Some men have life-changing experiences in their youth. Others spend their lives dreaming. A few have the opportunity to work through these moments later in life.

In Fawn Township, a group of retirees is turning discarded aviation memories into working studies of history.

Some men have life-changing experiences in their youth. Others spend their lives dreaming. A few have the opportunity to work through these moments later in life.

In Fawn Township, a group of retirees is turning discarded aviation memories into working studies of history.

Jack Kosko flew 18 missions in a Grumman TBM Avenger as a radioman during World War II.

"It took me out there and brought me back," Kosko said of the Avenger.

One of the planes made a bad landing on the aircraft carrier USS Langley. Kosko salvaged an altimeter and voltmeter before the bomber was pushed into the sea.

Today, the first Avenger Kosko ever restored still flies at the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum in Reading, carrying those gauges with it.

Kosko owns the Fawn Township property where the group gathers about twice a week to restore the old planes.

One of the men, Bill Butler, remembers how his father, a naval aviator during WWII, would take him to air shows.

"I can't fly, and I like to watch," said the Sykesville, Md., resident of the hobby, "so this is my big chair."

Frank Darney, of Jefferson, was an Air Force mechanic during WWII and with the Maryland National Guard for almost 40 years.

"We never had to do much with these planes back then other than daily inspections," he said.

While working to reconstruct the bomber doors of the group's second Avenger, Darney said, "This gives me something to look forward to."

Progress here isn't measured by time. It can take more than five years to reconstruct a vintage aircraft. But as Kosko will tell you when you meet him, "There are no problems, only challenges."

scanR is an App for the Blackberry Storm that harnesses the phone's sharp auto-focus, flash and excellent exposure control and turns it into a copier and character recognition tool.

The App is available via App World and via the scanR website, but via App World appears to be the better deal.

The image is captured via the camera and transferred to scanR where it is transposed into either a JPG, PDF or a text file.

Business cards can be automatically downloaded into your address book.

Long pages of text can be copied and processed into text.

It makes a great portable copy machine that can be interfaced with any printer via the web interface.

Documents can also be sent to a fax number from the handset.

scanR "turns the stuff we have to deal with in our daily lives--receipts, business cards, faxes, jottings on the back of napkins--into something digital. ... It's practical. And it's simple. wsj.com

scanR is one of those applications I keep using over and over. If you go to the effort to shoot a straight image the copies look pretty close to a dedicated copy machine.

Midge Morse, age 85, has competed in basketball, softball, tennis, golf and bowling. Today she takes home the silver for shuffleboard during the 8th Annual York County Senior Games.

Morse said that she started exercising regularly in 1970.

Midge, your my inspiration to get to the gym. Good health will get you further than any investment and will get you by when every financial investment fails.

Ubertwitter is a beta program that you won't find in Blackberry's App World, but it's my favorite Twitter app for the Blackberry Storm.

You can download it directly from their site by pointing your Blackberry web browser to their download link.

The program pushes an alert to the handset, while running in the background, and allows you to link a still picture or video from the camera or archive.

The coolest option is tagging the tweet and Facebook link with a general GPS location.

If you link Facebook to Twitter, the picture/video/GPS links mated to your pictures also appear in Facebook.

Some care in sizing photos will speed transfer times as Ubertwitter will transfer the full file size. I either set the Storm's camera down from 2048x1536 down to 640x480 or push the photo into a MMS text message and copy paste the photo back into the archive. The MMS message system will automatically downsize a photo suitable for texting.

Same with video: I usually shoot a MMS video at 176x144 rather than the 480x352. Huge files aren't any fun with twitter.

Ubertwitter reprocesses the video in Quicktime and embeds it off the status link looking like this http://mypict.me/50DS in a standard web page.

Ubertwitter has undergone two upgrades in the past week that work well with the most recent Blackberry Storm operating system upgrade.

The picture at left is a picture Tweet in Ubertwitter.

A software upgrade last month on the Storm made the global copy and paste more functional. A dot to define the beginning of the selection has been replaced with a floating window that increases the contact patch and smooths navigation. The method of copy and paste remains the same allowing the user to transfer between any field in the phone.

1. Select window appears in any field that you can copy by depressing the screen. Place the window where you want to select the text.
2. Blackberry key/ SELECT
3. Drag the select window to the the end of your selection
4. Blackberry key/ COPY
5. Swap application or open a new applications and place cursor in field to paste
6. Blackberry key/ PASTE

3,827: Number of property maintenance complaints received by the city in 2008
2,717: Number of complaints that were resolved

Broken community: A York yard in shambles. Owner occupied transitioning to rentals, destructive renters, abandoning owners, foreclosure and people gaming the system.

Self-interest, corporate and banking systems gone amok sucking the life out of the people who gave them their power.

Survival

People who loose the vision to love their community.

RIM's podcasting platform on the Blackberry Storm starts with a blank slate. Pick your software, find your streaming sites and download via the wireless network.

In 1968, you did this with an AM transistor radio powered by a 9 volt. People would sift the airwaves, make choices and listen for free.

There are several pieces of software that can stream podacsts to your Blackberry available from the wild and though Blackberry App World. I use PodTrapper downloaded via App World simple because it had a free trial and I didn't go further with software research. It works well, has a directory of hundreds of podcasts or you can copy and past the URL of your choice after searching the internet.

You aren't limited in file size for downloading over the wireless connection. Once your podcasts are chosen or URL's are loaded into your player software, the program can run in the background updating ready for you when you want to listen.

About this series

The recent OS upgrade appears to have added a pause feature when pushed content (email, facebook, IM, txt) is sending an alert. The podcast pauses, the alert sounds and the program leaves off where it stopped without missing anything. You can continue to listen and multitask by replying to pushed content.

I find myself never using the headphones as the external speaker on the Storm is petty good and i can just set the unit down in a room, or while working in the garage and not get tangled in headphones.

I almost never stream video, but I also never watch television. It's information while you are working in the garage, or hanging laundry or your eyes are ready to explode because you have been on a computer for 10 hours, but you still want more information.

Podcasting on the Blackberry Storm is a self contained information streaming device harnessed by your imagination.

Around 1920, there were hundreds of car companies in the United States. Industry revolved around local communities and the cars from those companies transported their local economies.

Wood craftsmen skilled in building wagons jumped into the car business. There were many chassis designs, but often the tiny car makers outsourced engines from a reputable engine supplier because they didn't have the resources to design their own cars.

Many local companies provided jobs and products in the communities they served using larger national suppliers for a complex standardized part. Hercules engines were used by some of these companies for their cars.

Most of these car companies were killed off by the depression and consolidation.

Fiat SpA Chief Executive Officer Sergio Marchionne says building 6 million cars is the minimum he that is required to be profitable through the economic contraction. bloomberg.com

Roger Penske, who grew his roots selling cars, is taking an entirely different turn after buying Saturn. The tossed off General Motors step-child will manufacture no cars and will source all of it's cars from yet undetermined manufactures. Time will tell if a trade-off between less risk and less total control will work as a car company. usatoday.com

In any case, it's a smaller, dealer run company and dealers as a force have a greater motivation to sustain their local economies.

It isn't reality to think that a group of woodworkers today could build and sell a horseless carriage with an outsourced engine and compete in a global market, however smaller, less corporate self-serving companies that can innovate in a global market might motivate people to invest money and soul in the products they consume.

A U.S. symbol ties a family and school together across 6000 miles.

The American flag raised at Orendorf Elementary School in Manchester was sent home by Dominick Versace as a thank you for support he has received over the past year.

Sometimes the path of commerce getting smaller is a good way to evolve.

East Market Street in York started out as a path for early inhabitants to pass though the woods, evolved into a congested main artery for local, rail and cross-country traffic and now serves as a route from a historical urban core.

Bill Schintz, a property owner and resident of East Market Street for the past 35 years would like to see the three lane, one-way street revert back to a two-way to cut down speed and racing by weekend loop traffic.

Volvo Car Corporation is sending a demonstration fleet of the new plug-in hybrid cars this summer, which feature two charging ports. newsoxy.com

On Monday , the utility put into effect a 8.3 percent increase that tacks on an additional $6.97 per month for the average residential customer who uses 750 kilowatt hours of power, said Scott Surgeoner, a spokesman for FirstEnergy.

The increased rate will cover the transmission charges paid by Met-Ed directly to PJM Interconnection, an organization that coordinates the movement of power from a plant to utility substations. The increase in population across the area contributed to the hike in transmission charges, Surgeoner said. inyork.com/ydr (6/06)

Now if the population is increasing, you would think that the number of connections would result in higher overall transmission fees collected by a greater number of connections. Statistics from the U.S. government seem to indicate that over all electrical use is down as is generation to supply that electricity.

Along with a recession is a reduced demand for power.

US Sales: For February 2009, sales in the residential and commercial sectors decreased by 2.7 percent and 4.8 percent, respectively, while sales in the industrial sector decreased by 13.8 percent, as compared to February 2008. For the month, total retail sales were 285.0 billion kWh, a decrease of 34.5 billion kWh from January 2009, and a decrease of 6.3 percent or 19.2 billion kWh from February 2008. Year-to-date 2009, sales were 604.5 billion kWh, a 4.0 percent decrease over the same period for 2008. eia.gov

Generation: Net generation in the United States dropped by 7.3 percent from February 2008 to February 2009. This was the seventh consecutive month that net generation was down compared to the same calendar month in the prior year and it was the second-largest percentage drop this decade. eia.org

Something doesn't add up here. Is PJM/FirstEnergy is scrambling to meet a "increased population" or is less revenue generating a need for profit from a monopoly in the face of conservation and recession?

General Motors Corp. has struck a deal to sell its Hummer truck unit to a Chinese industrial business, Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd. cnn.com/money

Trading a bicycle for a Hummer.

U.S. taxpayers, owning a major share of Government Motors, have given the Chinese people a new tool to consume themselves into the same standard of unsustainable living that has brought the U.S. population to it's current state .

More is always better.

The current success of the global free market has depended on massive consumption. What better tool to speed up this process for China than a vehicle, that when properly equipped, can consume gallons per mile!

Depleting China's resources, and increasing their standard of living and thus leveling wages with us will surely keep the quality of life in the U.S. from eroding further from outsourcing.

A free freezer filled with grain feed beef as an incentive with each Chinese Hummer sold in China would help complicate their diet further, burn up resources faster and make Chinese people less healthy.

As an added bonus, U.S. consumers will be able to continue to enjoy their ride in a new outsourced, Chinese made Hummer in the near future.

Human energy seeing basic nutrients from the clay that gives and takes life.

Sixty years ago Americans banded together to raise Victory Gardens for the war effort.

With more people losing jobs, produce from Grace United Methodist Church's garden will help demand at food pantries and other ministries in southern York County.

A major OS upgrade was pushed to Verizon's Blackberry Storm tonight. The phone can be upgraded over the network. The push alert came via the integrated data stream. I used the Blackberry Desktop Manager instead, which syncs the phone via the USB cord and backs up all apps and user data such as email, old txt messages, photos/video and restores it to the upgrade.

The backup, download and restore took about 30 minutes without a hitch. This time will vary with the amount of user data on your phone. Several applications were upgraded with this update. You can have an option with both the network or desktop upgrade to choose the apps and some aspects of the operating system you wish to upgrade or remove. I opted to remove Asian language support.

Only two options were available for Blackberry's Facebook App, remove or downgrade.. I have been given the option to downgrade since a day after I upgraded. I have never had any issues with the upgrade in question.At first glance there is an improvement in the speed of the camera and video and the black mask at the bottom of the viewfinder has been replaced with a semi-transparent one.The universal select/copy/paste has been enhanced to allow a more precise control of the selected content.

A full QWERTY option has been added to portrait mode.

The return key have become a green "go" button on the keyboard when using the Blackberry browser.

In a strange evolution of the not so free market gone amok. General Motors has gone from a personal goal last year to become the biggest car company in an unsustainable U.S. market to a post bankruptcy, taxpayer owned car company that has said it will shift planned micro car production from China to a plant in the U.S.

The retooled factory will be able to build 160,000 cars per year, GM said. It would create 1,200 jobs, the person said, offsetting some of the 21,000 that will be lost when GM closes the 14 factories by the end of next year.

The move to build the subcompact in the U.S. follows a firestorm caused by GM's plans to produce up to 51,000 subcompacts per year in China and ship them to the U.S. starting in 2011, disclosed in documents submitted to Congress. AP

General Motors was formally planning on taking my tax dollars and producing the car in China. The bright spot in this is that if I am going to pay for stupidity and greed, at least it is going toward building something that resembles a future for the people who are financing it.

Look for a big announcement by GM on Monday as a government deadline looms.

Few things are more annoying about large, flat, touch screen phones as carrying it and activating it unintentionally or manually locking and unlocking all the time to keep it from randomly communicating with the world from your pocket.

The leather Blackberry Storm holster has a magnetic strip embedded in the spine that interacts with the phone telling it that that it's time to go into holster mode.

When the phone is pulled from the holster, it automatically wakes up and unlocks. The optional password protection can automatically be activated when entering the case.

About this series

When the phone is placed in the holster it automatically goes into a low power mode. The sound alerts and calls can automatically go to vibrate via options selected off of the SOUNDS button. It isn't immediately obvious that you can scroll down in this menu.

The magic case is also perfect for streaming music while at the gym as there is a cut for the headphones/hands free jack. The power to the hungry screen is shut off and you don't have to carry this stupid box around wondering where to put it. The top of the case enclosure protects the head jack connection while in use.

The high quality leather case snaps closed with a magnetic leather tongue. Amazingly after two months of crawling, grinding and catching on things, I haven't broken this yet.

I arrive at the scene of a car into a house, two minutes later there is a picture waiting across town for the web editor. Before noon yesterday, all of my pictures were published from my camera phone.

Two news events back to back, little time to waste using laptops, cords and legacy cameras. The irony of this speedy turnaround is that the Blackberry Storm contains a very slow camera, and would normally be unsuitable by photojournalism's 8 frames per second world. The operator of a Graflex Speed Graphic in 1920 would have all the skills to anticipate the use of this camera.

About this series

Blackberry mailbox integration allows you to combine all of your pushed email, facebook, and chat (AIM, Yahoo conversation initiations), and call logs, etc. into one data stream. The advantage of this is that you don't have to have 12 different email boxes and other push icons cluttering up the home page of your phone randomly alerting you.

One of the ways the Blackberry multitasks is to place the load of checking multiple email accounts on their own servers and interacting with the phone in a native application rather than many different applications taking up space and resources on the phone. Email is pushed to the phone almost instantaneously as it appears in the native account. Deleting, or otherwise changing content in the universal message box will delete it in the individual email streams.

For this reason, I prefer not to use the Gmail App regularly. With the Blackberry integrated system, I can create, read, delete (on phone and/or on the native server), and open most attachments from a jpg, video, to a Word and Powerpoint. HTML emails and attributes appear as they were intended with an option to download embedded images. Integrated email can check mail from any web based, POP or IMAP account.

I keep my Gmail application on hand for the rare searching of old email in my notoriously overstuffed inbox. Email addresses for email accessed via the Blackberry server are sourced from your Blackberry address book so they need to be added to the phone's address book to create email from outside accounts.

There is also a Blackberry email address that comes with the phone.

I prefer to break down my home screen into different email accounts and keep things separate, responding to pushed data by the priority of the moment, but you can really clean up the home page with one button email.

I rarely use the Blackberry website for maintenance or adding, as all email accounts can be added and maintained by the handset. This is convenient, as in the case of my work email account, which goes down weekly and needs to be re-validated. On reliable mail servers there is no maintenance.

I met four people this weekend that define peace.

William Jenkins, a WWII draftee, found himself in a German POW camp for his 19th birthday. He came home to Hanover and married a German woman.

Dalea Lynn's house was gutted by a fire and her husband was killed by police while in their custody in Springettsbury Township. She likes her Wrightsville neighborhood and has a poster on her front lawn supporting the local police.

James Abram, of South Carolina, and Bill Hoff, a resident of Jefferson, became lifelong friends in 1966 while fighting the Vietnam War. Sunday, the two men were followed by a combined family of 28 people.

Friends since the Vietnam War, Bill Hoff and James Abram walk in the Jefferson Community Memorial Day parade.

Back in 1965, when Abram got to An Khe in South Vietnam, he was scared. They had little in common, the black man from South Carolina and the white man from Jefferson, but that didn't matter. "I just gravitated toward Bill," Abram said. "I needed a friend. He was withdrawn and didn't want to talk. I made it my business to talk to him"

It's not that Hoff had anything against Abram. Before they went to Vietnam, their boot camp instructors warned them not to get too close to anyone.

If you made a close friend and he got killed, they were told, that could mess you up. You wouldn't be able to concentrate, and you'd be a danger to yourself and the men serving with you.

Small, efficient, and the ability to condense data packages and hardware saving consumers time, energy, and money.

Worldwide mobile phone sales totaled 269.1 million units in the first quarter of 2009, a 9.4 per cent decrease from the first quarter of 2008. Smartphone sales surpassed 36.4 million units, a 12.7 per cent increase from the same period last year. cellular-news.com

Hewlett-Packard is off and Dell is expected to be off. cnn.com/money

I look down my block and I know the five houses surrounding me no longer use land line phones. The number of mobile-phone users in the U.S. surpassed the number of conventional land-based phone lines in the second half of 2004 latimes.com

When my last roommate moved out and into a rural area and away from my cable internet wi-fi cloud, his desktop computer became a dinosaur. His primary mode of email and communication became his phone.

Although data packages and hardware for smartphones cost more than a regular cell phone, the overall cost can be less when combining the cost of a high speed connection to the home, multiple hardware purchases and an existing cell phone account.

Add to this the mobility of a smartphone and the trend for smart phones gradually to be able to take on most computing tasks of a desktop you have a trend that is unstoppable.

The webpage with the cool statistics ( Google power meter - Greenmesh 2/09) is plugging into eight utilities and their customers by providing gadgets and info to track home electricity use. Check out the cool graphing.

The Google PowerMeter includes a that graph displays energy use hour by hour, and the users can view consumption totals day to day, across a week or more. The information displays in box that sits on a user's personalized iGoogle homepage.

So you are at the gym streaming internet radio via Pandora on your Blackberry Storm and you hear an alert for an email. Without stopping the music, you answer the email, then swap to your Twitter application, then send a text message and this all works fine. You still have Blackberry App World and VZ Navigator running from this morning in the background and decide it would be cool to shoot and upload a video of your feet moving on the elliptical via UberTwitter to Facebook.... and the world freezes.

The Storm has the ability to do alot of things at the same time and it has the ability for the user to destroy that experience pretty quickly. Some phone manufacturers increase stability by only letting you run one application at a time, RIM decided to give you the option of running everything and letting the user sort it out.

Multitasking operating systems have been around a long time. Windows Mobile, Android and Palm are other examples of a multitasking operating systems. It's a nightmare when designing a phone. Decreased battery life and draining memory. On the Blackberry, the ability to download applications from third party creators not necessarily approved by RIM adds a new twist of freedom and horror to the mix.

You learn pretty quickly how far you can push the phone and multitasking is probably the most common reason people hate the phone. "It's so slow !!" "It's crashing !!" This is also the reason why the store display phone is generally horrible as the day grinds on. Everyone who has walked by starts running a new application.

The Switch Application tool bar is your friend (see photo above). From the Blackberry button, this is accessible while running any application. It provides a widow into what is running similar to Crtl-Alt-Delete/Applications on a PC. This window allows you to jump between applications and CLOSE THEM DOWN if you don't need them.

So it is possible to listen to music and text and email, especially when running multiple email accounts though the Blackberry mail server system rather than using dedicated applications like Gmail, just shut down the navigation application you were using six hours ago.

I like the free application (Blackberry App World) QuickPull. It simulates a battery pull complete boot for the Blackberry Storm. You can schedule this complete cycle automatically in the middle of the night and it doesn't affect your alerts or wake-up
alarm.

Purge your email and text/picture/video messages. Multiple accounts with multiple attachments combined with text, pix and video left in for days eats up memory and makes the phone sluggish.

You can select the number of days you want to keep in the mail in each account automatically. I prefer a 15 day window automatic deletion window and to pick a moment when I have time and Delete Prior for each account. While you can delete messages from your native mail account account via the Blackberry mail server system, the mail that appears in the phone from your Gmail, Yahoo, corporate mail server, etc. is a mirror of that mail. All that garbage still looms on a server somewhere unless you decide to manually select a group of emails in your Storm and delete at the same time.

...well, maybe there is a 10% +/- chance that certain death won't occur. Even though an 80% chance of contracting cancer and dying from a drug would flip the panic switch at the FDA, a 90% chance of global warming is unlikely to create the same panic.

President Barack Obama will announce today that automakers must meet average U.S. fuel-economy standards of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, four years sooner than previously planned, a senior administration official said.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a 2007 report there's a 90 percent certainty that greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, cars and other human activities are causing higher temperatures and sea levels, potentially leading to dangerous climate change.

Former President George W. Bush balked at the idea of reducing emissions when he took office in 2001. Many automakers including "green" Toyota concurred since large vehicles were profitable and desirable.

Fast forward nine years.

The plan would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 900 million metric tons through 2016, the senior administration official said. In 2016, meeting the standards will cost automakers $600 a vehicle in addition to the $700-a-car cost automakers face under standards in existing law, the official said.

Also in 2016, light trucks would have to meet a standard of 30 mpg, and the average for cars would be 39 mpg.

bloomberg.com

About a month ago, I decided to move over to a smart phone from a good 3.2 megapixel still/ video phone, a Samsung ACH-990. I wanted to forward between a work/home phone without cost, so my decision was slanted toward the Verizon offerings.

This isn't an endorsement or an ongoing comparison, but rather an observation of using a Blackberry Storm for better or worse to help anyone with one or considering options for a phone application.

I considered the iPhone 3G from AT&T, as it is the dominant player in the smart phone game. Other smart phones in the running were the Samsung Omnia (5 megapixil !) and the HTC Touch.

Why I picked a Blackberry Storm

A phone is a tool. Like my plumbing, electrical and woodworking tools, I use the tool that works best for the job. I am photojournalist who is always looking for new ways to refine and speed up the process of transmitting still photos, video and data. I use multiple email accounts, picture/video and text messaging extensively.

I was intrigued by the iPhone but it quickly fell out of the running. No video capability, no picture/video messaging and a 2 megapixel camera with no flash or mechanical auto-focus. No multi-tasking of applications, no multi-threading of multiple server and web email accounts all running at the same time. No turn-by-turn navigation. No insurance. No replaceable battery. I have been going through a couple of phones per year. One got destroyed at a fire last year.

The iPhone is a fine tool for people dedicated to the Apple platform and find innovative uses sifting through a billion applications, but there were basic necessities of being a picture/video phone that I needed before considering all else.

The Samsung Omnia had a horrible screen and I never could get the Windows Mobile based phone to work right at the store. Like the Blackberry Storm, this multitasking phone usually has every possible application running opened in odd ways by every person who has touched it that day. The Verizon salespeople wouldn't let me cold boot the phones and they were tethered to an alarm/power source The Windows Mobile HTC Touch with a slide out keyboard seemed flimsy and cheap with a tiny screen.

Why I am writing this

While I have nothing against the iPhone, most of the reviews for the Blackberry Storm appear to be written by iPhone users comparing everything to their iPhone without connecting to the philosophy behind the Blackberry's design.

I want to share some tricks and observations that I figured out along the way without comparing the Blackberry Storm to anything.

Here's the tool, lets make it work.

The inflation/wage increase game has paused

May 15 (Bloomberg) -- The cost of living in the U.S. was unchanged in April as decreases in food and energy costs offset increases in medical care, autos and a second straight jump in tobacco prices.

The fear of a global market economy is deflation. A slow steady inflation of prices and an increase of wages signals a healthy economy.

The key word here is profit. Companies gauge their success based on increasing profit and individuals gauge their success on an increased wage.

I have often wondered where it ends.

A loaf of bread cost 11.5 cents 1920. The average yearly wage in 1920 was about $1200 (US Census Bureau). A business still makes a loaf of bread in 2009 and people make wages.

I'm not blowing hickory smoked tales of Americana here. It's just an observation of the artificial numbers game. A competition of numbers. A escalating seesaw of numeric wealth.

We gauge our success on amassing more numbers and by taking numbers away from from others so that we can have more numbers. The idea being that there is always a large supply of numbers to draw from and you just keep grabbing more numbers because no matter how many numbers you have it won't be worth as much a year from now.

In 2008, this brainless economic machine triggered an alert: The numbers have now been spread over a huge global population, most of which is living on 1920 numbers.

Breath deep. The game has paused for the U.S., other than medical care which appears to be still grabbing numbers pending some kind of catastrophic correction in the near future.

One of the first principles of physics that I learned in high school is that matter cannot be created not destroyed, only changed from one form to another.

A burning stick is in essence a battery - energy from the sun is stored in plants and released through oxidation (burning). Energy storage will become as important an invention as generation as we run screaming from oil.

General Electric announced this week a $100 million investment to build a new factory in upstate New York that will make sodium based batteries -- a sector with huge potential, according to G.E.'s chairman and chief executive, Jeffrey Immelt. nyt.com

Sodium based batteries are highly efficient in large applications like storing power from wind turbines or in use in heavy demand applications like locomotives.

Ford experimented with sodium-sulfur batteries in the Ford "Ecostar" prototype EV in the early 1990's, but other battery types proved more suitable for smaller applications.

Energy efficiency can be increased when energy is cheap to produce, store, and released at a later time.

• Think of the batteries that work with a gasoline hybrid


• Think of water reservoir storage systems for electrical utilities


• Think of peak demand vs. low demand for a utility

Caught during a ydr live stream, Dorothy appears before a district attorney candidate debate. I normally edit really tight... but hell, dreaming takes some time when performing in front of two hardened justice workers. And I was dreaming of a week of vacation.

Corine Bensel, a student at West York Area High School, promotes the York County High School Theater Awards during a Rotary lunch at the Yorktowne Hotel. Bensel sang a song from the Wizard of Oz.