JDPFu.com 2025

Are you saving enough for retirement? Probably not according to PBS/Frontline.
Over a 30 year working life, experts say you need to save between 15%-18% of your salary.

PBS-Frontline for more.

Another simple way to guess what you need is 12x your salary is your target for retirement.
The 401(k) plan probably isn’t the best solution for your retirement unless you learn how to invest – unfortunately, it is probably the best option that you have. You really don’t have any choice — learn some basics about investing and get started.

Schwab says you should expect to need about 25x your last year expenses before your first year of retirement. Check it here

Don’t put this off. You need to understand this sooner than later. GET HELP if you need it.

Or you will probably end up working when you should be retired.

Ok, we all need energy. We need it for our homes, computers, refrigeration, radios … normal household items. We need it for our cars, our businesses, to pump water, to mow our yards and just to have fun. Basically we either need energy at a static place OR a type of energy we can take with us, portable energy. Energy is either kinetic or potential; moving or something that can be moved.
Fossil fuels are good because they are portable and we have 100+ years of experience handling them, but there are negatives. Agreed?

For simplicity, let’s ponder just on home and car energy needs. If we can create a plan that solves those two energy types, most of the other energy problems can probably be solved.

For your house, we use solar, geothermal and wind power to create electricity. On sunny or really windy days when excess power is created, that excess power is used to convert hydrogen monoxide, water, H~2~~O into hydrogen and excess oxygen. The hydrogen is stored in containers in your garage for "other uses." If your solar panels leave room for water heating panels, use them to heat your water for bathing, washing, AND heating your home during cold periods. Today, solar and wind probably can’t fully support your total energy needs, but even 20-50% would make a huge difference if most of us did it. Higher efficiency solar panels are on the way, but you still need a way to have power at night and on cloudy days that last weeks, so plug into the power grid anyway. Geothermal power isn’t an option for most folks, unless they happen to live near geysers. This energy is all about having a thermal gradient that can be leveraged to heat and cool some type of liquid. In most states, the power company has to pay you for excess power.

For your car, we need a portable power solution and works at night, for over 300 miles of travel, and can be replenished along the way in 5 minutes or less. Your house will create hydrogen for this portable power need. The fuel cell in your car can work, just like the Space Shuttle uses. A car with 300-500 miles per tank is needed with performance similar to cars in use today. If you like, an electric car can also work, but battery power cars generally can’t have air conditioners too and need 4+ hours to recharge. Electric cars today have a 30 mile range except a few models with 60 mile ranges.

Sound too simple? It is. there are lots of problems. Solar cells are only about 20% efficient and are very expensive. Recently there have been headlines for new solar cell technology with 40% efficiency. Great, when can I buy them? I propose a requirement that wealthy homeowners building new homes worth, say, over $700K (inflation adjusted), be required to install solar panels on the roof. This will cause many benefits beyond local power generation. As there is more demand for solar cells, greater efficiency in production and in the cells themselves will occur bringing the price down for everyone. Also, these larger houses require more energy just to exist, so think of this as a way for the wealthy to pay back on their overuse in a small way. Over the long term, their homes will actually cost less to run thanks to this surcharge. Al Gore, are you listening ?

Hydrogen created from anything other than solar or geothermal or wind power or some other non-carbon creating renewal energy source isn’t very smart. That’s a mouthful. Hydrogen, H~2~~, appears in nature, but only rarely and never in the quantities we’d require to drive cars.

The US Government should sponsor an X-Prize -like contest for the first solar cell with 85% efficiency and a 50 year lifespan installed in over (500) 2000 sq ft homes, say the prize is $30M US. That provides a highly efficient, reproducible, manufacture-ready solution for everyone and it creates a buzz in the industry.

Cars and hydrogen power? Why? Purely electric cars don’t have the distance needed for most households and can’t be recharged in less than 5 minutes. Hydrogen cars can. The key to hydrogen cars is local generation using electrolysis, storing the hydrogen and having water available. Storing hydrogen is fairly difficult – it is the smallest atom and slowly escapes from all containers. This means some kind of chemical storage device is needed – something like a sponge for hydrogen that will easily release it. Perhaps another Auto X-Prize is needed? The other key is to have these hydrogen generation at every house and business. Basically, if there is electricity, there ought to be a hydrogen power plant. Decentralization, that’s the key.

So you have some items to think about. Can it be done? Certainly. Popular Mechanics

Lastly, ethanol from corn is just crazy! It takes almost as much energy to create (need 1 acre of corn to power the tractor used to farm the 1.24 acres corn) than you get back from the ethanol. Stupid, stupid, stupid . Why bother? This is anti-GREEN. Just because you aren’t causing the CO~2~~ to be released, doesn’t mean someone else in the chain is. The only way using ethanol makes sense is if it can be created using either solar or wind, 100% renewable energy sources.

Article on Well to Wheel efficiencies. The total cost of getting the fuel from the ground and making a wheel turn are calculated. This article confirmed what I knew intuitively – we must use solar or wind energy to create hydrogen, converting other fuels into hydrogen is too lossy to consider.

Ok, so let’s agree all this can be done. Who might want to stop this? Well, who has the most to lose or would need to change the most for local power generation and non-petroleum power? We all need to watch those industries carefully to ensure they don’t stop the changes. We need to convince these companies to change – and risk the change – into creating we need for local power generation and support the early adopters. Governments should also take bold steps to encourage risk takers in these areas. Just look at what Germany has done for electrical power already.

Need an external SATAII Enclosure? Check these guys out Very interesting.

Here’s another player. The DS-500 is an eSATA 5 drive RAID system.

You’ll want a hardware RAID 5 controller card too. Adaptec, LSI Logic, eWare, Highpoint and Raidcore are listed on Tom’s Hardware. Highpoint has linux support for current releases. Promise’s linux support is very dated. I never got Promise to work in HW RAID on Linux.

Building a new PC for my home "data center consolidation" effort. Here’s the equipment list (so far):

• Motherboard: MSI 975X Platinum PowerUP v2 775
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (4mb cache)
• Video: Gigabyte nVidia 7600GS 256MB Silent Pipe PCI-E 16x (GV-NX76G256D-RH)
• 2GB CORSAIR VS2GBKIT667D2 DDR2 RAM
• NEC DL-DVD Writer
• Motherboard has 7.1 DTS audio, GigE NIC, 2xFirewire, 4xUSB 2.0, 5xSATA2, 3xPIDE, RAID 0, 1, 10 onboard.
• Antec NeoHE 550W Power Supply (Fry’s had an unbelievable sale!)
  Still needed:
• External Array – local copy of Cooldrives.com article. I saw a 4 drive bay SATA array at Fry’s for $120. Very interesting….

Intent was originally to use SuSE 10.1 as the VMWare Host OS and drop WinXP, Ubuntu, Fedora, NAS, router/firewall distro and MythTV has Client OS installs. Unfortunately, the drivers for the motherboard, RAID, nVidia and audio are all Win32, so if I want to use any of the high end capabilities, then WinXP needs to be the host OS. I occasionally play games – it isn’t mandatory, but I will not purchase another copy of WinXP for this new box. OTOH, I won’t run an illegal installation on my current Windows PC either. What should I do?

Ok, everyone seems to be really confused about Mars and how close it is to earth this year, 2006. In 2003, Mars came as close to earth as it will be almost 60,000 years. For some reason, it has been making the internet spam rounds this year. Heck, even my Mother forwarded it to me.

See this article for info on the 2003 viewing. Mars to Get Closer than Ever in Recorded History in 2003

I had a dream last night it was quite and unsettling. I awoke in a pool of sweat. And the dream, there was a car garage performing custom installations, a private bachelor party, and meeting with bill gates and a few of his cronies. Scary!

For those of you who know me, you understand why I was freaked out.

By the way I’ve been playing with speech recognition for this the journal. It is faster but not better than typing.

GRC has been working on dynamic web content without JavaScript. Check this out

/. article – which spam filter is best?

Fast forward to 39:42 into the movie to see his rankings.

Here’s what I saw (YMMV):

1) bogofilter

2) ijsSPAM2

3) spamprobe

4) spamasas-b (learning only)

5) crmSPAM3 (1:40 ham eaten)

Of course, he immediately showed other views of the data and had different rankings. Basically, you need to decide how much real email you are willing to lose to fight any spam getting in.

New Gizmo and router forwarding settings!

Ok, I logged into the Gizmo to make these settings: according to it (the gizmo) the following ports are reserved: 68, 16384-16403, 5060. Better than what Linksys support is suggesting. I’ll forward these from my router. VoIP quality should be perfect once this is done.

The Gizmo also has configuration settings for bandwidth management – but they aren’t clear whether they have anything to do with VoIP quality or if they help when the LAN traffic doesn’t flow thru the Gizmo.

I’ve been listening and subscribing to Podcasts recently. My favorites are:

• The Value Guys – Value Line Observer
• Security Now! – a technology podcast related to computer and network security
• PerlCast – the best hacker language
• a number of books on tape from my local library system

I’m currently listening to Red Mars and plan to listen to Green Mars and Blue Mars immediately following. Hugo Winners are almost always a good read. Heinlein is my favorite author and has won the greatest number of Hugo awards.