People are talking more today about saving energy than ever before. With record heat in many places, and seemingly endless population growth, power plants are being stressed more than ever. Our individual power bills are also growing higher than ever. People point to large industry and home owners as a strain on the grid. I have another idea.

It kills me how much electricity is wasted in my office. People leave their computers and monitors on 24 hours a day, and they are even encouraged to. During the week, I log off of my computer and do leave it running for easy access the following morning, but I at least have a decency to shut off my power-hogging monitor when I leave every day. It stuns me how you drive past office buildings, and see all the lights on, with computer monitors and fans blasting. How hard is it to cut back on this? Aren’t these businesses interested in saving money? I just think it would make more sense to shut as many devices off during the night as possible if no one is going to be present to use them. If you work in an office of 100 people or more, you can imagine how much electricity this all must add up to. Replacing old CRT monitors for more power-friendly LCDs would help a great deal, too.

I won’t even go into the fact that people are allowed to have individual space heaters at their desks. During the hot summer, the air conditioning can keep it quite cold in the building; apparently so cold that some turn on their personal heaters at their desk. It is unbelievable. If the energy industry wants to find a good place to encourage conservation, I say start with large office buildings. You won’t believe the amount of wasteful consumption!

About five years ago, I wrote a quick list of movies that I believe to be the worst ever made. This isn’t a complete list, but rather some that I jotted down one day. I found this file on my computer recently, and found that I still completely agree with the movies I had listed. Bear in mind that this list is my sole opinion. I am not going to go into detail as to why I absolutely loathe each of these movies, but rather only present the titles to you. The list is reads as follows:

1. Willow
2. Legend
3. Parenthood
4. Natural Born Killers
5. Deliverance
6. The Shining
7. Hackers
8. Beatstreet
9. James and the Giant Peach
10. I Spit on Your Grave
11. Dogma
12. Eyes Wide Shut
13. Blazing Saddles
14. Ghost in the Shell (Anime)
15. The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert
16. Bladerunner
17. Halloween III
18. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

When I am at work, I use Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003. It absolutely drives me nuts that the alt-tab option of switching between programs gives priority to the Office applications. This seems to happen with all of them, but I notice it the most in Outlook. All normal programs behave in such a way that when you minimize its window, it is placed last in the chain of alt-tab switches. Not so with Outlook! As soon as you minimize the program and then hit alt-tab to leave the window you are then looking at, it immediately restores Outlook into view. What?! Microsoft should not be coding their apps to change the behavior of how Windows works for every other application.

I finally bit the bullet and signed up for Club Pogo. I have been addicted to the Pogo.com website for months, and I finally got tired of the ad interruptions. Instead of the $5.99 monthly Club Pogo membership, I opted for a full one-year membership, which is only $40 upfront. That comes out to $3.33 per month. In my view, that is a steal. I think it is a great deal. I recommend anyone who uses Pogo, even casual players, upgrade to Club Pogo. You get access to 35+ new games, free tokens, chat smilies, a player avatar, 2x jackpot winnings, and ad-free gaming. For better or worse, I am going to be glued to my computer for the next year! I hope to win back my membership free while gaming. Here’s to the jackpot. Let’s hope I hit one!

My favorite online resource for weather is Weather Underground. It is packed full of information, and displays weather stats from thousands of spots in the country. They have a terrific tropical storm section, too. When a hurricane forms, every last detail about the storm is on Weather Underground.

The site is indeed a little cluttered with all of the ads and tables of information, but you can access so many resources that you can become your own expert. The site offers up code that you can include on your own website to display the weather stats. During my last visit, I found they have integrated the local temperature and reading stations with Google Maps. See the screenshot, below. I think it is so awesome.

Last week, Apple unveiled its new line of sleek iMacs. They are now thinner, more powerful, and actually less expensive than the previous models. I’ve seen one myself, and it is mouth watering. However, while at the Apple Store in Raleigh this past Friday, I found that the new iMac wasn’t the only new thing to get excited about.

Apple has updated its Mac Mini computer. I own a Mini, having bought it at the end of May. Since then, the Mini’s processor has been upgraded to a 2.0 Ghz Intel Core Duo 2 processor and 1 GB memory now comes standard (I paid extra). The hard drive option has been increased to 160 GB as well. I had read some online predictions that Apple would not be continuing the Mac Mini line. I am very happy to know that this isn’t true. It is truly a fantastic machine and is worthy of more attention. I absolutely adore mine.

Last week also saw the release of iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08. Both sound like worthy upgrades to already exceptional software from Apple. I am not going to detail those now, but you can read all about them on their website. There has never been a better time to switch to a Mac. Also remember that the new Mac OS 10.5 Leopard will be out in October!

It seems like every couple of weeks, Apple releases an updated version of iTunes. It has become somewhat of a nuisance. I appreciate that the they are tweaking the product and providing updates, but every time a small incremental version comes out, you are forced to download the entire program in full. This is ridiculous. I hope that in the next big release (version 8, perhaps?) will be coded to receive small patches. This day in age, I expect all software to handle minor updates this way.

I must say that I really like the website overhaul that CNN.com has undergone. I was browsing some news sites in my bookmarks the other day and clicked on CNN because I hadn’t visited the site in ages. I was soon thrilled with its new look and feel. I think it is has an outstanding and very simplistic new look. The balance between text and video features is also just right. It is just a pleasure to read and explore. I must applaud CNN for having such a superb news website. Because, on a nationwide scale, when the shit hits the fan, I turn on CNN.

I once posted about how it seems like people don’t make use of online instant messengers like they used to. I remember a day when I’d sign onto AOL or Yahoo and I’d see a half a dozen people that were online. I would have expected popularity to grow as more and more people were connected to the Internet full time. For a while, it seemed to be that way, with friends staying online around the clock (mostly in an Away status). But today, usage appears to be a drop in the bucket compared to those days years ago. Perhaps that is just my own personal perception. After all, I am but one user that I am basing this whole thing on.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a single protocol to use for instant messaging, as we do for email? I want the medium to create a single way of making it all work as one, with companies competing to have the best application to serve computer users. Friends and Buddies would be universal, and everyone could be active on the same network, mobile users included.

Personally, I hate IRC, which is indeed a standard prototol, but I am not talking about that in this discussion. I am keeping this specifically about the traditional instant messenger programs. Today, there are an awful lot of chat solutions out there. I want the networks of AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Google (Jabber), etc. to become a single, industry-standard network. I have friends scattered all over the three big networks and it is ridiculous to manage. Having so many people spread so thin over these networks makes for everyone’s suffering in the end. With new technologies like MySpace becoming so overwhelmingly popular, I think the IM programs of yesterday need to merge into one to create a force that won’t become replaced or abandoned.

I’d actually read about this kind of proposal years ago. I heard that AOL was going to open up their network for use by everyone, and write a draft for an IM standard. At the time, AOL was the most popular IM service. I do not know if that is still true today. Obviously, the opening up of their network never happened and an industry standard was never created. I wonder if the will is still there today for this type of idea. We desperately need it, or I fear everyone’s buddy list will start to dry up as people switch to whatever the latest thing happens to be at the moment.

Until such a day, I’ll continue to use Adium on my Mac and Meebo on my PC as a way to access all of my chat services in one place. Vendor chat software like the real AOL Instant Messenger have become so bloated and full of ads, it is a wonder why anyone would even consider using them. Yahoo does make a good product, but the amount of memory it consumes is a little staggering, as is true with about all of them, as more features are stacked on to compete with the other guys. Perhaps some of the bloat in these programs can be trimmed by merging, as well. Sounds like a winning idea to me.