The power of the postman

Problem: Marketing department has 16 DVD’s of training video and interactive content in California. Wants to get it to a customer in Maryland, quickly.

Plot twist: Company’s IT engineers chew up 32 hours of company’s Internet connection to download huge chunk of those 16 DVD’s. However, process of burning the content to DVD’s locally fails undetected.

Result: All that effort provides zip, zilch, zero, nada – with less than 36 hours to required show time.

Suggestion of old fart on engineering staff (whose resemblence to this blog’s author is purely coincidental): Overnight the DVD’s from CA to MD.

Result: Fully functional DVD’s in customer’s hands barely in time for training seminar.

Moral to this story: Never underestimate the bandwidth of the US Postal Service.

New Motto: Sure we’re slow, but it beats the crap out of a failed download.

A new day dawning for nuclear power?

(I just noted that this story is also linked on Instapundit. Just thought I’d mention that before I proceed.)

To say that the environmental movement is staunchly opposed to nuclear energy is to say the sun is kind of bright. Their immediate reaction to any suggestion of the development, deployment, or continued use of nuclear power plants has been to condemn it and demand the termination of any such items. This has been true for all of my adult life and ramped up to a fever pitch when Three Mile Island had its accident, now almost 30 years ago. In 1979 it was the height of the Cold War and the real threat of real nuclear annihilation of this country wasn’t just a science fiction exercise. It was the real thing and it was really on the minds of people back then.  (Of course, I was in High School so my priorities were – shall we say – in other areas.) The prevailing perception was that anything nuclear was extremely dangerous.

So imagine my surprise at the tenor and direction of an editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post wherein Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, advocates the use of nuclear energy and the expanded development of more nuclear power plants.

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That’s the conviction that inspired Greenpeace’s first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

Blog was off-line much of Sunday

Some emergency maintenance here at WordPress.com knocked this blog (and several others) off-line yesterday. Apologies for the lack of posting but these things do happen every now and again. Thanks for being patient and I’ll try to make up for lost time.