I'm back after doing it!

Well there’s some news from this weekend. I was excited to see that Greenpeace “attacked” our local power station. Attacked is strong word (used by one newspaper) but what they did do is hang huge banners on the plant. The biggest (20m by 25m) said “1st Climate Killer In Italy”. This is to signify that the coal-fired power plant at Cerano was the biggest polluter of CO2 for 2006 in Italy. They also say that the 2nd place plant is in Taranto. Finally we beat Taranto! First of all, it’s a little scary that about a dozen Greenpeace activists could break into the plant and hang banners all over the place. I mean it's not easy to sneak in carrying huge banners. We all know the security at tourist sites is tight but not at the big power plant! It was done this weekend because the UN is meeting in Bali to talk about climate change. Greenpeace wanted to remind people the problem is right here in Europe, not just someone else’s fault. I also will go on record that I had nothing to do with this protest but I applaud their efforts. I hope Enel does something to improve this plant. In related news Enel is talking about merging with EDF an energy giant in France. The funny thing about this is that France is big in nuclear power and Italy is against nuclear power BUT Italy buys power from nuclear plants in France. This new merger would probably only increase the amount of nuclear energy in Italy.
I bought something electronic this weekend that I’ve been dreaming about. A Wii, or maybe an Xbox360? No, for me it was an external hard drive. I was giddy driving home with it (yes I’m that much of geek). This little baby is USB powered so it’s incredibly portable and it’s 160 GB! Now these days that’s not a lot but it’s more than all the other hard drives I own, together. My ancient laptop has a 30 GB hard drive. My iPod was the best of the time but only 40 GB and my work laptop is 60 GB. So I can save more stuff on this little new thing then all my old things together. I love it because now I’ll have all my music and photos with me when I travel back to the USA. If my sister wants a Francesco Renga song that I have then, BAM, we copy it over to their computer. If my Keith and Pam like one of the photos I took of Kyle then, BAM, we copy it to their computer. You get the point. I don’t need to carry my computer because everyone I know and everywhere I go, somebody has one. The really strange thing is that I tried to buy one of these hard drives in the US when I was there in October but nobody had them. I went to Best Buy, Circuit City and etc… they all “carried” them but didn’t have any in stock. I went to an electronics store here on a whim and they had several sizes and three different brands! I ended up getting a Packard Bell model because the physical size of the device was smaller than the Toshiba. I can’t help but wonder why in the world I couldn’t get this in the USA but I could here. It’s not just this as there are Wii shortages in the UK but plenty here. Are the businesses that bad and getting stock to right places or is there something else going on?