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The Oregonian reported today that Boardman, Oregon is getting a new plant that will produce ethanol, but this ethanol plant has an interesting twist.  Pacific Ethanol received a grant from the US Department of Energy that will allow the company to build a test cellulosic ethanol plant next to it’s existing conventional corn-based biofuels plant in Boardman.

How does cellulosic ethanol differ from conventional ethanol?  Easy - normal, every day ethanol is made primarily from corn. To me that presents a problem because since corn is used in many many activities (including meat production, it is driving up costs of many consumer items.  Been to the store lately to buy a gallon of milk or ice cream?  Notice the price was insane when compared to recent memory?  Corn based ethanol is a major contributor to that.

Cellulosic ethanol, on the other hand, can be made from cellulose plant fibers including stalks, grain straw, switch grass, and quick-growing trees.  This is exciting news because these quick growing trees are abundant in Eastern Oregon, if you’ve driven to Pendleton along I-84 you’ve undoubtedly seen the huge poplar stands on the south side if the road.

According to the article, the new ethanol plant will be able to produce 2.7 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol annually.

I’m very excited by this development.

Article link: Oregonian

Image Credit: Wolfgang Wildner

In an awesome move, Yahoo! has today announced their support for OpenID. What does this mean? That eventually you’ll be able to sign on to more than 9000 OpenID enabled sites using your Yahoo ID AND you’ll be able to sign into Yahoo! using your OpenID, if it’s hosted elsewhere (like at JanRain, for example).

Also, it one fell swoop, Yahoo is tripling the population of OpenID accounts by adding 250 million new accounts. Look for a private beta beginning January 30.

I posted more about this on DownloadSquad.

Also, I’ve covered OpenID plenty before.

(image credit: Bob Xu)

OK I know MacWorld starts today.  But lets not get crazy here.  This IS NOT Steve Job’s keynote.  The MacBook Air might be coming out, and so on.

I’m the biggest MacHead I know…but I don’t understand why people get crazy with products they think are coming out.  It’s just laughable and makes MacHeads look preposterous to PC people.

(image credit goes to Flickr user nebarnix)

So I’ve been blogging over at Download Squad for 3 or so weeks now and I’m really enjoying it.  Over the last week, I’ve had 3 of my posts make it on the front page of Digg.com!  For those of you who are unaware of digg, it’s a page where people vote for and discuss web articles, and getting on the front page is a big deal.  It means you have written a popular article and it also means you’re getting a lot of readers because digg is like a spotlight of web attention.

In fact, yesterday I had two articles get on the front page of Digg.  Both were on the subject of net neutrality, one about Comcast and one about AT&T.  Pretty cool, eh? 

Now I just have to get one of my posts from techcraver.com onto digg!

(image courtesy of Flickr user Victor Ngo)

OK, so I’m a code monkey and a blogger. I’m *not* in marketing. But, I do know what attracts my eye to a product. If I’m making an LCD display or TV, I think of slim and sexy. I think either an attractive woman, or something similar.

This is why I’m confused by this KDS monitor being sold at CompUSA. If I’m going to market an LCD monitor, I’m not going to choose this guy to put in the ad. Sorry, it’s just me.

I’m going to hop on my bike. See ya later.

I deleted my Pownce account today.  I’m on twitter and jaiku, and a crapload of other sites.  I have forgotten about my Pownce account, except for the emails I get whenever someone in my pownce circle sends out a message.

I have become saturated with requests for my time and I just don’t have time to keep up to date on Pownce as well.  Plus, Pownce doesn’t really present much of a value proposition over Twitter.  Additionally Twitter is where most of my friends are.

I have been trying to get Qik installed on my Nokia N81 8GB ever since reading Scoble’s experience with the software last week.

For those of you unaware, Qik is software that allows you to stream live video from your Nokia NSeries’ webcam, complete with audio. Qik uses the data plan on your mobile phone for network. 3G with AT&T is probably the best way to go, but I’ll be using T-Mobile’s EDGE data access and wi-fi, when I’m in range of an access point.

Think ustream.tv, but in your pocket, making you able to do live video casts whenever the mood strikes you. This has major implications. You can do your own live video conference or shoot live video whenever you want. You can become your own live news story if per chance you see a burning building or car accident.

Eager to try Qik out, I went on the site, entered in my phone number, and waited for the introductory SMS to come to my phone. The SMS never came, so I emailed Qik support. After a while, the introductory SMS came so I fired up my mobile browser and verified my phone number through their mobile web system. I was then told I’d have to wait for another SMS with a link to the application install file. That SMS never came so again I emailed Qik support. I heard back from a Qik person and was off and running!

I fired up the Qik application and since I was at home, told Qik to use my wi-fi. Having Qik.com up on my mac, within 3 seconds I saw the video and heard the noises that I was making in the room coming through my web-connected computer. pretty freaky to think I can do a live video cast from my mobile phone and make it available to web users who go to my qik site.

The next test…how would Qik work over EDGE, considering it has only a fraction of the bandwidth as my wi-fi. Well, I reset the Qik application after specifying T-Mobile’s edge connection and again I saw my video streaming live on the web. The delay was only 5-7 seconds…not much worse than the wi-fi uplink from before.

At this point I’d say Qik is easily a disruptive technology. At any point in time I can fire up Qik and do on-the-go interviews or videocasts. How amazing!

This also speaks volumes for the Nokia Nseries hardware platform. Qik was able to use the Nokia because of it’s great built-in camera, wi-fi (or cellular data access), and open Symbian operating system as a platform for building this fantastic application.

I’m so excited!

PS: I found Qik’s tech support team, notably Bhaskar Roy to be very helpful! Thanks guys!!