A view into the mind of Kelly Adams

MIT discovery could “supercharge” lithium ion batteries

One of the big problems with existing battery technologies is the charge and discharge rate. A battery that powers a device for several hours can take nearly the same amount of time to recharge, making it difficult to develop “continuous use” devices. There has been a lot of research into new technologies like super-capacitors, but production use of these approaches is years if not decades in the future. Thanks to the folks at MIT, however, we may soon have a simple alternative: quick-charge (and discharge) Lithium Ion batteries.

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In these difficult economic times, auto workers “cut to the bone” at $55 an hour

The North American auto industry is in dire straits. The economic situation is so difficult for them that they have been forced to go to their workers unions and ask for reductions in salary and benefits. In fact, these reductions are a condition of the U.S. federal government emergency loans. So it is with great relief that I have found in today’s news an update: Ford has managed to negotiate a reduction in the average hourly wage (including benefits) of their UAW employees down to the barely survivable level of $55 an hour.

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Green tea…

I’ve been drinking a couple of cups of green tea each day. It has become a habit of mine to have a mug of green tea each night to gear down before going to sleep. But until today, I basically just bought green tea bags from the Chinese grocers not far from us and dunked them in hot water. Today, I became “enlightened”, and that simple mug of green tea will never seem the same again.

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Home office refresh 2009

I’m starting on another “refresh” of my workspace at home: this is becoming a distressingly regular (annual?) activity that I’m hoping to put an end to soon. The objective this year is pretty much a total rebirth: minimizing/reducing, painting, and possibly re-flooring and new furniture. The first step was to excise a bunch of “stuff” from this rather small room, and to get ready for the painting which I intend to do myself.

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Impact of Google page rank

My site’s Google “PageRank” dropped in January, from a 3 to a 2, which is pretty much as low as you can go. Smaller numbers mean less “relevant”, at least as far as Google is concerned. I’d like a higher page rank but when I think about it doesn’t matter all that much to me. I’m more curious, however, to observe the impact of the ranking drop.

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Solid State Drives (SSD) and real-world performance

I have been following the development of solid state drives (SSD) for what seems like decades. The advantages of no moving parts and virtually zero random access latency are compelling, but the prices and capacities have not been where I needed them to be for practical use. That is nearly no longer true and SSDs are entering the mass market level for some particular purposes (notably laptops). Naturally, since it is on the leading edge, I’m all over it: I just bought a 128 GB SSD on my own dime for my work laptop.  

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Time to buy a PS3? Hardly…

The folks at Ars Technica would like you to believe that now is the time to buy a PS3. My interpretation of their thesis: the PS3 doesn’t really suck that bad, and if you don’t buy it you will lack a full understanding of the current “state of the art” in console gaming. I find the reasoning in the article to be rather shoddy, really: it only applies if you have a bucket of money sitting unused and don’t already have a console. I particularly don’t like the implication that I’m being shallow or ignorant by making the decision *not* to buy a PS3.

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Observations after a week of waking up to the (simulated) sun

A week ago I mentioned that I had purchased a lamp that simulates a sunrise. I promised at the time that I would provide some kind of a review after a week or two of use, and I think I’ve experienced enough with this lamp to offer some reasonable impressions. The results are good: waking up to ersatz sunlight helps make my day a bit better.

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