I watch my share of television. I am even willing to admit that I’ve been totally hooked on several shows (Futurama comes to mind). Never, however, have I seen a series as enthralling as The 4400.

I’ve been watching it more or less since the beginning. It originally aired as just a 6 episode miniseries, which was great, but it was so critically acclaimed that it came back the next summer as a full-fledged TV show. I’ve since watched every season since it first aired and so far own the first two seasons on DVD. I’ve truly never seen this happen to any TV show quite like this, but every single season gets exponentially better. I’m honestly not exaggerating, every season is better than the last by a long shot and that in no way leaves out the just-concluded fourth season. Multiple times during the most recent season’s finale my jaw literally dropped and I got giddy with excitement for what had just happened, what was about to happen, and/or what was alluded will happen during the next season – which, by the way, I cannot wait to see.

So you’ve read this, you’ve never seen the show, which seems to be the case among many of my friends. Here’s all you need to know, taken from Wikipedia, before you start watching it:

What is originally thought to be a comet deposits a group of exactly 4400 people at Highland Beach, in the Cascade Range foothills near Mount Rainier, Washington. All of the 4400 disappeared at various times starting in 1946 in a beam of white light. After their return, none have aged, all are disoriented, and remember nothing between the time of their disappearance and their return.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say that beyond what you’ve read above, the show is classified as Sci-Fi. Take from that what you will, but whether you’re a Sci-Fi fan or not, this series is phenomenal and worth your time as well as every penny of the cost of buying the currently available seasons. If you know me personally and want to borrow seasons one and two, just ask. If you don’t know me personally but still want to watch it, go buy season one. You won’t regret your purchase.

Well, this is a blog post I can truly say I never expected to be writing, but I’m a little unsure of what I saw last night, so I decided to put it in to words. To start, I’ve never really believed in ghosts and I’m still not sure I do. That’s not to say I think they don’t exist, because I don’t know that for sure either, but I’ve never honestly put much thought in to it.

On to the good part, though: Jessie and I were driving back from our friends’ house and shortly before we got home I saw something on the side of the road – just for a second – that was so foreign to my eyes that it took me another ten seconds to actually mutter the words “I think I just saw a ghost.” In discussing it with Jessie last night, the closest I could get to visually describe it was as a condensed wispy white fog about the size of a human, but showing no real discernible characteristics. Even just that description took me several minutes to be able to articulate. The only thing that did immediately strike me about it was that in the very second that I saw it chills instinctively and uncontrollably went down my spine and spread in to my limbs with such force that I was still able feel it when we got home. Did I actually see a ghost? Who knows. What I do know, is that it is still creepy to think about it.

The reasons for saving energy in your home are twofold. First, and foremost, it benefits the entire energy grid. If everyone is consuming less energy, less power needs to be created, which, in turn, is generally better for the environment. The second and more selfish reason is that it saves you money and everyone loves to save money.

Here are 10 great ways to save energy:

1. Replace the standard conventional incandescent light bulbs in your house with significantly lower wattage compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). They are available to replace most types of bulbs you would have in your home and as opposed to the 40-100 watts that a standard light bulb would consume, they will use only about 7-27 watts for equivalent light output. Even if you only replace the bulbs in high-traffic areas of your home where the lights are on the most, you will still have noticeable energy savings.
2. Do your electronics have a “sleep” feature? Use it. Most computers and some other electronics have a built-in feature where after a certain time of being idle they will automatically go to sleep, where they use minimal power, but can “wake up” rapidly if needed. On a computer, this is extremely helpful because it can turn off your monitor and spin down your hard disk when you walk away and are done using it.
3. Turn down your water heater. About 15% of average home energy bill is the cost of running the water heater. Turning this down even a little bit can save you at least a few dollars a month and isn’t really noticeable when you’re showering, because you’ll just turn the cold water down a little bit to compensate.
4. Staying on the topic of water, replace your shower head(s) and with low-flow shower heads and install sink aerators. They can be relatively inexpensive to buy, are easy to install, and pay for themselves pretty quickly with the savings on hot water. In our shower, we have a Waterpik that came with it and it’s great.
5. Here’s the last tip to involve savings related to hot water: Do your laundry with cold water. There’s detergent formulated specifically for cold water laundry and it does a good job. The combination of doing your laundry in cold water as well as the hot water saving techniques I mentioned above can save you a cool (pun intended) $60+ a year.
6. Buy products with the Energy Star^© logo. These products meet strict government guidelines for energy efficiency, so they’re pretty much guaranteed to shrink your energy bill as compared to the same product without the logo. You can get just about anything with this logo on it: refrigerators, TVs, cell phones, heaters, air conditioners, fluorescent lighting, and much much more.
7. Got a house with older windows and doors? Stop by the local hardware store and pick up some weather stripping for your doors and windows. During the winter, it’ll keep the hot air in and increase the efficiency of your heater and, likewise, will keep the cool air in during the summer and increase the efficiency of your A/C.
8. Check, clean, and/or replace your air filters on a regular basis. The dirtier they are, the more airflow is restricted, and the harder the heater or A/C will need to work to heat or cool your house. Not only does a dirty filter cause your equipment to work harder, but it’s likely going to shorten its life.
9. Install a programmable thermostat. It will allow you to automatically set the temperature of your house at comfortable levels while you’re home, while turning it down when you’re at work. From personal experience, I can guarantee that they’re easy to install for even the newest of homeowners.
10. Last, but not least: Turn stuff off! Not watching TV anymore? Turn if off. Done with the computer? Turn it off (or put it to sleep). Not using a room in your house at the moment? Turn off the lights. It’s not that hot outside? Turn off the A/C, open the windows, and get some fresh air.

I hope the above list is helpful to whoever reads it, if anyone even does. I will admit that I haven’t done all of these things in my home (yet), but I’ve only been a homeowner for a few months now and will slowly do my best to save any energy I can.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the DHS is the government agency better known as the Department of Homeland Security. This Cabinet-level department of the federal government is charged with the duty of protecting the United States from terrorist attacks and responding to natural disasters. The latter half of that statement is clearly a joke. I regularly watch the news on television, read it on the Internet, and listen to it on the radio, and I’ve never once heard the DHS even remotely mentioned in relation to any of the devastating natural disasters that has befallen the nation in the last few years from hurricanes to tornadoes to floods. It’s bad enough that the government can’t even take care of it’s own people when a natural disaster strikes, but on to what really scares the shit out of me.

It’s not that we don’t need a government agency to protect our citizens from terrorist attacks domestically (What ever happened to the FBI, CIA, and National Guard?), it’s the way they do it. In order to protect this country, the Bush administration for some reason feels that the absolute best way to do this is to strip us of our rights and use scare tactics to convince the large portion of the nation that is dumb and/or ignorant enough to be scared in to believing that this is the best way of going about homeland security and that the propaganda which consistently spews from the mouths of Bush administration officials is true. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, but it still needs to be said: Warrantless wiretapping, email filtering, and holding someone for questioning for extended amounts of time without charging them all violate basic constitutional rights.

The money that is flooded in to this department is of ridiculous proportions, is not required, and could instead be used for something that actually would benefit the country, such as research and development of alternative fuel sources, planning and construction of a nation-wide high speed rail line, and any number of other programs which would benefit society instead of scare it in to supporting war. Instead of funding peaceful and economically beneficial programs, the money instead goes towards fear tactics and new toys that allow the Department of Homeland Security’s gestapo-eqsue agents to better violate our rights.

What kind of toys, you ask? Wired is reporting of a new LED flashlight which temporarily blinds and incapacitates it’s victims (or, if you use the Bush administration’s term of choice, “Enemy Combantants”). Of course, this evolution in policing technology makes sense. Why stop someone, question them, intelligently profile them, read them their Miranda rights, and arrest them in the traditional legal way, when you can just blind and disorient them allowing you to cuff them and take them in for questioning without an arrest warrant? The president of the company being subsidized by the DHS to create this “flashlight” really summarizes the true purpose behind a weapon like this best: “With this, they don’t need to know English to comply.” As if this thing weren’t scary enough, Wired also points out that “the tool could be scaled up to make a light bazooka that could subdue a crowd”. If the DHS has weapons like this in the works, who knows what else they’ve got up their sleeve or in development to violate your rights, subdue you, and/or get the information out of you that they want.

Not only does this extremely powerful department of the federal government trample the constitution on a daily basis, but the Bush administration has allowed it to grow so immensely since it was first created after 9/11 that it is now the third largest cabinet department in the US with over 200,000 employees, only slightly behind the Department of Defense and The Department of Veteran Affairs. No one agency should be allowed to have the kind of power that the DHS has and that is what scares the shit out of me, but then again, isn’t that what they want?

Everyone knows that corn ethanol is a joke. Oh, you believed all those E85 commercials? Well, it’s not as good as it looks. Regular old gasoline is able to produce about 5 times as much energy as went in to it’s production. Corn ethanol only produces about 1.3 times as much energy as goes it to it’s creation because it has to have the sugar extracted from it, then it is converted to sugar ethanol. This process makes it barely break even in it’s efficiency. The plus, of course, being that it is a renewable resource that grows here in the US and removes dependency on foreign oil. Sure, it’s nice and “green”, but it’s still got 15% regular old gasoline in it and it really isn’t efficient enough to lower the prices at the pump.

What if we could take plants like corn or pretty much any other crop and turn it in to 100% ethanol fuel that is more efficient than current corn/sugar ethanol? Enter cellulosic ethanol. Part of what makes sugar ethanol inefficient and expensive is that not all plants have a lot of sugar in them to extract and process in to ethanol. All plants, however, have cellulose. Lots of it. A company called Range Fuels has plans to build a 100 million gallon per year cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgia, using wood waste from Georgia’s forests as it’s feed stock. Range Fuels’ claim is that their ethanol will be able to produce 16 times as much energy as goes in to its production. Similarly, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is spearheading a 125 million dollar initiative to research and develop biofuels utilizing cellulose to help relieve our dependence on foreign fuels.

These technologies go beyond using sugars found in sugarcane and corn to produce the ethanol and instead use non-food plants and parts of plants, relying on the cellulose. Instead of raising the prices of sugar or corn at the grocery store because it is instead being used to create fuel, the stalks left over would instead be used as the fuel. The corn could once again do what it’s best at: give me a stomach ache and not get fully digested. It goes beyond just using things like woodchips and corn stalks to create the fuel. Almost any bio waste could be turned in to ethanol, such as grass clippings, fallen trees, and pretty much any other plant waste. Now that the fuels are starting to be produced, it is just a matter of time before all of the car manufacturers start realizing that this is the way of the future and start making all of their cars ethanol-ready.

The real question is: How long until I’m driving an ethanol hybrid plug-in that I charge in my garage next to a personal ethanol processor into which I unload my grass clippings, weeds, and other yard waste so that I can fuel my car for the week?

Ok, so I didn’t see it on its first day in theaters. I didn’t even see it on the second. I did, however, finally see it. There’s been a thread at Digitally Wise building up hype for this movie for over a year now posting pictures, rumors, and whatever other tidbits of information we could find. Because of this, my expectations of the movie were set extremely high. At the same time, it being directed by Michael Bay made me worried. Sure, he’s done a few memorable movies like The Rock and The Island, but he also did Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and both of the Bad Boys movies. Even with my worries about the director, the childhood nostalgia kept my hopes up and I went in to the movie anticipating a great film.

Transformers went above and beyond my expectations. So much so, that I think my jaw was sore afterwards from hanging open for almost two and a half hours. The action was incredible, the effects were even more incredible, and the plot was exactly the type of thing you’d expect in a Transformers movie. All of this combined with the nostalgia skyrocketed the movie beyond awesome in my eyes. I was literally twitching with excitement the second Bumblebee first rolled in to the car dealer’s lot (Jessie can verify this) and it only got better. I was extremely pleased with the set of transformers that they chose to include in the film and however impatient I was for this movie to be release, I don’t know how I’m going to be able to wait for the upcoming sequel.

If you grew up with the original Transformers, you will absolutely not be in any way let down by this movie. Even if you weren’t the biggest fan but just enjoy a good action flick, go see this one. Transformers is easily the best action movie I’ve seen in quite some time and likely the best recreation of one of my childhood favorites that I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it now! It truly is more than meets the eye.

I’m so disgusted with the way that the Libby trial has been run and, moreso, the fact that Bush just commuted his sentence that I’m not even sure how to start this. First and foremost, no one had the balls to actually charge Libby, Cheney, and/or Bush with the charges that should have been filed in relation to the leaking of Valerie Plume’s identity: Treason. Leaking the identity of an undercover operative, ruining her career, and blowing the cover of the entire false company that had been set up to conceal her and her coworkers is no less treasonous today than an American citizen spying for the soviets was during the cold war and should be treated exactly the same way. Whoever was involved, whoever leaked her name, and whoever helped cover it up deserves a treason conviction and nothing else. Here is how treason is defined in United States Code Title 18, Part I, Chapter 115, § 2381:

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

If leaking the identity of an undercover operative and exposing her to our own nation as well as the rest of the world doesn’t qualify as giving our enemies aid, then I’m reading the above law wrong and Libby deserves his commuted sentence. Treason was, however, committed in the leaking of her identify. Libby, Cheney, and probably also Bush deserve a new trial on treason charges and should, once convicted, be immediately removed from office, as per the final part of the above code. This of course, would have probably already happened if the judicial branch of the government weren’t just as corrupt as the executive branch.

I realize that the above fantasy is never actually going to happen due to the aforementioned corruption, so on to Libby’s actual conviction: Four counts of obstruction of justice. Martha Stewart served 5 months in prison for a single count of obstruction and paid a fine of $195,000 for a stock sell-off that only saved her about $45,000. Libby however, was convicted of 4 counts and was fined only $250,000 and sentenced to 30 months in prison for leaking a CIA operative’s identity, ruining her career, and potentially compromising national security – all to get back at her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for “talking shit” about the Bush administration in an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times. Based on the severity of the crimes, I’d say that Libby got off easy. At the very least, his sentence was on par with Martha Stewart’s. The President, however, has “concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive”. Based on previous convictions of similar charges, this is a ridiculous statement for him to make, as sentence was in fact fair based on the counts he was convicted on. What is even more amazing to me is that in a single sentence Bush was able to use such large words as “concluded” and “excessive”. Three syllable words are tough for him to begin with, but two in one sentence! I’m astonished. It’s almost as if millions of our tax dollars have gone to speech lessons for the President (Conspiracy theory!?).

Hopefully, the next time that charges are brought against a member of the Bush administration, the powers that be will actually make them stick and the perpetrators will get what’s coming to them. I have yet to see corruption like this in my life time and I hope that when this current administration is kicked out or voted out, whichever comes first, that the next administration can begin to fix all of the damage that Bush and his cronies have caused.

I’ve wanted one of these things since before they were even released. Now, several months later, my terrific wife was awesome enough to find out that Best Buy was getting a bunch in and all we had to do was wake up early and wait for it this past Sunday. As soon as we got home, I set it up and we started playing Wii Sports and played all of the games in it: Tennis, Golf, Baseball, Bowling, and Boxing. If you aren’t familiar with how the Wii works, the controller is motion sensative, so in tennis, you have to swing it to hit the ball, in golf, you have to do a full swing to hit it or a short little swing to putt. We also got Wii Play which includes a second controller and offers us another 9 or so mini games whose purpose are to teach you how to use the controller to its fullest and has some crazy games such as cow racing, some sort of tank war game, duck-hunt-esque target practice, fishing, and a few others. The game that I’m hooked on right now is the golf game included with Wii Sports, but I can’t wait until we start building up our collection and get games like Super Monkey Ball, which was great on the GameCube and looks even better on the Wii, and possible a better golf game like Tiger Woods golf.

1. My legions of terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.
2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.
3. My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.
4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies.
5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box.
6. I will not gloat over my enemies’ predicament before killing them.
7. When the rebel leader challenges me to fight one-on-one and asks, “Or are you afraid without your armies to back you up?” My reply will be, “No, just sensible.”
8. When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll shoot him, and then say “No”.
9. After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three weeks time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.
10. I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled “Danger: Do Not Push”.
11. I will not order my trusted lieutenant to kill the infant who is destined to overthrow me — I’ll do it myself.
12. I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum — a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.
13. I will be secure in my superiority. Therefore, I will feel no need to prove it by leaving clues in the form of riddles or leaving my weaker enemies alive to show they pose no threat.
14. I will not waste time making my enemy’s death look like an accident: I’m not accountable to anyone and my other enemies wouldn’t believe it.
15. I will make it clear that I do know the meaning of the word “mercy”; I simply choose not show them any.
16. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
17. All slain enemies will be cremated, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.
18. My undercover agents will not have tattoos identifying them as members of my organization, nor will they be required to wear military boots or adhere to any other dress codes.
19. The hero is not entitled to a last kiss, a last cigarette, or any other form of last request.
20. I will never employ any device with a digital countdown. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable, I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.
21. I will design all doomsday machines myself. If I must hire a mad scientist to assist me, I will make sure that he is sufficiently twisted to never regret his evil ways and seek to undo the damage he’s caused.
22. I will never utter the sentence “But before I kill you, there’s just one thing I want to know.”
23. When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice.

I saw this on a few other sites and felt it was funny enough to be worth posting here. Hope you enjoyed it!

After a few years of using Firefox, I’ve learned some fun tricks that you can do to it to make your Internet browsing experience even better. If you use Firefox, I highly suggest reading through this and doing some of the things listed.

• Multiple Tabs As Your Homepage
  A while ago I accidentally discovered that you can easily have your homepage set with multiple pages, so when you open Firefox or click on the home button, it automatically opens each page in a different tab. The easiest way to do this is to open a tab for each page you want to have set as your home page, arrange the tabs the way you want them to appear each time, open up your main preferences, and click on “Use Current Pages” under home page. That’s it!
• Quick Find
  Looking for a specific word on a page? Hit the “/” key and you’ll notice that a little box on the bottom pops up that says “Quick Find”. Type what you want to find and it’ll instantly navigate you to that point on the page.
• Auto-Complete Addresses
  Type Control+L to get to the address bar, or just click on it. Type just the word that goes between the “www.” and the “.com/net/org”. If you hit Control+Enter, it will automatically fill it in with “.com”, Shift+Enter will automatically fill it in with “.net”, and Control+Shift+Enter will fill it in with “.org”.
• Navigating Tabs
  Hate having to click around with your mouse to navigate between the tabs you’ve got open? Here’s the keyboard shortcuts:
  • Control+Tab (Rotate forward through the tabs)
  • Control+Shift+Tab (Rotate backwards through the tabs)
  • Control+1-9 (Jump to any of the first nine tabs)
• Delete a URL From Your History
  You’ve probably noticed that as you type in a URL in the address bar, it shows you a list of similar links you’ve been to as you type. If you (for some unknown reason) want and/or need to remove one of those links, just use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to highlight, then simply hit the delete key and *poof* it’s gone.
• Got Broadband? Speed up Firefox
  If you have a broadband Internet connection (who doesn’t?), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. Basically, this allows Firefox to simultaneously load multiple items on a page, instead of the default setting of one at a time. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit enter. Then, type “network.http” in the filter field at the top of the page and change the following settings by double-clicking on them to change them.
  • Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
  • Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
  • Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number of around 20-30 (depending on how fast your broadband is). This will allow it to make up to that many requests at once.
  • Last, but not least, right-click anywhere on the window and select New -> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set the value to “0″. This is the amount of time the browser waits before it will act on the data it receives.

• Edit the “Close Tab” Button
  Ever click on a tab to open it an accidentally clicked the [x] to close it? I know I have. Open up about:config and type “browser.tabs.closeButtons” in the filter. There are 4 values you can enter in to change how they will appear:
  • 0 – Only display the [x] on the tab at the forefront.
  • 1 – [Default] Display the [x] on all tabs.
  • 2 – Don’t display the [x] on any tabs (Control+W or middle click on the tab will still close it).
  • 3 – Display a single [x] at the far right of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x Style).

I hope this was all helpful!