Solar Energy

Solar energy is the light and heat that reaches the Earth's surface from the Sun. The amount that reaches the Earth's surface is enormous. In 2002, enough solar energy was absorbed by the oceans and land masses in two hours to keep up with our energy needs for a whole year.The problem is, we aren't able to harvest all that, let alone store it. At the moment, most solar panels get about 5-18% efficiency, meaning 95-82% is lost as heat. Thi sounds like a lot, and it is, but that 5-18% is is still a fair bit of energy. Research into more efficient methods is being done by a number of companies. An older technology called luminescent solar concentration is being worked on and it is predicted that after research is done, it will have an efficiency of about 30%.

Here are some pros and cons of solar power

Pros:
        Inexpensive
        No waste products
        Doesn't require a special facility
        Can be used just about anywhere

Cons:
        Generates no power at night
        Delicate
        Not very efficient (yet)

Some funny stuff

These are just some links to funny pictures on the lolcats site.
Trashcat is not amused
Monorail cat
Before thermometer
TORTURE
Failure to launch
I has snow
LOAD!!!
Spring break!!!

That's enough for now, I hope to get some replies, but I have almost never gotten any. So post if you want to!

Just a Little Update, no, really!

Just me giving a little update (no kidding!) about what's going on. I'm almost done with school (I know, late, but i had about 2 hours of P.E. today.) and I'm going to start up Star Sonata, it is time for me to give up at trying to make a good Berserker class character, I'm gonna neuro-doc and go......something. I don't know what to choose yet (here's a list of classes that I'm looking at: Seer, Fleet Commander, and Speed Demon ). So far, I am thinking Fleet Commander. If you have any ideas, just post a reply, bye for today!

More Star Sonata fun!

I have been having a blast with Star Sonata. I have a new ship, called a Serenity, it is a paxian freighter, meaning it looks like a boomerang. This freighter is well tooled for capturing other ships, it can equip 3 weapons, has  over 1000 hull (cargo space), and has massive resistance to damage. Two flaws with it, it is dead slow, and runs out of energy quickly. The speed issue is a little annoying, but the energy issue is solved by fighters, I am currently using bulker light fighters, but hope to upgade to chihuahua light fighers soon. The nice thing about fighters is that they do not change targets, remote controlled "slave" ships will switch targets at weird times, like targeting the fighters of a green battleship when the fight is getting close....... yes, slaves do stupid things. Fighters don't, instead, they stay on target as log as they can. I have almost been nibbled to death by bulker light fighters on 3 occasions in the past. Those little monsters can go really far. Anyways, enough of my silly stories, time for strategies. When entering absolution, DO NOT use a serenity, you have been warned. Also, player-built unforges cannot win against an inferno, period, end of story. Now, many players will say that the best way to make money is capturing and selling infernos, this is a great way to do it, but if you can, capture any serenities you can find. While selling an inferno and all its gear nets you about 10 million credits, selling a serenities main weapon alone gets you just under 10 mil., So capture a serenity, sell all the stuff onboard except the engine and controlbot, then engage the bot and kill it, you cant sell serenities anywhere. Also, Pax Astralogicas can yield some great stuff when killed, like the ultra-rare calypso augmenter. However they can only be killed with surgical weapons, and once it starts running you've basically won. It will simply spin in circles and sometimes warp. I will give you more later, I have other stuff that really needs to get done, I could ramble on all day, but i can't right now. So goodbye for now and blog again tomorrow.

Just Some Around-the-House News

Well, I now have some snapdragons growing in a small pot in my backyard. When they get bigger, I will transplant them to individual pots. At the moment, I have no clue what color each one is, that will be fun to find out. I also plan to plant some cacti soon, once I have more pots to put them in of course. I will get some pictures of the snapdragons once they have grown a bit.

Star Sonata Update

Star Sonata has had it's universe reset. All the galaxies, planets, and bases have been reset. There are some new problems to solve though, for example, I was playing yesterday, in Sol, and all of the sudden, all the bases, wormholes, and ships in stasis were piled up in one place. That was odd. In other news, Sol now has a gate to Juxtaposition! My team has a base not far from sol, and very close to both Underworld and Prism. I just hope that my team does well and I have fun. One of the ships I want to get is called the Mzungu Fluid, I want it because of it's inbuilt secondary energy. This will give me a huge amount of energy to use. It also has 6 weapon slots, which will help me use this energy well. My team's home galaxy has both Paxian AND Bule ruins, these will provide lots of good stuff to aid us.

Argh! Mouse trouble!

My computer's mouse is dying on me. It often double or triple click when I click ONCE. the click flickers when I'm holding the button down. This has lead to a bit of trouble while playing Gmod. Speaking of which, I have a plan in motion to build a floating factory that uses Life Support mod's "powered hoverball", which is a normal hoverball that consumes energy to run, without energy, it shuts down. This means that I will have to find a good way to supply it with power. Solar panels should work fine, but I may need to upgrade to something a bit bigger. Also, I want to build a plane that uses no thrusters or hoverballs (which can be targeted easily) and instead uses a device called a "laser thruster". Here is a good video of the laser thruster (not by me) : Here. These are a bit difficult to use, but are quite strong. They also cannot be targeted, making it very hard to shoot a homing weapon at a plane made with these. In other news, Star Sonata is going to reset tomorrow, all galaxies are going to change, making for a fun time re-mapping. I hope that I dont find This place near low-level warps. I will let you know if I do sometime.

Well, I found QUITE a cool Star Sonata ship

In Star Sonata, I found an amazingly rare ship, 2 of them actually. One is called a Jujuso'rka, it is a ship built by a race known as the Urqa. The other is called a "Battle sphere" a ship so rare, there are less than 10 in the game (as far as I am aware). This picture has both of these ships, me, and an AI ship called "The Guardian of the Lyceum". The picture is a bit small, but the guardian is EASY to spot, it's the big disk on the left. The green ship is my Earth Force Frigate, the red ship is the Jujuso'rka, and the battle sphere is the big, black and white sphere on the right. The Jujoso'rka is a bit harder to spot, it is dark red, and somewhat small. It is my hope to someday have a Jujuso'rka of my own. The Battle sphere has no engine, and must be towed around using a tractor beam, making it dependent upon other people. You might ask "What is that blue ring around the battle sphere?" Well, it is a cloaking device, meant to make it harder to spot, but the Battle sphere has such a high visibility rating that I can see it with ease. I will get other pictures of cool ships and the like posted sometime (I hope!).

Almost forgot

Almost forgot to blog about this, but a few weeks after Kiko died, back in April, we got a new puppy who we named Jasper. (I can't believe I forgot about blogger that long.) He is a little ball of pure voom, and when we got him, he was so small, I could carry him up the stairs with ease, now, he's a very big, very energetic, and a very destructive puppy. He has managed to tear up a toy cow (made of canvas), a fire hose toy (made of actual fire hose), and several around-the house items, including a kiddie pool that we got for him to play in. He tore a large gash out of the side and we found bits of blue plastic in his poo a while later. Last night, he got a hold of his poop bag dispenser, broke it apart and shredded all the blue poop bags in the backyard.

Jasper is almost always hungry, wanting lots of treats and food. He's already starting to get fat, despite the crazy fast runs he goes on at the dog park. He's currently sleeping on my Mom's bed, worn out from being all zoom-zoom earlier today,and I hope he doesn't get to energetic today, I don't want him getting anyone mad.

Long time no post. Now onto a good game I found.

Man its been a while since I posted..... Oh well, here's a good online game I found. It's called "Star Sonata" and it's a very cool game. You basically fly around in a ship, trading, fighting , and making teams. Now this may not sound very good, but believe me, it is awesome. My brother is probably going to post something about how much it stinks, but he's just biased. If you have ever played Maelstrom or Asteroids, you'll have less trouble changing course when moving in this game, because it's in SPACE, you don't stop moving when you turn your engines off, duh. You'd be surprised how many space games mess that one up. One of the cool things in this game is that if you buy so-and-so item, you can only use it if you have N tech level in it's respective skill. One thing about this game is that you don't get to see EVERY player in the area, you only get to see the ones that your radar is good enough to spot. This is decided not only by your radar's stats, but also by the other person's visibility, the higher your visibility, or vis for short, the easier it is for people to spot you. Another important aspect is augmenters. These are permanent bonuses that you can equip to your ship. A ship can only equip augmenters that are equal or lower tech than the ship's tech level. So a basic augmenter (Tech 5) can only be equipped to a tech 5 or higher ship. One really interesting ship is the "Unforge." It can equip only one augmenter and gets no weapons, and takes double damage from heat-based weapons. The main advantage of this ship... it can store 2,000 units of cargo and takes 1/20th damage from everything but heat damage. Still, it is not very popular because of its speed and the fact that other ships can go faster, hold more, and actually shoot back when attacked. I have built a stealth ship using a "Kasper", a generic UFO, this ship is very hard to use, because there is no defined "front" it is a disk, one part is the front, good luck. This stealth ship is visibility 2, most ENGINES are vis 90 when running. this thing is vis 2 when the engine is off, 7 when its on. Every once in a while, the universe is reset and all bases, NPCs, and players go with it. One thing that doesn't go is docked ships, these will appear at the first station you dock in in the new universe. One galaxy, called lunacy, has a station named the asylum, the asylum used to buy the paxian ship called a serenity for amazing prices, because the station is orbiting SO fast, no serenity could reach docking speed with it. Some people found a way around this. They captured as many serenities as they could and then, when the universe reset, they made sure the first station they docked at was the asylum, then their serenities all appeared there and they sold them for a fortune. Shortly thereafter, the admins removed the amazing price on serenities. Now, when I talk about a ship called a "serenity" you might think of the show Serenity and the movie Firefly, well, the look nothing alike. The serenity from Star Sonata is a black, boomerang-shaped freighter. THE most dangerous AI team in the game is called "Grubbies" it consists of space termites. A space termite mound, if left unchecked, can destroy every living thing in a galaxy, bases, players, and other AI ships. The second most dangerous AI team is "Dark Commerce". They are everywhere, they are amazingly powerful, and attacking one of them can get you booted off some player teams they're so nasty. I will post some pictures later today (I hope!) of me playing, to show you some cool stuff.

A Memorial to Kiko

Yesterday, we had to euthanize our dog Kiko. A disk in his back had slipped and pinched a nerve in his spinal cord. Because of this, his hindquarters were paralyzed. He had to be euthanized because he would never recover. Kiko was our loving friend for nine years, and we will always miss him. When we first got him, he was just a puppy, and his ears were to large for his head. He didn't really perk up about a name until mom suggested Kiko. When we lived in Boise, he would sometimes want out really bad, and in his rush to get out, he would run into the sliding glass door. He did the same thing with the screen door in our current house. In our Genesee house, he had a lot of fun just going on walks around town and meeting other dogs. He still had fun in Sahuarita, but he only got a few walks. While we were in Sahuarita, he kept trying to sniff cacti on our walks, one day, he got to. It was a barrel cactus with long, hooked spines in addition to the normal ones. One of the spines caught in his nose and he yanked away, cutting his nose, we got the bleeding under control soon enough though. Even after this, he still tried to sniff half the cacti along the road during our walks. Kiko always loved snow, and romped in it at every opportunity. His birthday was October the thirty-first, Halloween, and his best present was meeting all sorts of new people and learning new smells. Every Christmas, we would hang up a stocking just for him, and it would be stuffed with goodies every time. Every Independence Day, he would get scared of the firework noises and run to hide, oftentimes under my mom's desk. He would never bite us, or hurt us, intentionally, and we always played together during the day. He was a funny, fuzzy friend whose death has left a hole in our lives. We will miss him forever.

Had a Fun Tour of a Copper Mine Yesteday

Yesterday, my family and I, excluding my dad since he was at work, went on a tour of a large copper mine. The first thing we did is wait for a tour bus to arrive, since we missed the first one while getting gas. While we waited, we looked around the gift shop and found that they had a lot of copper-based goodies. When the bus arrived, we got on as soon as we could, hoping to see the mine. The bus left shortly after everyone was aboard. The guide told everyone about a herd of wild horses that roams the area, though they never showed up. This was understandable, seeing as they have hundreds of acres to run around in. As we passed the mine, our tour guide explained the basic process of mining, but he did not go into specifics yet, that was to come later. When we reached the top of the mine, we were looking over an immense, tiered, pit that was several miles across in either direction and very deep. That day it was quite windy, so we did not stay very long (don't worry, there was a high fence). While we were there, we saw several of the mine's 320-ton dump trucks and the machines they use to scoop up large piles of dirt to load into the dump trucks. The scoops required huge amounts of power, but did not have any engines, instead, they were connected to the mine's power grid by miles of 4-5 inch thick power cable. When we got back into the bus and drove back down to the main building, we actually got to go inside and see the inner workings of the refinery. First was the SAG mill, which takes rocks that are 8 inches or smaller and breaks them up into rocks that are 5 inches or smaller. Then the rocks are sent to the ball mill, where 8 pound and 18 pound steel balls grind them into powder. Then they are sent to a tank the combines the powder with water, pine oil, and a few other chemicals and then the mix is agitated. The chemicals and pine oil cause the copper to attach to the bubbles in the water, which then rise to the surface. the copper-coated bubbles are then skimmed off and all the added materials are separated. The resulting copped is called copper concentrate, and is about 28% pure copper. This is later melted down and formed in anodes which are then transported to a different location for smelting, after which the copper is about 99% pure and usable. The whole trip was quite enjoyable.

My New Pet

Yesterday, I got A new pet. A male Leopard Gecko, to be precise. He is yet to be named (if you have any ideas, please let me know in a review). He is an active, happy gecko and he is really cute. As with most geckos, he is nocturnal and sleeps a lot during the day (particularly during the morning). So far he has eaten 2 crickets, with 2 more still running around in his tank. If you have any comments, fell free to post, especially about a name for him. I'll blog again soon (I hope).

P.S. My experiment went well. The bowl with fresh pineapple stayed liquid while the other two gelled properly.

Today's Science Experiment

Today, I have an science experiment that is currently in progress. In this experiment, I had to grind up fresh pineapple and put 1 tablespoon in a bowl. Then I cooked the rest of the ground pineapple on the stove and put 1 tablespoon of that in another bowl. 1 bowl had nothing in it. Then my mom made jello and put the mix in the three bowls. Then we refrigerated it and are waiting for it to be ready. In case you haven't already guessed, this experiment is about enzymes. I will post the results tomorrow.

A cool LEGO site

If your interested in complex LEGO builds, you should go to www.mocpages.com. It is a website where you can look at LEGO figures made by other people and even show your own. If you have the right LEGO pieces, you can even build the things you see. I particularly like this one. If you like a particular one, post the link in your reply(if you want).

My First 3-Axis Gmod Turret

Yesterday, I made my very first 3-axis turret in Garry's Mod. This means it can aim up and down. This turret is far better than my turret-on-a-stick because it can target properly no matter what angle it is at. Because of this, it can be mounted on the walls, floor, or ceiling and still work right. The only weakness of these turrets is that they always aim a little bit low, meaning that they have a hard time with thing that are low to the ground.

I have also gotten "Gcombat", a mod for Garry's Mod that incorporates several new weapons and a new damage calculation system. These new weapons can destroy props. I have built several 3-axis turrets using these weapons and most of them worked well. Unfortunately, I am yet to build a death ray turret because the death ray is to large. I hope to correct this problem soon an I also hope to post a video of my turrets in action.

Ruined Plans

Yesterday, my family and I were planning to go play mini golf at a local club. That morning it rained... hard. The rainfall messed up everything. Why must the weather bother me as well as time and cooperation?

Also, today has gone quite well. I got up at 7 this morning (First time since we moved in!) and I have already completed my school and done the dishes. I am having a great day and I hope to play soon. If you stop by to read this, please comment and let me know... it seems like no-one's there. Well, have a nice day. I'll try to post again tomorrow, as always.

Hello Again!

Hello and good its to be blogging again. It has been over a month since I last blogged. So far our computers are almost ready and most of our stuff is unpacked. I just found out my slippers are falling apart... great. Yesterday I flattened my bike tires on a bunch of Goat heads (thorny stickers) by accident... wonderful. We may have made progress at unpacking but there is still an ocean of stuff to go. I hope you readers are having a good time. I'll blog again on Monday.

Some Hilarious Videos

Yesterday, I found some absolutely insane videos on YouTube. It is a series called "Is It A Good Idea To Microwave This?" in which, the host puts things in a microwave that shouldn't be put in a microwave. That guy is crazy, he is on his seventh microwave as of now. Some of the things he has put in a microwave are: light bulbs, soap, liquid soap, lighters, a lava lamp, 2 furbies, eggs, fireworks (those killed his fifth microwave), bubble gum, ping pong balls (they did something really weird), canned spam (still sealed), CDs, a snowglobe, and even IPods. Check them out!

Brisingr Reviewed

Last night, I finished reading "Brisingr" the third book in Christopher Paolini's "Inheritance" series. This book is amazing. It is so good that I don't even want to give away any spoilers. I will tell you a few things. But first off, you need to understand the first two books "Eragon" and "Eldest". If you have not read these, you will not understand these (little) spoilers.

(spoiler)(spoiler)(spoiler) This book begins where Eldest left off. The first thing of importance that happens is that Eragon is sent to Farthen Dur in order to help speed up the process of selecting a new king there. Near the middle of the book, Eragon is told the source of Galbatorix's power. Near the end, Eragon does again what he did with Durza. About 3/4 of the way through the book Eragon gets a new rider sword.