bsod’s braindumps

Rita made landfall

Well, Rita is now on land, and hit Port Arthur like expected. It looks good. This is not an extreme killer, but still a hurricane. According to CNN weather, it’s gonna move slow over land, and dump shitloads of rain for several days.

Rita Hurricane

Rita seems to bend a little away from Houston and more to the direction of New Orleans. Oh well. At least it’s not a cat 5 anymore. Probably a cat 3 when it makes landfall. Probably Rita will make landfall somewhere West of New Orleans, but as we all know, the brunt of the rain is to the East of a hurricane. One of the levees in New Orleans appears to have been breached again, at Ninth Ward.

Oh, and by the way, I heard of $6 gasoline prices in the U.S. somewhere. Prolly somewhere in the coastal area between Galveston and New Orleans, I don’t remember.

If it’s gonna landfall at Port Arthur, which is on the Texan-Louisiana border, it would be bearable. The area East of Port Arthur to New Orleans, say South of the Interstate 10 looks like good coast that can take a punch. It looks sparsly populated aswell. If Rita is gonna hit Port Arthur head-on, I don’t wanna be there. It’s again a city build near a lake. The ground where it’s built on does not look particularly elevated, but I’ts probably not below sea level. But a storm surge from lake Sabine will prolly hit the first few blocks built right next to it (There is something that looks like a long stretch of land between most of the city and lake Sabine. Geez, they even have a city called Nederland (Netherlands) conglomerated to Port Arthur.

My uneducated guess however is that its gonna landfall a little to the East of Port Arthur. We’ll see. The whole area remains Tornado Area ofcourse. West of Port Arthur it looks like a shitload of rain is on the radar. We’ll see how Houston/Galveston manage.

Sources : wikipedia on Rita

Peak Oil and Human Nature

There has been a lot of talk about Peak Oil, and what impact it might or might not have and so forth. As we all know, prices are high. In the U.S., you pay about $3 a gallon, and in the Netherlands around $6, as I’ve said before. So from my point of view, gasoline is cheap in the U.S. and cheap stuff gets wasted. As I’ve understood from various people, $3 is already ‘impossibly high’. $6 would put people out of business, and so forth.

What is Oil? Oil is stuff that converts into economic activity. So the question is: How efficent do you use one barrel to generate a certain amount of economic activity? If you increase efficency you can do more with one barrel, so you don’t get as hit as hard by high oil prices. Simple. There is really nothing governements should or can do to influence oil prices on the international markets. The stuff gets expensive, you need to increase efficency.

I don’t think we’re gonna hit Peak Oil in the next few years. If you just take into account the wonders of technology done in the oil industry, the rate of innovation of it, you can be sure that newly found oil will be exploitable, especially if you’re talking about a, say, $75 a barrel market value. So no disasters anytime soon. Ofcourse, we’re gonna hit it at some point. Ofcourse I can’t see in the future and say when it’s going to happen, I simply don’t have the data required to make such a prediction, and I’m not an economist either.

So what do we do when the oil runs out, I get as question. Well, I think the whole question shows a wrong attitude, namely to nothing until it runs out, and live by the day. You have to want to adress the other problems of fossil fuel burning, the carbondioxide dumped into the atmosphere causing the greenhouse effect. For reasonable beings, humans tend to be surprisingly egoistic, self-destructive, greedy and all that jazz. They are basically animals. Men are stupid because they all want to be dominant over other males, and women are stupid because they want children. Note a slight over-generalization in the previous sentence. Yup, I’m male Do I think mankind will change to a more positive species? Perhaps, but not this century. I will not live to see it

Okay, why saying all this? It’s simple, we humans are a too successful species. We are a plague. If half the human population would die, say, and the rest would spend time thinking before going for profit, power and children, the situation would be much better in terms of long-term survival of the remainder of mankind. But I’m confident a natural correction to the human plaque will come, so don’t worry You can’t just waste a finite resource and get away with it.

Or can we? Perhaps some new wonderful technology will give us heaps of energy to waste and everybody will be happy and no collapse will occur. Who knows. We’ve made wonderful progress the last centuries, and oil has been good for us. Perhaps as a final gift, it will enable us to discover and develop new sources of energy that could keep us going for a while.

OpenGL support under Windows Vista

I don’t suppose that there is anybody able to explain why I can insert my Microsoft Expensive(TM) OEM Windows XP(R) CD’s and actually get OpenGL 1.5 by default, and why Windows Vista will only support OpenGL 1.3? This is simply an act of purposly withdrawing an open API for commercial reasons only.

Microsoft wants graphics programmers to use the DirectX API, for reasons beyond my comprehension. And I don’t like it one bit, because to support both DirectX and OpenGL, you need an extra layer of wrapper-code. Code that I don’t want to write/maintain/debug. An infinite amount of monkeys would not suffice to generate the random garbage required by Redmont to just write a program that says ‘hello’.

I’m pissed about politics sometime

The title says it all. I’m talking about fear. My statement of the day is: “I’m afraid and that’s normal”. I read in the paper today that the American government asked for emergency food from European countries, so millions of military rations where made ready. Next, they refuse these rations because of fear they might be contaminated with mad cow disease virus.

I’ve made no secret about the fact that Bush was a major disaster for America, from day one he went into office, but he really starts to annoy me now. Well, okay, he annoyed me from day one, too. I basically hate this guy, that’s probably a better way to put it. He rules by the virtue of ControlOfTheMedia, support from BigMoney, and his BlessedChristianVirtues. Add to this downright FearInThePopulation and a nice touch of Patriotism (don’t trust anybody but americans, everybody is against us, and more of that crap).

And he has the fucking nerve to talk about ‘Old Europe’. Jesus christ. Everything he stands for, and every technique he uses comes from an stone age long long long gone. His ideas and philosophy have nothing to do with a normal, free, equal and just society. And the bastard will probably use all that is in his power to make his Ideals (read ‘problems’) as long term possible by changing the power structures in the US government as permanent as ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ allows.

I’m sorry I have to write this at Sept. 11. I have nothing against the Americans, everybody who knows me, knows this.

Clijsters vs. Pierce

Alright, it’s the first set, Kim is doing fine, going for the set. The whole happy event is on eurosport, and a life discussion is going on at http://www.kimclijsters.be/. Set point as I type. First one gone… pfff… YES! pierce hits out.

Second set: Kim has the first service game, and she does extremly well… Looks good, takes the chances to hit winners. Her serve is just great to watch Okay, break against pierce, its 2-0 now. Love-game for Kim… 3-0. oh man….

She’s gonna win, I’m soooo sure of it. Pierce is not doing well, I must admit, but Kim is just playing very well, and that’s why she’s gonna win.

3-1. Piece made good points. Next, Kim to serve. An ACE yay. and another strong game for Kim, its 4-1 now.

I’m enjoying this with another one of those great Belgium pleasures, Duvel (http://www.duvel.be/)

Poor Pierce, she’s faced with another double break in her game… Okay!!! 5-1 yayayay… ONE game away from the championship, Kim to serve!! She gets the first point… 3 to go.. bleh 15-15. ACE. 30-15. Long rally… great… she lost the point however. 30-30. Bleh??? Double fault, break opportunity for Pierce. *sigh* Deuce. bleh, in the net. Advantage Pierce. C’mon Kim! ahhhhh ACE:) yay thanks Kim:) now finish the thing please. ADVANTAGE KIM…. match point match point …….. arghhhhh noo, ‘the ball is out’.

Okay, matchpoint #2… now do it, win win yayayayaya!!!!

GRAND SLAM for Kim Clijsters

awwright, this has been fun. Go Kim!

xxx

Latest on Katrina aftermath

I’m getting the impression that things are getting done, despite of the news about anarchy in New Orleans. I suspect this anarchy to go on for a while, but main issue is that people are being tranferred away from the affected area. It’s gonna improve, i’m sure of it. This is a terrible disaster, and it’s very big. But every day, personell and material keeps coming in. At some point, the situation will ‘tip over’ to the good side. Until that happens, we will keep hearing hysteric news reports from CNN.

The exact hit of Katrina was, according to MSNBC: ‘a 30 ft. (9 meter) storm surge came ashore wiping out 90% of buildings along the Biloxi-Gulfport coastline.’ According to wikipedia: ‘On August 29 the system made landfall as a strong Category 4 hurricane at 6:15 a.m. CDT near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana with maximum sustained winds of 145 mph (235 km/h).’

I’m kinda expecting Tess to be without power, cuz there are reports of blackouts in the Buffalo and Rochester (NY) area. She lives somewhere between Jamestown and Chautauqua Lake, a bit to the south, but in Katrina’s path.

Update: yay, Tess tried to initiate a chat at 05:30 with me, I was sleeping at that time, but this indicates that she’s got power and that everything is okay.

Yay it’s my birthday!

Okay, everybody rejoice cuz Bert has his birthday today. ‘Happy birthday, Bert’. ‘Thank you’

Hurricane Katrina Aftermath

Okay, with the situation stable now, it looks like anarchy has broken out in parts of New Orleans. Shots have been fired at a Chenook Helicopter. Incredible, but true. It looks like survivors are going to use guns to survive. They should not be in this city anyway. The evacuation of the superdome to the astrodome (Houston, Texas) has been halted for the moment because of this. This is however unconfirmed, and other reports say that the busses are still being filled and on the move. Thousands of deaths are being feared. A problem will probably become the diseases from these bodies, and over the whole of the US there are spiking petrol prices. In Holland a petrol is priced around $6/gallon, in the US it’s around $3. Around 20% of the refineries for the total of the US are out.

Hardest hit: Alabama: Mobile; Mississipi: Biloxi, Gulfport; Louisiana: New Orleans;

Basically everything below Interstate 10 between Mobile and New Orleans. I suppose Katrina made landfall somewhere west from Biloxi, which is basically ‘reduced to rubble’. In the Gulf itself around 20 oil platforms are ‘missing’.

Most major problems: No basic facilities like drinking water, food, petrol, electricity, communication. Looting occurs mainly for food and life essentials, according to the looters themselves. It won’t be long before these supplies are all done for. And then… what?

Update: Okay, I listened to a presentation from a military guy, who was actually the first who made sense to me. Looks like they will gain control of the situation today or tomorrow, at the latest.

Sources: WSDU, WWLTV.