As I guessed, I used about the same amount in 2008 as in 2007. I haven't done anything to reduce my usage since then, but I'm still thinking about it.

Every few months, ComEd includes with my bill an environmental disclosure pamphlet that lays out how its power was generated over the last twelve months. The most recent one covered the period up through September, 2008 and it broke down the sources as 60% nuclear, 34% coal, and a few percent from natural gas, hydro, and biomass. This seems to change quite a bit from pamphlet to pamphlet, which I'm guessing is because they're always buying their power from different sources.

It also provides a table that gives average amounts of emissions that those sources produced, per 1,000 kilowatt-hours. This lets me calculate my personal impact:

It’s a nice one, with lots of shiny chrome and stainless steel, and shipping it off to a repair shop would have cost a fortune (above and beyond the cost of the repair itself). So another interested co-worker and myself opened it up, found the problem and fixed it. For a while, and then it broke again.

We cracked it open and diagnosed a faulty pressurestat and a blown heating element. The heating element in particular is a fairly serious part (1400W of power!) It screws into the boiler with a 30mm wrench, and when we tried to unscrew it, we could not budge it. The boiler isn’t really attached to the frame of the machine. Instead it hangs off a tangle of copper pipes. (The heating element is the large hex-shaped piece in the picture below.)

Watching the guts of the machine flex as I torqued the heating element made us all very nervous. There’s nothing worse than creating two problems while trying to fix one, and the last thing we wanted to do was bend or break some crucial part. So we took the whole boiler out. (Sorry about the picture quality, all I had was my camera phone.)

It was still a bit of a struggle, but eventually we did manage to remove the heating element. Now we can install the new parts, reassemble the machine, and then, hopefully, start pulling shots again. After climbing a slope of increasing frustration: i) a bad pressurestat; ii) broken heating element; iii) heating element can’t be removed; iv) boiler has to be removed; we finally seem to be on the downslope. Wish us luck.

Sooner or later a great tool like GE leads to the urge to do something productive with it, hence my road trip project. In 2002 I made a solo motorcycle trip across the country, going from Michigan to Seattle to San Francisco and back to Michigan. These were the olden days, so although I had a GPS with me, I mostly navigated by paper and pencil. Whenever I entered a new state I’d buy a nice road map at the gas station (Rand McNally makes good ones) and I used it both to plan my route and to record it.

Shortly after GE was available (I don’t remember exactly when, but it was years ago) I decided I’d recreate my road trip in it, plotting the path I took and the places I stayed. For most of the route, this was a painstaking process of repeatedly clicking out my path, turn by turn, and so my progress was slow, especially once I reached the twisty roads out west. However, recently I discovered a shortcut using Google Map’s driving directions and KML export that cut the time required by 99%, and finally I’m finished.

For those of you who are curious—or bored—here’s a file containing the record of my trip. It has the route itself (red for travel between destinations, blue for side trips), places I stayed (tents for campsites, houses for homes and hostels), and photos I took along the way.

All this is interesting, but there’s more useful data in there waiting to be uncovered. Someone at Google put together a list of search terms that might be entered by someone with the flu, extracted a few years of search data, correlated that with the CDC’s disease data, and created Google Flu Trends. The idea is that when flu season hits and people start getting sick, they’ll start hunting for information and advice online. This will get noticed by Google and can provide useful data on where the flu seems to be hitting hardest. Additionally, since most people are likely to go online before they call their doctor or go to the hospital, trends might become apparent earlier through search data than through more traditional methods.

All in all, it’s a very clever way to take information which otherwise might get ignored, or used for a purely business-related purpose, and use it in a way that could help people. Get the backstory in this article at the New York Times.

After two intensely disappointing elections, I finally have had some of my faith in the American electorate restored. The last eight years have shown us clearly what happens when our vote is guided by fear and ignorance. I have my fingers crossed that the next eight will be a demonstration of the effects of hope and intelligence, and that people will remember the difference, and not go down that old dark road for a long time to come.