Seems like TXU’s pro-coal citizens flak is a bit weak

Compare this list with the dozens of member cities, plus member counties and school districts, in the Coalition of Clean Air Cities.

Hey, I’ve got news for you folks in and around Fairfield. If TXU builds the same, or about the same number, of power plants, only cleaner burning ones, they’ll still be building in your neck of the woods.

As for coal-related jobs, all the coal they’re going to burn will come from Wyoming, anyway, so not one new Texas lignite miner will be hired. Period.

Will the first person inside TXU to actually tell the truth about all of this please raise your hand?

An open note to Carol and south Lancaster residents

If it’s true that Tommy Tompkins and Steve Topletz are busy thinking of “The Preserve II,” or “Hank Haney South,” or whatever they might call it, here’s two words of advice: Be proactive.

Draft a list of minimum requirements for such a development well in advance of it ever being officially presented to the city. Get it published somewhere, if you can. (Sorry that I can’t help you; try Marlon over at the Focus, or the Lancaster insert page of news in DeSoto Today.)

Carol, as mayor pro tem, and knowing that Headen will at least be listening to your views on development now, say that you’ll vote to dismiss with prejudice anything tha doesn’t at least meet these standards.

Feel free to call a southside town hall meeting to brainstorm what all should be on such a “minimum standards list.” Couldn’t hurt your re-election campaign to rally your supporters by having them be at such a meeting, either.

Ten Mile Crook: Great post on Lancaster development issues

“The Kid” has some good comments on how development problems have spread beyond housing itself. He specifically mentions housing quality, vs. quantity, and school district growth rates, as among the problems.

Here's what I posted in reply:

You're absolutely right on how uncontrolled growth has affected the school district.

Strange, a lot of ppl associated with Lewis, or the Ed Foundation, or whatever, were city bigwigs back in the late 1990s already.

As I've said, on things like design standards, not just house and lot sizes, these ppl let the city get at least one development code out of date.

If that hadn't happened, the school district wouldn't still supposedly be one bond issue out of date. (Of course, you have to get something built right, too.)

And, above all, a commercial real estate agent, and a residential one, who can remain nameless but everybody knows them on Town Square, should have known better about design standards as well as house and lot sizes.

Of course, if that affects your property values, or your wheeling and dealing ...

'Nuff said for now.

Another Mac OS X gripe: Stickies

I loved the Stickies program in OS 9. Windows had and has nothing like that.

For those of you unfamiliar with Stickies, it’s a program to create computer desktop notes that look just like Post-It Notes. You had half a dozen colors to use, several different fonts, etc.

WHY couldn’t Steve Jobs have something like this with OS X? At least with the version I have here at work?

Peak Oil’s hit on transportation and free trade: some specifics

Just how will a worldwide peak in oil production affect Wal-Mart’s “just in time” delivery system? What’s it mean for the global economy? And how can more localized economies develop in response?

To the degree there are answers, or at least suggestions for direction, they’re right here.

Here’s a sampling of what could be in store:

In the 1960s transportation accounted for about 23 percent of all energy expended in the USA — now the figure is approaching 28 percent. …

I currently reside in Wisconsin. To eat local is cheese curds, fried fish and venison. All these things can be bought (or harvested) locally. But the cheese company gets milk transported from around the state, uses packaging made overseas from natural gas. Its employees drive to work using cars made in Japan and oil from Nigeria and eat food imported from Brazil. Although the dairy farmers themselves use largely local inputs for feed and bedding, their milk buckets are made from steel processed in China, and the wood for the barn comes from a mill in Canada. It is not easy to decipher the ’localness’ of a product, unless one walks out and picks a wild mushroom. Use your mind however to imagine WHAT IF oil doubles triples or more in price, what sort of domino effects might occur in the production supply lines. …

High quality and abundant oil has obfuscated the difference between wants and needs. At a Walmart or a Safeway, young people today see quilted bathroom tissue, pork chops, colorful shoes, dental floss, and avocados as a natural smorgasbord, without internalizing the complex energy/trade chain that put them there. …

As a thought experiment, the next time you go to your nearest box store, look at the gazillion products on display. Try to imagine where they come from, where their parts come from, and how that supply chain might change when new oil production fails to match decline rates of older wells. While you are there, you might notice how many of the myriad products improve yours or your friends’ lives, and how many do not.

It’s a long post in full, but well worth reading, if you’ve heard anything at all about Peak Oil.

NOT impressed with OS X

And no, this has nothing to do with my emotional state, or where I do or do not want to be.

After seven work days with OS X, I say: What’s the big deal, other than another brilliant marketing job by Steve Jobs?

Here, I’ve had problems with both Quark 6.5 and Photoshop CS2.

Sometimes on Quark, if I’ve done an Apple-A/Select All on text, and changed tracking, etc., and then need to make further changes, Quark doesn’t want to do anything unless I first save.

Photoshop? Pics seem slow to open, compared to Photoshop 7 on Mac OS 9.2, my reference point. Commands also seem slow.

If it were just Quark, with its quirks, doing this, I’d say it was a Quark problem.

But, two programs, and two of the “creative” programs that are supposed to run so well on Macs vs. PCs? Nope, that’s an OS problem, not a program problem.

Plus, I was trying to find a file, a Word doc, by body copy content. The search parameters are different, and I don’t know if the server here automatically indexes or not. (Up at Today, I couldn’t search docs on the server by body copy content because it wasn’t set to auto-index.) Well, here, after I launched the search, I wasn’t given an error message to that effect (the server here is on OS 9, while we work on OS X), and so I expected a result or results to be spit out soon enough.

Wrong. Ninety minutes later, my computer is still spinning search wheels.

Is Microslob still behind Mac in some ways? Yes, no doubt about it.

But, has the gap closed in the last few years? Absolutely.

On the Windows side, the “jump” from 2000 to XP was significantly more, IMO, than the Mac jump from OS 9 to OS X. Again, mark Steve Jobs as master salesman and spinmeister first, true innovator second. The iPhone and Apple TV should show that to anybody.