Just watched a program on National Geographic channel about Geothermal Power generation and at no point did they mention the effect that it would have on cooling the earths core.

Now, I’m no geologist, and I’m sure that there have been scientists that have looked into these effects and detirmined that the amount of cooling that Geothermal Power Generation would cool the core would be so small as to be one one millionth of a percent of the temp.  My concern is that the earths mantal has no means of re-generating any temp loss, and that it’s been theorised that the earths mantal is cooling each year and that if it cools below a certain point the earths magnetic field could disapear.

So yeah, my concerns may be unfounded as I don’t have all of the facts and figures, but there are still some facts that lead me to be slightly concerned given that this program was trying to sell Geothermal power as the best green solution for Power generation.  One thing I do need to explain is that there are two types of Geotermal power, the type that comes to the surface naturally, and the type they drill for.  My concern is for the type they drill for which is artificially allowing steam to escape and taking heat out of the mantal.  Facts below.

• Allowing pressurised steam to escape into the atmosphere removes heat from where it was previously trapped.
• The earth is basically cooling since it’s creation, and does really have a way to generate it’s own heat from what I remember (Thopugh I may be wrong here)
• Scientists believe the earths magnetic feild is created by the molten core moving around, and that if the core freezes the magnetic field may disapate.

Now sure…  like I said…  I don’t have all the fact, but my concern is that none of these factors were mentioned, and it was spouted as the end of fossil fuels if they can work out how to do it on a large scale, in area’s that it is currently not possible to do.  In otherwords, they are talking about opening the area that these potential core cooling plants can operate in from 10% of the worlds surface to almost 50%.  Anyway…  In theory I like the technology, but would need to see that these factors have been thought about.

Well, it seems that today I sold my first Pewter badge on Ebay.  That would be great if it hadn’t taken about 2 years at roughly $15/month to do it. ;)  Stupidly this is totally my fault for not actually doing anything with the Ebay store, just leaving it there each month paying the fee.  I guess what I should do is actually use the Camera I bought specifically to increase the stock in my ebay store to take photo’s of other things, and add them to the store.  This I should do now that I have some time…  In fact this I should have been doing since I was made unemployed as that was the only pathetic excuse I had back then.  Feel free to hassle me into getting stuff on the Ebay store!

So what have I been doing in my unemployment instead of doing sensible things like selling stuff on Ebay?  I have been getting armour and stuff ready very slowly in an attempt to start fighting heavy.  It’s another one of those things that I have been procrastinating about for ages, so I have been doing bits here and there to get prepared for it.  Today I spend an hour or two modifying the faceplate of my helm so that I can get the legal 1″ apart bars welded in place.  I have also needed to change the way the helm and faceplate meet, so it shall signifficantly change the look of the helm.  Last week I made a Boss for my shield, and once I manage to find my acrylics I shall paint the shield and finish off the edging.

Like always I think there is always a better way to do something and I experiment with everything.  When my helm was originally made I used boot polish to prevent it from rusting as I’m not a fan of the shiny helm look or the look of painted metal but I do enjoy the look of bear rough metal.  This provided a happy compromise, giving the metal a dull grey, but still metallic look.  It has lasted really well only showing sings of rust where friction had rubbed the polish down to metal from the canvas in my armour bag..   My latest experiment is to make a shield edge that lasts longer than the normal shield edges I have seen…  Now I must admit to start with that my experience of shield edges is very limited, so I won’t confess to knowing whether this has been tried before or not.  The shield edges I have seen are either aluminimum channel then hosepipe then tape, or just the channeling with leather edging over the top.  What I’m going to try is to silicon on a rope around the outside of the aluminimum edging.  I’m hoping that this will provide enough of a buffer between the blow on the edge and the wood to stop the wood from starting to split.  It should also increase the life of the leather going around the edge as the leather will no lnger be hitting directly onto metal.  Anyway..  that’s the theory. ;)  Time will tell, and there’s also the fact that being a newbie fighter, my head is likely to be taking most of the blows, not the shield edge.

That it from me tonight, but remember feel free to hasle me about either looking for work, or getting the Ebay store working better.

Well…  Work has finally started progressing on one of my pet projects, the Lochac Network Event posting bot, which is planned to be an event stewards one stop shop for advertising events in Lochac.  By filling out the one web form, the event steward or bookings officer can post an event notification to not only their own local list as well as the Lochac Network forums, their formatted event notification will automatically go to local groups within their area as well as the Lochac Announce list.  The form will ensure that all of the important information is filled in before it allows the send button to be pressed hopefully helping to remind the people sending it that there is information that needs to be provided.

The part of the project I’m doing at the moment involves collecting as many Local Group mailing lists as possible, as they seem to be scattered across 3 main servers (The SCAA server, the SCANZ server and Yahoogroups).  I currently have a basic form working that allows emails to be sent as well as posts to the relevent Forum on the Lochac Network, once I have a few security measures in place and have subscribed the bots email address to the relevant groups (which gives control of recieving the Bot’s emails firmly into the hands of the List Administrators), I can start looking into automating the form so that the sender only has a few options to select in order to advertise an event, rather than the current 30 odd lists to select from.

For those IT professionals out there who may freak at a form being created to send to that many lists, you need not worry, the form prevents header insertion, and the POST information is free of email addresses as all of the email addresses are stored elsewhere.  Once I manage to work out the authentication on the forum, users wishing to utilise this form will be required to be registered on the Lochac Network forums and their connected IP details will be recorded as well as added to the bottom of any email sent to a list.  However, as I am not actually a programmer and am just working through this with the help of friends who are and the resourses of the Net, please feel free to contact me to ask to see the source code if you are worried about this connecting to your server/list.