worked on the bus. Or the plane, or train or long haul travel when you want to look out the window as well as read a book.
they might even be good to cut down the building wide phone PA paging that used to interrupt me so much that I cut the speaker cable in my desk phone. It could ring (flashing light) but it couldn't speak.
It might even be useful in hosptital if it didn't interfere with the life support.
I think a heads up street map might be handy. Especially in my town, where street signs seem conspicuously absent.
Or did the telemarketers just piss off enough voters and string pullers without having a strong enough lobby group and "campaign donation" team of their own? I can see this one. GM beats telemarketer. GE beats Telemarketer. Monsanto beats telemarketer. Texas beats telemarketer...
Unfortunately for me, I live in Oz, hence no register or law and the only calls I get are charities and surveys from people using phone number generators.
Alternately I offer to send them a bill and ask for appropriate details or I ask them to call back in half an hour (they never do).
Imagine opening a regular set of email from your friends (not work). My screen would not be G rated.
Or just reading an unmoderated forum daft enough to allow html posts...Kathy Lette (warning hot pink alert), author of Puberty Blues and married to Mr Hypothetical, Geoffrey Robertson.Warning, apart from the hot pink, there are some posts in the notice board that have burned traumatic images in my head forever. Don't click there
It does give me a new reason to visit McDonalds, ie apart from the relatively clean toilets. I'd be going for the not-work surfing and email that I'd prefer my bosses did not know about. And yes Hortense there really is a McDonalds near Yass on the Hume Highway. Innocent/Rude Road Sign BTW an ass in Australia is a donkey.
Well they did when I worked there. But some of my cow-orkers used to program their user id and pw into the function keys on their terminals. So I guess the security is only human. (Flashes id card with picture of micky mouse).
Did you hear the joke about CIA sending Iraq Generals bogus SMS? Hard to do when there is bugger all mobile coverage in Iraq.
I thought the point of the internet was to be so vast as to be unstoppable...
or just the plain brown snakes that cross the road, or just sunbake in the middle.
Not to mention the roos, when it is drought and there is more grass along the road sides and grain from passing trucks. Galahs and Cockatoos are fun windscreen smashers too.
And just when you think you can set and forget the cruise control and tie the steering wheel up, you come across herds of cattle or sheep using the road as a stock route or long grass paddock.
That's the Hay plains (NSW Sydney to Adelaide). And then there is the nullabour (Adelaide to Perth), where a passenger can go to sleep for five hours (550km), wake up and wonder if we've moved at all.
And not a wi-fi or even a mobile phone signal the whole way. But our capital city CBDs are full of free unprotected wi-fi. Just no good for road trips. If you don't count Canberra, the closest they get together is 800km (500miles).
underground in coober pedy but not New Zealand
on
Back to the Trees
·
· Score: 1
The underground houses in Coober Pedy are the most popular, followed by things like mud brick and maybe strawbale, for their ability to withstand heat.
In NZ however, a brick house has less value than a weatherboard. This is because the place is very earthquake prone and bricks hurt a lot more when they fall on you and they are more likely to fall than weatherboard which has better flexibilty.
They've put most of their favourite stone buildings on stalks of rubber, so the whole place can wobble like a jelly and only the rubber gets stretched.
So I guess I nominate rubber tree for tree house construction.
a robot system for remote tiling and grouting for a space shuttle wing?
If I reply on the topic of an off topic post am I off topic or on topic?
Dad the saw-bones would still have to quit his sailing race or golf game to fix the broken motorcyclist. But at least he could travel to the nearest metropolitan hospital instead of the outback to do it. Oh curses, I know he would prefer the excuse to go outback. But these days it is cheaper to plug the holes and bring them back in helicopters or planes, just like MASH.
They don't seem to censor programs much here, I think we'd get to see more than the USA would but maybe not quite as much as some parts of Europe. I've even heard the F-word in daytime TV on our public funded broadcaster the abc
What the networks do (except our dear auntie ABC) is chop random chunks out of programs to make more advertising fit in. This has lead to some really strange broadcasts of things like Farscape and Buffy. And I've noticed one station has started putting "banner ads" directly on the actual programs. Too bad if there were subtitles, you wouldn't see them, and they certainly cover up the credits.
just when I've figured out (thanks to a post on/.) how to stop the banner ads on web sites. Sigh.
If human life was really worth anything, cars would be a lot safer, and the roads too. And the coalition of the willies* would not be lining up to bomb the crap out of Iraq, its power, clean water and people.
I cannot even comprehend the avarice of the people behind this. What do you buy when you have so much money you make Bill Gates look like a pauper? A US Government? What for?
I got a better idea, spend your silly squillions on NASA, health and education.
no I don't suppose they read/. dammit.
* "coalition of the willies" was on a placard in the peace march
in the second post under the news article
somebody confused.NET with NET most of the rest of the thread under that was people calling the.NET'r stupid.
I knew Microsoft was trying to usurp the language for their own profit again.
the posts marked Storm teacup were informative, ie if we're using secure telnet ie the ssh part of putty or just plain old ssh or secure ftp, router spoofing won't matter a lot. I have trouble believing that routers have been misconfigured as GOD routers only once (1997). This must have happened more than once. How many routers would you need to stuff up to make a glitch in the internet?
volcanically active satellite Io and this I read as "lo" as in "lo and behold" then I had to start translating
satellite = moon
Europan # European First though here was all the men were now sterile so they were breeding themselves into extinction
Europa = moon of jupiter (well I knew that one, boss like to name computers after rocks eg uluru, moon etc and I wanted to call the new one Europa - maybe that idea got discarded cos it was too wet along with Gibralta, sigh)
lo # low
lo # I/O nor Input/Output neither
Io is another satellite/moon of jupiter.
I wish they were more specific about what kind of radiation was coming from Jupiter. Are we talking heat like from a bar radiator, or EM radiation like from the Sun (Sol) or something else?
And I know of at least 3 that have survived, and a couple more that the owners couldn't bear to touch given the timing of the phone's swan dive. Blech.
Nokia service centres always check for water damage before they do any work, even when you're just asking them to fix the known faulty fading display problem.
I used to work in a warehouse that got quite cold at night. But the insides of PC's stay nice and warm, if you leave them on.
So my co-worker's PC was starting to get very noisy. We pulled the case off it to see what the matter was. The whole motherboard was covered in little bits of mouse poo,pee and fur. The back of the case had a hole where some accessory used to live, and now a live mouse had moved in.
Strangely the warehouse office had lots of ratsack, but the rats and mice never seemed interested in eating it.
Ran over my HP calculator once (circa 1982), and it's still fine. And found out that laptop tft screens do not like being compressed under airline seats (1998) but it came back to life on its own.
I guess Peter Falk got away with that look. But I'd rather see fit, and athletic and moderately cute. After all how many tv shows are vaguely true to life now.
Eg where is the bumbling inarticulate fat balding lawyer? Ah hell looks don't matter (Eg Rumpole of the Bailey), but the inarticulate does. Real lawyers like real politicians at work (not like spin city) are so dull, you'd cure insomnia with that TV. They call it "Question Time" in Australia.
Victoria's parliment got a little bit titilating recently, when they ejected our olympic aerial skier Kirsty Marshall for breastfeeding her baby, in the house. The excuse was - the baby was not elected.
Say what?
At my work there are nice scanner/photocopiers that will scan a multi page hardcopy and offer to email it (usually pdf, but other formats available) to the address/list of your choice.
And lots of people starting with Nixon, Diana, and Monica can vouch for the spread of interesting information originally made on the phone. Who knew someone had a recording device attached.
And now even home cameras have night vision, infrared and directional microphones. You need blackout blinds and double glazing just to stop people filming your bedroom.
Hopefully privacy will be protected by an abundance of noise (useless information). Unfortunately, history suggests that interesting stuff will always surface (eg dead sea scrolls and subsequent).
Perhaps next time Laurie can do a lovely abstract painting of her thoughts instead. At least most people will have a more difficult time figuring out the details, or find it less interesting.
I still got my abacus
and when that didn't work, there were always the quongdong seeds (a bit like puckered wooden marbles).
and when I was really good, we got pencil and paper and a log tables book. But I was always foiled by those when I added 2 and 3 and got 6.
I wouldn't mind one of those shells though. I want a burglar decoy. ie get a 486 laptop, fairly slimline, no cd player or floppy drive maybe, and use the kensington lock. Hopefully any burglar will waste his time on that and miss anything I really care about.
Where a team of well dressed young corporate execs seek out and expose corporate fraud, corporate pollution, corporate bribes (eg to political entities), and general corporate stuffing of the masses on whose backs they stand.
After they've busted the people and the planet - then how they going to make any money? Well I guess they don't have to be smart or forward thinking. There was a little bit around the edges in some of angel with the evil lawyers, although this is a bit lame these days. How about evil oil barons with missiles (how do we tell the difference between George and Saddam?)
How to use outlook to secure your private email, for example those email jokes and pictures and love notes that can get you into trouble.
remember: its not very secure if it's been through your boss's exchange server.
create a pst file
file > new > personal folders file (.pst)
browse to your pc hard disk and create pst file on there somewhere (don't use the default dir). Chances are that your boss's system is not likely to back up your hard drive. Remember the network techs are likely to trash the hard drive any time they want to do an upgrade so you are responsible for your own backups.
Select some level of encryption and enter a password. Remember the encryption is probably token and microsoft would be able to hack into it using their key.
Drag all your dodgy email into this personal folder. If you can do this the same day as you receive the dogdy email, there is a small chance that you will have downloaded it off the work server before it would have been backed up (usually overnight).
Then each night before you go home, you can copy your fred.pst file onto your portable storage, and securely delete it from the hard drive. In fact if it goes directly onto the portable storage (I love those usb port things) even better.
Now to access the pesky mail at home. You need to go into your copy of outlook and create a new pst file, with the same name and password as your work one. Then replace the file that outlook created with your work one. I dunno why you can't just "attach" the work pst but outlook won't let you.
I don't guarentee this method but it is a whole lot better than leaving it on the work server for anyone else to read. Better is to have your own email with an independent ISP, but if work mates insist on using work email for non work, then hide the results.
I like to think that if my previous job tried to sack me for sending dodgy email, I could take most of the workforce with me or claim unfair dismissal. Can't get anything done (profit) if you have no workers right?
And note, this doesn't protect you at all if you are the one sending the dodgy stuff.
I think Microsoft must be softening us up for another round of double speak (refer George Orwell "1984" for a definitive text)
security = anyone can access your stuff and break it
privacy = microsoft and your boss (via the network tech) can access all your stuff
reliability = system can be relied upon to crash and eat your work at least twice daily
business integrity = it's important to tell your customers what they want to hear ie lie
pillars = we only need one to hold everything up
improvement = as practiced by Bill Clinton: talking about it and reporting on the talk is the same as action and progress
phone won't work in another port when your network tech has pinched the port at the hub for something else.
"We can't win with everybody, but we can ensure we are transparent, honest and forthright" The sky is falling the sky is falling, does this mean microsoft wants to go open source??? OK, maybe not, must be more double speak.
transparent = obscure
honest = lie, cover up and divert attention
forthright = crooked, devious, manipulative
all patches are together in a single deliverable way
patch3 can't be installed without patch2 which requires patch1 which requires the install upgrade, which is no longer supported, so you must buy the spyware version of our software (XP). Sigh. I'm going freebsd and Xwin or similar.
I've been reading Michael Moore's book "stupid white men", and there is a lovely chapter in it for you called "idiot nation" and the supplementatry chapter "Nice planet, nobody home".
From the penguin australia edition c2002 of his book, chapter entitled nice planet nobody home, pg138 he says that (I've paraphrased a bit)
califorinia's electricity was supplied by regional monopolies, rates set by state legislation. Deregulation was proposed as a way for the companies to recoup what they'd spent on nuclear power plants (What? isn't california an earthquake zone, what the hell are nuke power plants doing anywhere near there?)...
Deregulation came into effect in 1996, including a state funded bailout to the electricity companies ($20 billion USA). 4 years prices frozen at above average cost (so you're already paying more). the deregulated companies did not build more power plants but preferred to buy power from interstate at daily spot market. "outrageously inflated prices". If you haven't got a contract for the power, what are you going to say no I don't like the price today, I think I'll turn the state fridges off?
But it gets better: The power was available. The independent (?) system operator had access to 45000 megawatts, more than enough power to cover summer peak (for you northeners, a/c seems to use more power than heating), Power companies hold back 13000 megawatts by going off line. The result is they get more demand and higher prices. Interestingly LA still has public ownership of its electricity supply and they do not go off line (read blackout).
Still I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to use more electricity unless it is generated by a renewable source.
And I can't recommend the book for the faint hearted or for fans of George Bush, it will just frighten you.
Slashdot Mirror
worked on the bus. Or the plane, or train or long haul travel when you want to look out the window as well as read a book.
they might even be good to cut down the building wide phone PA paging that used to interrupt me so much that I cut the speaker cable in my desk phone. It could ring (flashing light) but it couldn't speak.
It might even be useful in hosptital if it didn't interfere with the life support.
I think a heads up street map might be handy. Especially in my town, where street signs seem conspicuously absent.
Or did the telemarketers just piss off enough voters and string pullers without having a strong enough lobby group and "campaign donation" team of their own? I can see this one. GM beats telemarketer. GE beats Telemarketer. Monsanto beats telemarketer. Texas beats telemarketer...
Unfortunately for me, I live in Oz, hence no register or law and the only calls I get are charities and surveys from people using phone number generators.
Alternately I offer to send them a bill and ask for appropriate details or I ask them to call back in half an hour (they never do).
Imagine opening a regular set of email from your friends (not work). My screen would not be G rated.
Or just reading an unmoderated forum daft enough to allow html posts...Kathy Lette (warning hot pink alert), author of Puberty Blues and married to Mr Hypothetical, Geoffrey Robertson.Warning, apart from the hot pink, there are some posts in the notice board that have burned traumatic images in my head forever. Don't click there
It does give me a new reason to visit McDonalds, ie apart from the relatively clean toilets. I'd be going for the not-work surfing and email that I'd prefer my bosses did not know about. And yes Hortense there really is a McDonalds near Yass on the Hume Highway. Innocent/Rude Road Sign BTW an ass in Australia is a donkey.
Well they did when I worked there. But some of my cow-orkers used to program their user id and pw into the function keys on their terminals. So I guess the security is only human. (Flashes id card with picture of micky mouse).
Did you hear the joke about CIA sending Iraq Generals bogus SMS? Hard to do when there is bugger all mobile coverage in Iraq.
I thought the point of the internet was to be so vast as to be unstoppable...
or just the plain brown snakes that cross the road, or just sunbake in the middle.
Not to mention the roos, when it is drought and there is more grass along the road sides and grain from passing trucks. Galahs and Cockatoos are fun windscreen smashers too.
And just when you think you can set and forget the cruise control and tie the steering wheel up, you come across herds of cattle or sheep using the road as a stock route or long grass paddock.
That's the Hay plains (NSW Sydney to Adelaide). And then there is the nullabour (Adelaide to Perth), where a passenger can go to sleep for five hours (550km), wake up and wonder if we've moved at all.
And not a wi-fi or even a mobile phone signal the whole way. But our capital city CBDs are full of free unprotected wi-fi. Just no good for road trips. If you don't count Canberra, the closest they get together is 800km (500miles).
The underground houses in Coober Pedy are the most popular, followed by things like mud brick and maybe strawbale, for their ability to withstand heat.
In NZ however, a brick house has less value than a weatherboard. This is because the place is very earthquake prone and bricks hurt a lot more when they fall on you and they are more likely to fall than weatherboard which has better flexibilty.
They've put most of their favourite stone buildings on stalks of rubber, so the whole place can wobble like a jelly and only the rubber gets stretched.
So I guess I nominate rubber tree for tree house construction.
a robot system for remote tiling and grouting for a space shuttle wing?
If I reply on the topic of an off topic post am I off topic or on topic?
Dad the saw-bones would still have to quit his sailing race or golf game to fix the broken motorcyclist. But at least he could travel to the nearest metropolitan hospital instead of the outback to do it. Oh curses, I know he would prefer the excuse to go outback. But these days it is cheaper to plug the holes and bring them back in helicopters or planes, just like MASH.
They don't seem to censor programs much here, I think we'd get to see more than the USA would but maybe not quite as much as some parts of Europe. I've even heard the F-word in daytime TV on our public funded broadcaster the abc
/.) how to stop the banner ads on web sites. Sigh.
What the networks do (except our dear auntie ABC) is chop random chunks out of programs to make more advertising fit in. This has lead to some really strange broadcasts of things like Farscape and Buffy. And I've noticed one station has started putting "banner ads" directly on the actual programs. Too bad if there were subtitles, you wouldn't see them, and they certainly cover up the credits.
just when I've figured out (thanks to a post on
Hint: try google for doubleclick block hosts
If human life was really worth anything, cars would be a lot safer, and the roads too. And the coalition of the willies* would not be lining up to bomb the crap out of Iraq, its power, clean water and people.
/. dammit.
I cannot even comprehend the avarice of the people behind this. What do you buy when you have so much money you make Bill Gates look like a pauper? A US Government? What for?
I got a better idea, spend your silly squillions on NASA, health and education.
no I don't suppose they read
* "coalition of the willies" was on a placard in the peace march
in the second post under the news article somebody confused .NET with NET .NET'r stupid.
most of the rest of the thread under that was people calling the
I knew Microsoft was trying to usurp the language for their own profit again.
the posts marked Storm teacup were informative, ie if we're using secure telnet ie the ssh part of putty or just plain old ssh or secure ftp, router spoofing won't matter a lot. I have trouble believing that routers have been misconfigured as GOD routers only once (1997). This must have happened more than once. How many routers would you need to stuff up to make a glitch in the internet?
they told him to rant incoherently at the button to operate it.
hopefully he won't figure out that this isn't actually as "effective" as the button could be. the ranting is destructive enough.
volcanically active satellite Io
and this I read as "lo" as in "lo and behold" then I had to start translating
satellite = moon
Europan # European
First though here was all the men were now sterile so they were breeding themselves into extinction
Europa = moon of jupiter
(well I knew that one, boss like to name computers after rocks eg uluru, moon etc and I wanted to call the new one Europa - maybe that idea got discarded cos it was too wet along with Gibralta, sigh)
lo # low lo # I/O nor Input/Output neither
Io is another satellite/moon of jupiter.
I wish they were more specific about what kind of radiation was coming from Jupiter. Are we talking heat like from a bar radiator, or EM radiation like from the Sun (Sol) or something else?
I like this one
scamming Elvis
this guy actually cost the scammers some money.
I've yet to see a computer go postal without human help.
trouble is computers are designed by people.
air traffic control and missile guidance are two systems I'd never ever work on.
I'd like to program all the missiles to fly to the sun, but the consequences of a bug in the system are just too scary for me to contemplate.
And it isn't usually the bath tub.
And I know of at least 3 that have survived, and a couple more that the owners couldn't bear to touch given the timing of the phone's swan dive. Blech.
Nokia service centres always check for water damage before they do any work, even when you're just asking them to fix the known faulty fading display problem.
in a galaxy far far away and many years ago...
there was a bored computer operator in a room full of pdp-11's, kept cool by some evaporative airconditioners.
It happened that one of the coolers needed filling up at around the same time the operator needed to empty his bladder.
the evaporative cooler continued to work fine after the unfortunate maltreatment
but nobody could remain in the same room with it
so hiding your message in something like word or excel is a waste of time because a tool like this veracity will detect the change.
I like scramdisk. A pity they've gone commercial but good they've done it in Europe.
so anyone else have a favourite (free & opensource?) encryption tool
I used to work in a warehouse that got quite cold at night. But the insides of PC's stay nice and warm, if you leave them on.
So my co-worker's PC was starting to get very noisy. We pulled the case off it to see what the matter was. The whole motherboard was covered in little bits of mouse poo,pee and fur. The back of the case had a hole where some accessory used to live, and now a live mouse had moved in.
Strangely the warehouse office had lots of ratsack, but the rats and mice never seemed interested in eating it.
Ran over my HP calculator once (circa 1982), and it's still fine. And found out that laptop tft screens do not like being compressed under airline seats (1998) but it came back to life on its own.
I guess Peter Falk got away with that look. But I'd rather see fit, and athletic and moderately cute. After all how many tv shows are vaguely true to life now. Eg where is the bumbling inarticulate fat balding lawyer? Ah hell looks don't matter (Eg Rumpole of the Bailey), but the inarticulate does. Real lawyers like real politicians at work (not like spin city) are so dull, you'd cure insomnia with that TV. They call it "Question Time" in Australia. Victoria's parliment got a little bit titilating recently, when they ejected our olympic aerial skier Kirsty Marshall for breastfeeding her baby, in the house. The excuse was - the baby was not elected. Say what?
At my work there are nice scanner/photocopiers that will scan a multi page hardcopy and offer to email it (usually pdf, but other formats available) to the address/list of your choice. And lots of people starting with Nixon, Diana, and Monica can vouch for the spread of interesting information originally made on the phone. Who knew someone had a recording device attached. And now even home cameras have night vision, infrared and directional microphones. You need blackout blinds and double glazing just to stop people filming your bedroom. Hopefully privacy will be protected by an abundance of noise (useless information). Unfortunately, history suggests that interesting stuff will always surface (eg dead sea scrolls and subsequent). Perhaps next time Laurie can do a lovely abstract painting of her thoughts instead. At least most people will have a more difficult time figuring out the details, or find it less interesting.
I still got my abacus and when that didn't work, there were always the quongdong seeds (a bit like puckered wooden marbles). and when I was really good, we got pencil and paper and a log tables book. But I was always foiled by those when I added 2 and 3 and got 6. I wouldn't mind one of those shells though. I want a burglar decoy. ie get a 486 laptop, fairly slimline, no cd player or floppy drive maybe, and use the kensington lock. Hopefully any burglar will waste his time on that and miss anything I really care about.
Where a team of well dressed young corporate execs seek out and expose corporate fraud, corporate pollution, corporate bribes (eg to political entities), and general corporate stuffing of the masses on whose backs they stand.
After they've busted the people and the planet - then how they going to make any money? Well I guess they don't have to be smart or forward thinking. There was a little bit around the edges in some of angel with the evil lawyers, although this is a bit lame these days. How about evil oil barons with missiles (how do we tell the difference between George and Saddam?)
How to use outlook to secure your private email, for example those email jokes and pictures and love notes that can get you into trouble.
remember: its not very secure if it's been through your boss's exchange server.
create a pst file
file > new > personal folders file (.pst)
browse to your pc hard disk and create pst file on there somewhere (don't use the default dir). Chances are that your boss's system is not likely to back up your hard drive. Remember the network techs are likely to trash the hard drive any time they want to do an upgrade so you are responsible for your own backups.
Select some level of encryption and enter a password. Remember the encryption is probably token and microsoft would be able to hack into it using their key.
Drag all your dodgy email into this personal folder. If you can do this the same day as you receive the dogdy email, there is a small chance that you will have downloaded it off the work server before it would have been backed up (usually overnight).
Then each night before you go home, you can copy your fred.pst file onto your portable storage, and securely delete it from the hard drive. In fact if it goes directly onto the portable storage (I love those usb port things) even better.
Now to access the pesky mail at home. You need to go into your copy of outlook and create a new pst file, with the same name and password as your work one. Then replace the file that outlook created with your work one. I dunno why you can't just "attach" the work pst but outlook won't let you.
I don't guarentee this method but it is a whole lot better than leaving it on the work server for anyone else to read. Better is to have your own email with an independent ISP, but if work mates insist on using work email for non work, then hide the results.
I like to think that if my previous job tried to sack me for sending dodgy email, I could take most of the workforce with me or claim unfair dismissal. Can't get anything done (profit) if you have no workers right?
And note, this doesn't protect you at all if you are the one sending the dodgy stuff.
I think Microsoft must be softening us up for another round of double speak (refer George Orwell "1984" for a definitive text)
security = anyone can access your stuff and break it privacy = microsoft and your boss (via the network tech) can access all your stuff reliability = system can be relied upon to crash and eat your work at least twice daily business integrity = it's important to tell your customers what they want to hear ie lie
pillars = we only need one to hold everything up
improvement = as practiced by Bill Clinton: talking about it and reporting on the talk is the same as action and progress
phone won't work in another port when your network tech has pinched the port at the hub for something else.
"We can't win with everybody, but we can ensure we are transparent, honest and forthright" The sky is falling the sky is falling, does this mean microsoft wants to go open source??? OK, maybe not, must be more double speak.
transparent = obscure
honest = lie, cover up and divert attention
forthright = crooked, devious, manipulative
all patches are together in a single deliverable way patch3 can't be installed without patch2 which requires patch1 which requires the install upgrade, which is no longer supported, so you must buy the spyware version of our software (XP). Sigh. I'm going freebsd and Xwin or similar.
Geekee
I've been reading Michael Moore's book "stupid white men", and there is a lovely chapter in it for you called "idiot nation" and the supplementatry chapter "Nice planet, nobody home".
From the penguin australia edition c2002 of his book, chapter entitled nice planet nobody home, pg138 he says that (I've paraphrased a bit)
califorinia's electricity was supplied by regional monopolies, rates set by state legislation. Deregulation was proposed as a way for the companies to recoup what they'd spent on nuclear power plants (What? isn't california an earthquake zone, what the hell are nuke power plants doing anywhere near there?)...
Deregulation came into effect in 1996, including a state funded bailout to the electricity companies ($20 billion USA). 4 years prices frozen at above average cost (so you're already paying more). the deregulated companies did not build more power plants but preferred to buy power from interstate at daily spot market. "outrageously inflated prices". If you haven't got a contract for the power, what are you going to say no I don't like the price today, I think I'll turn the state fridges off?
But it gets better: The power was available. The independent (?) system operator had access to 45000 megawatts, more than enough power to cover summer peak (for you northeners, a/c seems to use more power than heating), Power companies hold back 13000 megawatts by going off line. The result is they get more demand and higher prices. Interestingly LA still has public ownership of its electricity supply and they do not go off line (read blackout).
Still I wouldn't want to encourage anyone to use more electricity unless it is generated by a renewable source.
And I can't recommend the book for the faint hearted or for fans of George Bush, it will just frighten you.