Jeff Pinard has written an outstanding guide to Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar that you absolutely should check out:

Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar Complete Guide

In a recent article, I talked about how Ethanol is not a solution to our energy needs. It's not "green" by any rational sense of the word and it's not practical and it's expensive.

I get a lot of email and this article produced more than its fair share as proponents of bio-diesel, solar, wind, and so forth got into the act.  A lot of the emails had a central theme "So what's YOUR solution then???"

There is no easy solution.  A lot of solutions involve replacing one environmental problem with another. Nova had an interesting show this week called "Saved by the Sun".  It is a pretty one-sided but informative piece on how solar power might be part of our solution.

I think that 50 years from now, solar power will be a major source of our energy. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that within 50 years that a third of our energy comes from solar power.  But it's not ready for prime time, not even close.

Germany is working hard to get a significant chunk of their energy needs from solar power. I wish them well. But I don't think their approach would work in the United States (nor would I want it).  Let me be clear: I do not support wiping out huge swaths of natural habitats casually.  And many of the "renewable energy" solutions propose just that. 

The largest solar-based power plant in the United States does a piddly 80MW of power output and is larger than central park.  That's a lot of space used up.  To put that number in perspective, the crummy old Fermi nuclear power plant in Michigan has a NET capacity of 1,110MW and uses a lot less space.  Newer ones could do much more in less space (Fermi is over 40 years old). 

According to their stats, the solar plant uses over 1,000 acres of land to provide 0.45% of California's electrical needs.  To produce enough for California's electrical needs, a field that is 350 square miles would be needed. By contract, the area needed for ANWR drilling is 3 square miles. 1/100th as much and that area isn't even contiguous (which amazingly environmentalists argue is a "bad" thing).

In other words, environmentalists will happily let 350 square miles of wilderness be wiped out for solar power but freak out about 3 square miles for drilling in the wilderness in the middle of nowhere. 

Someone who says that solar power will get much better is correct -- it will get better.  But even at 100% efficiency (which isn't ever going to happen) you're still talking maybe 400MW for that same space. 

In short, solar power plants aren't the solution either.   But they may not need to be for solar to take off.

Instead, what I see happening is that building materials will be made of solar powering properties.  The paint for your house or a spray for your roof might quickly turn your house into a self-sufficient structure.  Not enough sun? No problem. There's solutions for that too.

So while I don't see solar power becoming a major solution through putting tacky, maintenance intensive, habitat destroying, expensive solar panels on the side of highways like they're doing in Germany, I do see a bright future for solar power.  It's just a matter of how long it will take to become practical.

And when that comes, you will see a drastic reduction in power requirements. Combine a largely energy-independent home with a plug-in hybrid and you've reduced nearly 80% of the CO2 (if you're one of those people sweating that) and reduced our "impact" on the planet drastically.

In the meantime, I hope to eventually install some solar panels of some kind onto the roof of our office if I can keep the geese away from them and design my next home to make use of solar power.  I think solar power has made it over the big curve and is starting to become increasingly practical at an accelerated rate.  We'll see.

The Object Desktop 2008 preview is now publicly available.  Get a sneak peek of what Stardock has in mind to take Windows XP and Windows Vista to the next level on the link below.

In the past year or so we've seen more and more people jump onto the Ethanol bandwagon.  After learning more about it (and it doesn't take very long to do some basic research) I've concluded that Ethanol advocates are idiots.  Let me be very clear: If you think Ethanol is a serious alternative fuel you either haven't researched it at all or you are too dumb to be expressing opinions.

It's actually difficult to find a "plus" to Ethanol.  I guess, in theory, it would reduce dependence on foreign oil. Which seems ironic that anyone would tolerate the negatives to deal a minor blow to middle east oil producers even as they shop at Walmart (which imports vast amounts of its "stuff" from China) on their way to a "Get our troops out of there" protest rally.

So what's wrong with Ethanol? Let's count the ways:

1) It's not carbon-neutral. Not by a long shot.  Burning a bio fuel in itself is "carbon-neutral" but producing the bio fuel in the first place (whether it be corn or switch grass) and then harvesting it and then turning it into fuel is hardly carbon-neutral.

2) It takes more than 1 gallon of fresh water to produce 1 gallon of Ethanol. Think about that for a moment.  Environmentalists talk a great deal about conserving water. But producing Ethanol is one of the worst things you can do in that area.  When someone runs their shower for a long time, at least that water is (ahem) recycled if you're living in a city.  But the fresh water used for farming and producing ethanol is not coming back to the water table or the lake or stream it came from any time soon.

3) It pollutes the air. In our rush to worry about CO2 (better known as the stuff that plants breath) people seem to forget about good old fashioned real pollution. 

But let's put away the extra pollution in Ethanol itself, let's consider the production of it which involves using massive amounts of nitrogen for fertizing it and the effect of that.  Or how about all the other things involved in raising crops.  I'm no farmer but one doesn't need to look hard to find out that the "agribusiness" is a pretty environmentally intrusive thing.  It's one thing if it's being done for food, but as an alternative to gasoline?

4) It wouldn't even come close to solving our problems. Even if we turned nearly all the ariable farm in the United States to switch grass or corn production and we switched to using corn stalks or other more efficient methods of getting bio-fuels, we still wouldn't have enough for even today's gasoline needs. 

5) Ethanol actually requires more energy to produce than it provides.  Let me be clear on this because Ethanol advocates try to side-step this by saying that all energy sources are like this.  But the difference is that Ethanol already uses more energy in the sense that it takes more gas, coal, ethanol, whatever fuels you want to use to produce ethanol than the produced ethanol will provide back.

It's a fraud.  Really wanting something to be true really badly doesn't make it true. One study showed that a gallon of Ethanol has 76k BTUs but requires 116k BTUs to produce -- before you even start transporting the stuff! In other words, it's not a close call on that point.

It's like the Simpsons episode where Homer goes into the Grease business and Bart says "That bacon you just used to produce that grease that made 50 cents cost $5." and Homer says "That's your mother's money" and Bart says "But her money comes from you." and Homer says "And my money comes from grease."

THAT's the kind of reasoning an Ethanol advocate has to use. Homer Simpson logic.

6) Ethanol has less energy in the final fuel. That means you get fewer miles per gallon on your car which means more trips to the gas station and more overall overhead.

7) Ethanol production would (obviously) raise food prices.  The government subsidizes Ethanol production. So farmers produce it instead of other grops (you know, food). Food prices go up. There have already been food riots on this.  To dumb this down so that ethanol advocates can understand: We are paying taxes so that we can pay more money for our food.

8) How do you transport Ethanol? Do advocates realize that Ethanol is a type of alcohol? (the name implies it, no?).  That means you can't use pipelines like we do for gasoline. What happens to alcohol when you mix it with water? What happens to piping if you run alcohol through it for awhile? The wikipedia page for Ethanol talks about this. But it's easy to forget that its advocates apparently don't like reading..or math.   So even if we were willing to lay waste to the land necessary to produce this stuff, how do you transport it around? By truck or train. And what powers those? Grease?

None of these facts are hard to find out. They're not part of some conspiracy by the evil oil companies.  Half of it is common sense.  Fossil Fuels, whether we like them or not, are about the closest thing we have to Energon cubes we got.

We need to get away from fossil fuels but we need to do it intelligently. Ethanol is just such a patently stupid idea on so many levels that I can't believe no one has bothered to expose it yet and discredit it once and for all.

Personally, I think plug-in hybrids are a good start. Sure, our power comes from fossil fuels but it's lot easier (and cheaper) to control what power plants emit than cars. Moreover, the US is the OPEC of coal which is what most of our power plants produce.  Better yet, use nuclear power and send the waste over to Iraq (just kidding) (not kidding, secret evil plan in progress) .

Most of our fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions come from vehicles. Give me a car that could even go 20 miles per day on electric and I'd be off of gasoline.  The answer isn't to find some new magical carbon fuel, the answer is to reduce how much our cars use IMO.

Maybe I'm starting to get old or something but I'm ready for a vacation. 

Since last Summer, I've only had a scattering of days off (all pre-determined holidays).  This Winter we finished up GalCiv II: Dark Avatar which involved a couple of all-nighters and massive hours. 

So I definitely have the time. I have 13 personal days (I used 2 to go up North a couple weeks ago) plus around 10 make up days from weekends and extra hours put in.  I'll never end up using them all.

My hope is to be able to make it until early June when our cottage is done and I can go somewhere and really relax.  Things have been so busy that it's hard to take off. 

It's not that the company would die or something if I took time off but rather we'd miss opportunities I think I'd regret later.  And so here I am, feeling spent.  June is almost here though and I will use up a good chunk of those 23 days this Summer...I hope.

Stardock has released ObjectDock 1.9.  ObjectDock is a free program that adds a configurable, skinnable dock to Windows.  Once installed, users can add short-cuts, display running tasks, and add mini-applets called docklets to their docks that can display weather information, time, system info, or much anything else.

ObjectDock 1.9 adds a host of new features including a Start menu docklet (for bringing up the real Start menu in the system tray), live thumbnail previews on Windows Vista, a new weather docklet, minimize and restore effects on Windows Vista, free-form screen positioning, a new graphics engine for massively better performance, reduce memory requirements, new tileable dock backgrounds, and much more.

ObjectDock is a free download at http://www.objectdock.com.  Stardock also has ObjectDock Plus which adds support for multiple docks, tabbed docks, system tray support, additional mouse-over effects and more.

Article: ObjectDock gets a facelift
 Screenshot: Tileable dock backgrounds
 Screenshot: Start Menu docklet
 Screenshot: ObjectDock explained
Download: ObjectDock 1.9

ObjectDock is a program that adds a skinnable dock to your Windows desktop.  It is one of the most popular desktop enhancement programs available. 

ObjectDock 1.9 is such a major update over 1.5 that it could have been called ObjectDock 2.0. In fact, there was a lot of internal debate on this with 1.9 being the compromise versioning!

So what's new in it?  Here is a list of changes from v1.5:

What's changed in ObjectDock 1.9 over 1.5:    Brand new awesome weather docklet! New docklet uses brand new technology to fly out your 5 day forecast when you click on it or hover over it, and hides it when your mouse goes away. Zoomin/Zoomout smoothness *significantly* enhanced, and is now adjustable! Find the new options in the "Quality & Performance" settings ObjectDock now comes bundled with some really great artwork (icons and backgrounds) from the community. (Permission recieved to use all of the images involved). New artwork has been pre-associated with over 50 different programs! As result, chances are if you add a program, it will show up with a nice high-resolution icon! New minimize effect on Vista! When Live Thumbnails are in use on Vista and your dock is showing a taskbar, windows will now do a nice minimize animation into any zooming dock. I Live minimize effect should be smoother than any other program available! Effort was made to make it work with minimal to no interference to your workflow, and the animation should never jump around / flicker heavily at the end unlike other versions of this effect you may have seen. "Live previews" for files and folders are enabled! While folders will not have their icons update automatically if their contents change, when loaded folders will show as their correct preview. The same with other types of documents that offer a live preview (PDF's, etc) In Vista, all minimized windows will show up as a live mini-thumbnail in the ObjectDock taskbar! Optionally you can have all windows, minimized or not, show up as thumbnails. Note: this feature is only available for zooming docks, it does not support tabbed docks. New background ability! Tile-based backgrounds can now adjust the size/position of the original icon, end result, really cool tiled backgrounds. Check out the included HyperGrass theme for an example of how cool tiled backgrounds can now be! Completely redone the mouse-activation / layering system. See the new "interaction" area in zooming dock's positioning options. The new interaction abilities should make ObjectDock a much more pleasent program to use! Custom icons set for program file shortcuts now automatically sync with custom icons set for windows of a program in taskbars. Entry areas in shortcut dialogs now use AutoComplete Entering in generic terms or filetypes such as "internet", "email", ".doc", etc for a shortcut will now Background code *significantly* improved. New "Troubleshooting" dialog with quick access to disabling features of ObjectDock Increased drawing optimization code's ability to manage images. Should result in quicker than ever drawing and decreased memory usage for zooming docks. Docks can now not only be left/right/center aligned, but anywhere in-between. See the new slider in zooming dock's positioning options Brand new "Show Start Menu" functionality! Will show your existing startmenu/startpanel right next to the cursor when you click it. Add one by right clicking dock and choosing "Add -> New Start Menu Entry" "Add" menus now significantly more useful ; they now give you the option to add a wide variety of different built-in entries New "command entry" abilities! You can now create a dock item to toggle autohide on and off, or toggle hiding/showing the taskbar. Very useful! New option available to turn on "proportionate stretching" for backgrounds New mode available in plus: "keep on top, hiding off-screen for maximized applications", which makes the dock always on top except when a window is maximized, at which point it will automatically temporarily turn on autohide Improved dock's ability to judge what maximum size it should be. Dock will now exactly fill the screen when you set it to be as large as possible, and it will properly maintain this as you add/remove items. Brand new taskbar modes available in Plus! Your taskbar can now be set to show "all windows", "minimized windows only", or "non-minimized windows only" Dramatically improved behavior during right click menus on zooming docks. When you right click and the dock's zooming locks in position, if you click/right-click on another item ObjectDock will now correctly select the item that your cursor was over at the time, not what i would be after the zoom lock is released. Similarly, if you begin dragging an item while locked, the program will behave appropriately instead of its prior very unpredictable behavior. Improved handling / awareness of full-screen applications Completely redone system tray mechanism for Plus, which is more lighweight and does not require any additional resident EXE (that’s right, sdmcp.exe will be a thing of the past ) System tray will not currently work on 64-bit versions of Windows, but they do work with Windows Vista, including the new "Special" tray icons in Vista. Performance and memory usage has been improved. Lots of optimizing for CPU usage. Every single 'glitchy' behavior that we/users could find in previous versions of ObjectDock has been fixed When using extension-only in shortcuts, the item's title will now automatically update to the name of the application, not just its filename. Ability added for ObjectDock to apply included default images for programs that do not have high-resolution icons already included with them. For example, a default Notepad shortcut on XP would use the included custom high-quality icon, but on Vista where a high-quality icon is available for Notepad, ObjectDock will use the actual Notepad icon. Improved system tray, should now work more reliably than ever! Outlook 2007 and Windows Live Messenger should both now work reliably. Fixed up a couple minor resource leaks Improved taskbars / thumbnail behavior. Added option to turn off tabbed docks' ability to automatically dock to the edge as a drawer when dragging. Option available in "misc options". Fixed multimonitor issue with the Start Menu functionality, and added better problem-notification. Fixed issue with flyouts where if they contained 9+ items and zooming is disabled, they could show up partially behind the dock. UI improvments Ability to export backgrounds added to the DockZip packaging format. Try this feature today by right clicking the dock and choosing "Pack images for sharing" Dialog flow / layout improved for zooming docks Colorizing a background now also colorizes the indicators you've selected to use When packing up icons, you can now reliably drag dock items on to the "packager" dialog, and the icon associated with that item will automatically be added to the package you're creating Improved autohide ability in general. Also, added ability for autohide to give activation back to the window that had it if an autohidden dock gets activated temporarily and then hides. improved shortcuts so that the dock longer pauses for a moment when you run something improved delete-item animation so that there is no longer a delay when you delete something from the dock clicking empty space directly above/below a zooming dock that is still part of the background (e.g. a shadow) no longer causes the dock item below it to get selected. similarly, right clicking that area will bring up options for the dock itself, not the item below where you clicked. On Vista, Taskbar should now show / be able to interact with applications ran as administrator when UAC is enabled in vista, even if ObjectDock isn't elevated. (Minimize animations will not work for programs ran as administrator however) Fixed issue where icons for url-shortcuts would not get remembered Can now drag/drop "Internet" and "Email" shortcuts from start panel into dock ObjectDock is better than ever at picking up the best high-quality icon for your file, particularly in Windows Vista. You can now zoom icons up to 256x256. Click Here to check out some of the features of ObjectDock as a video.

In short, a lot has changed.

Highlighted Changes

There's so many new things in ObjectDock 1.9 that it's hard to narrow things down to a handful. And even the above list isn't complete!  Here are some of our favorite changes:

It's Faster!

Probably one of the first things some users will notice is how much faster ObjectDock 1.9 is.  That's because the underlying engine was largely rewritten to take advantage of advances in OS and video card technology. It's faster while using less memory.

It's Prettier!

Another thing users will notice, especially long-time users, is how many cool new backgrounds and icons come with it. The default look has been changed, the default icons changed, and a ton of artwork from the WinCustomize.com community (with permission) has bee included.

One other note about that screenshot, ObjectDock supports backgrounds on a per item basis!

It's more useful!

ObjectDock is popular not just because it's so visually cool and pretty but because it is very useful. Docklets that support searching and the ability to display running tasks as part of your dock are examples of why ObjectDock isn't just a cool program, it's a very useful one.

ObjectDock 1.9 includes a new weather docklet that on a single click will display the 5-day forecast.

ObjectDock 1.9 also includes a new Start menu docklet that will bring up the real Start menu (and if it's skinned, then it'll still be skinned!).

It's more usable!

ObjectDock has always been strong about having features that make is convenient to use. But ObjectDock 1.9 goes even further!

ObjectDock 1.9 now includes options for dock placement that is completely free-form! Put the dock anywhere you want on the screen!

It's easier to use! 

The user interface has been updated to be easier to use with functionality much more accessible!

It has more Windows Vista support!

While users of Windows XP have much to rejoice, users of Windows Vista get live thumbnail previews and minimize and restore effects thanks to the new Windows Vista desktop graphics engine (the DWM) which provides hardware acceleration features!

It's more fun!

With thousands of skins and icons for ObjectDock and tons of cool effects and options to choose from, ObjectDock doesn't just look great and work great, it's just fun to use.

And it's still free!

The world's most fully featured dock on any platform is still freeware. 

Stardock also makes ObjectDock PLUS! which adds tabbed docks, system tray support, additional mouse-over effects, multiple dock support, taskbar grouping, and more!

But ObjectDock itself remains free as it always has even with all these new features.  Try it yourself and find out what millions of others have learned -- it's fun, pretty, and useful!  

Get it at http://www.objectdock.com

The next big game from Stardock is a real-time strategy game called Sins of a Solar Empire. It combines the best of 4X games with the benefits of real-time gaming.

Gamespot has a very thorough Q&A with Ironclad, the development team behind it.  Check it out!

Gamespot Q&A

Watching PBS show on Jeff Skilling, the main guy behind Enron's corruption and describing his beliefs and showing interviews with him.

Oye is this guy literally my polar opposite. He believes ideas are king. He feels people should be rewarded on ideas alone and execution of those ideas is left for the lesser beings of the world.

It was that philosphy that was Enron's undoing. Their switch to mark to market accounting is based on booking as profit deals as they are pinned. So if you sign a deal that will generate (in theory) $10 billion over 20 years, they'd book all $10 billion up front.  Here in reality, we call that counting chickens before they're hatched.

He also apparently said that only money motivates people which I know for a fact to be untrue. There is a lot more to life than materialism. What motivates one person may not motivate others. 

The PBS show definitely doesn't make Enron's people look very good. If even half of what is in this show is true, we're talking about a bunch of despicable people with Jeff Skilling at that top of the list.

 Tomorrow the biggest update ever to ObjectDock will be released! ObjectDock is a freeware program that allow users to add a fully skinnable dock to their Windows desktop. It is one of the most popular desktop extension programs of all time.  ObjectDock 1.9 adds a ton of new features and comes with a lot of great new content created by the WinCustomize community.

We'll be making the announcement of its availability tomorrow! Stay tuned!