A couple years ago, I tried switching to dvorak. I liked it, but then I got a new computer and I didn’t switch the keys on it.
Until last night:
All the keys switched on my Macbook Pro keyboard. Click for full size.
I’m slowly re-learning where everything is.
Thank goodness 2008 is gone. What a crazy year.
Normally we send out a year-in-review letter with our Christmas cards, but we just couldn’t do it this year. So, here are the highlights:
Talk about a year of ups and downs. I’m just ready to look ahead, work hard, and enjoy life with my newly expanded family.
Kevin and I used to debate on where to eat lunch every day. The agony of the decision weighed heavily on us. We made a random lunch picker to let The Fates decide our dining decisions.
But, we never made a blog about it. Unlike this fellow at Kansas City Lunch Spots.
This image caught my eye in the post about health inspections. Some states require that health inspection placards are placed in the window, and this place didn’t do so well. Never mind that! A little team spirit to the rescue!
Sneaky Restaurant
While watching a renovation show the other day, the solar panel installers put the panels on this raised tracks. By raising the panels, you get more airflow under them to dissipate the heat, which is very important because the efficiency goes down as their temperature goes up.
Later, someone was installing a solar tube water heater. Water circulates through these tubes to be heated and then used for hot water in the house.
Why aren’t these combined into one product?
Use the panel to generate electricity. Underneath, have a second panel that the water circulates into to collect the extra heat. Seems like you could get enough heat to heat your house, even, if you used a radiant flooring system that ciruculated the hot water through tubes in the house.
I did a quick search for combo-solar-type panels and couldn’t find anything, but I’d be curious to know if anyone is developing such a combo-solar-panel for the general market.
Lately I’ve been trying to think of ways to use free market strategies in different ways. I’m fascinated by the simple, yet complex, relationship between supply and demand can be. For instance, we use a lot of corn for ethanol, so farmers want to grow more corn, so they grow less of other crops, so other foods can be more expensive. We’re not growing enough corn, so corn prices rise as well. Corn also gets fed to cows, so scarce corn means higher prices, which equals higher beef prices or a switch to a grassier diet.
And so on.
If you’re interested in these types of relationships, I highly recommend Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt. Lots of neat linkages between things you wouldn’t necessarily associate with each other.
In this same train of thought, I read a great article about taxes in The Wall Street Journal that uses IRS data to analyze how the cut in the dividend tax actually raised tax revenues. As tax rates fell, investors were more likely to target investments that gave dividends and companies were more likely to issue divendends. The loss from lowering the tax percentage was more than made up by getting more transactions to tax.
Let’s try a couple more wacky ideas!
People should recycle. It’s not that hard to separate your plastic and glass and cans and put them in a different container for them to be taken away and re-used.
Yet (at least here in Olathe) it costs me a monthly fee for recycling but I can put as much trash out as I want. Instead, I’d like to encourage less trash and more recycling. So, switch the two. Recycling would be free and you would pay for each bag of trash you put out (maybe you have to use the city-supplied trash bags, for instance.) Suddenly, people are motivated to use less and to recycle more.
If you’ve got any more ideas, I’d love to hear them!
The intersection of technology and democracy has finally culminated; you can pick the next design for Kansas license plates:
http://www.ksrevenue.org/apps/vote.aspx
Personalized plates are due to change in 2010.
