Here’s a little amusement for the day…these made me chuckle and you might too.

Word/Phrase	Anagram
The Morse Code	Here Come Dots
Slot Machines	Cash Lost in ’em
Dormitory	Dirty Room
Evangelist	Evil’s Agent
Desperation	A Rope Ends It
Semolina	Is No Meal
The Public Art Galleries	Large Picture Halls, I Bet
A Decimal Point	I’m a Dot in Place
Snooze Alarms	Alas! No More Zs
The Earthquakes	That Queer Shake
Eleven plus two	Twelve plus one

The Geothermal Resources Council has recently made a new resource available for its members. The organization has taken over 3,000 technical articles produced in the GRC Transactions and Special Reports and posted them in a research library. This will be an incredibly valuable resource to those interested in geothermal electricity production.

Access the GRC Research Library.

For no particular reason, here’s a photo of a geothermal plant. Enjoy!

Soda Lake Geothermal Plant

While working to develop and test the new look for MftC, I came across a fantastic tool called BrowserShots. What this tool does is assemble what you page looks like when viewed through different browser versions and types on different operating systems. Since I’m pretty much a Mac shop now, this is very helpful to me particularly when attempting to ascertain how the design will appear to the many Windows/Internet Explorer users of the world.

The best bits? It’s dirt simple to use and it’s free! (Though you may subscribe to a periodic snapshot service.) First off, visit the BrowserShots home page. Then enter the URL you would like to test, select the browser/platform combinations, select screensizes/resolutions, turn on/off javascript, etc. then press submit. The jobs will be submitted and in 30 minutes or less, a nice set of screenshots of the page in question will be waiting for your review.

BrowserShots Control Panel


The results page displays the screenshots and then allows you to download a compressed tar ball of all the images should you so desire. It’s a great utility and if you’re looking to increase browser testing coverage, is a great way to accomplish that goal. Since they’re AdSense monetized, I clicked the banner there to help them out a little…A couple of results are posted below in small form, if you want the larger form, click the image in question to retrieve it.

The Geothermal Energy Association, a group that is effectively the geothermal industry’s lobby in Washington, D.C., is sponsoring another Development and Finance Workshop. We’ve attended two of these and can say, for people trying to break into geothermal, they’re a value-added event. Also, like all of these events, it’s proven to be an excellent networking opportunity. This one will be in Las Vegas at the Bally Hotel, Wednesday, January 16, 2008. The session runs from 8-5 and a reception follows.

Session Topics:

• The outlook for state renewable energy laws, federal tax incentives, and other key incentives for expanding geothermal energy production in the West.
• New avenues for financial support of geothermal projects – green power, climate credits, and other approaches.
• Geothermal investing from a variety of viewpoints, including the financing, investing, and marketing of new projects.
• Geothermal project development basics from leading project developers.
• New projects under development: what, where and by whom.
• Geothermal resources in the West – overview and key issues to address for development

So, if you’re interested in geothermal project development and you’d like to get a jump start, we recommend attending this workshop.

Now that the “award season” in college football has concluded with the Heisman ceremony, I’d like to gripe a little bit about the whole process. What if baseball’s MVP awards were handed out after the regular season was over but before the playoffs commenced? It’s not a great policy to grant individual awards when there are 32 games left to play in the season. In fact, it’s downright silly.

The other aspect of the individual award circuit that is troubling has to do with singling a player out when there are many players contributing to their success. In some ways, I can understand quarterback awards as there is only one active at a time and that player touches the ball virtually every play throughout the offensive series. Kickers, there’s another I can understand a bit. But when you get to defenses, tail backs, receivers, offensive lines it seems counter-productive to do anything other than reward the unit as a whole.

I’m going to pick a little bit on James Laurinaitis, Butkus Award Winner for best linebacker of the season. By all accounts and measures, James is an outstanding football player. But if you want an example of unit performance, look at the Penn State/Ohio State game where Penn State had a scheme where there was always someone focused on blocking him and taking him out of the play. It was effective in that game, though the defensive unit as a whole adjusted well and dominated Penn State just the same. In that game, Laurinaitis was limited to 2 tackles vs. his average of 10 tackles per game.

Does that one game mean he doesn’t deserve the award? No, I don’t that that’s the point. The point is, it’s a defensive unit performance that matters in the end and the fact that the defensive line occupies blockers enables Laurinaitis to roam free and make plays. When that situation wasn’t working, the defense overall adjusted and still prevailed. I have to wonder if these ill-timed individual awards damage team cohesion. At a minimum, the season should be complete before handing them out.