Barley + Yeast + Coffee Grounds = Cheap Printing?

Late last year, Diageo announced plans to build a bio-energy power plant hard by Scotland’s Firth of Forth in Fife (say that five times fast).  The plant will be fueled by the organic waste yielded by Diageo’s Cameron Bridge distillery and should supply the supermajority of the steam and electrical power needed to operate the plant.  This is practically perpetual motion (not really, but fun to say).  Diageo produces a dizzying array of “adult beverages” including 46 different blended and single malt whiskies; Guinness, Red Stripe and Windhoek (my favorite Namibian lager) beers; Dom Pérignon; Gilbey’s, Gordon’s and Tanqueray Gins; Captain Morgan Rum; Romana Sambuca; Smirnoff vodkas; José Cuervo tequilas and all kinds of other good stuff to drink. Clearly, with all this boozing, these guys produce a lot of waste that could be converted to energy and it will be interesting to see if this first Scottish experiment spreads across their empire.

Today, an outfit called E-Fuel announced a deal with my favorite pale ale producer, Sierra Nevada Brewing, to install a bunch of their EFuel100 MicroFueler machines in SNB’s Chico, CA brewery (the location where I consumed first glass of their legendary Big Foot Ale).  The machines will be fed all the dead yeast and other gunk found at the bottom of the fermentation tanks after each batch of beer is drained off to be bottled and in turn the MicroFueler’s will make ethanol out of that waste.  Fill a MicroFueler with 200 gallons of goop and get about 35 gallons of ethanol a week later.  The machines do require 110V / 20A power supply and water to produce the ethanol and CO2, so it would be interesting to understand their true efficiency.  Brewer’s yeast isn’t just for breakfast anymore, I guess.  Not sure what SNB is going to do with all the ethanol they make, but it would be cool to roll into the pub attached to the brewery with your 64 oz beer growler and get a little ethanol to go.  It seems E-Fuel will sell you(!) one of these machines for about $10k ($7k after various federal tax credits) and their website promotes the idea of just pumping the ethanol right into your vehicle’s gas tank.  Unless you have an E85 flex fuel vehicle, not sure it would be a good idea to try to mix in ethanol on your own, but it’s a cool idea to have one of these sitting next to the house.  Although they are bright green and I’m not sure my HOA would go for it.

So we’ve pretty much covered green ways to deal with the production waste of two of my favorite things, whiskie and beer.  If only there was something for coffee.  Besides composting.  Or Java Logs (who has a real fireplace these days?).  Enter the RITI printer.  While just a concept, this home printer uses the wet dregs from your morning brew as the “ink”.  Although you can’t plug it into a computer and you have to advance the paper / operate the print stylus by hand (a good notch below dot matrix print quality), it’s an intriguing idea.  Some day.

Maybe in the not so distant future, I’ll have an ethanol-powered electrical generator to run my power hungry home office (including a coffee grounds printer), while sipping on Diageo-powered Long Island Ice Tea.  Maybe the future isn’t so dark after all.  I guess it’s time to write Obama and ask him to toss a few bucks in to the next stimulus package for green drinks initiatives.  What could it hurt?

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Long a fan of telling business “stories” with pictures, I’m always looking for new sources and references for ideas.  One dropped in my lap the other day when a Point B colleague mentioned A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods in a Yammer posting (more to come on Yammer in another post…).  Graeme’s gift prompted me to recollect and revisit Visual Complexity, another longtime favorite of mine.

Was ist das? Eintausend Wörter.

Used in the right way, pictorial presentation of material can communicate far more than a stack of bullet points on a slide.  Which leads me to a visual tool I’m experimenting with: mind mapping.

I’ve been exposed to mind mapping a couple times and it’s nothing new to many folks, but I personally haven’t done much with it. However, it’s picking up steam with many of my colleagues, so I’m giving the Mindjet application a shot as a way to learn about mind mapping.  In many respects, Mindjet is just a different way to collect and organize notes, which is something I do a lot regularly with MS OneNote.  But it’s also interesting in that it does a lot of things you might try to do graphically with MS Visio, but a bit easier.

So I guess it’s sort of a hybrid tool, but it’s really not the tool that interests me.  It’s the mind mapping techniques and other presentation formats like you see on the Periodic Table that I need to spend time learning how to use.  Really not sure where this post is going other than making plugs for PToV and Visual Complexity.  They’re just cool.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Unboxing

I’m a wee bit behind on my posts and can’t believe it’s taken me this long to publish this post which I started on 30.Nov.08.

Julie was due for an upgrade on her personal computing power. As I reached the checkout on Dell.com for her rather snazzy new Dell Studio 1537 (in lime green!), I was offered the opportunity to add a Dell Inspiron Mini 910 netbook to my order.  “How much you pay?”, I asked.  “$173.85 with shipping & handling”, sez Michael Dell and crew.  Sold!  Here’s what came in the cutest little box ever:

• Intel Atom N270 CPU (1.6GHz w/ 512k L2 cache)
• 1GB DDR2 RAM
• 8.9″ Wide Screen WSVGA TL monitor
• 8GB Solid State Drive
• Ubuntu Linux

Make no mistake, this is not your son’s gaming power house PC.  But it runs Ubuntu real nice, goes for hours unplugged, comes with Star Office out-of-the-box and boots up in 42 sec.  Really.  It does.  Honest.  With WiFi, a 10/100 Ethernet NIC, 3 x USB ports and a 15-pin VGA video output, it’s got the basics covered. It is sort of hard for me to touch type on, so I pretty much peck type when I use it during the occassional Saturday morning outing to Starbucks.  My kids like to steal it and check on their Webkinz.  Other than that, I haven’t found too many uses for it.  I think I need to be more purposeful in taking it with me when I run random errands.  If you’ve got ideas on how to use it more, I’m all ears.

So, without further ado, here are the unboxing pics. Enjoy!

Da Box

Da Packing

Da Gadget

2008: A Brief Year in Review

Let’s see.  What happened this year?  Quite a bit actually.

According to my 2008 annual report from Dopplr, I traveled 189,838 km (52% of the distance to the moon) to achieve an average “personal velocity” of 21.8 km/hr over the year.  And that doesn’t count my Nike Training Log totals for 133 runs (572 mi over 81 hrs 31 min).  I spent many, many hours coaching soccer, playing soccer, watching soccer or talking about soccer, but I still love it.  I shut down my business and opened up a new career chapter.  Bought a house, sold a house, then refinanced a house.  Hosted a family reunion for 13 and a Thanksgiving dinner for 13.  Crested 500 business connections in LinkedIn and 170 friends in Facebook.  Watched my investment portfolio crater, then shifted gears to take advantage of the market opportunity.  Grew my MP3 collection to more than 4,300 tracks (with many, many more CDs yet to rip) and converted 722 35mm slides to digital images.  I shoveled, mowed, mulched, weed whacked and leaf blowed a whole bunch.  Posted a rather lame 27 times on this blog.  Gotta do better than every other week in 2009, but not exactly off to a blazing start, am I?  I did fire up rockymtnfuller.com, so that has to count for something.

Anyway, a busy year with another on the way.

Now, I leave you with this: JibJab’s usual irreverent compilation of recent events encapsulated in their short film entitled What a @#$% Year! 2008.

Drambuie Unboxing

Aged Malt Whiskies, Spiced Honey and other Secret Stuff

Over 250 years ago, Captain John Mackinnon helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape from his pursuers on the Isle of Skye. His reward was to be entrusted with the recipe for Drambuie, which has been handed down through the generations and remains a closely guarded secret by the Mackinnon family to this day.

Weel may we a’ be,
Ill may we never see;
Here’s to the King
And the gude companie.

Through good fortune not unlike that bestowed upon John as he rescued Charlie, I received this Christmas a fine bottle of the sweet nectar that is Drambuie.  Truth be told, I asked for it and thusly did receive from my wise older sister Kris.  I am forever in her debt or at least in her debt until I’ve finished the bottle. Shouldn’t take too long.

The New rockymtnfuller.com

After years of procrastinating, I finally registered the rockymtnfuller.com domain.  With a few minutes of painstaking research, I selected the WordPress one-click install from the list of apps GoDaddy.com has available with its hosting packages.  I was already hosting with GoDaddy.com, so easy choice there.   For those familiar with OpenKimono, I’ve been blogging for a couple years now, mostly about  my business, gadgets, soccer and whatever.  RockyMtnFuller is more focused on family, in particular what my daughter’s Grace and Erin are up to as well as my wife Julie’s activities.  Anyway, check it out it if you like.  Or not.

ColderBOLDER08

On Friday I was just minding my own business and wrapping up work for the week when my buddy (we’ll call him… Eric Phipps) busted in on IM and said:

Eric:    I am running colder boulder this weekend.  Are you?
Dave:    nope.  no run for me.  didn’t even know about that.  i could do it though
Eric:    well if you do let me know – were having beers afterqwards probably at lazy dog on pearl streeet mall

What is the ColderBOLDER you ask?  It’s the little brother of the BolderBOULDER 10k.  A 5k race, this run is part of big brother’s race training series.  Normally, the weather this time of year would be pretty chilly thus the Colder moniker, but this morning I found myself sitting at Buchanan’s Coffee Pub staring at gray skies and 52°F at 8am.  Not bad.

The race course runs through and around the perimeter of the University of Colorado at Boulder and, like the 10k, is impeccably organized.  I did a walk in registration with no problem.  The race is run in waves according to your most recent 10k time, so you can go out and shoot for a official PR quite easily.

Now, I haven’t been running a ton lately; 3 days a week around my neighborhood 4.5mi loop plus pick-up soccer on Saturdays when the weather is nice, thus my expectations were for about a 25 min time.  Where did I finish? 21:43.  And I didn’t throw up (but it was close).

Afterwords, I rolled home to observe Julie and the kids trimming our Christmas tree , but that’s another story that’s probably never to be told.

T-Mobile G1 Unboxing

About 6 weeks ago, it was finally time to upgrade Julie’s mobile phone.  She’d been making do with a hand-me-down BlackBerry 8700g, so we looked around and decided to order a T-Mobile G1, also known as the first Googlephone.  After a couple weeks, I couldn’t stand Julie’s shift to the top of our household early adopter rankings and ordered another one to replace my BlackBerry Curve 8320.  I needed a new phone anyway as my Curve had always been a little flaky since I dropped it in the bathtub in Feb’08 (why didn’t I blog about that?  remove cover and battery, rinse in rubbing alcohol, place in a ziplock with some rice, wait for everything to dry out).

Moving away from a BlackBerry was no trivial thing.  I have had four BlackBerry devices since my first one in 2003 (see here for a really good RIM history lesson):

1. The so called BlueBerry 6210, a monochrome device
2. BlackBerry 7100, a color device that debuted the SureType keyboard
3. The aforementioned 8700g
4. The aforementioned Curve (with WiFi and a trackball)

Throughout the years, my dependence on the device has grown.  It’s become a trusted partner in both business and personal affairs.  But, alas, due to the vagaries of exclusive marketing agreements, the new BlackBerry Bold will be exclusive to AT&T Wireless for quite some time and Verizon Wireless will dominate distribution of the BlackBerry Storm. Thus, I decided to take the leap and go for the G1.

So far, I’m really enjoying the device. Powered by Google’s Android open source mobile OS, the device has a touch screen, a real QWERTY keyboard and a trackball for GUI interactions plus it has WiFi, GPS, is 3G-ready and a fantastic screen.  Although Android Marketplace is a far second to Apple’s App Store for the iPhone, I sense momentum is building and I’ve found a few cool apps out there.

The biggest downsides for me so far are the short battery life (daily charges are mandatory) and lack of integration with MS Exchange.  The G1 does come fully integrated to Gmail, Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts and supports generic POP / IMAP access to other mailbox platforms, but there’s nothing really good yet for MS Exchange.  So I’m manually synching contacts using MS Outlook Export and Gmail Import, using Google Calendar Sync for that data and accessing work e-mail via my company’s OWA implementation.  Pretty hack compared to the seamless BlackBerry experience, but I expect the Android Marketplace will come through in the next few months to save me.

So, without further ado, here are the unboxing pics.  Enjoy!

Da Box

Da Packing

Da Gadget

Facebook: 1 Year Later

It’s been a year since I signed up for Facebook so I figured it was time to provide an update.  The Facebook network has a lot of folks I can’t find on LinkedIn, particularly friends from college and high school.  There’s probably an interesting study in there somewhere to see how career paths, areas of the country and other factors influence which network you use or if you use both or none.

Growth of my Facebook network as has also been pretty good: I’ve gone from 0 to 160 friends in 365 days or about one new connection every 2.28 days.  Reasonably rapid given I haven’t really done a lot of trolling around looking for people.  I have also noticed a lot of friends have popped up when I search for my high school or college classes.  A year ago, there was just a handful.  Now there are dozens, so the timing of my joining Facebook seems to have coincided with that of many others.

Other than creating connections, I really don’t do a lot on Facebook.  I have a few applications loaded, but don’t play around with them much.  I’ve found the most basic features (like access to contact info and Groups) the most useful as a huge swath of the applications are really just for killing time.  And when I’m ready to kill time, there’s many other things I’d rather do than issue a SuperPoke or sent virtual cocktails.

Still, if you don’t already have a Facebook profile, give it a whirl.  It’s nice to reconnect with folks to learn where they are and what they are doing.

The Pinnacle of Popularity? Hardly.

It’s been well over 3 years since I joined LinkedIn and I finally reached that magical mark where my profile says “500+ connections”.  From now on, people will just have to just guess about the sheer massivicity of my network since LinkedIn will no longer communicate to the public with any specificity about how many connections I have (currently 507, but who’s counting).  I’m not going to blather on about what a great thing LinkedIn is, etc, etc, since everyone knows what it is / does, but i do find myself on the site at least once a week looking for someone or seeking a connection.

But truth be known, there are many, many contacts on my list that I don’t speak with very often (some never), but it’s surprising how many I bump into at alumni happy hours, soccer games and other accidental encounters around town.  The foundation of my network remains concentrated in Level 3 folks, many of whom are still there or went to work at other companies around Denver, so the odds are good for a chance encounter.

A thanks to one of my Point B colleagues, Jason Hayes, for finally putting me over the mark.