Solar power in howard county

Saw this article in the Baltimore Sun today (Solar credits have residents glowing). It's nice to know that Federal, State and County programs are now making solar energy more affordable making a $5,500 solar powered water heating system just $1,255. For those who need to replace their water heating system, that's a very attractive price.

The article also mentions a company in Jessup (Cheasapeake Wind & Solar LLC) that specializes in renewable energy technologies. I hope their business prospects continue improving as more people are encouraged to consider solar energy with the help of these tax programs.

Technorati Tags: percworks, Robin Abello, Technology, Community, Solar Energy, Renewable Energy

Infrared tech for the outdoor cook

Infrared to sear your steaks. The article says infrared burners will do to outdoor cooking what the microwave did to indoor kitchen.

Infrared burners are ready to barbecue

I remember many years ago, I attended a tech summit and the speaker on the stage started his presentation by showing us his latest tech toy ... a stainless steel weber summit grill. He shared details of the features including pictures and some reviews about its performance. Then he went into the rest of his presentation.

I've had my weber for about 8 years now and I've changed some of the parts including the burners and I've often remarked how simple the technology is inside these grills. Gas flowing through a burner tube ... not much different than old gas stoves. That will all change when infrared burners becomes mainstream.

Something to look forward to in the summers to come.

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Solar energy

I've been a fan of solar energy since I was a kid. When my Dad gave me a solar calculator back in the 70s, I honestly thought that by the time I had my own kids, the world would be using mostly solar energy for most of its power consumption. I guessed wrong. I would have thought that 30 years would be enough time to do the research into making solar power viable and affordable for everyone to use.

The good news is maybe that could still happen in my lifetime. I saw this article earlier today about how the Amish community have adopted solar enery for their needs and I find it interesting that they're in some ways more forward looking than most of the world when it comes to energy.

Amish in Southern Md. find solar power plain practical

The main barrier today is cost. But one company is trying to change that (Selling Homeowners a Solar Dream). They're just in the launch phase and time will tell if their plan is viable.

One country that is successfully pursuing a long term approach to solar energy is Germany (Cloudy Germany a Powerhouse in Solar Energy). Solar panels have become commonplace in new German homes and a great wall of solar panels line the autobahn. Today they are the biggest producers not only of solar energy but also wind energy. Their goal is by 2020, at least a quarter of their energy use will be from renewable sources of energy. The German government has also decided to close down all their nuclear power plants by 2020.

All of this sounds exciting and promising. If we can only see as much advancement in renewable energy in the next 30 years as we have seen in the computer industry the past 30 years , think about what could be possible.

Technorati Tags: percworks, Robin Abello, Technology, Community, Solar Energy, Renewable Energy, Amish

Amazon buys dpreview.com

Just saw this on the news --- Amazon Acquires dpreview.com.

dpreview has been my favorite camera equipment website for a long time. The site always looked and felt authoritative and genuine. Plus they're strictly a reviews site, so you know going in that you're there just to research. And the research is pretty good, enough technical information for the pros and serious amateurs, but also a lot of information that the not too technical can understand.

You might wonder why Amazon would want to buy a reviews site. But if we consider that people who are doing their research on dpreview are thinking of buying camera equipment at some point, making it convenient to buy that equipment on Amazon might be the underlying motive here.

The founder (Phil Askey) is mentioned as saying the acquisition will allow him to devote more time to expand and improve features. The forums section is a bit lacking so hopefully that will be an area that we'll see some improvements on. With an excess of 7 million unique visitors a month, dpreview has a solid following that could only grow if the right features are added.

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Shopping for clothes online?

Clothes, fashion accessories & footwear are now the number 1 items being bought online (Computers bumped from top of online sales). Retail stores are making it easier to return items bought online to a local store in case you need a different size or color. And often times it's easier to search among hundreds of clothing and shoe designs online than in a store who may not even have your size and color in stock.

The future is going to be virtual reality that will allow you to fit and maybe even touch and feel your clothes without having to step in the store. There's been some work done on virtual fitting the past couple years and this year some retailers hope it will help their customers who are shopping for swimwear (Online fittings take the dread out of swimsuit shopping).

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Working from home?

I first thought this was a joke but sounds like it's the real deal.

For those who work from home (or who've always wanted to), here's something to make your home office literally sound like a real office --- Background Sounds for the Home Office.

I guess there might be some appeal to this, but one of the reasons I find great about working from home is the silence and the privacy. But you can get cabin fever especially if you work in the basement. And I remember when I started telecommuting 8 years ago, the one thing I began to miss was the interaction with other people so everytime I went to work (once a week if I wasn't travelling) I would always chat with my officemates just to reconnect with the world.

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Wise words from WordPress founder

Even though this blog is on blogger, I still want to share this posting from the founder of WordPress (Matt) ---
Meaningful Overnight Relationship.

I read a lot of blogs out there that are written on WordPress and most (if not all) my clients who are blogging use WordPress. It's a good take on how he views success and where he wants WordPress to go. The one thing I've liked about WordPress is how customizable it is and how the platform allows developers to build on top of a pretty robust framework.

I think judging from the title of his posting (Meaningful Overnight Relationship) Matt really wants to talk more about the difference between an overnight success and a long-term success. I couldn't agree with him more. One of the books to read about how overnight success and a lot of publicity doesn't necessarily translate into long-term success is Jim Collin's book "Good to Great". And there's money to be made from this theory as Jim Collins shows how investors can be rewarded if they choose these companies that are built for the long haul.

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Photoshop Rock Star

In all my photoshop classes I recommend to my students that if they wanted to go out and buy a photoshop book they should look for the ones written by Scott Kelby. I ran across his very first book (Down and Dirty Photoshop Tricks) a few years ago and was very impressed with the quality and content so I've been a fan ever since. I never knew he was a former rock musician. Looks like he's developed quite a following - his books have sold more than 1 million copies and his Photoshop TV podcast is downloaded more than 3 million times monthly.

Scott Kelby - A career built on Photoshop

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