• Ok, McCain’s speech isn’t the shot out of the park that Palin delivered last night, but its a good solid double off the wall… #

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I was bummed when NBC didn’t pick up the sleeper of last season, Studio 60. I was a little more bummed when Fox dropped Standoff. I thought both of those shows were the stand outs from last season (I never understood the attraction to heros and I still don’t other than Hayden and now Kirsten Bell being on the show). I gotta say though, NBC has redeemed themselves a little with three of this seasons best new shows, Life, chuck and Bionic Woman.

These three shows have me tuning in every week (it helps that the CIA agent on Chuck and cruise’s partner on Life and Jamie on Bionic Woman are all HOT) to see what happens next. They are all well done, the actors are, from what I can tell, relatively unknown (Adam Baldwin on Chuck was on Firefly) and the stories are pretty compelling as well. The effects in Bionic Woman could have gone over the top, but have been kept fairly realistic and the story behind how she came to be bionic is compelling as well.

The most far fetched of the three is possibly chuck (who now holds all the NSA and CIA’s secrets in his head), but thats easily forgotten when you look at the action and how well everything ties together. My favorite and the one I will not miss every week is Life. I like the zenlike attitude that Charlie has adopted since being in Prison for a crime he didn’t commit and the fact that half of the force seems to be with him and half against makes for some good action too. All in all, while I miss the old, I like at least, three of the new…

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I’ve blogged a lot lately about the lack of rain (except for this week for some reason) in the Atlanta area due to the drought. The problems of the drought have pretty much caused my lawn and gardens to transform from something I could be a little happy with to brown and crackly messes that I just want to tear out and do all over again (but I won’t. At least, not yet). Most of it is caused by the restrictions on watering that have been imposed due to the drought which could have been avoided with a little bit of careful planing. For instance, earlier in the year, the sprinklers at the entrance to the hood would run even in the rain. wasting who knows how much water. Thats a common problem with many of the sprinkler systems, they lack a rain detector.

There’s a new player in the market though, that really really looks promising. The advances made in home automation have been great over the past couple of years. Cyber-Rain.com wants to take it a step farther by linking your sprinkler systems to your home PC for better automation and management and I think its a cool idea. We had an estimate done earlier in the summer for a new lawn and sprinkler system. We didn’t do it (the price was a little more than we were prepared for) but I may look again at a sprinkler system, especially if I can get cyber rain installed.

The coolest thing about this is that it automagically adjusts the watering schedule based on weather reports that it downloads from the net. HOW FREAKING AWESOME IS THAT?? Its a simple box that adds on to your sprinkler system, it connects to your network wirelessly via 802.11g protocol and you can control everything from your PC/mac/whatever. I think that is worth it in itself. The time, energy and water you could save with this system would pay for itself in the matter of months. Is anyone out there using a solution like this already? Have you seen any benefit from it??

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Recently, there was a row in the UK over the Government requiring schools to show Gore’s farce of a movie about Global Warming. It actually went to court and a Judge in the UK found that it had at least nine falsehoods in it. There’s an interesting review of the movie at the Science and Public Policy Institute that found there are actually 35 Inconvenient Truths in the film.

I don’t care if you believe in Global Warming or not (for the record, I don’t). What I do care about is whether or not you believe what you hear or see with out doing the research yourself. It is far too easy to take what we hear for truth these days with out ever doing a bit of back checking to see if its any where near the ballpark (have you gotten that chain email about the Applebee’s Gift Cert?).

The article at the SPPI goes in depth on 35 of the specific errors (such as the ice on Kilimanjaro melting or the pacific islands disappearing under water) and refutes the claims made in “an Inconvenient Truth” with actual science. Something that while not lacking in the movie is consistently one sided. The problem with the movie (as with anything done by Michael Moore as well) is that it takes data and uses it as the backers of the flick see fit. What it doesn’t tell you are the other sides to every issue brought up by the film.

Take a look at the article, let me know if you still take the film as the gospel truth on global warming…

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A couple of days ago I mentioned in a post that Hillary was trying to ear mark some money ($1,000,000 to be exact) for a museum commemorating Woodstock. This week while she was Busy celebrating her birthday with fundrasing parties, Senator McCaine was busy celebrating the 40th anniversery of his capture by North Vietnamese forces.

He did have this to say about the museum:

A few days ago, Sen. Clinton tried to spend one million dollars on the Woodstock concert museum,” McCain said. “Now my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was, I was tied up at the time.

While I don’t think he has what it takes to be president, i wouldn’t mind seeing him in the VP position. I think a Huckabee/McCain ticket could work…

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