Still trying to track down our power usage. I ran the dehumidifier on the kill-a-watt for 91 hours 16 minutes (3.75 days or so). In that time it used 42.18 kWh. Based on our current cost of 9.764 ¢/kWh that’s a cost of about $1.09 per day.

 › technology     2008-07-17 10:52   ...0 comments

I am stalling got curious about whether it is more cost effective to drive to Carleton and pay to park while sitting in the air conditioned library or to sit in my bedroom and run our thermostat-equipped window air conditioner.

Parking at Carleton is $10 for 4 hours, or $2.50 per hour.

I plugged a “Kill-A-Watt” power meter inline with my window air conditioner and ran it. The room was already cool, so this is the cost to maintain the coolness we had overnight.

When actively cooling (not just fan) the air conditioner uses 530 Watts of power. If it were to run solid for one hour at 530 W then it would use 0.53 kWh. At current rates we pay 9.764 ¢/kWh, giving a cost to operate of 5.1 ¢/hr. I recalculated using the current peak rate for people with smart meters (13.594 ¢/kWh) and they would pay 7.2 ¢/hr to operate the window air conditioner.

Of course these numbers assume constant operation of the air conditioner. Normally it cycles back to fan a lot. I ran mine for an hour with an inside temperature of 23.3 and an outside temperature of 28.5 (humidex 37). I read the actual kWh reading off the kill-a-watt. I actually used 0.28 kWh, or 2.7 ¢.

For kicks (and stalling) I decided to check the split ductless air conditioners a friend is thinking of installing. Of course, these units are designed for much higher capacity because they aren’t sized to cool a single room. Still if you can get away with single-room cooling and the ductless units are a luxury then it makes sense to see the difference in cost to operate.

I put in “ductless air conditioner watts” into google, picked the first link, and selected the biggest option of 24000 BTU/hr in the hopes this would approximate the system the friend is thinking about (2 cooling units run to a single compresser). (For comparison my window air conditioner is 6000 BTU/hr.) These units run at a spec of 2590 W while cooling. Using the same calculations this would run 25.2 ¢/hr at current rates or 35.2 ¢/hr at peak smart meter rates. Again, these are flat out cooling, not cycling on and off.

A full-house central air conditioner, lets say a 4 ton unit, runs at 48000 BTUs. I can’t find operating watts for these. Let’s assume the costs double from the 24000 BTU ductless. That gives 50 ¢ per operating hour (70 ¢ for the smart meter rate).

So there you have it. Running full tilt, a window air conditioner uses 5 ¢/hr, a 24000 BTU ductless uses 5 times that, and a whole house estimated at 10 times the window air conditioner. You cool more area with the more expensive methods, but I just need a cool corner to work in, and so it doesn’t make sense for me to pay $2.50 an hour to park at carleton when it’s costing me 5 ¢ an hour to stay home.

Of course, Carleton is already paying for the air conditioning so there may be an environmental benefit to going there, but my little air conditioner is already saving 90% of the power I’d use if we were on central air. I might choose to go to Carleton on this basis when the province’s power grid is really hurting.

 › technology     2008-07-08 12:49   ...1 comment

OpenID is good technology. It lets you have one standard centralized web identity, protected with a username and password. When you want to make a comment on some weblog, you don’t have to make an account on that weblog, you just use your OpenID to authenticate.

Your ID is actually a webpage that you control. Mine is my home page. You put a tiny bit of magic text into the webpage, and poof it works!

There needs to a a little server somewhere that checks your password, but it doesn’t have to be in the same place as your webpage. I set one up on xyzzy. If you want to set this up let me know.

 › technology     2008-06-28 20:45   ...0 comments

This is a really funny flame from Bill Gates about how hard it is to download and install stuff on Windows. I’m sure we’ve all felt this way at one time or another.

 › funny     2008-06-27 11:01   ...0 comments

Parliant has created the iPhoneAuthors custom iPhone programming team. We have lots of experience in all the right technologies, so feel free to get in touch if you require contract work for the iPhone.

    2008-06-20 17:37   ...0 comments

An interesting paper came out today looking at fathers and how involved they are with taking care of their babies.

The paper tried to look at why some fathers do not seem to engage with baby-raising. It argues that (in their U.S. sample) the encouragement of the mother was more important than whether the men wanted to help. So men who wanted to help but were criticised or shut out of the process disengaged. Men who were encouraged got engaged in the process, even if they hadn’t been that interested.

This isn’t a causational study, so things likely go in both directions, but still very interesting nonetheless and worth a read:

Summary: Mom’s behavior impacts father’s child rearing: study (reuters)

Medium detail: Mom’s Behavior Key To Dad’s Involvement In Child Care (press release)

(I tried to find a link to the paper, but the issue isn’t out yet.)

    2008-06-05 16:30   ...0 comments

The buds on our lilacs are opening. And I have a new macro lens! Can’t decide which of these I like better.

 › photos     2008-04-19 19:21   ...0 comments

Jay Leno did a bake-off between morse code and text messaging to see which one is faster. Watch it to find out if Motorola will be implementing a morse code SMS input mode on their next phone.

 › technology     2008-04-14 12:14   ...0 comments

Several years back I wrote about Captchas. By now we’re all familiar with them, they’re the little automated “please type these words” tests that websites use to stop automated systems from posing as users.

A very cool new project has popped up called Recaptcha that is getting users to digitize historical books by offering a captcha service to websites. They want digital copies of very old books, and scanning and using OCR (optical character recognition) just produces too many errors. What they do is take images of two words and present them as a captcha all over the net. You type the two words in, they get the help and you prove you’re human. It’s a great solution.

You can use this too. You can use their public “mailhide” api when you need to post your email address online. You post a link to their site and they reveal your real address only if a human correctly answers the captcha. It’s called Mailhide. Here’s my address: c…@orange-carb.org

Learn more about how Recaptcha works over here.

 › technology     2008-03-28 09:15   ...1 comment

I just spent three days in Co. Dublin and very much enjoyed my time there indeed. Here’s a few photos from the trip.

Bottles at the Guinness Brewery

Read the Complete Entry

    2008-03-06 10:34   ...0 comments

I have long said that I have done all the winter camping that I ever want to do. I am willing to make one amendment to that. Anyone wanting to send me for a few nights at ICEHOTEL is more than welcome to do so. This would be an awesome place to stay for a night or two. In a thermal sleeping bag on a bed of ice.

ICEHOTEL

    2008-02-19 15:14   ...4 comments

Sent today to the Citizen, a big improvement on the rant I sent around to councillors earlier.

Edited Feb 13 to add the revised version of this letter that was printed. The Citizen’s letter editor actually called me, we discussed the issue at some length and he suggested I take another run at the letter. This one is much less of a flame. I think it’s a better letter.

 › letters     2008-02-08 15:16   ...2 comments

Tom West’s whiteboard admonishment to his team — “not everything worth doing is worth doing well” &mdash was quoted by Tracy Kidder in Soul of a New Machine.

I have always wanted to live by these words, but it is hard for me to do so. (q.v. what you learn from a Ph.D.)

My boss Kevin just sent me a link to a great rant that makes this point using a different quotation: Better is the enemy of Good.

Actually, Voltaire’s quote is “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” which is pleasantly ambiguous: either better or perfect is the enemy of the good. You decide. Perhaps they are the same. To me, Voltaire’s quote actually illuminates West’s. West’s quote always had me wondering “should I do things poorly?” The truth is that good and done is better than well done but coming.

 › normative     2008-01-24 14:20   ...1 comment

The City of Ottawa has created Design Lansdowne. This is an online community (run by a pollster) for debate and discussion on the Lansdowne project.

Anyone can comment, and if you register you will get to vote on surveys they will be sending out that will help to shape the design competition.

    2008-01-24 11:44   ...0 comments

I just clued into the fact that Keltie is posting her 365 masks on a different blog than her regular one. It’s at 365 Masks.

    2008-01-24 11:42   ...0 comments

We’re finally done our long-awaited Home Edition of PhoneValet.

It has now shipped. I can go to bed.

    2008-01-14 04:11   ...2 comments

Sent today to the Ottawa Citizen:

 › letters     2007-12-11 14:28   ...1 comment

Jen is interested in environmental footprinting as a way of analysing environmental costs and benefits of various lifestyles.

Along the same lines, BLDGBLOG has an interesting essay today on the topic of the carbon footprint of internet servers. This is something I haven’t really thought about before, but it is true that even a small server room can pump out a lot of heat. Of course all this heat, and the energy to run the massive cooling systems that have to move it outside, come from electricity which has a fairly high carbon footprint.

One server (particulars not specified) is apparently equivalent to an SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. One data farm (particulars not specified) uses up to a small city’s worth of power, primarily for cooling. Makes you think about what benefit we are getting for the costs.

ETA: In other news, it turns out that divorce is bad too (for the environment that is).

 › environment     2007-12-03 17:45   ...2 comments

Well, there is a very long story behind this, but suffice it to say that I’m getting some firefighter training, probably next week. We’ll be going into a training facilty under live fire conditions and probably learning about smoke movement, and fire behaviour. I’m really looking forward to it.

Of course, you have to have the right equipment, including SCBA breathing apparatus. We were fitted for masks today and tested with computer equipment that makes absolutely sure that the masks work. In order for the mask to work it needs a very good seal with your face. For men, this means that you cannot have any facial hair from the corners of the mouth down.

This required me to shave. I have worn a Van Dyke beard since December 1999, so I was a little put off by this. But since beards do grow back, I decided to go ahead with it. Now my face feels a bit naked, and cold!

Of course, the opportunity is too good to pass up without documenting with photos — some people have never seen me beardless! So here’s me with progressively less and less hair.

Before

Click for the real me!

 › self     2007-11-26 15:45   ...4 comments

My proposal defence was this morning. Feeling quite tired out by it. I am told that it went well and I have nothing to worry about. I did feel a bit beaten up by the process, but I have been told that is part of the territory. There was one detail that I hoped would be easily put to bed that is still up in the air, so that is of some slight concern. However, all in all it seemed to go OK. I have not been asked to revise the proposal, and the work proposed has been deemed satisfactory for the degree if completed as promised.

 › school     2007-11-23 13:40   ...0 comments