Making Ripples: post-corporate adventures in Floyd County Virginia

It's not easy being green

A burning Chevy Volt lighting up the landscape illustrates some of the dificulties in achieving an all-green sustainable lifestyle. The path of development has never run smoothly and that is why pioneers get used to scoffers pointing out design flaws.

Creating a green economy with green technology is not all that different from the creation of a digital economy in the years following the Second World War.

Early digital computers were inefficient and unreliable like today's wind generators and all-electric vehicles. They were the butt of many jokes just like today's efforts at capturing wind energy and all-electric transportation.


I was involved in the commercial development of several generations of early digital computers and I know that government support was instrumental in the very early days of computer development. As I recall, however, there was no big push on the part of the government to get us to discard our calculators and pencil and paper. Computers took over the workplace and the homefront when they became MORE CONVENIENT than the alternatives.

I feel there will be a place for wind generators and all electric vehicles when they become MORE CONVENIENT AND COMPETITIVE than our current generators and vehicles. This may only occur in specialized sitations, but I feel we will see working installations with excellent customer satisfaction eventually.  Right now, we see too many failures like this:

The efforts of our current administration to shove untested ideas down our throats will only result in discrediting their motives. The unfortunate examples of crony capitalism like Solyndra, General Moters, and these later failures:

Evergreen Energy-Which has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, saying it’s "impossible to maintain operations" due to funding shortfalls. This announcement comes after the company received $5.3 million in "stimulus" funds.

Abound Solar Manufcturing of Longmount, Colorado received a $400 million federal loan and laid off 70% of its workforce in March, 2012.

Amonix Inc.-A manufacturer of solar panels that received $5.9 million from the "stimulus", will lay off about 200 employees only seven months after opening a factory in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s home State of Nevada.

Beacon Power Corp-Sought bankruptcy protection last year after they received a $43 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy.

Ener1 Electric-A car battery manufacturer, filed for bankruptcy last Thursday, three years after receiving a $118.5 million grant from the U.S. government.

The nonprofit Citizens Against Government Waste counts nearly 20 energy companies that have gotten federal loan guarantees or grants that have run into financial trouble ranging from layoffs to losses to bankruptcies. An outside consultant hired by the White House said the Energy Department's loan pool includes $2.7 billion in potentially risky loans and suggests the agency hire a "chief risk officer" to help minimize problems.

To watchdogs, the pattern of firms awarding bonuses only to file for bankruptcy raises questions about how well the Energy Department chose its winners, and how thoroughly it kept an eye on them once selected.

If we are going to see a green economy, perhaps we should see more open and competitive bidding.

Use all of your skills to offset tough economic times

Manufacturing jobs may have left the country but there are still jobs in service industries as well as in creative design occupations.

You can scramble around looking for jobs like you used to have or you can take stock of your skills and assess the opportunities to put them to good use.

Look at the situation as one of potential exchange. Someone needs something done, can you do it and get some worthwhile exchange for it?

If you keep your eyes open for opportunities to help others in some way, you are likely to stumble across an opportunity that you will not find in the want ads.

The other side of the coin is to look at what your former customers are doing now instead of buying products or services from you. Small businesses that are still operating after four years of economic uncertainty have figured out what customers are willing to pay for and have adjusted their product offerings accordingly.

If you do not have useful skills or products that are in demand, perhaps it's time to regroup and figure out what skills and products are needed and wanted and do whatever is necessary to produce what is wanted.

Keep on refining your offerings even when you achieve a measure of stability because we may be in for many years of increasing uncertainty.

Try to develop multiple sources of income.

NRV Livability Initiative consensus process results

We have slides showing the summary results of the NRV Livability Initiative consensus process.

There was useful information collected and many of us made contacts that may open doors to worthwhile discussions. In spite of my earlier concerns, I feel that progress can be made and a plan can be developed that will not ride roughshod over property rights and destroy what we have in Floyd. However, we must participate in every discussion and make sure that our concerns are heard and are duplicated.

The continuing voicing of our concerns about communitarian efforts to collectivise land ownership and institute forced wealth sharing is being heard. The principle speaker, Kevin Byrd, even addressed these concerns in his opening speech. That does not mean that all is well, but it does mean that property rights are recognized as a rallying cry for concerned citizens.

The weak point so far is in the consensus process used to identify goals for the livability Initiative. We all provided inputs but the noise level was so high that the facilitators often did not hear all that was said and some used their own judgment on what to write down.

Another weakness of the consensus method is that our needs did not fall into a neat bell curve distribution. We were from widely disparate environments and some of the regional solutions were ludicrous when applied to Floyd. In fact, my lasting impression is that there are very few REGIONAL solutions that will fit both rural and city needs. I think that planning should incorporate both urban and rural solutions or it will be fought tooth and nail where the solutions degrade an existing and superior environment.

You should take a look at what happens when data collection is not perfect and when average solutions are proposed for vastly different areas. You will need to log in to Facebook to see these photos.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.214715185245158.50987.125693624147315&type=1

I will be posting videos of key portions of this event as soon as possible.

NRV Livibility Initiative poses interesting challenges

Yesterday's kickoff meeting for the NRV Livibility Initiative brought together people with a wide range of interests and hopes for vastly different outcomes as far as the future of life in the New River Valley.

The meeting started with small group discussions of the strength and challenges of our invidiual communities, of the NRV region as a whole. It seemed that many people, including myself, had difficulty in visualizing the region as a whole and as a result it seemed that there was little concensus on what the challenges were for the region as a whole.

Trying to average the needs of a person living in a remote part of Floyd with someone living in downtown Blacksburg produces a result unusable by either.

Solutions are available of course, but my takeaway from this meeting was that a one-size-fits-all solution for any of the nine discussion areas like transportation, housing, water, etc. will meet with determined opposition from the localities that will see their quality of life being degraded by a solution that does not apply to them.

Another challenge faced by the Initiative participants is that in some cases they are trying to hit a moving target. As a community moves from a commuting lifestyle to a telecommuting lifestyle, the need for transportation drops and the demand for faster Internet services escalates. People can move to a rural area for the lifestyle and can still make a living doing what they once did at the office, but now do in their kitchen.

The biggest challengse of all is the ensuring of accurate data collection from group discussions. The volunteer faciltators seemed to have a difficult time hearing and keeping up with the sheer volume of data being provided by attendees. Unless they were really meticulous, this resulted in ideas being truncated or altered from the original ideas agreed upon by the group. A challenge of needing better roads could be summarized as needing public transportation, which is not the same challenge at all.

I was at one table where the facilitators ran good control and everyone was allowed to share their ideas. This resulted in a meeting of minds and lots of useful dialogs ensued.

I was at another table where the facilitator let everyone talk at will. As a result, a few people dominated the conversation. I heard from several sources that other tables where facilitators did not run good control were highly unproductive and were upsetting to many of the people at the table. Instead of a series of dialogs, there were opposing monologues. Additionally, at these tables the facilitators were not able to duplicate what points were being made and the notes they were taking appeared to represent their opinion. not what the participants were saying. This could have also been a result of the high noise level which made ordinary conversations nearly impossible.

These issues of meeting noise level and facilitator skill must be addressed in future meetings or there will be little confidence in the results obtained from these discussions.

All in all, I felt it was a good first effort and with a little more tuning can produce usable results to improve the quality of life in the New River Valley.

My suggestions for improving the process are:

1. Suggest appropriate solutions for unique area requirements. Do not create a general solution that degrades life in a particular area that already has a superior solution.

2. Do whatever is necessary to acquaint planning participants with the unique characteristics of each community in the NRV and what actual challenges and strengths exist in that area. Proposed solutions must fit the needs of the region involved. Avoid lunping together rural and urban areas when the needs are not similar.

3. Obtain facilitators who understand the critical importance of their role and train them to capture the data provided and not filter it in any way. In this way, the results obtained can lead to workable programs if solutions are applied as needed, not because it seems expedient.

4. Organize group discussions so that conversations can be heard. The noise level was so high at times that we could not hear people speaking to us across the table. That was probably a major contributing factor to the errors in data capture.

5. Set conservative targets for discussion times. I think that a few more minutes might have ensured a better result in terms of getting accurate data from the participants.

I am looking forward to participating in future discussions and will be interested is seeing how the NRV Initiative discussions evolve. There is much that can be done and some areas of the NRV change is needed. I would like to make sure that any areas that are happy with their situations do not suffer from imposition of a forced change that will degrade the quality of life in that area.

Do-It-Yourself Wireless Range Extender

Sooner or later you will find yourself needing a way to get a reliable wireless connection  between one part of your house and another such as between your workshop/studio and your living quarters.

After you try the commercial solutions to the problem, I suggest you construct this Do-It-Yourself wireless range extender. Total cost was $8.00 and it allows me to access the Internet through a wireless router that is 200 feet away.

As we add more computers to our arsenal of working gear, it is no longer possible to run CAT 5 cable everywhere you need an internet connection.

If you are like most of us you will try various "wireless range extenders" and will find that most are not worth buying. Some products, like the Linksys Wireless-G Range Expander are so much of a product catastrophe that I had to write a product warning about it.

What does seem to work in many cases is to add a longer antenna to your wireless router. This is a relatively cheap solution and has few drawbacks unless you object to antennas sprouting from the top of cabinets and bookshelves.

This solution only addresses one half of the problem. It does not give you control of the signal strength at the remote computer. When you are trying to reach a wireless router that is 100 feet away in a separate building, you need all the signal gain you can get.
A parabolic reflector can significantly increase the distance over which you can send and receive internet traffic on a wireless link. I came up with a reflector system for $8.00 which allows me to access a wireless router that is 200 feet away and is blocked by trees and undergrowth. The reflector can be attached to a support with the rubber grips and is pointed in the general direction of the wireless router.

The electrical parts of the light socket was removed and the housing was drilled out to receive a .75 inch diameter plastic pipe which was notched to hold the socket end of a USB cable extender. You can see the USB wireless adapter sticking out at the approximate focal point of the reflector.

You can locate the focal point by assembling the reflector and pointing it at the sun. The wireless adaptor should be positioned so that the brightest point falls on the business end of the adaptor. You can make final adjustments by looking at the output of the wireless adaptor management console which will show you the changes on signal strength as you tweak your design and and align the reflector.

You can buy a USB Wireless adapter to give you wireless connectivity for any computer or laptop. Adding a reflector as shown above will give you the extra coverage that can make your life much easier.

Recovering from a hard drive crash

A few days ago, I was working away on a project when my faithful computer make a quiet ..errrrkk! sound and quit.

It was after midnight and I made several attempts to restart the computer, with no success. The system could not even complete a Safe Boot sequence. I quit for the night and spent a restless night trying to figure out how I was going to stretch my budget to buy a replacement computer.

The next day the full reality of my situation hit me. All of my image files and articles were on this particular computer and many applications that were vital to my production of income. I had bought several backup drives but had never set up a real backup system to capture new and revised files on a daily basis. I had been winging it as far as backups and now was having to pay the price.

Google came to the rescue with many helpful suggestions on applications that would rescue files from my damaged hard drive. I chose Disc Doctors because they offer a free evaluation download which would help me decide whether enough data could be recovered to make it worthwhile buying the application.

It was a bargain and I recovered almost 255 Gb of data within two days. If you want to know how it was done, you will need to read the rest of the story.

Maybe it's time to recycle Congress

We started out, as I recall, with a representative form of government which has gradually morphed into an elite group of lawmakers who are no longer accountable to the people who elect them.

For example, our Congress critters vote themselves raises even as the economy tanks because of their inept leadership. These same public servants have a health care system that is not affected by the health care legislation that was voted on today.

In case after case, we find the leadership of the House and Senate buying votes through special deals, funneling money to relatives through contract awards and special tax breaks, and holding closed-door sessions to circumvent established procedures.

I think the problem began with us voters assuming that our representatives would represent our interests and not realizing that once in Washington, DC. our representatives play to a different audience.

Too many Congressmen and Senators have turned a deaf ear to constituent's complaints. Some have even utilized union goons to intimidate voters who asked embarrassing questions. We are seeing a climate of corruption that is getting worse every month.

Even 30 year veterans like Rick Boucher seem indifferent to constituent's questions. Send him an email on a specific measure and you will get a canned response in a month or two with a few platitudes and no specifics.

The dark side of modern technology

Technology allows us to do more in less time than ever before, but there is a price to pay, especially when we try to upgrade a working system to another level of capability. That's when we have to look under the hood and our complacency is often shattered.

I spent the last two days installing a secure wireless network in my home and my workplace. This was not bleeding edge technology because I deliberately chose a two year old model in hopes that the product would be properly sorted out.

I Googled for evidence of problems and found plenty, but most of the complaints were several years old. Recent installations seemed to have gone well, so I chose a TRENDnet wireless router and hoped for the best.

I knew I was in trouble when the Network Wizard software that was shipped with the router failed to recognize the router. This "Network Wizard" was supposed to handle all of the messy details of the installation and couldn't even start. The installation went downhill from there.

I have had root canal procedures that were easier to experience...

I would have much preferred to follow the example of this cat and spend the time snoozing.

Instead, I subjected myself to another "learning experience" which resulted in me working furiously to get a system working instead of having a pleasant weekend with friends and family.

Those of you who are considering adding wireless capability to your home computer network might be interested in what happened. Continue reading after the jump.