management side, but I'm thinking that might be the only route that'll get me any more moolah in this area and I would like to think my background would mean I could recommend and deligate well.

Ultimately I'd like to do full time programming, hopefully it'll be varied enough to keep me interested. I'd need more official training and if I can ever get to it I've got some additional programming classes coming. My development plan - read: list of classes for a degree - is fairly intense and involved so I might not really get to the actual programming classes until later. I know .NET but I've only been through official VB6 classes so I'm really looking forward to it for the best practices end of things.

Labels: 2009, baby, school, status

posted @ 18:13

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Friday, March 20, 2009

post://1044381229610060318/

If you were talking about a "car" 3 years ago, you might have had referred to the resurgence of the muscle car, with larger, more powerful engines with hardly a mention of fuel economy. After the fuel crisis of the past summer though, everyone was looking at cars in a whole new light. They wanted fuel economy, and hybrid technology in their cars.

I believe we would have gone much further and faster too, if it weren't for the economic slowdown that inevitably followed. No one wanted to buy cars, even the specialty hybrids. Before the downturn the demand for hybrids was so high that Toyota had slated a plant in the US designed especially for their Prius line alone but by December of 2008 - they had halted construction (1).

The idea of a hybrid car is certainly not new, and neither is an entirely electric car. In the early 1900s electric and petroleum based cars were large rivals, but after some major technological breakthroughs - petroleum based vehicles became a more economically sound option. Where petroleum cars were roughly $650, electric cars sold for about $1750 (2).

In 1990 California passed a revolutionary new law, the zero-emission mandate which would require 10 percent of new vehicles sales in the state to be all electric by 2003. It based this on a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80% of the 1990 level by 2050, so in order to reach this goal they would need to have at least 400,000 zero emission vehicles on the road by 2020 (3).

This early push "sparked" a major electric offering by all the major car companies, and especially by GM with the EV1. An all electric vehicle - it required a charging station placed in the home or garage. In addition, there were several public charge locations set up with taxpayer dollars throughout the state. The goal was to start creating the infrastructure to support this new automotive model. It would have succeeded, if not for a push by the car companies to declare the law unconstitutional. They said they could not do it and remain profitable in the state, proposing a lack of vehicles being available and with that, a lack of new car sales, and new car sales taxes.

The push worked, CA caved on their requirements and all the companies began taking back their vehicles from consumers. Offered only on limited 3 year leases, and not for purchase, there was not one person who owned their EV1 - they were all repossessed, in some cases by force. The EV1s (along with the other company models) were carted off to large lots behind the company headquarters, or hidden in fenced in areas. There they sat for years, with vigilant watch by many electric car proponents. When the cars were finally moved to their final resting place and crushed, police were called to escort the car carriers full of revolutionary cars to protect the trucks from the activists, many who protested by laying down in front of or blocking the trucks. (4)

We could have gotten to this place much faster, but the environment was never as much on the table as our hard earned cash.

1.) http://www.environmentalleader.com/2008/12/17/toyota-halts-construction-on-us-prius-plant/
2.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car
3.) http://www.hybridcars.com/news/california-air-cuts-electric-car-goal-again.html
4.) Who Killed the Electric Car?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA2u_KbCs6A
Netflix: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car/70052424

Labels: school, science, technology

posted @ 22:37

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