Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Yesterday, literally yesterday, it occurred to me that it had been a few months since my last unsolicited, BS email from Senator Rob Portman (R-OH). Finally, I thought, they had invested the time and energy to make sure that the little “unsubscribe” link actually worked. Victory. Victory I say… is short lived. Guess which putz senator from Ohio spammed me today. Go ahead. Guess.

If you guessed Senator Rob “Eff you I spam whoever I effing want” Portman, you win a lifetime supply of pork-product emails. This is absurd.

Yesterday I was researching a new solar power plant that is going to be connected to the grid. I started with very little information, so I had to wade through a lot of false-leads to get the information I was seeking. In the process though, I ran across info for one solar power plant, the economics of which I found to be amazing.

A school in Pennsylvania chose to build a 1MW solar PV plant on something like ~6 acres, that I guess they didn’t have anything else to do with. The total cost was $4.8 million. This is not the amazing part. To get it built, they got grants to cover 51% of the costs. Most of that was federal and state grants. But they also got about 10% from the local utility. Still, that huge subsidy is not the amazing part. What surprised me, was that they get renewable energy credits for each megawatt-hour they generate, to the tune of something like $300. That’s the equivalent of 30 cents-per-killowatt-hour. And the local utility has to buy these credits. So for every killowatt-hour they produce, they don’t have to buy power from the grid at a cost of 11 cents/kwh and they then get paid 30 cents/kwh.

If this school had to rely only the power the solar PV farm produced to pay back the investment, it would take about 30 years. But with the freebies, the payback period is 4. 4 years! After that, I reckon they’ll be revenue positive as long as the price of the renewable energy credits doesn’t tank. Good deal if you can get it.

For something like 2 years, I have received 2 auto-generated work emails each and every day. I have been unable to auto-filter them because the emails have no subject / empty subject / missing subject. Not that I’ve spent much time on it, but over that period I have been unable to figure out how to have the filter recognize the lack of a subject. Today I finally cracked the code.

In SquirrelMail, the filtering options are these:

• contains
• does not contain
• is
• is not
• matches wildcard
• does not match wildcard
• > is greater than
• >= is greater than or equal to
• > is lower than
• >= is lower than or equal to
• = is equal to
• != is not equal to
• matches regexp
• does not match regexp

In the past I had attempted to use “contains” and then leave the field empty. No dice. Same thing for “is”. Specifying that the subject “is” “null” or “is” “empty” didn’t work. Nor did saying the subject “is” “(no subject)” (as the subject is displayed in the folder view) nor the subject “contains” “(no subject)”.

Recently I suspected the key must be to use the regular expression matching. Alas the “^$” filter did not work, I suspect because there are no empty spaces in the subject line because there literally is no subject and it therefore cannot contain any empty spaces.

Finally, after reading up a bit on the subject (no pun intended), I finally figured out that the wildcard was the key. The ultimate winner was “does not match wildcard” “*”.

I love simple solutions. I just hate it when it takes me forever to find it.

UPDATE 2011-12-26: Back to the drawing board. This worked in trial conditions but has been otherwise failing. Dagnabit!

I’m becoming a bit hesitant to upgrade my versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. It seems with each new version there is some little change that really throws me off (or it has my add-ons disabled for bit to throw me off). My upgrade to Thunderbird 8 was no exception. In the new version I was having problems finding the quick filter functionality. Turns out there was a good reason: one of the stupid old additions was fixed:

There are also new Search and Find keyboard shortcuts alongside numerous security patches and bug fixes.

The new keyboard shortcuts have come about due to an ambiguity between using the [Ctrl] + [F] shortcut to both search using the Quick Filter and within individual messages depending on what was selected. Now [Ctrl] + [F] is used specifically to search within selected messages; to search using the Quick Filter bar, use the brand new [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [K] shortcut instead.

It always bugged me that [Ctrl] + [F] did different things. I think the search functions in Thunderbird still need a lot of help, but this is a god start.

Thanks to BetaNews for having the scoop.

… for linking to PrisonPlanet and easily the dumbest article I’ve read all year. “Obama’s Blocking Of New Power Plants Triggers Nationwide Blackouts” says Prison Planet. Look, I hate Obama as President, but that claim is bullshit. Pure bullshit. I have to figure that they are “stuck on stupid.” And they must be to a) figure that Obama has had so much influence in just over 2 years given the lengthy, multi-year process involved in building a new power plant and b) claim “the inability of power companies to meet demand is almost exclusively a consequence of the Obama administration’s publicly stated goal to bankrupt the coal industry” to ignore other factors such as major natural gas supply disruptions caused by “[f]rozen natural gas wellheads in the Rocky Mountains and pipeline problems in Texas.”

For my work, I’m granted a Verizon Mobile Broadband card. It’s a nice perk, but for the last several months, it hasn’t worked right. It would work fine until I would connect to my work’s VPN (so that I could actually, you know, work). About a minute after connection to the VPN it would go into a dormant state and then disconnect very soon thereafter. Any number of google and bing searches revealed solutions that didn’t solve my problem. Finally, today, I found the fix at the SmarterGeek Blog by Rex Moncrief.

Wrote Rex:

I decided to troubleshoot. After all, I rely on the service when I am not at my office. The first thing I did was try and think of anything that had changed between Tuesday and Wednesday on my machine. My laptop runs a very clean installation of XP Pro – and I know every piece of software that is installed.

Linksys Print Server Utility 1.0
On Tuesday, I was at a client’s office and we installed a Linksys WPSM54G Print Server, which requires the installation of Linksys Print Server Utility 1.0 and naturally Linksys thinks it has to run at start-up. Typically, I would remove software like that from startup, but in my hurry I just hadn’t done it yet.

Funny. I installed some Linksys print server software many months ago when I purchased and installed a Linksys Wireless-G Print Server for my brother. Rex was right, the Linksys software is the problem. I just disabled it and now my Verizon access is being maintained perfectly.

Thanks, Rex!