Stereoscopic, originally uploaded by isayx3.

Found on Flickr

Photos I ended up not using after deciding that I did not appreciate having my time wasted out on Warped Tour last year.

W/ All Time Low, Matt Flyzik and Aaron Gillespie

Now I just spent hours clearing through negatives and finding ones worth pulling ..

and some more photos from various assignments at Warped 2009

MOOORE

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

by GLI Editors in Solar Energy/PV

When you’ve been in the solar energy industry as long as I have, you often end up with a sense of déjà vu when you hear the concerns and objections people voice around the idea of utilizing solar/photovoltaic energy in their homes. In fact, it’s quite common to hear the same exact set of questions and concerns voiced by prospective solar customers, and so I’ve collected what I refer to as “The 5 Myths of Solar Energy.” All of these concerns and questions are quite natural when one is new to solar energy.

Without further ado, let’s set the record straight on some of these common misnomers about solar/photovoltaic energy in the home:

* Solar systems only work where there is abundant sunshine. It won’t work for me.

solararray1.png The largest solar markets in the world are Germany and Japan (roughly 5 and 3 times the size of the US market). Latitude wise the most Southern portion of Germany is the same as the northern tier US states close to the Canadian border. The average usable sunlight in Japan equals that of Michigan and Illinois (hardly the Sun Belt). Solar electric power systems work anywhere that the sun shines. Of course, in areas where there is abundant sunshine like Arizona, a smaller solar system will provide as much power as a larger system located in Maine or Washington State for example. But, solar works just about anywhere and makes a difference on your utility bills and in the amount of greenhouse gases emitted through the burning of fossil fuels. If there is enough light to see your hand in front of your face then solar panels can produce electricity.
*
Solar power is too expensive.

Expensive is a relative term. Though the average price of utility power in the U.S. is a little more than $.10 per kilowatt hour (kWh), if you live in some of the most populous areas you could be paying quite a bit more. Residents of California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and other states can pay upward of $.35 per kWh at times of peak power usage ( when solar works best). Many of these same states have rebates and incentives to help buy down the cost of solar power and the Federal Government is offering a tax credit incentive of 30% that reduces your cost even more. Let’s take a look at what this means in dollars and cents. A typical 3 KW solar home system in California costs approximately $21,000.00. After state rebate your cost is $13,500.00. The Federal tax credit for this system is $2000.00. So your net cost is $11,500 or $3,800 per KW. This system should cover roughly 50% of the yearly energy use of the home. And the value gets better over time as utility costs rise. When was the last time your utility reduced its rates?

Remember that solar energy is a clean technology: no pollutants, no noise, no clean up. The alternatives (i.e. the power sources that most people are using, including natural gas, coal and nuclear), are not. Nowhere in the cost of electricity generated from these sources is the cost of clean up added in. Think about it: What would the price of your power be if the cost of cleaning up the air and water from industry power production were added into your utility bill? Would you still consider solar to be expensive if it were? Another point to keep in mind is that when you pay your utility bill, all you really get in return is… well, the right to pay next months bill. An average family in the U.S. will pay more than $100,000.00 to the utility company in their lifetimes. You own your home, so why rent your electricity?
*
Solar electric systems will destroy the aesthetics of my home.

Solar HouseMost people who make this complaint are thinking about older solar hot water systems which employ large panels that sit in plain site on the roof. While I think solar hot water systems are very useful appliances for any home, solar electric systems are much different. They typically use much less space and come in shapes and models that make them almost invisible. The newest solar electric systems can have black backings which make the panel look uniform, fit the contours of a roof with triangular panels, and have trim that blends the solar array into the roof like a skylight. Also, solar modules in the shape of roof tiles that are virtually unnoticeable are now available.

The bottom line is that solar module manufacturers realize that in order for solar power to be accepted as a mainstream energy solution it has to look mainstream.
*
Americans change homes on the average of every seven years. You can never recoup your investment on a solar system.

The latest data shows that not only will you make a profit on your investment but you will sell your home quicker if you have a solar electric system installed. And as today’s housing boom flattens out, ease of selling is becoming a more important issue. Most, if not all, remodeling or home improvement, programs — such as putting in a swimming pool or a new hardwood floor — return 95% or less of the initial investment. Solar systems (because every system comes at a discount — remember state and federal incentives — and people value energy savings as utility rates continue to rise) return more than the original investment. Think about it, if you were looking at two identical homes for purchase but the yearly utility bill of one was half as much as the other, wouldn’t you pay a little more (and don’t forget that increased amount is translated into a small increase in your monthly mortgage payment). That’s all without considering the value of doing something good for your family and the environment.
*
Solar power only works because of government incentives.

Yeah, so what? Do you think it’s a coincidence that we pay less per gallon of gas than motorists who live in two of our largest gas suppliers, Mexico and Canada? It’s a fact that every fuel source that we use is subsidized in some way. For example, in the Federal Energy Bill of 2005, the Nuclear Industry was granted freedom from paying for law suits incurred. In that case, the Federal Government pays, thus lowering the cost of making electricity from nuclear fuels. Subsidies for solar systems typically and historically feature fixed time of operation, diminishing year-on-year subsidy amounts, and a sunset when the subsidy ends and solar power — in order to successfully matriculate into a mainstream energy choice — must be available at market price or as we like to say, achieve grid parity.

Many new and emerging technologies have been subsidized to ease market entry such as hybrid vehicles, wind power, energy efficient lighting and water heater blankets. Once America wakes up to that fact and gives solar the same shake as other energy sources, we’ll be better off.

REPOSTED FROM: http://greenlivingideas.com/topics/alternative-energy/solar-energy-photovoltaics/the-5-myths-of-solar-energy

My savior at the moment would be this wonderful song…

I’ve spent hours and hours and hours,
weeks, months, possibly years for a few things

cleaning, pruning, arranging, rearranging, organizing, reliving and FRAAFing! damn

all on this wonderful computer and it’s many files of joy and wonder

and some heartache.

I’ve been designing for 11 years now, and I’ve had this computer case and setup for 8 years…

and now I’m packaging it off for another soul, and hoping I can buy the things I honestly need and pay off evil credit cards.

dun dun dun

I am thankful for another chance to go through all of these negatives… TREASURE

Update Appended: Aug. 25, 2010

Looking for a quick way to feel lousy about yourself? Then forget the idea of a healthy diet and just eat what your body wants you to eat. Your body wants meat; your body wants fat; your body wants salt and sugar. Your body will put up with fruits and vegetables if it must, but only after all the meat, fat, salt and sugar are gone. And as for the question of where your food comes from — whether it’s locally grown, sustainably raised, grass-fed, free range or pesticide-free? Your body doesn’t give a hoot.

But you and your body aren’t the only ones with a stake in this game. Your doctor has opinions about what you should eat. So does your family. And so too do the food purists who lately seem to be everywhere, insisting that everything that crosses your lips be raised and harvested and brought to market in just the right way. If you find this tiresome — even intrusive — you’re not alone. “It’s food, man. It’s identity,” says James McWilliams, a professor of environmental history at Texas State University. “We encourage people to eat sensibly and virtuously, and then we set this incredibly high bar for how they do it.” (See whether you should buy organic or conventional food.)

The ideal — as we’re reminded and reminded and reminded — is to go organic, to trade processed foods for fresh foods and the supermarket for the farmers’ market. Organic foods of all kinds currently represent only about 3% of the total American market, according to the most recent numbers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), but it’s a sector we all should be supporting more.

That sounds like a great idea, but we’ll pay a price for it. Organic fruits and vegetables cost 13¢ to 36¢ per lb. more than ordinary produce, though prices fluctuate depending on the particular food and region of the country. Milk certified as hormone- and antibiotic-free costs $6 per gal. on average, compared with $3.50 for ordinary grocery-store milk.

What’s more, while grass-fed beef is lower in fat, and milk without chemicals is clearly a good idea, it’s less obvious that organic fruits and vegetables have a nutritional edge to speak of. A 2009 study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition led to a firestorm in the food world. It found no difference between organic and conventional produce with regard to all but three of the vitamins and other food components studied, and conventional produce actually squeaked past organic for one of those three. (See the results of a farm vs. supermarket taste test.)

“We draw these bright lines between organic and conventional food,” says McWilliams. “But science doesn’t draw those lines. They crisscross, and you have people on both sides of the argument cherry-picking their data.” For consumers trying to stay healthy and feed their families — and do both on budgets that have become tighter than ever — the ideological back-and-forth does no good at all. What’s needed are not arguments but answers.

The Wages of Eating
The biggest reason not to ignore the food purists is that in a lot of ways they’re right. Our diet is indeed killing us, and it’s killing the planet too. Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta released a study revealing that nearly 27% of Americans are now considered obese (that is, more than 20% above their ideal weight), and in nine states, the obesity rate tops 30%. We eat way too much meat — up to 220 lb. per year for every man, woman and child in the U.S. — and only 14% of us consume our recommended five servings of fruits and vegetables per day. Our processed food is dense with salt and swimming in high-fructose corn syrup, two flavors we can’t resist. Currently, enough food is manufactured in the U.S. for every American to consume 3,800 calories per day — we need only 2,350 in a healthy diet — and while some of that gets thrown away, most is gobbled up long before it can go stale on the shelves.

Keeping the food flowing — and the prices low enough for people to continue buying it — requires a lot of industrial-engineering tricks, and those have knock-on effects of their own. Up to 10 million tons of chemical fertilizer per year are poured onto fields to cultivate corn alone, for example, which has increased yields 23% from 1990 to 2009 but has led to toxic runoffs that are poisoning the beleaguered Gulf of Mexico. Beef raised in industrial conditions are dosed with antibiotics and growth-boosting hormones, leaving chemical residues in meat and milk. A multicenter study released just two days after the obesity report showed that American girls as young as 7 are entering puberty at double the rate they were in the late 1990s, perhaps as a result of the obesity epidemic but perhaps too as a result of the hormones in their environment — including their food. And for out-of-season foods to be available in all seasons as they now are, crops must be grown in one place and flown or trucked thousands of miles to market. That leaves an awfully big carbon footprint for the privilege of eating a plum in December.

The food wars are fought on multiple fronts, but it’s the battle over meat that generates the most ferocious disagreement. Americans have always been unapologetic carnivores, which befits a nation that grew up chasing buffalo and raising cattle across endless stretches of open plains. But lately things have gotten out of hand. The U.S. produces a breathtaking 80 billion lb. of meat per year, with poultry alone making up 35 billion lb. It’s now common knowledge that the animals are raised in mostly miserable conditions, jammed together on factory farms and filled with high-calorie, corn-based feed that fattens them up and moves them to slaughter as fast as possible. It can take up to two and a half years to raise a grass-fed cow, while a feedlot animal may face the knife after just 14 months. (See TIME’s special report “How to Live 100 Years.”)

The idea of animals living such short, brutish lives introduces an element of altruism into the organic-vs.-commercial debate over meat that isn’t there for other foods. Just this month, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland brokered a truce between animal-rights activists and farmers in his state to improve the living conditions of hogs, veal calves and hens; that agreement followed similar reforms enacted in California in 2008.

“When you’re raising something with a circulatory system and a nervous system, they deserve care,” says Bev Eggleston, the owner of EcoFriendly Foods, a decidedly nonindustrial farm in Moneta, Va., that produces cattle, hogs, veal, lamb and poultry. Eggleston’s animals live in fields and coops, not feedlots and cages. The farm has a petting zoo, and the doors of the slaughterhouse are open to visitors so they can see the clean and as-humane-as-possible conditions in which the animals are killed. “I want to speak for the animals,” Eggleston says. “When I pull a knife, I want them to know their gift is being received.”

There are material advantages to that kind of humane treatment. Cattle that eat more grass have higher ratios of omega-3 fatty acids to omega-6s, a balance that’s widely believed to reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease and arthritis and to improve cognitive function. Take the cows out of the pasture, put them in a feedlot and stuff them with corn-based feed, and the omega-3s plummet. (See a special report on women and health.)

“The levels are almost undetectable after three months,” says Ken Jaffe, a former physician who now runs Slope Farms, an open-air cattle farm in the Catskill Mountains of New York. The big beef manufacturers concede that while the ratio for omega-6s to omega-3s is 1.5 to 1 for grass-fed cows, it leaps to 7 to 1 for those that are grain-fed. But industry reps challenge the significance of those numbers. “The best ratio hasn’t been determined yet in terms of nutritional balance,” says Shalene McNeill, a registered dietitian working for the National Beef Cattlemen’s Association, an industry group. “And it’s important to remember that this is just one small part of a consumer’s overall diet.”

Farm-raised animals are also higher in conjugated lineoleic acids, fatty acids that, according to studies of lab animals, may help reduce the risk of various cancers. What’s more, animals not raised on feedlots have less chance of spreading E. coli bacteria through contact with other animals’ manure, though the industry insists it is making improvements, with better spacing of animals on the lots and better cleaning methods in slaughterhouses.

Hogs and chickens present fewer problems than cattle — at least in terms of chemicals — since government regulations prohibit farmers from using growth hormones on either animal. But antibiotics are still served up liberally, and that creates other dangers. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), for example, an often deadly pathogen associated mostly with hospital-acquired infections, has been increasingly turning up in hog farmers, who contract it from their animals. In one study last year, a University of Iowa epidemiologist found that 49% of the hogs she tested were positive for MRSA, as were 45% of the humans who handled them.

Far more troubling — if only because the problem is far more widespread — is the recent recall of more than half a billion eggs from two producers due to salmonella contamination. Salmonella is hardly unheard of even among chickens raised in comfortable, free-range conditions. But when you confine half a dozen birds at a time in cages no larger than an opened broadsheet newspaper, and stack hundreds or thousands of those so-called battery cages together, you’re going to spread the bacterium a lot faster. The egg manufacturers stress that thoroughly cooking eggs can kill salmonella — which is true as far as it goes. But treating chickens like conscious creatures instead of egg-manufacturing machinery can help avoid outbreaks in the first place.

Short of swearing off eggs and meat — a perfectly good choice, but with only 3% of Americans describing themselves as vegetarians, not likely for most people — there are no easy solutions. For one thing, if we all decided to switch to healthier, chemical-free meat, there wouldn’t be remotely enough to go around. Only 3% of cattle in the U.S. are organically raised, and just 0.02% of hogs and 1.5% of poultry. What’s more, that scarcity helps drive the already premium price higher still.

Another alternative is to eat more fish, which is healthier anyway because it’s leaner, lower in calories and higher in omega-3s. But with fish stocks collapsing worldwide because of rampant overconsumption, there’s only so far that solution could take us. A half measure — but a very powerful one — is simply to cut back on whatever meat we do eat, even if we can’t quit it altogether. This shouldn’t be too hard: Americans already consume at least 1.5 times as much meat as the USDA recommends in its famed food pyramid. And with plenty of protein to be found in eggs, soy, cheese, grains, nuts, legumes and leafy green vegetables, there is no shortage of ways to compensate. (See “The Battle for Global Health.”)

“You need to eat animals only to close the nutrient cycle,” says Fred Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. “If we changed a few things about how we live, we’d have fewer animals in the system.”

Cash Crops
When animal protein, whether organic or not, becomes a supporting player in the diet, then fruits, veggies and grains take the lead. That’s generally a good thing, but here too there are complications. The back-to-the-land ideal of farming without the use of synthetic pesticides and other chemicals can take you only so far in a country with 309 million mouths to feed (not to mention a world with 6.8 billion). Say what you will about the environmental depredations of agribusiness, industrial farms coax up to twice as much food out of every acre of land as organic farms do. And even that full-tilt output may not be enough to keep up with a global population that’s galloping ahead to a projected 9 billion by 2050.

“Only about 5% of the arable land on the planet remains unused,” says McWilliams. “But we’ll need to increase food production by 50% to 100%.” If we have to spray, fertilize and even genetically engineer our way there, that’s something we may simply have to accept.

In the U.S., running out of crop foods is not a problem — at least not yet — but pesticide residues on fruits and vegetables cause people some perfectly reasonable worries. Properly washing or peeling produce can take care of most of the problem, but if you buy organic, you avoid the pesticide issue altogether, right? Not necessarily. It’s not just that drift from nearby nonorganic farms can contaminate other crops in the vicinity; it’s also that organic farmers use pesticides of their own. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there are now 195 registered biopesticides — substances derived from animals, plants or minerals that are toxic to certain species — used in 780 commercial products. There is broad agreement that biopesticides are not as dangerous as commercial pesticides, but less toxic doesn’t mean nontoxic, and even such lower-impact chemistry has a nasty habit of hanging around in soil and water longer than you want it to. “Organic farming may represent only 2% of the total of all farming,” says McWilliams, “but what if it became 20%? The chemicals are used only sparingly now, but they wouldn’t be then.”

Organic fertilizers are less of a problem, since they consist mostly of manure, as well as other relatively benign materials like peat, seaweed, saltpeter and compost. Humble as such substances are, however, they can become awfully pricey, because you need very big quantities to pack the same fertilizing punch as synthetic brands do. “It can take four tons of manure per acre to raise food,” says McWilliams. “When you know that, a bag of synthetic fertilizer starts to look pretty good.”

Wallet and Palate
But for most consumers — even those who think of themselves as environmentally conscious — the critical considerations in deciding to go organic involve the far more personal matters of price, flavor and nutrition. Last year’s nutrient study had a lot of organic partisans wincing — and a lot of commercial growers feeling smug — but one paper is hardly the whole story. The real difference between organic and nonorganic produce is in the relative presence of micronutrients such as copper, iron and manganese, as well as folic acid, none of which were included in the study. With these, the results are mixed. (See whether you should buy organic or conventional food.)

In a meta-analysis conducted by the Organic Center, a nonprofit group in Boulder, Colo., organic produce was found to be 25% higher in phenolic acids and antioxidants. “It’s these components that are deficient in American diets, so that makes this finding especially significant,” says Charles Benbrook, the group’s chief scientist. But the organic label alone is not enough to ensure that all consumers get the same boost. “The real nutrient value in produce comes from the soil,” says Kirschenmann. “So that’s a mixed deal unless you know the farmer and know how he’s managing his soil.”

The farmer also plays the biggest role in determining the most subjective of all variables: taste. You can start a lot of arguments about whether organic crops actually have better, fresher, more complex flavors than industrial crops do, but without a double-blind taste test, there’s no way to know. On a few points, most people agree: a freakishly large, overly engineered tomato or strawberry designed to ripen en route to a distribution center will never come close to the taste of its vine-ripened, fresh-picked cousin. The Red Delicious apple is the poster fruit for what can go wrong when commercial growers manipulate their product too much. Bred and rebred for an ever redder skin and an ever more tapered shape, the apples became mealy, juiceless and all but unpalatable inside.

That, however, is not to say organic growers don’t also try to prettify their produce before revealing it to the world. “Green markets can be a kind of food pornography,” says Manny Howard, author of My Empire of Dirt, about his experiences with backyard farming. “You buy a big bushel of beet greens without a wormhole in it, and that’s just not what farm food looks like.”

There may be flavor to be found in lovely and unlovely food alike, and a lot of things have to go right to raise the best-tasting produce. It’s not just the quality of the soil that’s at work, says Kirschenmann. “Selecting the right variety of plant and using the right mix of compost are important too. With farm-to-table food, the farmers are in many ways the chefs, as opposed to, say, molecular gastronomy, in which so much happens in the kitchen.”

The kitchen, of course, is the center of everything for families too, and this is where the shouting of the food partisans fades to babble. Eating an apple is almost always better than not eating an apple, no matter where it came from. And getting the whole brood into the habit of sitting down to a meal of lean meats, lots of veggies and judicious amounts of carbs and starches is hard enough without bringing politics into the mix. Farmers’ markets are undeniably great — if you can afford them, if there’s one near you and if you have time between the job and the kids to make a special trip when you know you can get everything in a single stop at the supermarket. The food industry undeniably churns out all manner of dangerous and addictive junk without a shred of real nutritional value in it, but there are also food companies that manage to get healthy, high-quality food to market and keep the cost of it reasonable.

The answer, ultimately, is for the two sets of producers — and their two sets of customers — to find a better way to co-exist. It’s important to crack down on the industry’s most egregious and polluting practices — to say nothing of its punishing treatment of animals — but we need to make sure the food still gets to the stores. It’s important too to support the local-farming movement not only to make more fresh foods available to more consumers but also to boost a growing economic sector and perhaps bring down prices as efficiencies of scale come up.

“If we all had to concentrate on raising our own food, we wouldn’t have time to do anything else,” says Howard. Happily, we don’t have to do that anymore. But that doesn’t let us entirely off the hook. We still have to get smart about what the people who bring us our food are selling, to find the right mix of the commercial and the local, the organic and the industrial. There’s a lot more than just groceries on the line — there’s health and long life too.

The original version of this article, which appeared in the Aug. 30, 2010, issue of TIME, has been updated to reflect the egg recall.

AMAZON DAILY DEAL – AUGUST 26TH

We won’t hold it against you if you haven’t had a chance to purchase our new album yet, but if you let this next opportunity pass you by, then we may have to rethink our position.

On August 26th, Amazon.com will be selling our album for $3.99 through the Amazon MP3 Store.  You don’t want to miss this incredible sale, which will only run one day.  If you have a copy of the album, make sure to tell your friends who have been sitting on the fence.  It’s okay, let them in on your little secret … more good times for all of us at the upcoming shows.

Look, originally uploaded by Waxbutterfly.

love and other shazz

and im sitting here feeling like a pure raw being
a me
and just processing, its sort of strange.

being so much myself and so open and processing, feeling the anxiety off and on

im almost to the edge of the mountain, it’s almost time to jump

I keep trying not to think about what it will feel like balancing sturdy rock under my bare feet and staring straight down into a world of hazy dreams and whatever (send in a bottle)