The Inquisitive Geek

Smart Meters coming to Idaho

As a bit of a greenie, technology like this always appeals to me.  It’s no secret that information is key to most of us acting, and smart meters provide many homes around the world the raw data needed to make them act.

It’s almost like a game for some folks, constantly tweaking variables in the home to try and beat out last months energy usage.  Whilst that may sound silly, I can think of worse games to be playing!

I read recently a post over at treehugger discussing the development of more smart meter systems in Idaho in conjunction with Idaho Power, who have been piloting the new meters for the past few years.  This is great news for Idaho residents, but perhaps only exciting for folks like me who enjoy the statistics of it all

I wonder of the smart meter can integrate with micro generation deployments and show me how much I’m generating as well as using? now if only we could standardize on a more localized monitoring system, say, per outlet?

Posted in Green Thinking | No Comments »

Freeways of the Future

I was reading something over the weekend that places the American broadband experience at something like 16th in the world, quite poor considering the pedigree we are talking about.

I’ve been in Idaho for a few months now and my internet experience has been less than stellar. Bandwidth availability is poor, caps are common practice, reliability is no where near perfect and any thought of high speed fiber connectivity turns up nothing from the few carriers that currently offer such a service.

During some weekend reading I happened to come across this map of the US interstate system, the image portrays current and future interstate freeways across the 48 contiguous states.

Immediately it dawned on me that with a pre built network such as this it would be easy to distribute a modern fiber infrastructure capable of multi-terabit backbone capacity across the entire country.  To date, in my understanding, it is the service provider that shoulders the cost for any upgrades to their infrastructure, that includes core infrastructure and a lot of last mile work.

Connectivity should be treated like any other infrastructure, it needs a massive federal cash injection and it needs to be treated as a national resource, available to all. With a change to the way service providers operate by removing the need to manage the infrastructure, they can focus on service and capabilities and content. States and local government can handle last mile connectivity, in conjunction with community developers and the federal government can maintain a massive network of modern connectivity equipment that will finally bring the US back to the top of the broadband pile.

Imagine a spur box at every interstate junction, that locals could use to plug in to a national fiber infrastructure, and ultimately the world.  Where service providers can operate in varying regions without the requirement for individual service provider glass? Bring on that day…

The Fiber To The Home Council has recently submitted a proposal to congress for a ‘100 Megabit nation’ that they wish to see in place by 2015, whilst I fully support that Endeavour, I feel with the lack of a central infrastructure we will constantly hit the roadblocks and investment barriers we currently see with private industry controlling such a core infrastructure.  Can you imagine with Ford and Exxon owned the freeways? how much would it cost to get to work then?

Posted in Futures, Musings | No Comments »

Diet Downsizing

Before I left the UK I had started to alter my diet toward better things, less take out, more water, more organic veggies, less meat, lots of good stuff really.  I have come to realize that since I arrived in the US, jobless and on a budget, the quality of my diet has fallen quite considerably.

I eat out almost every day, because we don’t really have a comfortable place to store and prepare food, and whilst we don’t eat Fast Food all the time, eating out is not the greatest endeavor around here. A recent read through a restaurants nutrition guide highlighted just how bad it can be when you think your eating good food, quite scary really!

Whilst I have not really put any weight on since arriving here, I had lost about 20lb in the month and a half before I left the UK, and was hoping to continue this trend, I’m pretty sure I will be able to, but not before I’m back on a regular schedule

I think I will attempt another CCC (Confectionary, Cake, Crap) free diet next week to see if I can motivate myself back into the swing of things. I’ve recently started going to the gym a few times a week and hitting the cardio, light stuff at the moment such as the stationary bike and power walking on the treadmill, something to get the blood pumping for 30 minutes though and not eating right feels like it’s just undermining the effort

Starting tomorrow, the CCC Free rules apply for one week initially

• No Cake
• No Crap
• No Confectionary
• Diet soda only
• 1L Water minimum per day
• 1 Eat Whatever token good for one item of food

‘Crap’ is a hard to define item, in general cases I would say it means no fast food, but with the budget what it is it probably won’t be quite so strict, I’m still off the fries and potato based items for the most part, and I avoid pizza bar the occasional trip to flying pie, so perhaps we will see the shedding of some more pounds in the coming week, I could definitely use to see them gone.

Posted in Musings | No Comments »

Mind Mapping a Speech Outline

As part of my communications class this semester we are preparing to give our first class speech, whilst giving speeches and talks is not totally new to me, I am getting my first taste at some of the concepts behind planning a speech which I am finding quite enjoyable.

As the date of our speech draws nearer and we have defined items such as our subject, thesis, and topic, it’s time to form the basic outline of our speech.  A well formed outline is an important tool to giving an informative and well received speech.  Have you ever noticed a speaker looking constantly down at notes? reading verbatim what they have on paper? It’s not a very engaging way to get a message across is it?

An outline on the other hand has the benefit of acting as a cue card, allowing simple glances at keywords to trigger the appropriate part of the speech.  These outlines can be in a simple written format, or a more elaborate mind map type layout, of which I have opted for

To the left you can see the initial map I have created to outline my speech.  As you can see, the map clearly identifies the stages of the speech, the transitions, and provides quick keyword reminders of the speaking point.  Whilst most of my professional speaking has had no specific time limits, this will be the first that is constrained to a +/- 30 second window, so proper planning is essential to the effective delivery of my speech.

I can now confidently use only this outline on the podium to deliver my speech in its entirety, allowing me to better maintain focus on my audience and not on some sort of script.

There is still plenty of planning to be done, I hope to perhaps give you some more tips as I progress through the various additional stages of planning my speech.

Posted in University | No Comments »

A Blog a day

So it was inevitable I guess, once again I fail to keep up with the blog updates.

I’m not sure if it’s my distaste for writing, or the time I spend on forums and not wanting to repeat myself, but time and time again I have tried and failed to keep the blog going, despite my continued efforts at sharing my knowledge and cool tech discoveries with others

I’ve decided to start a blog a day initiative, partly to improve my written skills, partly to encourage the upkeep of my blog and get me into that habit, and partly just to see if the incentive system I have devised for myself works!

They will not all be long posts, some in fact will be quick snippets and nothing more, but I hope the act itself encourages me to be a little more on top of things blog wise

Posted in Musings | No Comments »

First American Football game

So today was the start of college football season, and I went to my first game to watch the Boise State Broncos play the Idaho State Bengals.  Before the game started I barely knew the rules, and having been to a few football (with feet) games and not been impressed, was not sure exactly what to expect.

The experience itself began pretty early, my friend picked me up and we headed to Boise, grabbed brunch on campus and went shopping for some ‘Bronco’ gear so I didn’t look totally out of place! Got me a hat, that was it for now

We wandered around the parking lot and there were hundred of people set up behind cars and trucks ‘tailgating’ the practice of just throwing a BBQ and some beer in the back of your ride for some pre game feasting! Everyone was definitely in the spirit of the day.

We started lining up at 3:30pm at the student entrance, kick off was not until 6pm but we were allowed in at 4:30pm and wanted to get some good seats (Which we did, see pic below)

The game itself was pretty exciting, I’m not sure if thats because I didn’t know any of the rules to begin with, or if it was the pure spirit of being surrounded by 10′000 screaming students, but I had a blast!

The Broncos won 49 - 7 with some impressive moves from some of the players, especially the new freshman quarterback, it looks like we are in for an exciting season.

I think the most interesting observation I made is the spirit the whole town seems to get into on game day, I think the closest example I have seen in London is New Years Eve, everyone is friendly, everyone is interested and even 20 miles away on the way home people stopped and asked us how the game was, a great vibe!

Bring on Homecoming weekend and Bowling Green on the 13th of September!

Posted in Musings, University | No Comments »

First day at Uni

Today I had my first day at Uni, ever!

In fact it was my first day in academia for over 10 years, since I left college in London, to say I was a little nervous would be an understatement.

I only have one class a week at the moment, 6-9pm on a Thursday evening at the local BSU campus and today was the first lesson of COMM 101, Foundations of Speech communication.  We went over the general elements of communication, what the course is designed to teach us, the important aspects, that the rules of the class were, exam schedules and content, and then we did a simple exercise to help us remember who everyone is, this is important as it will be in the exam, communication is much more meaningful when it is personal, and the first step to that end is to know the receivers name! The exercise was quite fun and we all gave ourselves nicknames, something I’m sure will be the subject of much joking over the remainder of the semester

I hope I can continue in this class, it seems like a great bunch of people, but if my contract comes to fruition in Oregon I will be away for 2 - 3 months and have to forfit the class until next semester.

Can’t wait for next week now!

Posted in Futures, University | No Comments »

Building Hyper-V on a MacBook

On Monday I was at TVP in Reading for a virtualisation event hosted by Microsoft where I finally got to see a bit more of the product line that MS is wrapping around Hyper-V, boy was I impressed!  they are definitely doing some cool things over in Redmond.

My dilemma was this, in two weeks I emigrate to the US, and as you can imagine all that goes with that includes packing everything for the long voyage, that includes my test lab, which was considered low priority at the time (oops!) yet I came home from the event really keen to play with Hyper-V, System Center and Virtual Machine Manager!

The only machine left was my MacBook, and so I set about trying to get an unsupported operating system of an unsupported architecture to run in bootcamp, and here’s the summery for the rest of you

1. Create a boot camp partition, I already had one with Vista on, so I just used that
2. You will need to alter the windows 2008 ISO file due to some problems it presents when trying to boot, I followed the directions set forth by jowie
3. Once the ISO is created and cut, put it in the MacBook and reboot via bootcamp
4. Windows should now install without a hitch
5. Once server 2008 is installed, put the OSX CD in to install drivers, not all of these will work as they will be 32 bit only, I collected the x64 graphics drivers from intel.com (My MacBook has the GMA 950 stuff) but nothing else caused me too much grief (two services will fail to start during the installation, this did not seem to be a major issue (so far))
6. For those of you in the UK who set up the system with the UK locale, go and get the updates before installing hyper-v, this will get you the RC1 code and remove to weird locale glitch we all know and love
7. Install the Hyper-V role
8. voila!
9. Once complete I made some additional changes to make Server 2008 behave more like a desktop OS, being it’s running on my laptop it seemed like a good idea I followed the directions set forth by Vijayshinva Karnure

Special shout out to Volker Will who’s post and videos I followed some of the way

And the result is a sweet site

Posted in Virtualization | No Comments »