I know quite a few Democrats out there, I’ve lived with some of you, I’ve worked with some of you, I’ve gone to school with some of you. Here we are in an election year, after 8 extremely divisive years, where this country is ready to elect a moderate from either party. On one side we have John McCain a moderate Republican, war hero, electable, yet beatable by the right candidate.

On the other side we have Barack Obama, a young Senator, excellent speaker, no voting record to run away from and very much a moderate, fiscally conservative, socially liberal. And then we have Hillary Clinton. HATED by the right, more skeletons in the closet than clothes and appears to want to continue this left vs right crap and is pretty much unelectable.

And then we have democrats who appear to be just dumb enough to nominate Hillary anyway.  At least if the dems are dumb enough to nominate Hillary and give the Whitehouse to McCain,Obama will be in a great position to run again and likely beat McCain in 4 years just like he could now,  if only democrats weren’t so dumb.

Here we are in an online MBA program full of “adults” where we have homework assignments due each Sunday. Personally I don’t really feel challenged by the program so I usually end up doing the homework Sunday afternoon because I can without too much worry. I could probably do better work and make the program more challenging to myself, by myself but let’s be honest, doing the minimum is just easier.

So we come to this week. It’s an odd enough week with Thanksgiving in the middle of the week and then to top it off, our school decided that this would be a good week to have a group project due. Now as everyone with a brain knows, people travel over long holiday weekends but our school doesn’t seem to understand that. So here I am attempting to finish my “group” project when I’d much rather be testing out the snow up at PCMR after working on it on Thursday morning and spending the last two days hoping someone else in my group would voice an opinion or do something to move the project forward.

I’m pretty tired of this school and the crappy students they let into it.

The New York Times has an interesting article about how Google is working with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) on some plug in Hybrid technology.

Plug in Hybrids allow you to charge up the batteries overnight when power is generally less expensive as opposed to the regular hybrids that only charge via the internal combustion engine. This allows users to get up in the morning to fully charged batteries and run on them for the first bunch of miles. They say thanks to that initial charge they can get 75mpg out of a Prius instead of the usual 50-60. At the same time you’re moving CO₂ production from the less efficient car engine to the more efficient electric plants.

Now what Google has done is lined portions of their parking lots at HQ with solar arrays which could allow employees to plug in their cars to charge the batteries via “free” solar power. If these plug in hybrids take off, we’re starting to look at a world where businesses could find it more cost effective to replace fleets of vehicles with their own plug in hybrid’s and solar panels. It’s a pretty cool world ahead.

Check out the article above for a better explanation.

Someone on Jaiku asked if there was a firefox plugin to post. I thought hmm, I can do that via an opensearch plugin, so here it is.

Linky, Linky.

Save this into your profile’s searchplugins directory, in Windows this is usually C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profile\{random}\searchplugins

So get this… we dropped the car off at the shop this morning for an oil change and inspection.  He asks, “When do you need it back?”  We tell him end of the day is fine.  He tells us they close at 6.  He calls us at 2:30 to say the car’s done.  It’s 7PM and we didn’t pick up the car…. Time to write a note to slide under the door.
Looks like we’re stealing our own car to get home tonight.

Let’s be honest with ourselves shopping for flights sucks. It may even suck and blow at the same time but that’s beyond me, I’m no physicist. There was a New York Times article that’s making the rounds on the internet pointing to a new airline fare tracking site at http://www.farecast.com/. Instead of just telling you what the fares are at this moment they are looking at past rates, looking at trends and tries to predict what rates will do in the near future. Another awesome feature is they will allow you to put in a date and it will check for the best price within 30 days of that date to allow people to say “I want to go to D.C. sometime this summer for a week, when will it be cheap to fly?”

Currently they’re only supporting flights out of Boston and Seattle but hopefully they’ll roll out service in SLC soon.

Edit: I just re-read this and realized it sounds like a big spam post… I really just think it sounds like a great idea.

I know it sounds really sad but I’ve realized just how dependent I am on having internet access. We’ve been completely cut off from the internet at home since Thursday or so, and all last week it was cutting out for hours at a time. It means that Amber and I had to spend some time at the office and Badass Coffee this weekend to get our homework done and posted. The worst thing though was we wanted to go see a movie on Saturday but we had no idea what time anything was playing… it’s odd how dependant we get on having information at our fingertips and then when it’s gone we don’t seem to know anything.

Amber and I spent the weekend in Milwaukee for a wedding. To be honest I was really not looking forward to this trip but it turned out to be a lot of fun.

We flew into Chicago-Midway on Friday and rented a car to drive up to Milwaukee. Toll roads are interesting phenomena; in theory I think they’re great. Those who use the roads pay for the roads, but when you forget that you’re getting on to a toll road and need to scramble for change to pay for the tolls they really suck.

Between the wedding and the reception we had a few hours to burn and since there were about a dozen of us with nothing to do we decided to go take the Miller Brewery tour. It was a free tour with free beer at the end, even if it was crappy Miller products it still doesn’t get any better than that.

On Sunday once everyone got to the airport(s) we headed to Gambill’s to hang out with him for a few hours. We went to his office in the Sears tower. He’s “only” on the 33rd floor but it’s still a heck of a view. We followed that up with a trip down to Millennium Park. It’s a gift to the people of the city of Chicago… bought by the people of Chicago :-). It’s a really nice park with some great features. The artistic center piece is a piece of art known locally as “the bean” which is a giant reflective bean that gives a whole new perspective on the city via its reflection. But stand underneath the sculpture and its reflective surface can definitely cause a bit of disorientation and I know for me at least it threw my equilibrium off for a few hours… but it’s really cool to see.  We followed this up with Pizza at Gino’s East.  MMM pizza.

Monday morning we found ourselves with a couple of hours to burn and ended up going to the Brookfield Zoo.  It’s absolutely HUGE and we saw maybe 1/4 of it.  Highly suggested if you find yourself in the area with a day or two to burn.

So that was our weekend.  Good times all around.