I was ambushed today outside the Apple Store in Palo Alto by these two students (Lisa Day and friend) gathering support for Environment California.
The state is the 12th largest source of global warming pollution in the world, more than most countries. They're also at the forefront of the fight to make a difference, with good old Arnie Schwarzenegger (now generally known as Governor) leading the charge.
But there still seems to be a lack of joined-up thinking in some quarters. Electrical power consumption is still rising. On 7th August a new record for power demand was set, coinciding with the peak of the heatwave.
So let me get this... the hotter it gets, the more power is consumed, presumably to run airconditioning. So as the planet generally gets hotter, more and more power is going to be consumed to keep the Californians cool.
Moving to greener sources of energy is definitely a step in the right direction, but mightn't it help if people learned to use less power as well?
Many environmental objectives seem to be painfully far into the future - fuel cells, hydrogen, new wind farms. If every single person used the aircon for one less hour a day, today, it would start to make a difference with a zero lead time.
Is air-conditioning essential, or is it a luxury?
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The Outdoor Retailer Show is yielding all kinds of goodies. Here is my haul from today - not easy to fit Bridgedale socks, a UV monitor, an underwater pen, a head torch and a Tilley hat into one photo, especially when one hand is occupied with holding the camera, but here is my best shot. There should have been some Larabars in there as well but I've eaten them all.
The weekend yielded some intangible (and inedible) goodies as well - meetings with Eric Larsen and Lonnie Dupre, Will Steger, and Ben Saunders - all polar trekkers.
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My MacBook may have gone off to hospital in Memphis for 10 days, but nothing gets in the way of the Pacific sponsorship campaign. There is a marvellously handy technique called 'cloning' or 'ghosting' a computer, that creates a phantom version of my MacBook on an external hard drive. So I can sit here in the Palo Alto Apple Store, using one of their MacBook Pro machines hooked up to my external hard drive, and it's exactly as if I'm using my own laptop.
Not just my data, but also my applications, bookmarks, passwords, settings - absolutely everything is replicated. I used Carbon Copy Cloner, a free application, to create my ghost. It's so lifelike, it's almost spooky....
Here's another Google Video Giggle.
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There are many useful, productive, interesting things I was going to do today. I was going to send out sponsorship letters, arrange my Oct-Dec itinerary, edit my Atlantic videos into a 3-minute promo. How many of these things did I get done? Precisely none, nada, diddly-squat. Instead, I spent my entire day to-ing and fro-ing from the Apple Store in Palo Alto, trying to get some customer satisfaction and failing.
I haven't slept properly for two nights - nightmares about melting MacBooks keep waking me up. I feel depressed, stressed and anxious. A tight knot of tension has lodged in my chest. It seems that my ailing laptop has to go to hospital in Memphis, a journey that will take up to 7 working days and could potentially return my laptop to factory settings - no data, no post-purchase software installations. All my software disks, of course, are in England.
I hate to bad-mouth Apple because I am a huge fan of their products. So I won't. But how can it be right that here I am, overseas, trying to run a business, with only one computer at my disposal, and there is nothing that can be done to speed up the process or lend me a replacement while mine is in for repair?
On the Atlantic I learned to my anger and frustration through yell therapy, hollering and screaming at the waves until the veins stood out on my temples. It made me feel a lot better. But I suspect that this would be unseemly behaviour in a technology store in downtown Palo Alto.
On other Atlantic days I started to learn to be philosophical and to accept that **it happens. I started to adopt a serene indifference to high winds or no winds, communications or no communications, progress or no progress.
I am trying to maintain that equanimity now, but failing dismally.
Having said that, I do now feel a lot better for having shared. Thanks for listening.
As laughter is the best medicine, here's a video that made me giggle - watch the teeth, and enjoy!
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