Those who seek truth will find a certain variety of it in The Journal of Lie Theory.

(Thanks to Bob O'Hara for bringing this to our attention.)

by Last Night in Little Rock

In FEMA's haste to play catch-up and provide housing in New Orleans, it contracted with Carnival Cruise Lines for three ships for six months, and did the deal overnight, as reported in today's Washington Post.

The problem with the deal with Carnival was a $236M no-bid contract that effectively paid Carnival twice the per person cost of a cruise, with full crew and entertainment, and the ships never leave port. Yet, the ships are only half occupied, so Carnival reaps even greater profits. Do the math: that's four times the cost of a cruise. Without a full crew, the profit is even greater.

Makes me wonder if anybody at Carnival was a big Republican supporter, or were they just incredibly lucky?

by Last Night in Little Rock

In an incredible piece of irony, Presidential Press Secretary Scott McClellan urged Americans to save fuel by eliminating unnecessary trips during the President's seventh day trip to the Gulf Coast for a photo op as noted in today's NY Times. He noted that the Presidential motorcade had fewer vehicles in it, all for a trip of a few hundred feet to meet with local officials. That was an example of the White House conserving.

by Last Night in Little Rock

The protestors arrested outside the White House, including Cindi Sheehan, were subjected to "catch and release," according to Raw Story.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) wrote to the Park Police Chief that the problem was that many were held in handcuffs for 12 hours, many were grandmothers and some were senior citizens, and they were released from a holding facility in Anacostia at 4:30 a.m., after the Metro stopped for the night, there were no taxicabs, and people were unfamiliar with the city to walk anywhere.

Filed under: Recipes, Television

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Ever stared with envy at those huge, remote controlled planes flying around at a public park? Get your kicks from the world’s lightest and smallest indoor remote controlled airplane – the Butterfly. Pick one up today and fly it around the living room during TV commercials or to kill off boredom, regardless of the weather outside. Capable of precise flying within a 12’ x 16’ perimeter, you just need 4AA batteries in order to take to the skies anytime you feel like it. $299.00 will get you the following…

[buy at ThinkGeek via Random Good Stuff]

SolCool has created a “Hybrid Solar Chiller”, the world’s first solar-powered air conditioning system that makes use of 12-volt/back-up battery energy and 110-volt power. 

"The AC platform will support continued operation during powers outages eliminating the need for backup generators in most cases"

[SolCool via Treehugger]

Chinese company Languang have unveiled this cute detachable TV/HomeTheater combo, the LG-L20B1. It is a 20” TV that comes with a contrast ratio of 500:1, PIP function, built-in FM tuner, an inetgrated DVD player (multi-region) that supports AC-3, DTS, and MP3 formats. A plus point would be its portability, as you can detach both speakers or screen and rearrange it according to your taste.

[Languang via Akihabara News]

What does the new Bluetooth Remote Control 1.10 do? Well, it basically transforms your Bluetooth-enabled Sony Ericsson cell phones into a fully-fledged remote control. This means you can control your PC media player, PowerPoint presentation, or any other applications on both Windows and Mac platforms via your cell phone. For a list of compatible Sony Ericsson phones supported by the program, make the jump.

[Sony Ericsson via MacBidouille (fr)]

The layout of the fuel cell-ultracapacitor hybrid bus

Hydrogenics has tapped American Superconductor Corporation as the provider for power electronic converters for use in the propulsion system of a 40-foot fuel cell-ultracapacitor hybrid transit bus being developed for demonstration in Canada.

The fuel cell bus demonstration project, partly funded by Natural Resources Canada, was announced at the end of 2003, and was originally due to be complete this year. Current timing projects completion early in 2006. The bus will be the first in Canada to use a hybrid combination of fuel cells and ultracapacitors. The bus will also feature Hydrogenics’ vehicle-to-grid capabilities.

Rather than use a single fuel cell power source, Hydrogenics is using an array of three HyPM 65-kW stacks, each of which will use an American Superconductor PM1000 power converter.

The converters regulate the output power for the electric drive system, enabling it to operate over the fluctuating output voltage range of the fuel cell generators and will be a key element in optimizing the energy management for the propulsion system. The operation of the PM1000 power converters will be coordinated with Hydrogenics’ proprietary system controller through high speed Controlled Area Network (CAN) communications.

The bus will also demonstrate Hydrogenics’ proprietary vehicle-to-grid technology. This vehicle-to-grid capability enables a vehicle’s power supply to provide off-board power and power to the electrical grid while the vehicle is sitting idle. The company has been developing technology around the concept of using vehicles as a source of distributed power and has been aggregating key intellectual property in this area.

Maxwell ultracapacitors provide energy storage for peaking demands and regenerative braking. Other partners in the project include New Flyer Industries (bus manufacturer); Dynetek (storage); ISE Research (electric and hybrid drive systems); and the Province of Manitoba, where the bus will be shown (Winnipeg).

ISE has worked with Maxwell on other hybrid bus applications using ultracapacitors. Hydrogenics and Maxwell struck a four-year partnership in 2004 to collaborate on integrating Maxwell’s ultracapacitors into Hydrogenics’ fuel cell power systems.

By now, it is clear that New Orleans will be rebuilt. The flood of water will soon be replaced, and indeed dwarfed, by the flood of reconstruction money.

What is not yet clear is how to invest that money in such a way that the New New Orleans is indeed both wonderful and sustainable, in the eyes of the world, and in the eyes of its most loyal inhabitants.

The pressures to rebuild quickly are great, and quick decisions, especially about long-lived infrastructure, are often not the most strategic. What can one do to influence the process constructively, now, while the key decisions are still in the process of formation?

What follows is a first-draft answer to that question, and a follow up to an earlier essay on Dreaming a New New Orleans.

At the recent annual meeting of the Balaton Group -- an international network of sustainability researchers and practitioners that has been meeting annually since 1982 -- I pulled together a small workshop of colleagues interested in thinking about New Orleans, and about ways to support its sustainable redevelopment. (See the end of this essay for the list of contributors.)

This essay is in three parts:

First, some general reflections on information as a tool for leverage. The US Congress is opening a fire hydrant, and the rush of money into the whole Gulf region will be as powerful as the Mississippi. Flows of money that large make their own rules, and once they start, it is hard to redirect them. For most people, good information is the only tool available to try to affect it.

Second, a quick and partial list of critical issues the reconstruction effort must take into account. These issues are also a potential "tool" for helping to aim that money in the best and most sustainable way.

And third, a set of rough scenarios about how New Orleans' future might play out, depending on what kinds of choices are made regarding the issues of leverage. It is our hope that these ideas will help the many forces of influence in the redevelopment process to steer resources in the most strategic direction.

1. NUDGING MONEY WITH INFORMATION

How much money will flow into the New Orleans reconstruction effort? President Bush has pledged "whatever it takes," and most estimates range well above $100 billion. The money has flowed in so fast that in at least one case, the State of Louisiana has actually returned over $300 million in disaster relief to the US government, because it could not spend the relief money fast enough. Critics are warning about "disaster profiteering" and the awarding of Iraq-style no-bid contracts to the nation's giant construction companies.

One can be certain that whole departments of people in many organizations are now strategizing ways to be the recipients of that money. What they need, whether they want or not, is information. They need information on the historical background, and they need information to support the best possible, most forward-looking, and most systemic solutions for rebuilding.

Let's start with information about what could have been done to avoid the Katrina disaster in the first place -- and what still needs to be done. Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana was the plan developed in 1998 that, for the cost of a "mere" $14 billion, would have restored wetlands and prevented the move inward of the Louisiana coast by an estimated 50 kilometers (which is what was projected to happen by 2050). These documents map out the "system collapse" conditions that were inexorably making the region prone to exactly this kind of catastrophe, and other catastrophes besides; and they map a way forward. The cost of executing that plan is certain to be more than $14 billion today, but it still should on the short list of "essentials" in terms of where the Katrina money goes.

Secondly, it is not often that a major newspaper publishes an excellent and well-researched warning of looming catastrophe, and then must report on the catastrophe when it happens, but that is what the New Orleans Times-Picayune has done. Their 2002 five-part series called Washing Away warned in one of its opening headlines that "Levees, our best protection from flooding, may turn against us;" and on day two, the top headline noted that "A major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It's just a matter of time."

These two sources, at a minimum, are required reading to have some historical perspective on the disaster; and that historical awareness should be promoted into every decision-making venue one can find, especially where money is being directed into reconstruction.

As for information on solutions, sources abound, and many are aggregated here at WorldChanging.com. Alternative energy, sustainable housing, pedestrianized streets, transit, economic development and capacity building ... these days, anybody with a web browser can quickly become well-educated on what is already possible, and indeed actual. New Orleans can take lessons from the best-of-the-best in cities like Curitiba, Bogotá, Melbourne, Vancouver, and (closer to home) "green city" programs in places like Chattanooga, Pittsburgh, or Austin.

What's needed now is an outpouring of information, directed at those places where the vector of dollars gets determined, so that no one can claim not to have known what was needed, and what was possible.

2. ISSUES AND LEVERAGE POINTS

Consider the following (partial) list of issues confronting New Orleans:

• The need for genuine livelihoods for those who are desperately poor

• Education, education, education

• The skillful management of nature (much of it in the form of working with it, rather than against it)

• Insuring that those who live in a place have adequate housing and property rights (remembering that many whose homes were rebuilt after Hurricane Andrew by FEMA funds could not afford to move back into them)

• The management of future risks to the city, especially environmental ones, with special attention to increasing flood risk and the cost of future weather-related catastrophes

• Capitalizing better on the strategic location of New Orleans as a port at the mouth of the nation's largest river

• The need to avoid business relocation, and attract new business to the area

• Environmental quality problems as a retardant to economic development

• Public health issues and access to health care

• Significantly higher exposure to environmental risks for the poor

• Maintenance of vulnerable and decaying infrastructure

• Issues of high corruption, low trust, and low participation in public life

The remarkable thing about all the issues on this list is that they pre-date Katrina. Some of these were issues on the mend in the Big Difficult, but many were not; and the flooding, physical destruction, and social chaos stirred up by a moderately powerful hurricane (one that after all missed a direct hit on the city by many miles) have only exacerbated them by a couple of orders of magnitude.

But these and other issues can also be seen as "leverage points" for steering money back into New Orleans in a healthier and more sustainable way, particularly when combined in creative ways. Improving one is good; improving several simultaneously is much better. The goal must not be simply to "rebuild" the city; the goal must be to use the resources flowing in to create a new city, one that addresses the full range of economic challenges, social inequities, and environmental threats that were already facing the old city, and that will continue to face it in the years ahead.

At a minimum, a list like this can serve as an assessment checklist: If the money isn't taking care of these problems, it's not doing a good job. More strategically, lists like this should be doing their work now to help direct the money so that it has the chance to address several of these challenges at once. For a region that was already facing "system collapse" (according to the Coast 2050 report), "systemic solutions" are now required.

The region does have at least one set of tools to support strategic thinking of this kind: the Top 10 by 2010 Regional Indicators Report. Those indicators were always meant to do more than keep score: they were meant to help regional leaders think collaboratively and strategically to address the region's challenges, in the most effective ways possible. When Katrina hit, they had only started their work; now is the time to work them as hard as everyone else in the region will have to work, to restore what was lost in a way that improves upon the city's historical legacy, and improves the prospects of all its citizens.

New Orleans and the Gulf region may be known a bit for their casinos, but with a hundred billion dollars on the table, now is not the time for impulsive gambling with regard to the best pathway for reconstruction. Careful, integrated, forward-looking, strategic thinking is in order. This kind of thinking takes a bit of additional time, but the pay-off to Southeast Louisiana will be enormous.

Keeping these issues visibly on the table, and actively in the planning process, will help ensure that rebuilding produces the most beneficial outcome possible.

3. IMAGINING ALTERNATIVES: SCENARIOS FOR NEW ORLEANS

Another tool for producing best-possible outcomes is scenario planning: imagining several likely future-history pathways, starting from present conditions. In a short brainstorming session, at an international conference on regional sustainability held in central Hungary, an informal workshop group produced several possible scenarios for what New Orleans could become. Three of these scenarios are named after the Dutch cities they most resemble -- appropriate, given the city's position at the end of a major river, under sea level -- and they roughly correspond with some scenarios floated by other US commentators (which I had heard about largely through conversation with a BusinessWeek editor reporting on the story).

Describing scenarios in this way can help clarify what we are actually aiming for. It can also help as an information tool for those attempting to aim redevelopment money toward desired alternatives -- and away from unpleasant or non-optimal outcomes.

This list is obviously not meant to be an exercise in planning, but to be used as a conversation starter. Here are six scenarios for New Orleans: Which one do you prefer? What mixture? Or better yet, what's your scenario for a New New Orleans?

1. The Amsterdam Scenario

New Orleans continues to be a center for tourism, culture, and commerce, with a "racy" side and with an emphasis on its identity as a melting pot of cultures. The airport expands to serve the region and burgeoning Baton Rouge, with high-speed rail connections. The city bustles ... but major industry, and even ship-borne traffic, continues its historic shift elsewhere, and the river recedes in economic and psychological importance.

2. The Rotterdam Scenario

New Orleans focuses on its role as a port, builds infrastructure, gets "back to basics" in terms of generating revenue and jobs as a major flow-through point for the world's largest economy. Tourism still exists, but gets de-emphasized in economic development planning. The closer-to-home model (though it is far less vulnerable to flooding) is Houston.

3. The Gröningen Scenario

New Orleans becomes more like this smaller, lesser-known, university-dominated city in the North of the Netherlands: less industrial, less of a destination, but a student town that is also showcase for green city planning (with lots of bicycles). Think Austin in the bayou, but without the computer business, and with a solar roof on a reconstructed Superdome meeting LEED Platinum green-building standards.



4. The Shanty-Town Scenario

We removed the city-name originally tagged to this scenario, since there are so many in the world. New Orleans fails to return as a major city, but the people do. The redevelopment money dries up or gets directed into gentrification. The city's underclass is more vulnerable than ever before. This is exactly what nobody hopes for, and exactly what often happens in other parts of the world.

5. The High-Ground Scenario

Just as some smaller towns have been moved from river-bank to bluff, this scenario involves consolidating the city onto areas of higher elevation. The pour are bought out or economically kept out by the conversion of existing housing to raised, gentrified housing, or back-to-nature flood plain. New Orleans becomes a kind of exclusive enclave, for residents and tourists alike.

6. The Galveston Scenario

This Texas town barely makes the news anymore, and then only when a hurricane is about to hit it ... again. It is picturesque and pleasant, but since being smashed by a massive hurricane in 1900, it is no longer a dynamic economic growth engine. Several soothsayers point to Galveston as a "likely" outcome for New Orleans: reconstructed, smaller, more about history than the future.

We certainly hope that New Orleans chooses "the best of the best" of these and other scenarios, and avoids the worst. And we look forward to hearing your comments on future scenarios for New Orleans, and on leverage points for directing the reconstruction effort in the most sustainable direction possible.

Written by Alan AtKisson, on behalf of the New Orleans Workshop Group, which met 18 September 2005 at the 24th meeting of the Balaton Group. Workshop participants:

Ian McPhail, Commissioner for Environmental Sustainability, State of Victoria, Australia

Garry Peterson, Assistant Professor/Canada Research Chair, McGill University, Canada

Wouter de Ridder, Researcher on EU Sustainable Development Strategy, Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency

Rustam Vania, Sustainability Educator and Cartoonist, India

Diana Wright, Publications Director, Sustainability Institute

Carlos Quesada, Former Vice-Rector (Retired), University of Costa Rica

(Posted by Alan AtKisson in WorldChanging Essays at 04:45 AM)

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003551.html

Got back from the superb

road trip through the Lori region of Armenia. Hope I

didn’t bore anyone. As fine a road trip as I’ve done in a while, and in Armenia no less.









So I’m back in Yerevan and am heading out tonight. Coming back to New York on a nasty 4 am flight. But today I did

catch the Bambir concert in Yerevan, which was pretty

entertaining. Bambir is an Armenian band that I discovered through a couple of friends who are into the Armenian music

scene (the photo here is a screenshot from my video camera…this is Narek and Arik before the concert). They

come from the city of Gyumri, the city that was devastated,

basically destroyed by the earthquake in the mid 80s. The Bambir guys are youngish, in their early 20s, and very funny,

very talented, and overall really good dudes.

They play rock and roll, but they have a flutist, Arik, who gives the band a Jethro Tull sound (it’s pretty much

impossible NOT to have a JT sound if you have a flute in your band). But despite this, they have a unique sound too. I

don’t want to say they copy JT because they don’t.

So before the concert, I headed over to Bambir’s producer’s place (his name is

Artyoum) in the late afternoon and found

the Bambir guys hanging out listening to the Kinks. I asked them if this was part of their usual pre-concert ritual and

they said it was, that their drummer Ashok decides what to play to psyche them up, and that it’s usually some mix of

classic rock and jazz. They were pretty relaxed, and hardly seemed stressed out by having to be on stage in a few

hours.









I rode to the club in a cab with the lead singer Narek and the bassist Armen, probably the two most talkative members

of the group. The club is called the Stop Café and is in the center of Yerevan. It was very typical sort of music club,

like you’d find in any big city. There is a big John Lennon painting on the floor and pictures of jazz legends on the

walls. A guitar hangs from the ceiling.

There were a few people there hanging out, and I sat with the guys and had a glass of wine, and asked them about

their ambitions. I wondered if they had plans to sell their stuff on the Internet to get their music out to the world,

and whether their stuff was available on itunes. Turns out they’d never heard of itunes. I explained that it was the

place to buy music for your ipod. “What’s an ipod?” Narek asked.









After the sound check, the guys started to play, banging out some of the songs from their second album. I’d seen them

rehearse a bit at Artyoum’s house, and I thought they were quite good, but here live they were even better. Narek has a

strong baritone and is a talented guitar player. Arik’s flute adds a lively, unorthodox layer to the band’s sound which

is, overall, unique and a positive addition.









As I said, even though there are hints of Jethro Tull there, they have developed their own sound, and are continuing

to do so. I sat through all the sets, and really enjoyed the music. The club was nearly full with fans of the band and

others (including some very attractive groupies), who sat and watched and cheered enthusiastically after each song.

After a while people started to dance and Narek took off his shirt. Arik played some jazzy riff on hs flute that

soared over the room. Their bassist Armen sat on the edge of the stage and played, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

These guys are real rockers. Even though I was occupied shooting them for a story, I was having an excellent time.

Finally they started to play some covers – Satisfaction by the Stones, Foxy Lady by Jimmy Hendrix, and the crowd really

got into it.

Sadly, as the night became early morning, I had to leave. It was time to fly home. And so before their final set, I

said good bye to the guys of Bambir and wished them the best. I told them I really did like their sound and I hoped

they’d soon be successful enough that none of them would have to work in the local CD store (where their drummer Ashok

works now). They were very cool guys and they thanked me for being interested in them. Then Narek hit a deep power

chord on his guitar and kicked into Mad Dog by Led Zeppelin, and we slipped out the door.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

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All the speculation has forced the British government to come up with a new Official Story on what the two police-murderin', anti-tank-weapon-totin', Arab-dress-sportin' soldiers were up to in Basra:

"TWO SAS soldiers rescued last week after being arrested by Iraqi police and handed over to a militia were engaged in a 'secret war' against insurgents bringing sophisticated bombs into the country from Iran.

The men had left their base near the southern Iraqi city of Basra to carry out reconnaissance and supply a second patrol with 'more tools and fire power', said a source with knowledge of their activities.

They had been in Basra for seven weeks on an operation prompted by intelligence that a new type of roadside bomb which has been used against British troops was among weapons being smuggled over the Iranian border."

"'Since the increase in attacks against UK forces two months ago, a 24-strong SAS team has been working out of Basra to provide a safety net to stop the bombers getting into the city from Iran,' said one source. 'The aim is to identify routes used by insurgents and either capture or kill them.'"

In the meantime, in the last 24 hours we hear that the British are:

1. definitely pulling out of Iraq starting next May; or


2. definitely not pulling out; or


3. sending in more SAS soldiers so they can definitely pull out.

Indignant Saudi women on Tuesday turned the tables on Karen Hughes, the US under secretary for public diplomacy, rejecting her analogy of them as the “broken wing” of a bird that the US will help fly.

The lesson in Arab pride came in the setting of a women’s university auditorium in Saudi Arabia’s coastal city of Jeddah, the second stop of Mrs Hughes’ listening tour of the Middle East that kicks off her campaign to mend America’s own broken image among Muslims.

Mrs Hughes, better known as the long-time communications guru for President George W. Bush, began the “open dialogue” before several hundred women at Dar al-Hekma university by introducing herself as a “working mom”.

She went on to talk about the importance the US attaches to freedom and welcomed a new Saudi labour law that is supposed to open up more job opportunities for women.

Mrs Hughes said she looked forward to the day that Saudi women would play an active role in civil society and quoted Laura Bush, the first lady, as saying a bird can’t fly if one wing is broken. America hoped Saudi women will “spread your wings”, she said.

Students and teachers lined up at the microphones to express in perfect English their indignance at the stereo-typing of Saudi women as living in a closed society, unable to work or drive or vote. They also slammed the US media for spreading such an image, notably one Oprah Winfrey show that they said presented a Saudi woman beaten by her husband together with the message that theirs was a country to be avoided.

“We are happy, not just content, but happy,” one student objected.

Mrs Hughes quickly replied that she thought Arab women were strong and intelligent, but stuck to her guns, saying that Americans “take their freedom very seriously”, and that means speech, religion, voting and driving – for work and shopping.

The discord between the American official, setting foot in the Middle East for the first time, and her Saudi audience reflects the immense complexities facing the Bush administration as it tries to focus on the ideological dimension of its “war on terror”.

The theme of terrorism did not appear to go down well either. Selected intellectuals in Cairo and Jeddah – of whom virtually none could be described as radical Muslims or from the left – showed little enthusiasm for discussing the subject.

Yet in small ways, the weight Mrs Hughes carries -- thanks to the close relationship with Mr Bush -- has pushed some doors open already.

One US diplomat described as a “historic breakthrough” permission given to western male reporters to sit in the same auditorium as the young female students, instead of watching the proceedings on a screen in a separate room. The decision was taken by a princess in the royal family who attended the conference.

Afterwards, the young women – many from wealthy families who spend their summers in the west – were eager to give interviews, explaining why driving was not such a big deal for them, and that the right to vote would come eventually.

“We don’t want the US to force us to bring change,” said one teacher. “They did not allow the blacks to vote before, and now they are forcing the world to accept their views.”

Despite what The Smoking Gun has discovered Major League Baseball thinks about the American League East, we appear primed for a final five days of rather intense pre-playoff madness. The Yankees and Red Sox are still tied, the Indians are tied with them too and the White Sox are still toying around with the idea of choking it all away, just for shits and giggles.

Baseball Musings' David Pinto is openly daydreaming of a four-way tie, Red Sox fans are second-guessing both their team and the Yanks and everyone all just kind of freaking out. We were at a very crowded bar last night full of very loud Red Sox fans, and we were reminded just how exhausting the next three-four weeks are going to be. (By the time the World Series happened last year, we were begging for a day off, away from baseball. Playoffs just kill us every year, man.) For everyone in the American League not from Anaheim, this is all starting a week early. Expect employees to be showing up an hour or so late, beginning, oh, now.

Four Way Tie [Baseball Musings]
4 8 15 16 23 42 [Soxaholix]
Yanks Top Sox For AL East Crown! [The Smoking Gun]

As you can see, I have 2.0 running with the browser on my PSP.









Step 1: Download the downgrader from either here,

here or

here. Then make sure you get a copy of the

original 1.5 firmware upgrader. I found my copy

here.









Step 2: Connect your PSP to your computer via USB. On your memory stick, create a folder called UPDATE inside

/PSP/GAME/ and place the EBOOT.PBP file from the 1.50 update inside this UPDATE folder.









Step 3: Unzip MPHDowngrader.zip. Drop overflow.tif into your /PSP/PHOTO/ folder. Put both

h.bin and index.dat in the root of your Memory Stick.









Step 4: Disconnect your PSP from your computer and plug in the AC adapter.









Step 5: Navigate to Photo then Memory Stick via the PSP’s menu system and start scrolling down through your photos

until you reach the overflow.tif picture.














You’ll know you’ve hit it when everything freezes and you get a black screen with a bunch of white text output.














If your PSP freezes without going to this black text screen, then hold the power button for about 10 seconds until the

PSP shuts down, then hit the power button again to start it back up. Repeat this step until you get that black

screen.









Step 6: Don’t panic. Hold the power button for about 10 seconds until the PSP powers off. Hit the power button again.

Your PSP will start up, and if you navigate to your System Information, you’ll discover that your PSP thinks it is

running version 1.0 of the firmware. It isn’t and you cannot run homebrew (yet).



















Step 7: Navigate to Game—>Memory Stick, hit the X button, and navigate to the 1.5 updater.

Make sure you have your PSP plugged in or the upgrade won’t work. Click the X button and update like you

normally would. At the end of the upgrade you will receive an error saying that the upgrade failed and to contact Sony.

Don’t panic. Ignore this and again force your PSP to power off and reboot.














Step 8: After the PSP reboots you will receive an error screen that is scary and confusing because it is in multiple

languages. Don’t panic. Find the language you can understand and read the corresponding line. It notes that your

preferences are fragged and that you need only hit the O button to restore some default-ish settings. Hit the

O button.









Step 9: The PSP will start back up and you will go through the initial setup like the day when you first bought your

PSP. Do so and then go to the system info pane again, where you will see that you are rocking version 1.5. Run homebrew

at will.




I ran through this entire procedure, then I downloaded the 2.0 update and installed that again, and then yet again

went through the entire procedure again. It works like a charm. It’s a little time-consuming, but you can have

the best of both worlds. Have fun!

Surfwax's lookahead RSS search returns news items with your search term in the title as you type. Try entering "Rita" or "Bush" and watch the results line up and fill in below the search field.

Lookahead search covers the last 7 days of a "top" RSS feeds, which seem to be skewed towards more mainstream news versus individual blogs. RSS Lookahead search is brought to you by the same folks who released the ever-useful WikiWax Wikipedia search.

I've started the podcast by reading aloud from a novellette-in-progress called "After the Siege," inspired by my grandmother's hair-raising stories of being a little girl in Leningrad during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad, which she recounted this summer while we were at a family reunion in St Petersburg, Russia (Leningrad that was).

Link

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/28/cory_starts_podcasti.html

Filed under: Snacks, Fruit, Newspapers

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This week marks the 2,256th anniversary of the birth of Confucius. His birthday celebration falls on the 27th or

28th of September each year, at the Confucius Temple in

Qufu, in the eastern province of Shandong. The

Temple, as well as the Confucius Family Mansion and Cemetery, became

UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1994.









In past years, this festival was the only time the city performed an ancient Ming Dynasty opening ceremony of the

temple, but to increase tourism in the area, it was announced in March 2005 that the temple gate will now be opened

weekly from April to October each year.

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© 2005 Weblogs, Inc.

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Reader Jeff Covey shares how he’s started beating procrastination with a dash. Jeff’s system features a very fast daily start-up and a clever way to make sure every to-do gets touched first thing every morning.

Running a Progressive Dash

by Jeff Covey

The recent post about running a
dash gave me an idea which has turned out to be a good way to get
myself in motion. It's something like a train pulling out of a station,
with a lot of force and effort at the beginning leading to smooth
gliding through the long haul.

One of my gtd scripts is named "tenmins", and I've used it to make sure
I put at least a little time into each of my next actions lists each
day. As the name implies, I picked ten minutes as the arbitrary amount
of time to give each category of work. tenmins would look through my
lists for any which had items waiting to be done. Then it would say,
for example, "work on phone calls", display a timer counting down the
time remaining, and pop up a message saying "stop" when the time was up.

Last week, I decided to try putting tenmins on a loop which starts with
one minute for each category and adds another minute on each iteration.
I start the day with an all-out sprint through my work landscape with a
minute for each actions list, then stretch out with two minutes for
each, then three and four and so on. I'm finding a number of benefits
hiding in this simple trick:

• Since all bases are touched at least once, my whole workload
  becomes fresh in my mind after just a few minutes (1 minute * the
  number of active next action lists). There are no worries that
  there's something waiting in hiding to bite me.


• I rush at the beginning of the work day when I'm fresh, and at a
  more leisurely pace later, instead of spending a lot of time on one
  thing (not necessarily the most important thing) and facing a panicked
  race to get through everything else. I have progressively more and
  more time to get things done, instead of less and less.


• As I add items to my lists, they get done more quickly, or at
  least started sooner (the next time that list comes up in the cycle).


• I feel my load lightening as I dispatch everything that can be done
  in one minute, then two minutes, etc. By the time I get to something
  that's going to take an hour, I know there's really nothing else I
  should be doing.


• Chipping away at a project one minute at a time, then two, then
  three, I find projects starting to be finished today that I thought
  would take the rest of the week.


• The reverse psychology described in The
  Now Habit comes into play. I take something I don't want to
  do at all and limit myself to only spending a minute or two on it.
  By the end of that time, I wish I could continue and get more done.
  Pretty soon, I'm wanting to get back to it and finish it instead of
  procrastinating about it.


• Since I only have a minute to get started on something, sometimes
  I just use screen to create a new screen, name it after what I'm doing, and open a
  document or start a program or do whatever it is I need to get
  started. Then, when it comes around again, the work material is
  already laid out, and it's much easier to get started and do something
  even in just two or three minutes. When I have a screen dedicated to
  a certain project, I'm more likely to want to get that project done
  and close the screen than to close it undone.

I’ve liked this so well that I’ve added three more notices to the end of
the tenmins loop:

Incoming mailboxes

Once I’ve gone through all the next actions lists, tenmins checks
for any non-zero-sized mbox files that procmail has placed in ~/mail/incoming/ (general inbox, work mail, mailing
lists, etc.), and asks me to spend x minutes on each.
If I get done early with one of them, I grab the next one and the
next until time’s up. By the time tenmins is through finding ones
I haven’t already emptied, I’m often back to zero.

Postponed mail

tenmins then checks whether I have any draft messages in ~/mail/postponed and bugs me to work on them.

Reading

When everything else is done, tenmins asks me to spend some time
on my list of things to read (articles, books, RSS feeds, etc.).

I wouldn’t recommend this as a regular means of working; constantly
changing from one project to another can break your chain of thought.
It can frustrate you when you come back to something and have to spend
time getting back into the flow of it, trying to retrace where you were
headed before the last interruption. But though it may not be the best
way to choose how to use your time all the time, it can be a good trick
for getting you moving on all fronts, especially if you’re not sure what
to do next.

— Jeff Covey

With very few words of text on each page, the book teaches you how to find Orion's belt, one of the most easily recognized constellations in the sky. It goes on to teach you how to find the Big Dipper, Venus, and the North star. It shows you an easy way to find north after locating the North star (draw an imaginary line from the point directly overhead to the North Star. That's North).

The book teaches you how to find constellations by repeating the exercizes over and over, changing the orientation of the stars each time. In twenty minutes, I learned enough astronomy to make me feel a little less like an idiot when I look up at the night sky. Link

The projects are easy to make, in fact, you probably have 95% of the materials needed for all the projects at home already. The explanations are well-thought out and the back-of-a-napkin sketches are a joy to look at. If you have kids, they love this book, which has a lot of ideas I've never seen in any other science project book. Link

After the first week, I figured out that he was just going through each example in the book, and offered nothing in the way of additional enlightenment beyond the text. I stopped going to class and read the book on my own. I don't remember the book very well. I do remember that it was boring, and that I didn't feel as if I understood physics very well after reading it. Fortunately, the professor's test questions were nearly identical to the examples in the book (he usually just changed the values), so I got an A in the class.

A few years later, I saw a copy of Thinking Physics, and was drawn to the playful illustrations on the cover. The book had a loving, handmade quality to it. Flipping through it, I saw that it was written in the form of physics puzzles. I bought the book, and in the course of a couple of weeks, I developed a true feel for Newtonian physics. I understood, on an intuitive level, the difference between force, energy, and work. The how and why of calculus became clear. Interestingly, most of the questions in the book don't require that you pull out a pencil I'll and paper. They just require you to visualize and think.

Check out the reviews on Amazon. Everyone gives this book a solid five stars. And they're well deserved. Link

The 100 page book is the first hand account of a young man named Sean's roadtrip during the final 10 hours of all life on earth. A giant meteor is due to decimate the planet, and Sean wants to spend his remaining time with his ex-girlfriend, Selma. Along the way, Sean -- who is half-zonked on pot and opium -- gets tangled up in a number of bizarre pre-apocalyptic sidetrip adventures. I don't want to give them away here, because it's much more fun to be surprised.

Shapiro is a fine writer. Writing a book about the end of the world is risky, because its easy to slip into sentimentality. Shapiro smartly avoids it. Instead, he presents a darkly humorous, insighftul, and curiously believable account of the last hours of human life on a doomed planet. Link

For example, I have a bunch of Quicken housekeeping to do -- hours and hours of it. I dread it, but it has to be done, for tax purposes. I don't want to blow an entire day doing it, so I've started attacking it in 15 minute chunks each day, which is much more bearable. I use a free OS X program called Fob, from Leaky Puppy Software, as a countdown timer.

Fob lets you set up and store a list of timers that you can use whenever you want. I have a timer that I can activate that gives me 30 minutes to research a book I'm working on. I have another timer that lets me work on a painting for 20 minutes (in this case, I use this as a timer to force me to stop doing something fun, as opposed to the Quicken timer, which I use to encourage me to do something I hate).

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders has written some great stuff about using timers to beat procrastination. Just today I noticed that he reviewed another Mac-based timer called Minuteur. It looks nice, but I haven't tried it yet. Link

My biggest problem is that my drawings have a tendency to look stiff. Caldwell's work is dynamic, even explosive. He's good at showing how to exaggerate activities such as running, jumping, or even standing and sitting. I plan to keep his book close at hand while drawing figures.



Link

Because I edit a how-to magazine (Make), I have learned to appreciate well-designed step-by-step instructions, and I give this book an A+. The photography is excellent, as are the instructions themselves.

I haven't made any of the projects, but I plan to try the Eames-like room divider, the storage bench, and the planter bench. Prepare to be amazed by this book.
Link

To use it, you launch the program and enter a master password. That gives you access to all the records. I use it all the time to get my credit card numbers to make online purchases.

One great feature is the way it syncs the data back and forth between my Palm OS and my home computer. Earlier this week I went to a Chinese restaurant to pick up some food I'd ordered on the phone and I forgot my wallet. But I talked them into selling me the meal by reading my credit card number from my PDA.



Link

My friend Matt Maranian knows this. In 1997 he and Tony Lovett wrote a guide to Los Angeles called L. A. Bizzaro! The Insider's Guide to the Obscure, the Absurd and the Perverse in Los Angeles. I defy you to read this and not be surprised, entertained, and eager to head out the door to explore the places covered in this book.

For example, there's Clifton's cafeteria, a "delighfully dingy wonderland," opened in the 1931 with a cedar forest complete with cascading waterfalls and stuffed forest creatures. It's still in operation today. Then there's Tri-Ess Sciences near the Burbank Airport -- a chemical supply house that caters to the special effects industry. There's also the mind-blowing Bob Baker Marionette Theater ("the oldest operating puppet theater in the country"), located under a freeway ramp in a decrepit industrial area of LA. I've enjoyed Baker's skillful and almost-psychedelic shows with my kids three times so far, and I'm looking forward to returning soon.

If you're in LA and have access to a car and this book, you'll never be bored. Link