Mumblings

On May 21, the 499 foot tall cooling tower at the Trojan nuclear plant north of Portland will be demolished using more than two thousnad pounds of explosives. Just to give you an idea of how massive this demoliion is, the cooling tower is only a little smaller than the tallest building in Portland. Yet Portland General Electric, which owns the Trojan plant, doesn't want people to come and watch.

I find this very dissapointing; I've been to a number of implosions and each one is a very memorable expirience. I don't understand why PGE is taking such extreme levels of precaution--yes this is a nuclear power plant, however the nearest radioactive material is 900 feet away from the tower, sealed in concrete casks that can withstand collision with a locomotive. The reactor itself is in a concrete burial hundreds of miles up the Columbia River.

My friends and I are trying to find a good spot to watch the demolitions. If anyone has any thoughts on where there are loopholes in PGE's lockdown that would enable a decent sight of the implosion, please tell me. As far as I can tell, the best options are: (a) on the other side of the river from the site, either way up in the hills east of I-5 or (b) right on the river itself or (c) on the same side of the river as the plant, up in the cliffs above (there's a log road that gets you within a mile of the cliff, the rest would be walking). I'm not even sure if the last option would give a good viewing point: it may be wooded in, or the cliffs may be much softer than the maps are showing.

Anyhow, I would really like to see the demolition, so if you have any thoughts, send me a line.

You would be surprised how six tiny squares, no wider than the width of two hairs, could become such an annoying pariah. This Saturday, I opened my aforementioned macbookpro to find that six pixels sat, utterly lifeless at the bottom of my screen, just to the left of the shiny "MacBookPro" label. This adds to another dead pixel in the upper left corner of the screen, but these six are not only right next to eachother, forming a nice big speck on the screen, but they're right in the center of the dock. Grr! I'll be calling AppleCare pretty soon about it. Hopefully they can fix (replace) the screen without having to ship it off to some far away factory for days on end. I would feel naked without it. What's more, I think they might make me back up all my data before I send it to them: which means about five more hours for me.

I have used my MacBookPro (MBP) for the past three weeks and, overall, I am quite satisfied with my experience. Before I get to my problems with the laptop, I would like to highlight some of the really nice features.

1. OS X: On the first day of owning my Mac, I thought to myself, "God what have you gotten yourself into...is that restocking fee worth it?" It took me about two days, from 3 pm to 11 pm to get all my songs, documents and photos from my windows desktop onto the laptop. Thankfully I had my iPod, but that ended up being more of a problem because I ran into several issues with the Auto-update and bad libraries. However, after the first few days were over, I started to get used to the Apple UI and the one-button mouse. Today, I'm much faster on a Mac than I ever was on windows, particularly after I installed quicksilver.
2. Design: Like the iPod, this Apple product is truly gorgeous. Every surface of the exterior feels right: from the smooth plastic case to the size of the speaker holes. I really appreciate the small tolerances this machine is built off of: when I run my finger over the power button, I don't feel it sunken into the body or butting out, it's perfectly level. Oftentimes I find myself inadvertently cleaning small specks of dust off the palm rests or screen--not even a nice car inspires this much affection out of me.

While there are plenty more reasons why this is a good laptop, I'll stop short with those two. I have had some problems with the laptop. Aside from the transitioning problem above, I ran into two other problems.

1. My screensaver preferences panel would crash whenever it was opened. After about a week of this, I brought it into the Applestore and they fixed it by deleting some system files--sweet.
2. Like some other people, my MBP will get very hot after an hour of heavy use. The top fifth of the laptop, where the function keys are sitting, gets pretty painful to the touch. The good thing is that, for me, the bottom is still bearable so I can put it on my lap while wearing shorts. Now, thinking about my physics lessons in thermodynamics, I know that the free moving air will transfer a lot of heat. Just sitting on my desk, the laptop is almost completely surrounded by air. To increase the heat-radiation, I decided to lift the laptop off the desk a few millimeters just so some air could get under there. This should be better than the wood desk, which insulates the heat inside the laptop. Wanting to test this solution, I stacked three quarters on top each other and taped the stack together, to hold it tight. I did this again so I had four stacks of quarters, three quarters thick. Then I placed one stack under each corner of the laptop. From what I can tell, the laptop runs a little cooler, but that might just be my impressions. I can't gage the laptop temperature because Apple has locked that sensor from OS X usage. Bummer. I am thinking of getting a small heat probe and placing it on the laptop, but I'm not sure if that will work either. More on this later.
   

1. MacBookPro
2. Cell phone, with broken front screen.
3. Roll of Scotch tape.
4. TV remote
5. X-Box remote
6. Altoids tin
7. Cordless phone and dock
8. Quarters taped together in stacks of three more on that later...
9. Several sticky note pads
10. USB flashdrive 128MB
11. Red pen
12. Old belt
13. Desk lamp
14. Water glass
15. Overdue bill from Portland State University
16. MacBookPro Remote
17. History Review Sheet
18. Zits comic calander
19. Parts of my MacBook power cable.
20. AppleCare Protection Plan box
21. A spool of CD-R's (half empty)
22. A spool of DVDR's (full)
23. Three CD jewl cases
24. A screen duster
25. Box of Tazo tea (China Green Tea)
26. OSX CD box
27. ProCare pamphlet
28. HP Scanner/Printer
29. USB cable for said printer.
30. Bourne Identity and case
31. Another bill from Portland State University
32. My ballot for Oregon primaries
33. AP physics review sheets.
34. WEP code on a wrinkled piece of paper
35. Transcript of a debate round
36. Another history paper
37. Letter from UChicago (not bill!)
38. PCGamer June 2006 (unread)
39. Mother Jones May-June (partial read)
40. Manila Envelopes
41. A copy of my history research paper.
42. Oh, and a note for my history paper...which is done.

There, that gives me 42, a good number indeed. This ends my little warm-up writing assignment.

Yep Just a little activity