My new MiPod has been working fine, I charge it every night and it sits and grows warm next to my laptop. Today I listened to some more Talk of the Nation Science Friday. The same place I heard about the most insane laser physics experiment ever.

I saw a Pizza Hut today. Not just any ordinary Pizza Hut, but a "Pizza Hut Italian Bistro". What's that about? By no stretch of the imagination has any Pizza Hut I've been in or near counted as a Bistro of any sort, Italian or otherwise. I think what it means is that not only are they a Pizza Hut, but they're a Pizza Hut with awnings.

I passed 30,000 clicks on our Nikon CoolpiX 5400 a couple of days ago. I think that's more pictures than most people will take in a lifetime. I'm well on my way to 40,000 clicks and should easily reach that pitiful number by the end of my current trip. So far the camera has been working fine for me. I'd echo the reviews I've read that say that it has trouble focusing in low light conditions. I don't know if it's just low light or not, but low contrast surfaces like, say, the blank wall of a hotel room when taking a photo at f/4 and 1/4s for proper exposure are definitely things that it has some trouble with sometimes. I've thought of bringing along a laser pointer to give the surface some contrast, but it seems to be sufficient just to tip the tripod to give the camera a good view of the wall / floor interface. The only real complaint I have is the speed at which it accesses the CF card. The write speed seems to be somewhere around 500KB/s for writing (including file compression) which sounds like a lot until you start taking full resolution 5Mpx .tiff pictures and have to wait 25 - 30 seconds to write one to the card. Even the 300k .jpg files take a couple of seconds to compress and write. A full 1GB CF card takes around 20 minutes to copy, compared to 4 minutes using a FireWire card reader. That's under 1MB/s for the camera and 4MB/s for the reader (Though the camera is limited to the speed of its 10Mb/s USB interface and the reader to its 400Mb/s FireWire interface). Oh well, the Canon EOS-1D Mark II N and 1Ds Mark II are both a smidge out of my price range at the moment so the CoolpiX and the EOS-10D will have to do for now.

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For anyone who is curious about the type of photos I'm taking. You can see a virtual tour of a hotel here. It's not the hotel chain I'm doing now and I'm not saying I took every single picture on the site or even one for that matter and I definitely didn't take the one with the chick getting out of the pool.

Oh, and if you need a portable bidet with a handy built-in digital camera. Gizmodo's got your back

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This morning, after waking to a cool, 64 degree morning, while driving through northeastern Wisconsin, along the border with Michigan, listening to a track from a mix disk made by one of my favorite techno groups, as I tipped my head back to drink from my caramel mocha and saw a bright blue sky through the open sunroof, the thought came to me; "this could be a good day."

Overall, despite the company I'm working for dicking with my schedule and not having a cell phone signal to call home with tonight, it wasn't a bad day. The sky stayed mostly blue, the weather stayed mostly cool and I stayed mostly on schedule. I did notice one thing though; Northeastern Wisconsin has decided on a price for unleaded gasoline: $2.899. I've seen a total of two variations in this price since yesterday morning: One place had the eight upside down and one place had gas for two cents cheaper.

I knew that Minnesota had an Embarrass, but I didn't know that Wisconsin had one. It turns out Illinois has one too.

So, anyway... This place I was filming yesterday had the TV on while I was there. There was an ad detailing how one could get information on why it was crucial to invest in gold right now by calling 1-800-949-GOLD. This ad was wrong on so many levels. First of all, they just told you that you needed to "buy gold now", then they offer to give you a leaflet that says the same thing? OK, obviously the leaflet tells you to buy gold from them because they have a bunch that they're not using. Which is not only obvious, but leads me to the next thing that's wrong with this ad: Gold always goes up in value when the rest of the economy is crappy and goes down when the economy gets better. Basically, they're telling people to "buy gold now (quick before the price goes down so we can reap our profits because we bought it at the right time years ago)". The bastards.

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A store named Gene's Beaver Floral.

That's all I got.

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A couple of odd signs I've seen over the last few days:

"Good Clean Fun Tattoo and Piercing: Behind Liquor Store". Tattooing and Piercing should be clean. If they're not, go somewhere else. I wonder if the liquor store is clean too.

There was a small sewing shop selling sewing machines but the sign said "Sewing Mechs". Now there's an idea: My pants need hemming, so I'll give them to this 20 foot robot with lots of thread

So, I'm driving down the road and I see a train. No big deal. The train was half full of Bradley Fighting Vehicles though. I wonder where they're headed. Do we need them in Louisiana?

Lastly: while driving down another road I saw a truck carrying boats. I had a sudden urge to perform a Truck Torpedo takedown but, as usual, there were no rivals close enough. (Burnout - Revenge is out this month! )

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"Yes, you can have rolex 20 times chipper!"

From the "What Were They Thinking" files we have this subject line. I have to think that the rolex should be quite a bit less expensive after 20 times through a chipper. Or maybe there are 20 pieces of the timepiece from the chipper

I just don't know...

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Here are a couple of random links I found interesting. The Mac Mini Millennium Falcon mod and the iPhone iSpoof Art Show.

Both are from Gizmodo.

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My mother sent me this link to an article discussing the future of FEMA as proposed by President Bush. 'Nuff said.

It turns out that I did not make it to both Lucas and Davenport, Iowa. I-80 was under construction through that area so I took I-280, the bypass around Davenport. Actually, the whole Lucas Davenport thing might have been screwed from the start since I really just saw Lucas, Iowa from across the train tracks. I'm pretty sure I was in Lucas, but maybe not. Anyway, no Lucas Davenport for me.

When I was in Iowa, after being in Missouri, I came up with a theory. I think that there is something fundamentally different between the infrared radiation given off by nuclear fusion and the infrared radiation given off by the combustion of carbohydrate material such as cellulose or natural gas. I came to this conclusion based on the fact that the sun was terribly bright, hot and annoying for much of my trip but when I was filming a hotel room that had a fireplace running for effect when the room was already quite hot, I didn't mind it at all. I actually enjoyed it.

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Hurricane Katrina, Part Deux

I guess what really gets me about the situation is who will suffer because of it. The people who are really going to take the hit down where it happened are the poor people; the ones without insurance, without transportation, and currently, without income. The rich and the middle class will mostly be OK and they'll be educated enough to know where to go to get money for the damage. The people who will be hurt in the rest of the country as a result are also the poor. Sure gas prices are higher for everyone, but the poor pay a higher percentage of their earnings for essentials and essentials are about to get more expensive.

One oil pipeline is down right now because of a power outage the oil companies couldn't be bothered to plan for. That pipeline goes to the east coast and will likely affect the delivery schedule there. I'm in the midwest but I just paid $2.999 per gallon for gas. So, since the east coast can't get fresh oil, Iowa has higher gas prices? I know they're also going to have to repair quite a bit of damage to some off-shore rigs and that means that they are going to raise prices to make up for it but I think they're glad to profit from something like this. What it means to the rest of the country is that the higher fuel costs will result in higher transportation costs for everything we buy and that's going to hurt the people who can least afford it the most.

I know that New Orleans wasn't hit directly by the hurricane, and I know they just had a little flooding really. I've also been to New Orleans, and It's a really neat place. I don't want to live there or be there during a tropical storm of any kind, but it's a neat place to visit. I know I sounded harsh when I said that it was a bad idea to move to where tropical storms ravish the countryside every year, but it's true. The people who were born there on the other hand have less of a say in the matter. I can spare a little sympathy for people who are having their entire life history flattened.

There is a culture and a feel to those regions that would be completely lost if everyone moved out and I think that it would be missed. I know that many places have bans on building new buildings in areas that have been flooded in recent history. I don't know if these areas have them, but I think it's something to think about. I would still feel bad that people who have lived there all their lives had to move farther out and we'd loose a lot of very valuable land to flooding but it would make a nice park. We'd also loose a lot of farmland to forced sprawl, but a lot of farmers are going to have a hard time this year because of higher fuel costs, so maybe they'll be looking for a new job anyway. I don't mean that to sound harsh, I just want to think it could be made convenient for everyone concerned.

Anyway, I said I was tired of hearing about Katrina and here I go with more about Katrina. Let's try something else shall we?

As I said earlier, I filled my tank at $2.999 per gallon today. The regular unleaded (87 octane) was going for $3.099 at the same station. What's interesting about many of the places I've filled my tank is that the 10% ethanol blend fuels have been the middle grade fuels and been cheaper. It makes sense that ethanol fortified fuel would have a higher octane rating because ethanol has a higher octane rating than octane. What I find unique is that it's almost always 10 cents cheaper per gallon. I'm guessing that it's subsidized because it's an earth-friendly fuel additive that's made domestically and they're trying to get people to buy more of it, but I'm thrilled because, living in Minnesota, all my gasoline contains 10% ethanol anyway so, while the prices are pretty bad, I still get a little break.

Since MiPod has been dead for most of this trip, I've been listing to a lot of radio. I haven't been able to find a lot of college radio, but I've found the occasional NPR affiliate, and there's almost always some sort of hard rock station within range. The best part about hard rock is that, because I have to switch stations frequently due to my rate of travel, even if I'm starting to get a weak signal and getting some static, it's OK because it sounds a lot like the music they're playing. I mean with hard rock, it's not so much a mater of signal-to-noise as it is noise-to-other-noise.

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"I just checked out your blog by the way. I'm impressed...You've put together a nice collection of interesting tidbits that reflect your own personality, and you've made it look effortless. As a writer, I'm a bit envious.
---The Author's Wife

"Your Travel log, etc., is very interesting, Ben. Deep Thoughts on so many subjects. I'm not surprised at all. I'm pleased."
---The Author's Mother

"Just buzzed by your traveling page. I enjoyed it."
---The Author's Buddy

"I like reading the travel journals, man."
---The Author's other Buddy

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