Personal YouTube
I have various video and audio productions that I would like to share on the web, but on my own web site in addition to third-party sites like YouTube, Facebook, etc.
About six years ago, I designed a web application called The Outhouse. This web application was designed to be used for sharing video and audio, and utilized embedded Windows Media players (that worked on about 5% of users' computers...). I upgraded it about a year ago to use Flash Video (FLV) instead of Windows Media, but it has not been public for I have not had any content that I would like to share. Now that I do, I would like to revive this system but considered a more complex software package to make things easier and to provide more features.
I noticed that my web host had a package called Clip Bucket available for installation. Clip Bucket is a PHP/MySQL-based YouTube clone. It provides nearly every (if not every) feature that YouTube has to offer. It looked nice, and I figured that I could just template it to meet the needs of my site and have a wonderful video portal!
Ha. Yeah, that is if I spent the time sifting through the hundreds of template files, PHP scripts, and nearly 60 kiB "main" CSS sheet which attempts to apply a background color to the same element about a dozen times. It seems like every single little element is given its own template file, and there is an utter overabundance of CSS elements and an obvious over-styling of everything.
I think I will just write a bare-bones PHP script to convert my uploaded (via SFTP) videos to FLV using phpMyAdmin and edit the details right in the database. Much easier.
Clip Bucket is a great 800-pound gorilla piece of software if you are looking to build the next YouTube and/or have enough time to style its every pixel and clean up its inefficiencies. If you just want to put some home movies or videos up on your site, I suggest something simpler, like static (or semi-static) HTML pages with flash FLV players playing pre-encoded FLV video files.
I'll put the stuff on Youtube, etc. for distribution, and use the good old Outhouse to keep it available on my own site.
API Front Group - Energy Citizens
I clicked on an ad titled Affordable Energy alongside some search results in Google. The page http://www.energycitizens.org/protectamerica/default.aspx was brought up, telling me to fill in the form and join Energy Citizens, or else a combination of imported energy and actions of Congress will cause me to lose my JOB. Uh oh.
That particular page displays no information about who Energy Citizens are, but shortening the URL to http://www.energycitizens.org and scrolling to the very bottom confirmed the obvious: Energy Citizens is supported by the American Petroleum Institute, or API. API is the face of the oil and gas industry in the U.S., and is responsible for their lobbying in Washington. API hired a marketing firm to create Energy Citizens, it is not the wonderful little grassroots organization sprouted by a few concerned citizens in America's Heartland that it appears to be. Yes, the pretty soft blue and green web site with cuddly serif fonts and pictures of blue-collar workers and liberal use of the J-word (jobs) may be quite convincing - convincing because that's what marketers (advertisers) are trained to do - convince us. It's a business ploy.
It warns of dangers (to API companies) posed by the dependence on imported fossil fuels while also threatening people like the oil workers shown on the site with their J-O-B-S if we decide to reduce carbon dioxide emissions (and therefore fossil fuel consumption)
API is advertising its product, for fear it will lose market share. Just like an ad for the latest As-Seen-On-TV gimmick, "YOU NEED THIS NOW OR ELSE!", and you must go digging for the fine print. Unfortunately energy is much more serious matter, and it is a bit disturbing that people are probably signing up for this group without even knowing what a joule is.
Gullible Nation
"Body Washes" are hyped-up bottles of soap water which have come to outsell solid bars of soap for washing among American male consumers. Recent ad campaigns for such products have proven wildly successful, despite the product containing little or no added benefit over solid bars of soap.
Transporting the heavy bottles requires more energy, their packaging produces more trash, they are more expensive, the bottles are voluminous and heavy to travel with, and their efficacy over bar soap is nil. Nonetheless, we fall for the marketing noise and apparently believe that if we use a certain brand of body wash that we will attract partners and will live the life of an overly-muscled guy with a towel around his waist, speaking in a deep voice as he slides between "masculine" articles such as hot tubs and motorcycles.
It might seem pitiful that I have even thought about something so petty as the personal hygiene supplies purchased by men, but in a world where we anger about the (perceived) economics of sustainability efforts, we are falling for something which is nothing more than marketing hype - something produced by a company simply for the purpose of making more money, not to provide an added utilitarian or aesthetic value to the consumer. We spend extra money and produce more needless trash just because we are gullible and believe whatever the TV tells us.
Some guys apparently like the smell of the washes, even though solid soaps are available with nice smells. I've found that the odor dissipates after no more than an hour following the shower, along with the odors of the similarly hyped-up body spray brands. Use 'em if you wish, but understand that they may not be all they are hyped up to be.
The bottled water industry is the other classic example, in which case many people are realizing that it is all marketing hype with no benefit barring maybe convenience.
Polishing Turds While Flushing Diamonds
On a daily basis I receive updates from the "Waste-to-Energy" group on the career networking web site LinkedIn with the latest "intellectual property" corporations looking to convert municipal trash, sewage, animal guts, and anything else imaginable into "Clean and Green automobile fuel". They all claim to have the best system and they ALWAYS have "Turnkey Solutions" to offer!
Why do we desire to build multi-million dollar turd polishers while we still burn high-quality gas and oil to produce low-grade space heating in homes and other buildings?
The ideas that many entrepreneurs have regarding energy seem to be backwards, but when the goal is to "make money" rather than to "produce energy" it is what we end up with - expensive turd polishers that take a tiny bit of the energy in the feedstock and convert it into a valuable end product, whether that be a liquid fuel or electricity. The remainder of the energy is tossed overboard as waste heat, all while people flush the energy equivalent of diamonds and gold down the toilet when they burn oil, gas, and electricity (through resistance) to provide 72 degree space heating.
Low grade heat can't be bought and sold on the marketplace like electricity and hydrocarbon fuels. It has to be either used at the point of generation, or dumped. So we just ignore it and dump it into the energy trash bin. The people then complain when they can't afford to heat their house with oil/gas/electric resistance. Political windbags start fighting and supporting the policies which made them the most money during last campaign season and/or the policies which incense the opposing party to the greatest degree rather than actually understanding thermodynamics and the natural tendencies of energy.
You wouldn't buy steaks just to grind them up to make hamburgers, right?
When delta T Shrinks
What if I said Making your crisp, air conditioned house or office possible is a 10-story tall coal boiler burning 300 tons of coal per hour at 3000°F, heating water to nearly the melting point of aluminum and raising its pressure to 220 times that of Earth's atmosphere?
Our world of heat engines and heat pumps is struggling in the eastern United States today, with record high temperatures.
Air conditioners are working over time. As the difference between the temperature inside and the temperature outside rises, heat flows through our walls and windows at an exponentially increasing rate. This means our air conditioners must pump this heat (in addition to the heat emitted by human bodies, lights, plasma TVs, and computers) back outside at the same rate in an impossible-to-win rat race, against this large temperature difference! More temperature difference, known as delta T, means more work (electricity). Climbing stairs takes work. Heat is jumping off a high-rise building into your house, and your air-conditioner has to pump it out and back up to the top using the stairs!
Electric power plants which provide this work use the exact opposite process. We boil water using giant coal fires and nuclear tea kettles and as the heat flows through a turbine on its way to the outdoors, work is produced which we put on a wire and send off to our homes and offices where we use it to drive the hamster wheel against nature. With A/C we want a low delta T for optimum efficiency, but power plants need a high delta T! So, on hot days A/C and power plants both lose efficiency.
The same effect applies to car and aircraft engines. Our cars suck in hot air and the lower temperature difference between this air and the burning gasoline mixture results in lower efficiency. The lower density of the air means lower mass flow rate and therefore lower heat flow rate, so we lose power (pickup) in our cars as well as efficiency. Combine this with the need to pump the air conditioner against an equally pitiful delta T and we end up with in-the-crapper gas mileage. Airliners need more runway to take off on hot days due to the lower delta T and less-dense air resulting in less thrust and less useful work produced per unit of fuel burnt.