Hydrogen: A Red Herring

/

While I'm glad that President Bush has stopped pimping for Big Oil long enough to endorse hydrogen as an alternative energy strategy, I have to point out that hydrogen is not an energy source. How do you get hydrogen? Well, that's simple, you run electricity through water and collect the hydrogen, right? Then, you burn the hydrogen in your car. How much energy do you get from burning it? Less than you used to separate it from the water in the first place, quoth Wikipedia:

It is currently very difficult to obtain hydrogen gas without expending energy in the process. The process of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen using electrolysis consumes large amounts of energy. It has been calculated that it takes 1.4 joules of electricity to produce 1 joule of hydrogen (Pimentel, 2002). If oil or gases are used to provide this energy, fossil fuels are consumed, forming pollution and nullifying the value of using a fuel cell. It would be more efficient to use fossil fuel directly

That said, I think hydrogen could be useful to power our cars, as long as we use nuclear, solar, or wind energy to get it from our water, with nuclear making the most sense. So now, to power our fleet of hydrogen cars, we just need a bunch of new nuclear plants, which most "green" activists won't abide. So now what?

Meet Me In Montana

/

I booked a cabin in Montana this week. No, I'm not going to become the next Unabomber, my family is going there on vacation in June. After browsing every area web site, I finally selected the Apgar Village Lodge as where we'll stay. My parents and my sister are going to meet my wife and I there, and hopefully we'll be bringing my grandparents along with us, if they can get away from the farm for a week. We're also going to do some whitewater rafting while we're in Montana, possibly here.

Bad Service

/

I had some abysmally bad customer service from Gateway yesterday, I only wish I was able to save the transcript of the online chat session I had with one of their techs. I was helping a student who had to reinstall Windows on his laptop, and Gateway didn't have the drivers on their web site for his network card. He'd managed to lose the Restore CD for his laptop, but had purchased a copy of Windows XP, so this should have been no problem, right? Wrong. Even though I'd already said that I had the wireless drivers working (which are on their site), the tech insisted twice that those were the network drivers I needed. After I made it clear that I was after WIRED networking drivers, he tried telling me that the only way to get those were off the restore CD. So, I asked what chipset was in the laptop, and after 10 minutes he came back and told me it was a Marvel-Yukon Gigabit PCI-Express chipset. I said "I guarantee to you that this laptop does not have that chipset". The laptop wasn't ancient by any means, but it was more than a year and a half old, and sure enough, while the tech was insisting I was wrong, I found that the laptop actually used the Broadcom 4401 chipset, and downloaded and installed those drivers with no problem, though the tech still insisted I was wrong...

Needless to say, "Simon" got a negative rating in the feedback section from me...