Somewhere out there!

In Beware how you meddle with climate change, Robert Matthews reports on new research that highlights the complexity of environmental science.

This is not a product of trees and plants rotting, which everyone already knew was a source of methane; it is an entirely natural side-effect of plant growth that scientists had somehow missed. Yet it is by no means trivial: preliminary estimates suggest that living trees and plants account for about 10 to 30 per cent of the methane entering the atmosphere.

In fact, evidence pointing to huge holes in the science of atmospheric methane has been circulating for years. In 1998, Nature carried a study showing global increases in methane were mysteriously levelling off. Now it seems that deforestation – that bête noire of the environmentalist movement – may have helped combat the rise of this greenhouse gas.

Everyone knows fossil fuel power stations are hefty producers of CO2 and need urgently to be replaced. Yet they are now also recognised as hefty producers of aerosols – tiny particles in the atmosphere that play a key role in reflecting the sun’s heat back into space.

Nice summary by Matt Vance of Getting Things Done. Link originally from No time to read?

Technorati Tags: books, gtd, review

Back in the polite surfeit calm land of the Brit, I can contemplate the smoky dens of eating and a constant need to argue; just a little bit.

A vegetarian travelling in the modern era usually discovers the most difficult thing is finding a place to eat where the meal beast is not as common as wheat and people don’t have trouble understanding the exact mean of “I eat no meat” (wo bu chi rou). Yes, that means no fish. While in snow-bound Central Europe this time, instead the most difficult thing was the combination of central heating and smoking. Pretty soon just the smell of heat was sufficient to create the feeling of being surrounded by several tables of smokers in a small oily room.

Maybe the essential oil of smoke had embedded itself into my nose hairs.

The best value though, was finding comfort in the joys of my new snow jacket, while discovering the four borders on the midnight bus between Zagreb and Vienna. I guess with the European borders about to move, low-traffic night time is a great time to practice border control computer skills.

Doesn’t help much with sleep though.

Final word on ADSL in Croatia, seems that being owned by Germans and having a monopoly means that only Siemens modems work for DSL in Zagreb. Shame they don’t tell you that at the computer store when you are buying a Netgear Wireless ADSL Router. Instead after several days of trying, phoning, asking and tinkering, you then find a second hand Siemens SE515 that just works.

Maybe New Zealand Telecom isn’t so bad after all.

Got to go for the cakes though!

Technorati Tags: travel, humor, life, zagreb, central-europe

Visiting relatives who cook little cakes is very dangerous at this time of year. So I’ve backtracked five kilos. Maybe I can blame it on a summer/winter weight thing, travelling from summer in NZ to winter in the UK with the accompanying system stock. Regardless its time to follow a plan, I need to find a better system which can deal with a lot of the travelling I’m doing at the moment. Combination of software and a good system. Here are few places to start:

• The Hacker’s Diet
• Losing weight with Gnuplot
• “After I bought my iPAQ, life at the gym became fun!”
• Ball Seating Research

Technorati Tags: cakes, diet, exercise, health

From dirtSimple, Grow your brain with by meditating. Dirt Simple is a pretty cool site, with interesting articles about Mind 1.99 beta.

Also from but she’s a geek, a classification of productivity archetypes in an article about the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and Spy.

The Printable CEO a clever self-management method.

Joining the meme, here is my travel map.

You can create your own here.

An account by a survivor of New Orleans.

The thing that amazes me is people taking TVs when there is nothing to plug them into. I can understand the need for food, water and even clothing. But TVs!?!

I’ve been quite quiet on the blog front recently. A combination of very non-geeky accounting work, being laid up a little by a back strain and running around like a headless chicken completing task lists before I go on a trip.

Anyway Ingram recently had a great deal on IBM R51s, $500 off. So as I’ve been promising my brother, I replaced his R40/C1.6GHz/20Gb/512Mb/DVD/14″ with a spanky new R50 PM1.7GHz/1Gb/60Gb/DVD+RW/15″. The R51 is a great machine, its tempting to me to reverse my earlier iBook decision. Especially since I’m still having trouble finding a decent terminal application in OSX that works with my Linux based 4GL application.

Macrumors is telling me that a new iBook model is due soon, plus Tiger is due some time this month. I figured it was better to use the R40 as my current travel machine. So I did a IBM Access complete HDD wipe and re-install of WinXP (damn that 4 wasted Gb!), shrink the NTFS partition and decided to install Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is the shiznit!

Installs easy, has a sexy login system. It looks tidy and stuff just works. It’s Debian designed from the ground up for the desktop. It still needs some work on making laptop features work out of the box, but that is by accounts on the list. If KDE is prefer the Ubuntu has recent released Kubuntu. KDE is not yet quite as slickly intergrated as Gnome. Still its pretty good. I’ll be posting more as I use Ubuntu.

Auckland has some houses with very nice views. This one for instances at 4/259 Jervois Road.