7/21/2003 ·  8/ 6/2003
 5/29/2003 ·  7/18/2003
 4/25/2003 ·  5/28/2003
 3/24/2003 ·  4/24/2003
 3/ 1/2003 ·  3/21/2003
 1/28/2003 ·  2/28/2003
11/30/2002 ·  1/23/2003
11/ 1/2002 · 11/29/2002
 9/23/2002 · 10/30/2002
 9/ 5/2002 ·  9/20/2002
 8/10/2002 ·  9/ 4/2002
 7/24/2002 ·  8/ 9/2002
 6/27/2002 ·  7/23/2002
 6/ 3/2002 ·  6/25/2002
 4/24/2002 ·  5/31/2002
 4/ 1/2002 ·  4/23/2002
 3/ 1/2002 ·  3/31/2002
 2/10/2002 ·  2/28/2002
 1/22/2002 ·  2/ 9/2002
 1/ 3/2002 ·  1/16/2002
12/16/2001 ·  1/ 2/2002
12/ 2/2001 · 12/15/2001
11/ 1/2001 · 11/29/2001
10/16/2001 · 10/31/2001
 9/23/2001 · 10/13/2001
 9/11/2001 ·  9/22/2001
 7/29/2001 ·  9/10/2001
 7/ 2/2001 ·  7/28/2001
 5/29/2001 ·  6/30/2001
 5/ 1/2001 ·  5/21/2001
 4/ 8/2001 ·  4/29/2001
 3/25/2001 ·  4/ 7/2001
 3/11/2001 ·  3/24/2001
 3/ 4/2001 ·  3/10/2001
 2/18/2001 ·  3/ 3/2001
 2/ 4/2001 ·  2/17/2001
 1/23/2001 ·  2/ 2/2001
 1/ 1/2001 ·  1/22/2001
12/18/2000 · 12/31/2000
11/30/2000 · 12/ 7/2000
11/ 6/2000 · 11/28/2000
10/29/2000 · 11/ 5/2000
10/11/2000 · 10/19/2000
10/ 1/2000 · 10/ 9/2000
 9/24/2000 ·  9/30/2000
 9/15/2000 ·  9/22/2000
 9/ 7/2000 ·  9/13/2000

Search rbgilbert.com

This is my blogchalk:
United States, Massachusetts, Boston, Brighton, English, Ron, Male, Photography, Nudity.

Fermented Beaver: I don't even have to make up stuff.

Al Gross, who died December 21, 2000
We are sorry to be so late in bringing this news to you. Among Al Gross' inventions:

• The pager
• The walkie-talkie

And here is the NY Times obituary:

January 2, 2001
Al Gross, Inventor of Gizmos With Potential, Dies at 82
By WOLFGANG SAXON
Al Gross, also known as Phineas Thaddeus Veeblefetzer, granddaddy of citizens' band radio, who tinkered with all manner of electronic gear before people just had to have them, died on Dec. 21 at a hospice in Sun City, Ariz., his hometown. He was 82.

Mr. Gross died after a brief illness, said Ethel Stanka Gross, his wife and sole immediate survivor.

Mr. Gross's wizardry in wireless communications earned him a stack of patents foretelling the advent of things like cell phones, paging systems, garage-door openers and walkie-talkies. One idea that did not catch on at first was the pager.

"The doctors hated it," Mr. Gross said when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology honored him last May. "They complained that it would interrupt their golf games."

He received the Lemelson-M.I.T. Lifetime Achievement Award for Invention, and the Federal Communications Commission sent him a letter of commendation. At his death, having given up his own wireless radio business years ago, he was a senior staff engineer for the Orbital Sciences Corporation of Chandler, Ariz.

Al Gross was born in Toronto. He became fascinated with things wireless at age 9 when his parents took him on a cruise on Lake Erie, and the ship's radio operator let him listen in.

At 12 he scrounged parts from a junkyard to cobble together a ham radio, and at 16 he earned an amateur operator's license. The next step had to be what he called a "walkie- talkie" because, he said, "I wanted to walk around and talk to other hams."

By 1938, after some experimentation, he built one that worked. He pioneered citizens' band radio, adopting the name Veeblefetzer as his own CB handle. He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from what is now Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1939 and kept improving on his lightweight, hand-held mobile transceivers.

After World War II began, he organized a command demonstration of his walkie-talkie for Gen. William J. Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the C.I.A. "Donovan liked the idea," Mr. Gross recalled. "He recruited me and converted me from a civilian to a captain."

His top-secret mission was to develop the first ground-to-air, battery- operated two-way radio. With compact antennas and ranges of up to 30 miles, the radio used unexplored high frequencies that enabled the military to conduct surveillance behind enemy lines as well.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff later praised Mr. Gross's project, code- named Joan-Eleanor, as having ranked among the Allies' "most successful wireless intelligence-gathering operations, saving millions of lives by shortening the war."

With the war's end drawing near, Mr. Gross demonstrated his contraption for the Federal Communications Commission, which created the Citizens' Radio Communications Service for private short-range radio transmissions. Mr. Gross went into business for himself, establishing the Citizens Radio Corporation.

He developed the circuitry that opened the way to personal pocket paging systems, and patented precursors of the cell phone and the cordless phone. He was also credited with having given Chester Gould, a cartoonist, the idea for Dick Tracy's wristwatch radio, something Mr. Gould observed Mr. Gross tinkering with in his workshop.

Over the years Mr. Gross worked as a principal engineer for leading electronics manufacturers like the Sperry Corporation, Westinghouse, AG Communications Systems and, for the past 10 years, Orbital Sciences. At Orbital Sciences he remained active as an inventor and engineer in aerospace, satellite and military electrical and electronic systems.

And that stack of patents to his name? They expired, drifting into the public domain for others to build on once the public was ready for cell phones and even the doctors packed pagers.

"Otherwise," Mr. Gross said, with the M.I.T. lifetime award securely his, "I'd be as rich as Bill Gates."

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company

Having trouble obtaining the product of sperm/ovum combination? Let your pictures of dead presidents do the hard stuff at Black Market Babies. Coming soon, they promise, are black market pandas and black market tigers!

Click to see the larger, original, stunningly horrifying and beautiful picture.

Thinking I'm engaged in worthless waste of time, I run across The Confluence Project and realize I could be doing worse.

Bitch!
And let everyone else hear you at The Complaint Station

And if you enjoy other people's misery and revel in the decline of the high tech boom then you're probably a leftist, and you'll also enjoy FuckedCompany.

And if maybe you just don't give a damn, then perhaps you ought to do some reading at the Paxil Database.

Hack the boogie bass! You be the boss! Click here.

A free software suite compatible with Microsoft Office.

The sixties never ended...at least in Dallas, Texas. Go here.

Here are a buncha more links regarding power regulation in California. We're sorry, but you won't find a single suggestion here for a bigger government or more regulation.

Fat Bread
Here's an excellent bread recipe...sized for a bread machine:
1 package dry yeast
3 cups bread flour
2 Tbs dry milk powder
1 Tbs sugar
1 tsp salt
¾ cup sour cream
½ cup water
1 Tbs white vinegar
¼ tsp ground ginger

Here's a great, cute little display provided by the Virginia Railway Express commuter train system. Check it out at a time of day when trains are actually running.

Hey, only 1461 days to go.

Acela Express to DC To remove potential ambiguity, it was LAST weekend that I rode the Acela Express. I have not gone to DC for the inauguration. Here, then, are notes I took on the way: 4:15 PM arrive at South Station. I know where the Acela Lounge is supposed to be based on a Globe article. But the elevator is labeled "For Handicap Use Only" and just plain doesn't work. The obvious stairway is locked. There are no signs. I wait and ask the info lady. She points me to the locked stairway. I ask how to get the doors open. She tells me to push the doorbell. I go and do it. And wait. There is no one in sight. No sound. I push the door. Nothing. I wait. I look around. Then I see an Amtrak employee at the top of the stairs waving me up. The door is now unlocked, but never made so much as a click. I go up. I am not greeted or checked. There might be 10 people in the whole space. Sort of middle class living room style. Not fancy. Chairs are showing a bit of wear even though the Acela has been running only since December 11. There are computer desks. I don't check to see if there are internet connections. There are free soft drinks, but it takes me awhile to find them. [In DC the Acela Lounge is still called the Metroliner Lounge and, even though they're supposed to be available an hour before Acela departures, it doesn't open until 4:45 AM, just 15 minutes before the sole daily departure. Basically just a spot to get a free newspaper and coffee.] 4:45 PM and there is still light in the sky. Spring cometh. With my noise canceling headphones on I hear nothing outside of my own CD, so I was surprised by the sudden flurry of activity around me. Saw a Red Cap go by. Grabbed up my stuff. They were boarding the first class passengers only. There are only two classes on Acela Express. I was in business class. After just a minute they let us through and we all board in a civil manner. I select a seat on the righthand side as usual, so I can see Manhattan when we arrive there. The engine, though, is headed into South Station. Is the train double-headed? Surely they don't use that streamlined engine to push! Or does the train turn around? If we turn, it has to be done before we get to Back Bay station. [It turned out the train is, in fact, double-headed]. I see a couple of other passengers who are also obviously on their way to MAL, but this is only Boston. New York will tell. The train sits very quietly. The ventilation system seems quieter than on regular Amtrak trains. I feel no vibrations. The seats are very nice with good lumbar support and a small adjustable pillow. The footrest, however, is so unusual I didn't recognize it until I saw someone else using it well past Philadelphia. Also, it is so powerfully sprung you cannot return it to its upright position without a tremendous bang. Space allotment seems a bit larger than on the old Amtrak cars. [Oh, do I need to add, for anyone who has never ridden Amtrak, that the space allotted to the individual passenger is huge compared to airline coach? It's about the same as airline first class.] We're moving! 4 seconds early by my watch. After 11 seconds we stop. Then we go again. The interior lighting is BRILLIANT! I hope they can tone it down so I can see out. The doors between cars are two sheets of glass that slide open automatically, although there is a button you can hit if there is some need to. They, unfortunately, have not designed them to go "Snick!" like on Star Trek. This car is about half full at Back Bay. We gained one passenger in our car. There are 6 cars on the train, cafe car in the middle, first class at one end. Add the two engines (one at each end) for 8 pieces total. The PA system on the train is good and the announcer has almost no accent. This is very different from the usual Amtrak announcements. The one glitch is that his first words were "Welcome to Ekcela..." or would that be spelled "Accela?" The name of the service is pronounced uh-SEL-uh. This looks like it's gonna be the "espresso" - "expresso" thing all over. 5:26 PM Dedham. Our car picks up 3 or 4 people. Several whiners pass through on their way to first class. Less than 2 minutes at Dedham [this turns out to be our longest layover, apart from NY Penn Station] which is officially called "Route 128 University Park." What "university?" Having heard a few comments that the Acela Express is markedly smoother running than the old trains, I'm surprised to feel the car shimmying and vibrating just like the old cars. [Later I found out this vibration doesn't occur until the Acela is already going faster than the maximum speed of the old cars...I had no sensation of how fast we were going...at about 120 mph the Acela can vibrate like the old cars at about 70 or 80] The conductor is extraordinarily friendly as he takes my ticket, even touching my shoulder. The entire crew is quite obviously enjoying very high morale. There is an announcement that we are proceeding at Acela's top speed: 150 mph. [Apparently, there are, on our route, only three sections of track of sufficient quality to support this speed: this section between Boston and Providence the section between Providence and the Connecticut line, and in New Jersey north of Trenton] 150 mph on the Acela feels like mid-speed on the old trains. The lights are turned down so we can see out and the entire city of Norwood flits by like nothing. I begin to get an idea of our speed. I hit the wheelchair accessible restroom. It's lovely! The toilet is made of real porcelain with a black lining in the bowl. Very nice fixtures you might see in an upscale nursing facility. And...there's a window! But it is heavily frosted. The only glitch with the restrooms is they have done away with the very reliable, understandable-by-all-cultures-and-levels-of-intelligence, positive locking device which was pretty similar to what they used on airlines. Now you have to slam the door to get it to latch, then you have to poke your finger in a little hole and slide a little metal thing so that only red paint shows, and no green. No little light comes on to confirm that you have succeeded, and there is no way to test it from inside the restroom. Sometimes you can't move the little lock any further than half red/half green. This means, I discovered as I was buckling up, that it is not locked. I go to the cafe car which is just forward of my car. It has a well designed bar area. The layout is much better than the old cafe cars. But the menu is identical to the old menu, for now at least. The train is very well staffed, and there are a lot of Amtrak employees along for the ride. I overhear many of their conversations and they are all eager to share information about the train. 5:40 PM as I'm still in the cafe car we zoom by the prison which heralds our arrival in Rhode Island. Wine in the cafe car is $3.75 and they have white, pink and red, though they try to be nice about it. 5:48 PM Providence. The boarding platform signs are reversed, saying we are a Boston local and the MBTA commuter train on the other track is heading to Washington. Fortunately, all potential passengers are bright enough to figure it out. In a vestibule in the cafe car I saw a computer display with lots of graphics and lots of buttons. Conductors were in there pushing buttons and watching. I can't tell if they're just monitoring things, or if they can actually do something with it, like adjust lights and temperature. There are 120 volt outlets along the seats, but they're down lower than they were in the old cars, so they're difficult to locate. One outlet per seat. I plug in my CD player. There are no hand rails at head height, probably because they expected to be able to use the banking car feature, but they can't. This feature would allow the train to go fast on curving tracks as the cars would tilt as the wheels stayed on the tracks (we hope). The cars were built perfectly according to Amtrak's specifications. Only upon receipt of the cars did they realize that when they tilted they exceeded the maxiumum allowable width by 4 inches! I suppose they could still use it if they could assure there are no adjacent trains or any side obstructions that encroach that close. A bit of risk, though. Anyway, the result is that passengers must rely on seats and overhead luggage bins for balance as they walk, same as on airlines. By the way, the open overhead racks are gone. The Acela has bins, same as a plane. 6:04 PM Again they announce we are at 150 mph. Outside, as move across Rhode Island, the black sky is clear. Venus is quite obvious in the west. There is a thin layer of snow in the woods. It is difficult to recognize the usual landmarks. In one instant you see you are moving through a small town. You can't focus fast enough to read any signs. Then it's gone. In the seatback is the Acela on-board magazine "Arrive" with spelling American, so you know it contains no cycling information. It is the November-December issue! It contains holiday schedules. Nothing for MLK weekend. But, so cute, it has little floorplans of the major train stations along the way, just like airline magazines do of airports. I think NY Penn Station is the only station where one could potentially get momentarily confused (not even lost) and it isn't a tenth (not even a twentieth!) the size of an airport! The 120 volt power, I see, is pretty undependable. If you've ridden Amtrak before you have probably noticed those times when the ventilation shuts down for a minute or so. That seems to be triggered by some power glitch. There are other smaller glitches. Every time there's a flicker my CD player stops. This is something I've never seen when it's plugged into a regular 120 volt landline. I don't think I would recommend plugging your laptop into Amtrak's 120 volt lines. 6:23 PM and I see Long Island Sound, so we must be approaching Mystic. 6:25 PM and we are definitely going through Mystic, but I wouldn't have known it except for the unique Mystic Amtrak station. It's just an eyeblink. All displays on the Acela are electronic except for the basic restroom symbols. We drop to under 100 to approach New London. There are headphone jacks and electronic channel selectors in the seat arms, but they don't work. [They did, however, work on the return trip: four unreliable channels of nice music, one channel of talk radio taped the day before, so it was dated. Whenever the power flickered, the channels crashed and you were dumped back to channel 1.] 6:33 PM we cross the Thames. The wine is very icy and when I thought the cafe attendant said "Sauvignon" he was actually saying "Sutter Home." It's allegedly chardonnay and smells like sweaty underwear. Sort of a win some, lose some. How about some $5 wine on future Acelas? (What is the plural of "Acela?" "Acelae" I suppose.) 6:35 PM we creep through the New London station. The BIG ferry is loading for Orient Point, Long Island. Someone needs to organize a nude excursion on the Acela - or is it just that they've got it a touch too warm in here? Hey! I've just noticed that the reading light fixtures have two areas facing the aisle that look like they're for text display. I would guess these are intended eventually to show the passenger's destination city. Too cool. The conductor would just need to scan the ticket and it would be transmitted via IR to the display. Probably the conductor would have to push a button to indicate whether the info was for the aisle or window seat. However, the conductors still used the old, tested methods. The paper seat checks get shoved into a crevice in the overhead bins, or into the headrest of your seat. Seating in first class is three abreast (well, one and two). Here in business class it's four abreast (two and two). In both classes there are a few sets of seats that face each other across small tables. These would seem to be natural places for Coast Guard cadets to gather for card games. Too bad the train doesn't stop in New London. 6:50 PM we cross the Connecticut River. Acela still uses the classic little paper cone cups for water, same as old Amtrak trains. And thank goodness the trash receptacles are in about the same place, I realized as I staggered down the aisle at 120 mph with my crap to toss. 7:10 PM New Haven, our only Connecticut stop. We sit less than one minute. 7:20 PM we slow, and to our left I can see I-95. Trucks there are gaining on us! I am displeased. 7:33 PM Bridgeport at normal speed. No stop. We come back close to 95 again and we are going slightly faster than the wide open, clear traffic, so I would guess we are going a bit more than 80. There are still a helluva lot of Christmas lights up in these Connecticut towns - but they're damn tasteful. Damn tasteful! 7:52 PM through Darien. No Aryan. 7:55 PM Stamford. 8:04 PM Port Chester. 8:01 Cos Cob. 8:02 Greenwich. 8:06 Rye. 8:11 NY Thruway toll plaza. 8:12 New Rochelle. Substantial slowing. 8:17 PM Coop City, i.e. New York City. We proceed at the speed of a bicycle over the drawbridge. 8:26 PM Manhattan comes into view. We proceed from the Bronx and parallel the Triboro bridge. I have forgotten how truly gigantic that whole bridge complex is since my little ride across it last August. I'm still working on the web site for that. 8:31 PM we pass the Queens Home Depot and enter the tunnel at 8:34 PM, arriving at Penn Station at 8:37. On time. There is the usual layover at Penn Station while they change crews. We depart at 9:00. The new crew doesn't have the spirit of the Boston crew. These guys probably consider this just an overpriced Metroliner. All the bright lights are turned on and left on. The announcements are back to normal: fast, accented, slurred, partial or missing. For the rest of the trip to DC I mostly sleep. I don't discover any more features to the train. As we approached 30th Street Station in Philadelphia I woke up enough to see the few other Acela trains in existence. They live there. I think they have only two fully functioning trains right now. They run only one. The other is the back up. As more trains become available, they'll run more. They don't stop at New Carrolton outside DC! I always use this stop as the landmark to get myself all together, so I'm really surprised when they announce Union Station and I see city all around us. We pulled in at 11:40 PM, 5 minutes early. My return trip was Tuesday morning at 5:00 AM. The only major difference was that this was morning rush hour to New York City. Between Philadelphia and New York every seat was full and there were dozens of cell phone conversations going on simultaneously around me [there is too much steel in Newark station to allow cell phone connections]. Complimentary copies of the NY Times were available in the cafe car.

Diary!
I'm still reading Dahlgren so I was amazed to run across this "found" San Francisco diary on the web. Give it a read.

Another Ring
This one, the Gay Diary ring, is "dedicated to gay, lesbian and bisexual online journallers."

Jazz starts tomorrow, January 8, on PBS. Let's hope it lives up to the hype.

Current read: Dhalgren by Samuel Delany. Fascinating!

Who Left Those Pod Bay Doors Open?
The monolith is gone. Go see my 1/3/2001 entry about the monolith. Now they wonder where it's got to. Jeez! People are so uninformed. It's in orbit around Jupiter, stupid!

California Power
These past few weeks I've been confused by the news stories that speak of the "deregulation" of the power market while simultaneously telling me that the power companies were seeking state approval of a rate increase. If the state controls the rates, that doesn't sound deregulated to me. But I hadn't been following the story too closely and hoped somebody would come along and explain to me how it is that a deregulated industry has its rates set by the politicians in Sacramento.

Fortunately, someone did just that recently. The Wall Street Journal carried an article last week that explained when what passes for "deregulation" in California came to pass, the power companies gladly hopped right into bed with that saggy old whore of a state government (or maybe the power company was the whore?). The power companies agreed to a fixed price higher than the market price, hoping to recoup old debts. Well, anybody can tell you that when you sleep with whores you get up with crabs.

I know the bright people who read Ron's Log understand that letting the state government set your prices, whether above or below the market rate, is not deregulation; and that it's worse than a shame that this bit of pink-fascism is being called "deregulation" all over the news.

Here's a lengthier analysis at Reason magazine: California Scheming: Don't blame deregulation for the Golden State's electricity snafus

The WSJ article is available here, but that link may not work for you, so here's the article:

California's PG&E Struggles
To Survive Electricity Squeeze
By REBECCA SMITH and JOHN R. EMSHWILLER
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

SAN FRANCISCO -- In August, Bruce R. Worthington did something no PG&E Corp. executive had done in the utility's nearly 150-year history: He hired lawyers to prepare it for possible bankruptcy proceedings.

While the company wasn't talking publicly about insolvency at the time, and indeed later raised $2.7 billion in fresh financing from banks and investors, Mr. Worthington, its general counsel, and other top executives were increasingly anxious about the growing difference between what PG&E was paying for power and what the utility was allowed to sell it for. Today, Mr. Worthington says he retained Weil Gotshal & Manges of New York back then because PG&E needed to know "what happens when you get near the zone of insolvency."

It may find out yet. Since last summer, a crisis brought on by tight electricity supplies and runaway wholesale-electric prices in California has put PG&E and the state's other major investor-owned utility, Southern California Edison, on the brink of filing for bankruptcy protection. California's two-year-old plan to deregulate its electricity market now threatens to undermine the state's prosperity and ripple through the nation's financial markets. And it has stalled what had been a vigorous nationwide trend toward electricity deregulation.

A Degree of Relief

Over the past six months, PG&E's Pacific Gas & Electric unit and Edison International's Southern California Edison subsidiary have spent a total of $11 billion more to buy electricity from the state's electrical-power producers than they have been able to recoup by reselling it to retail customers. Executives at both companies say that without quick and large rate increases the two utilities will likely have to seek protection under federal bankruptcy laws in coming weeks.


Wednesday, the California Public Utilities Commission proposed granting the two utilities partial relief in the form of a 90-day rate increase of as much as 15%, roughly half of what the utilities said they needed immediately. Consumer groups, which have vehemently opposed any rate increases, criticized the commission's decision, saying it punishes consumers while unfairly rewarding companies that have played a major role in creating the current mess.

Finding a politically palatable solution is testing the mettle of state leaders, particularly Gov. Gray Davis, who Wednesday called a special session of the legislature for later this month to address the issue. Gov. Davis, who has been criticized for being slow to act, late last month flew to Washington to seek assistance from President Clinton. Soon, the California debacle and the threat of rolling blackouts in the state are likely to test the Bush administration's attitude toward federal intervention.

Even with a big stage and a growing number of players, the main characters remain the two utilities, which together serve two-thirds of all Californians and are among the state's biggest companies. A look inside PG&E, which has been the quieter of the two as the crisis has unfolded, shows a business struggling to find its way through a once-familiar world turned topsy-turvy.

As its financial situation has deteriorated, the company has veered away from vocal advocacy of free markets to voice support for a return to cost-based regulation of power suppliers. It has proposed billion-dollar accounting adjustments to minimize its exposure to the spike in electrical prices that took hold in late May. And PG&E executives have tried to walk a fine line between sounding an alarm for help from state regulators and not sounding it too loudly in places where it could hurt the company, such as on Wall Street.


Robert Glynn Jr., PG&E's chief executive, defends the company's actions as proper but concedes that it hasn't "been down this path, so we don't have a map."

PG&E, which has long been firmly embedded in this city's establishment, isn't accustomed to feeling lost. It was founded in 1852 by entrepreneur Peter Donahue, who built gasworks that supplied San Francisco's street lights. PG&E survived and thrived through depressions and earthquakes while serving a state that grew into the world's sixth-largest economy. Today, PG&E's service area of 70,000 square miles covers half of California.

California's electricity market used to be the exclusive domain of regulated utilities that held monopolies in their assigned service territories. But by the 1990s, costly fiascoes involving nuclear power plants -- such as PG&E's $5.8 billion Diablo Canyon facility, which came online a decade late and billions over budget -- had eroded public confidence in the old order at a time when new sources of supply appeared capable of driving down prices.

When the idea of creating a competitive marketplace for utilities began to gain support across the U.S., no state embraced it more enthusiastically than California. The state's electricity deregulation plan, which was developed in close consultation with PG&E and Edison, took effect March 31, 1998. Under it, utilities were required to divest at least half of their power plants, and new entrants were allowed to compete for retail customers. The price the state's power generators could charge the utilities for electricity, in most cases, was capped at $750 per megawatt hour, a price so high that few thought it was anything more than a theoretical ceiling.

Even though the new competition was expected to bring down electricity prices, the state's plan froze consumers' rates until 2002, or until the utilities had finished recouping their so-called stranded costs. Those costs reflected the utilities' past investments in power plants that would be money losers in the new deregulated marketplace. At the utilities' urging, rates were frozen at what then seemed like high levels. That kept the utilities' margins fat enough to allow them to pay down their accumulated debts.

Good Start

For the first 18 months, the system worked beautifully from the utilities' point of view. PG&E and Edison were able to buy low-cost wholesale electricity from generators and traders and had enough money left over to pay off $17 billion in debt. "The world was fine up to May 31," says Dan Richard Jr., PG&E senior vice president for government affairs.

Then, at the beginning of last summer, wholesale prices began to shoot higher. No new power plants had been built in California for a decade. Meanwhile, fueled by the growing economy, the rise in demand for electricity in the state had been more robust and more sustained than expected.

In June, the average monthly wholesale price hit $120 per megawatt hour, more than five times the year-earlier price. Even more worrisome was the fact that in California's day-ahead auction market, where utilities are obliged to buy much of their power, prices weren't fluctuating according to the ebb and flow of demand, as they had in the past.

Gordon Smith, president of Pacific Gas & Electric, says he was "shocked" that prices weren't reacting normally. "Generators had learned they could charge anything -- and get it," he says.

The state's power suppliers, however, say utility executives share some culpability for their own power-purchase losses. After all, the utilities had authority to sign long-term contracts and move as much as a third of their demand out of the state's spot market as early as July 1999, but were slow to act. As they hesitated, forward prices rose. Last January, the utilities could have locked in power at $38 per megawatt hour for 2001. By December, the price had jumped to $136, more than double the price PG&E is allowed to charge residential customers. For their part, PG&E executives say the company bought what it could but found few sellers.

Instead of exercising their hedging powers, PG&E and Edison began pressing utility regulators to lower the state's $750-per-megawatt-hour price cap. PG&E says it is philosophically opposed to such caps, but it also saw them as one way of breaking the unrelenting rise in prices.

On June 28, the Independent System Operator, a state-chartered organization that controls most of California's electricity grid, lowered the wholesale cap to $500 per megawatt hour. In August, it lowered the cap even further, to $250.

The two cuts didn't have the intended effect, however. During the previous summer, prices had peaked during the day and declined at night, reflecting shifts in demand. Now they spent much of the day and night bumping up against the cap. But both executives and regulators thought that relief would still arrive -- in the form of cooler weather, which would reduce air-conditioner use.

'Contingency Plan'

By Aug. 31, PG&E's uncollected deficit, the difference between its power-purchase costs and its power-resale income, topped $2.2 billion. The time for reporting its third-quarter earnings was approaching, and PG&E faced the prospect of having to write off its uncollected deficit as "unpaid receivables," unless some kind of relief was at least promised.

In late August, PG&E quietly hired bankruptcy lawyers. Mr. Glynn, the CEO, says the utility did so as part of "a contingency plan," in case it couldn't persuade regulators to end the rate freeze which kept it from passing its costs on to consumers. Meanwhile, PG&E set out to raise a mountain of cash to help tide it over until conditions improved. The utility told its investment banker, Lehman Brothers, to prepare for the sale of nearly $2 billion in PG&E bonds. It also arranged a $1 billion line of bank credit.

Just as the bond-sales effort was gearing up, a Sept. 27 article in The Wall Street Journal quoted rating-agency analysts as saying that PG&E and Edison faced technical insolvency by early 2001. The news temporarily shut the companies out of the capital markets, says Joseph Sauvage, a Lehman Brothers managing director.

Conditions thawed enough for PG&E to float the bonds after California Public Utilities Commissioner Henry Duque issued a ruling on Oct. 17 that concluded that the uncollected costs might "be appropriate for recovery over time." The ruling also made it possible for PG&E to avoid a write-off of its deficit. A week later, it reported a 22% increase in third-quarter net income. At the time, in its earnings news release and in comments to the press, the utility heralded the strong profits it was making from energy trading and made scant reference to the undercollection problem and no mention of Weil Gotshal.

Peter Vaream, a portfolio manager at Boston-based MFS Investment Management, said he wasn't aware that PG&E had hired bankruptcy counsel when his firm bought some of the new bonds. He adds that he believes the market "would have demanded much more onerous" terms if the information had been public.

PG&E's Mr. Worthington says the company fully disclosed the risks involved in buying the bonds but says it wasn't obliged to tell investors that it had retained bankruptcy lawyers.

Bankers, meanwhile, were clearly nervous. Fifty-six out of the 66 banks contacted about joining PG&E's credit line declined -- a startling rebuff for a company with PG&E's pedigree. In the end, PG&E managed to piece together an $850 million credit line from a consortium headed by Bank of America.

With roughly $2.7 billion in hand at the beginning of November, as a result of its fund-raising dash, PG&E reckoned it had enough cash to last well into 2001. It knew, however, that without an end to the rate freeze, it would again face the same dilemma.

Thus, PG&E found itself in a trap of its own making. The freeze was supposed to keep rates high enough to bring it a reliable gusher of revenues, but in fact they weren't even high enough to cover costs. Now, it desperately needed to undo the freeze quickly in order to raise rates further. But the terms of the deregulation plan stipulated that the freeze would stay in place as long as PG&E was still recouping the costs of its past uneconomic investments. That provision, which was supposed to protect PG&E, was now hamstringing it.

Planning an Escape

So, PG&E's only escape was to argue that it had already recouped the costs of its investments. To do that, it had to persuade regulators to assign a high value to its profitable hydroelectric generating system, a vast network of flumes, powerhouses and dams in the Sierra Nevada mountains. In a Sept. 14 filing with state regulators, PG&E proposed setting a value of $2.8 billion on the hydro system, a sum that then would have offset its stranded costs enough for PG&E to claim that it had recouped those losses.

But as wholesale prices stayed high and the company's uncollected deficit mounted, PG&E last month recalculated the value of its hydro assets to reflect what it said was "more current market price data." The new proposed value of as much as $4.2 billion would let the utility argue that it had essentially recouped its stranded costs in April and should therefore be allowed to bill its retail customers for the big run-up in wholesale power prices that started in May.

Even as it was maneuvering to close the gap on money spent months ago, PG&E found itself confronted with a new problem. On Dec. 9, California's Independent System Operator unilaterally abandoned the wholesale price cap its board had previously imposed on electricity. Generators had been withholding power from the state's day-ahead auctions, knowing the ISO, as the state's buyer of last resort, would buy power on an emergency basis at whatever it cost just to keep the state's lights on, and then pass the bill on to PG&E and other utilities. After the ISO lifted the cap, there was plenty of electricity available, but at prices four times higher than in June -- an average of $450 per megawatt hour.

Rating agencies moved to slash PG&E's credit rating and began issuing reports that said bankruptcy proceedings were a real possibility. Indeed, PG&E calculated by the end of 2000, it had spent $7 billion more for power than it was allowed to bill its customers. In the meantime, the company's market capitalization has fallen to $6.58 billion from a 52-week high of $12.31 billion in September.

Not Convinced

Consumer advocates aren't convinced the utilities need or deserve to be bailed out. One thing working against the utilities, says State Senate President John Burton, is the fact that their credibility "isn't the best." He says he has been particularly struck by Pacific Gas & Electric's assertion that it can't get money from its parent company to help it through the current crisis. James Weil, a former hearing judge at the Public Utilities Commission who is now a consumer activist, says that since 1997 the parent company has pulled $2.6 billion out of the utility unit in dividends and contributions for stock repurchases. "That's $2.6 billion of loose cash that sure would be useful to the utility right now," says Mr. Weil.

Mr. Glynn, the PG&E CEO, says the transfers are legitimate ones, and that PG&E simply can't survive without a big rate increase.

That the company's fate now is in the hands of others is especially irksome to PG&E's Mr. Smith, whose father also worked for the utility. As he looks out from a 24th-floor conference room at company headquarters one recent evening, he focuses not on the panoramic view of San Francisco, but on a few strings of Christmas lights on a nearby skyscraper. Each bulb is being subsidized by PG&E, he says, adding that he has tried to get the building owner to turn the lights off, at least during the day. As he slaps his hand on the conference table, he exclaims, "I can't get them shut off!"

Wolfram
Here's a fascinating article in Forbes about Stephen Wolfram. It's not your father's Fibonacci sequence!

Russia ready to build £40bn tunnel link to America

TUESDAY JANUARY 02 2001
FROM GILES WHITTELL IN MOSCOW
IT would cost £40 billion, take 20 years to complete and even then would link only two of the world’s most remote places. Yet a tunnel between Russia and America under the Bering Strait can and will be built, according to a senior Moscow official.
Emboldened by the new millennium, the man in charge of modernising Russia’s vast but creaking infrastructure has said that the construction of a 60-mile tunnel under the international dateline from eastern Chukotka to western Alaska is only a matter of time. The money, he insists, is available.

The tunnel would be the biggest project of its kind. At the windswept point where they appear on most maps to kiss, the Russian and American mainlands are separated by only 23 miles of water and their furthest outposts, the Diomede Islands, by three. An international feasibility study concluded, however, that to be safe a tunnel joining them would have to be more than twice as long.

The study is ready to go before the World Bank and the US and Russian Governments with a draft agreement on how to take the project forward, Viktor Razbegin, director of Moscow’s Centre for Regional Transport Projects, said.

Mr Razbegin has been Russia’s chief promoter of a Bering tunnel for the past six years, during which the economic crisis has ruled out the super-projects for which the Soviet Union was famous. There was also a little local difficulty: the nearest road to the Russian side of the Strait is 1,000 miles away at Magadan, a former transit point for prisoners en route to Stalin’s harshest labour camps.

On the American side a road would have to be built from Fairbanks in the face of objections from environmentalists. For a rail tunnel, the nearest North American mainline station is at Prince George, British Columbia, 1,200 miles away. After a year of healthy oil and gas exports, however, Russia has record hard currency reserves and is keen to open up its frontiers for more mineral extraction.

Similar factors have attracted initial funding, much of it from Japan, for a shorter but still ambitious tunnel linking Hokkaido and the Russian mainland via Sakhalin. Construction of the Sakhalin tunnel is due to begin this year.

Russians have been obsessed with finding their own land routes to the New World, however long and arduous, ever since Peter the Great sent Captain Vitus Bering of the Imperial Russian Navy to discover what lay at the easternmost reaches of his continent in 1725.

From 1917 to 1991 the Diomede Islands were home only to birds of passage and nervous frontier troops. Since then Alaskan businessmen have tried to establish links with destitute Chukotka, but have largely failed. Maybe all they need is a tunnel.

Don't Piss Me Off!
Let's finally address something that really pisses me off: people getting all in a lather, twisting up their panties and madly scrambling to click FORWARD to send me (and five million of their closest friends and relatives) obviously stupid virus myths, patently idiotic urban legends, and clearly ignorant internext hoaxes. I have "friends" who I never hear from except when they shriek out to alert me about the "Wobbler" virus or a hypodermic needle plot.

On the other hand, I welcome an alert about a new, genuine virus. And if you have real information about some terrible injustice occurring in the world, do let me know. And I really don't mind if I get a few repeats of old jokes or a few well-meant petitions.

What we need is accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. What we have is a lot of naive people thinking "Hurry, hurry, hurry! Panic, panic, panic!"

False reports, virus myths, urban legends, internet hoaxes are the boy crying wolf over and over and over until the village people are ready to puke. It becomes difficult to identify any real threat, if there is one. They waste my time and resources, and those of millions of other users (who are, of course, less important than me). Also, the hysterical sender of a myth or hoax goes way down in my personal estimation.

Many of the urban legends originated in racism and bigotry. Repeating them is simply a way to continue to feed and support that bigotry, even if the details have changed. For example, the hypodermic needles in the legends no longer come from black drug addicts, but from people with AIDS. Have you ever heard of insulin users hiding their needles in places where you could get stuck?!

Korova has already said it better than I will. Go read it there.

Viruses:
If you get a report of a virus you can check out its truth at Vmyths or Symantec or McAfee. But even before you do that, there are usually clues that a virus alert is probably false:

• Many say "Microsoft (and/or IBM) announced..."
• Well, neither Microsoft nor IBM announce viruses. In fact, even when a real virus is using Microsoft Office to do its damage, Microsoft won't say anything about it for days, if ever.

• Some say "...announced yesterday..."
• "Yesterday." Right. And that day would be...? A real announcement is going to have a real date and I guarantee you Microsoft is not going to get out of a warm bed to make a virus announcement on Sunday (I get so many of these on Mondays!).

• Fake announcements are usually plagued with bad grammar and spelling and typing errors.
• False virus alerts exhort you to forward the alert to everyone you know.

• More informatiion on spotting false virus warnings is available here.

• Korova Hoax du Jour
• Urban Legends Reference Pages
• The AFU & Urban Legends Archive
• Lycos
• The alt.folklore.urban FAQ
• Internet Scambusters
• Hoaxbusters from CIAC and the Dept of Energy
• Urban Myths and Legends
• Give Away Hoaxes
• About.com's Urban Legends
• Malicious Code Hoaxes

• The Curse Of A Thousand Chain Letters
• Funnymail.com
• Chain Letters Central
• Scam Chains
• Threat Chains
• CIAC Chain Letters

Can't We All Just Get Along?
Mickey Kaus revels, positively revels, in the piercing clarity of hindsight in Slate.

Company in Ukraine offers 'Fat in Chocolate'
From CNN.com
January 2, 2001
Web posted at: 9:25 AM EST (1425 GMT)

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- A Ukrainian candy company has begun marketing what may be the stickiest, richest and most fattening holiday treat on the market: pure pork fat covered in chocolate.

Cracking open a finger-sized stick of the dark chocolate candy bar reveals a vein of white fat where most candies conceal butterscotch, caramel or other traditional sweets. The candies are called "Fat in Chocolate."

The product pokes fun at the traditional Ukrainian snack of salo, or salted pork fat, usually consumed with vodka and pickles. Salo is a national symbol of Ukraine recognized throughout the former Soviet Union, although younger people in Ukraine now often turn up their noses at the dish.

A spokesman for candy company AO Odessa said the "Fat in Chocolate" bars were made as a lighthearted and self-deprecating joke for Ukrainians. While edible, they are not really meant to be eaten, the official said.

A bar tried Tuesday was very sweet, while the fat filling retained some of its salty nature. The fat had the gooey texture of well-cooked pasta.

The bars were wrapped in red holiday foil, and show a Ukrainian Cossack with a mustache munching a piece of fat. The candies sold briskly to laughing customers in stores in Ukraine's capital city Kiev on Tuesday.

Copyright 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Fuzzy thinking, arrogance, hypocrisy and irrationality amongst the British upper class and monarchy!

Stunning!
Click here to see this absolutely stunning composite satellite photo of the entire Earth at night. Warning! It's big!

• Here is an explanation of the picture.
• And here is some amateur commentary on it.
• This shows you the lights of North America
• European lights here.

"Nobody will ever be safe until the last cop is dead."
This is almost unbelievable! A former Libertarian, former Democrat, finally finds his rightful home in the Republican party, gets elected, and then lets the world know his enlightened views:

N.H. Lawmaker Advocates Killing Cops

By MIKE RECHT, Associated Press Writer

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - A newly elected Republican state lawmaker has enraged his constituents, party leaders and police by saying he favors killing police officers when they cross the line. One police chief calls him "a hate-mongering lunatic."

Tom Alciere, 41, won a seat in the New Hampshire House on his fourth try after a low-key campaign last fall. It wasn't until Sunday that his constituents in Nashua learned of his anti-police views.

Alciere told the Valley News of Lebanon that he loves it when someone kills a police officer: "It's unfortunate that cops do make it necessary (to kill them) when they're waging a war on drugs, and I view cops as enemy officers." He said he is "too chicken" to do it himself.

He acknowledges posting his views at Internet chat sites for months, including this 1999 comment: "Nobody will ever be safe until the last cop is dead."

State GOP Chairman Steve Duprey said Alciere should renounce his views or resign. But Alciere stood his ground.

"There's no way I'm going to resign," he said Tuesday.

Alciere, a married father of one who inspects circuit boards at a factory, said he was arrested for "petty stuff" years ago but never went to jail and has no criminal record. He said his anti-police comments are the "harmless rantings of a private citizen" that won't influence his legislative work.

New Hampshire has no procedure for recalling state representatives, and legislators said they expect Alciere to serve.

"As despicable as the ideas are, the complaints against him are for his ideas," said Peter Burling, the House Democratic leader.

With 400 members, the New Hampshire House is the largest state legislative body in the country and many campaigns don't get much media attention. Alciere admits he didn't advertise his views during his campaign, but denies misleading anyone.

"Nobody asked," he said. "For state representative, you don't have to tell where you stand on the issues."

He said when police cross the line, citizens have the right to use force to defend themselves: "Whatever is necessary is necessary. It sounds kind of harsh."

He is taking plenty of heat. Newmarket police Chief Rodney Collins called Alciere "a hate-mongering lunatic," and Gov. Jeanne Shaheen is among state leaders to denounce him.

Nashua Deputy Police Chief Timothy Hefferan said supervisors warn officers to be careful if they get a call to Alciere's apartment building. He said police usually stay out of politics, but "I think we'll have to revisit that policy just to enlighten people."

Alciere's views got some publicity when he wrote letters to newspapers.

In 1997, three days after Carl Drega killed two state troopers, a part-time judge and a newspaper editor in Colebrook, Alciere sent a letter saying that except for the editor, Drega was "an otherwise innocent cop-killer taking out enemy officers in battle."

The letter was never published, but became part of the investigation.

A short time later, Epsom police officer Jeremy Charron was murdered. Alciere defended Charron's killer, Gordon Perry, because he said Charron had no right to ask Perry and a companion for identification while they slept in their car.

Alciere said his anger stems from reading and watching television about police misconduct, and his belief that many of the laws the police enforce are unjust.

But during his campaign, he promised simply to oppose any bills that infringe on freedom, and defeated a Democratic incumbent by 55 votes. In his previous runs for the seat, Alciere ran twice as a Libertarian and once as a Democrat.

After the election, Alciere went online and said he was elected by a "bunch of fat, stupid, ugly old ladies that watch soap operas, play bingo, read tabloids and don't know the metric system."

"The same lamebrains who vote for politicians who are WRONG finally voted for one who is RIGHT," he wrote.

I found the article on Yahoo.

You'll like glassdog and maybe David Gaddis.

Recognizing The Millennium
I have not worn any clothes during this millennium.

Space Station
NASA provides a dynamic International Space Station tracking site. It shows the current location of the space station and indicates where it might be visible on earth. There are also tables of sighting schedules available here, but the Boston one hadn't been updated since December 30, so...

I am not this Ron Gilbert.

Nor am I this one.