I saw you in Life magazine back in Fifty Two
Lying awake intent at learning all ’bout you.
If I was young it didn’t stop you coming through.

Oh-a oh

They took the credit for your proud efficiency.
Worked over by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.

Oh-a oh

I met your children
Oh-a oh

What did you tell them?
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str.
Txtspk kld teh shrthnd str.
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BatchPCB offer an innovative service to electrical hobbyists - the ability to have single circuit boards - or small quantities - professionally manufactured at a relatively reasonable cost. They’ve been around for a while, they’re relatively easy to use, and they’ve become something of a de-facto standard recommendation in the electronics hobbyist community when someone asks about PCB prototyping.

They do good work, and they provide a valuable service, don’t get me wrong. Thing is, they’re also really slow - expect to wait a month or five weeks to get your PCBs - they don’t offer any real options to speak of, and their prices simply aren’t competitive if you need more than one or two copies of the same PCB.

So, with that in mind, here are some recommendations for alternative fabrication houses that I’ve used.
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I’m home sick, after somewhat foolishly eating something I shouldn’t have last night. As I have a blinding headache that no reasonable quantity of painkillers seems to have an effect on, this will be relatively brief:

A government commissioner in the UK bemoans England’s hostility to young people. Notably glossed over? Young peoples’ hostility to the world around them…

Wikileaks, if you haven’t noticed, are up to their usual mild incompetence and still begging for money which they claim desperately to need but refuse to give an accounting for…

There are worse ways to kill a few hours than by browsing through Notebook Stories dot com;

Two pieces of hard-hitting journalism from our friends at Pravda:

Russia willing to restore Soviet Legacy in Afghanistan; and

Most popular stress reliever turns 60… bet you can’t guess what it is!

And from the folks at Ria Novosti, a look at a suspicious Google translation error that seems to have strong political views…

It gets cold in Minnesota, in the winter. This is not an anomaly, or a carefully guarded secret of some sort. Minnesota + winter = cold. That’s just the way it is, and most people are aware of this, especially if they have the misfortune of living in Minnesota. This week, I don’t think we’ve hit double digits, Fahrenheit, and every night has been below zero, Fahrenheit.

Consider the wind turbine for a moment, if you would, the “green energy” source that nobody really likes. People in the energy sector don’t like them - they produce a random amount of energy at random times of day, which they don’t, for some reason, view as terribly useful. The more excitable environmental activists don’t like them, because they can and apparently do kill birds and bats. Anyone who lives within eyesight of one seems to hate them, because they’re ugly. And anyone who lives really close to one seems to really hate them, because they’re ugly and noisy, too.

Even the most gung-ho supporter of wind turbines, though, will probably concede, however grudgingly, that American energy independence probably shouldn’t rely terribly much on something that seizes up in the cold.

When I first heard about this on the local news, I thought that the recent ice storms we’d had were at fault - that the turbines had iced up, or something like that. That would be kind of sad, but we did have something like forty-eight straight hours of freezing rain, which isn’t quite a regular occurrence, even in this wonderful winter wasteland.

Instead, however, it appears that the problem is much more basic - the various fluids in these turbines just can’t handle the temperatures we get here.

To be fair, this does appear to be only affecting some unsurprisingly craptastic turbines manufactured in the People’s Republic of California, but that such equipment, incapable of handling relatively mild winter weather, could be sold to, you know, Minnesota, suggests to me that the wind-power industry has a long way to go before it can hope to be taken terribly seriously - someone, somewhere, should have recognized that this could be a problem. I don’t care who - the manufacturer, the owners, their consultants, some regulatory body or industry standards group - take your pick. It’s just an unbelievably boneheaded oversight that it makes you suspect that nobody really knows what they’re doing, which means you can’t help but wonder what else is being done wrong…

Random thingies of little import:

For a couple of weeks now, we’ve been having horrible problems with our home DSL connection, which is Powered By Qwest(TM). (Well, there’s your problem!, I hear you all shout. I know, I know.) From about 1600-2330 local time, we’re frequently unable to get even 20Kbps speeds on what should be a 1.5Mbps connection, and ping times can exceed four seconds to servers a few dozen miles away. Clearly, our DSL trunk or whatever it’s called is “congested”, a complicated technical term that basically means “oversold”. When we contacted our (local) ISP, they sympathized with our plight, agreed that it sounded like congestion, and said they’d contact Qwest, but said “the odds of anything being done about it are slim. Qwest is pushing fiber-optic internet service now, and considers copper-wire DSL service a basically unsupported legacy product they just don’t care about.” We’re doomed…

One of my roommates had a strange dream the other night; in part, this is notable because she very, very rarely ever remembers more than vague details once she wakes up. In the dream, she arrived at her old college campus to find a loud demonstration in progress; a new sculpture had been installed in one of the courtyards, replacing an older sculpture that had succumbed to the elements. The grass around the sculpture’s plinth was full of gopher holes, which the angry students thought was part of the “installation”, and while some were yelling that this was dangerous, the majority were upset by the “sexist and misogynistic overtones” of the holes. (Yes, she went to college in Minneapolis; why do you ask?) When her dream-self tried to point out that they were just gopher holes, a bunch of eco-activists denounced the exploitation of animals, and attempted to burn down the art department. (Psychoanalyze that!)

In something that resembles actual news, albeit obscure, Russia has announced plans to invest 330 million USD in the disputed territory of Abkhazia over the next three years. That might not sound like a lot, but that basically subsidizes the relatively small territory’s trade deficit for the next couple years, and between the outright cash and “economic investments”, should serve to greatly increase Moscow’s influence in (and by proxy control over) Abkhazia.

It’s easy to not care about that part of the world, but the timing is suspect, coming as it does amid an important election in the Ukraine, and the tensions over Poland, and it’s not hard to see this as a sign that Russia wants to increase its influence with as many of its neighbors as it can, and move as many polities into the “firmly pro-Russia” column as possible. It’s just like the Cold War, all over again - controversial missile basing issues in central Europe, a gently antagonistic ascendant Russia trying to increase its influence over its neighbors… Everything old is new again… again.