two kingdoms, hundreds of thousands of miles
There are appropriate uses for using hydraulic fracturing to get more oil and gas out of the ground. If a reservoir engineer believes that the earth around a well is solid, and in most cases it is, he may recommend hydraulic fracturing as a way to put cracks in the ground around an oil well so that oil and gas may flow more easily to a wellbore.
A hammer has good uses and bad uses; yet we should not ban hammers. Likewise, hydraulic fracturing.
I had a Sears appliance technician come and work on our washing machine, which was intermittently throwing a bizarre error code and shutting down in the middle of the cycle.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t reproduce the error, but he did say a couple of things about the detergent. We’d been using All “free and clear,” which has the “h-e” symbol on it for our high efficiency washer.
First, since we were on relatively clean city water, we didn’t need even as much as the cap suggested: only 1-2 tbsp. of detergent was necessary.
Secondly, he said their tech department has been saying that Tide, Cheer, and Gain carry an extra additive that makes them true high-efficiency detergents. He couldn’t say what it was. I’ll have to see if I can find ingredients lists.
Finally, he recommended a washer cleaner, affresh, to clean out the washing machine once a month.
I wanted to thank everyone who’s been visiting the Time Out site lately. The last two episodes that have been up for more than a week, Episodes 124 and 125, have been near-record-setting and record-smashing, respectively.
I can think of three factors that pushed 125: the appearance on Issues, Etc., the fact that Time Out had content from the Higher Things conferences, and the fact that 125 was an Overtime. I don’t know how much is due to each of these things because the referral data looks the same whether someone heard the address on Issues, Etc., and typed it in, someone heard the address by word of mouth at the conference, or from downloading with iTunes or other players. Whatever the reason, thank you!
One thing that has always frustrated me with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and now Google+, is that people overshare. People that I value for insights into certain topics almost beg me to debate them in unrelated fields: do you know how many Christian Socialists are out there? 
With Twitter and Facebook, you see everything someone distributes. What if you could just choose the stuff you like? Why do I have to ban every goofy game on Facebook? Why can’t I just say, “NO GAMES”?
Google+ isn’t another Facebook, and that’s good and bad.
I got an invite yesterday evening to check out the “field test,” and I immediately invited another six people. I would describe Google+ as a suite of web services: sharing, interest reading, and video conferencing.
Video conferencing, called Hangout, looking at the demonstration, is going to be quite cool if you have sufficiently high-speed internet. The main viewer of the camera automatically switches to whoever is talking, and the controls look easy.
Interest reading, called Sparks, needs the ability to be fine-tuned by the reader. It could benefit from Google Reader’s “Recommended items” and suggest topics according to subscriptions in Google Reader. I have Sparks for “BlackBerry” and “Kansas City Chiefs.”
CNet columnist Marguerite Reardon has declared, “The new iMessage feature in iOS 5 from Apple will certainly be a BlackBerry killer.” I would certainly temper that expectation.
iMessage, from what I’ve been able to see from the YouTube videos, does the same thing as other apps already in the marketplace: WhatsApp, LiveProfile, and PingChat. Those apps also have cross-platform clients, something iMessage won’t be. The iPhone users who were already looking for a way to get around SMS charges probably already have one of these apps.
BlackBerry’s own messaging system, BlackBerry Messenger, also benefits from encryption, whether going through RIM’s BlackBerry Internet Service servers or a company’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server environment.
That’s not to say that Apple can’t make a better iMessage app than what’s already out there. Our experience with the cross-platform applications is mixed. All three systems have dropped messages, and only PingChat has told me that a message hasn’t made it and let me retry.
If RIM’s BBM were cross-platform, the game would be over.
