Now $515 will buy only a piece-of-crap table that’s new, unless you spent more time looking for an antique (which is probably the route I would take). But if I chose to buy a new table, then the equation would become more complex and the money would become more diluted. That $515 would end up split among the furniture store, the furniture distributor, the owners of the furniture factory and the people who actually made the table. My money wouldn’t reward making something as much as it would reward moving something or storing it until it could be sold.

And I should add that a 40-hour table from a furniture store is unlikely to be something that will last forever. That’s because mass-manufactured furniture is a terrible compromise, like mass-produced beer, bologna or aerosol cheese. Manufactured furniture never perfectly suits the space or its intended use. It might be close enough for the time being, but it is almost always made using low-quality materials and joints. It is furniture intended to be replaced within a few years–itself a relatively new and awful idea.

…

After I built my table, I lost the desire for another one. After I built the chair that I sit in at that table, I eliminated any desire I had for a better one. And so on. The process of building my own furniture extinguished forever my longings for commercial furniture. And I found this attitude seeping into other areas of my life. I now can’t stand poorly made clothes, books, food or tools.

If I cannot build or grow something myself, I try to buy stuff from people who also care deeply about the things they make. I buy meat, bread and vegetables from local merchants who cut the sides of beef, bake the bread and grow the vegetables. I haven’t eaten in fast-food restaurants since the Clinton administration. And I like to buy tools from the people who actually make them.

I want to reward the people who do the work in the same way that I am directly rewarded when I do the work at my bench in my shop.

– from The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, by Christopher Schwarz, p. 344-346

Presto-change-o! There’s a new blogging engine in town. I got sick of the hassle of upgrading Wordpress (as easy as it is…) and thought that perhaps if I did a little internal work on Bread & Soup that I’d be inspired to do some posting to it, although I don’t know what form that will take, and I make no promises. I still need to do a little editing of the older posts to deal with conversion issues, but they’re there.

The new engine, if you care, is called Octopress and so far it’s working pretty well. Unlike a traditional CMS like Wordpress, it’s not a fancy multi-featured application that sits on your server, but rather a process which runs on your local machine (or can) and generates static HTML files which then get synced to the server. I had to install Xcode, get an Apple developer account, install ruby, then install Octopress, and somehow it was still easier than installing a server-side applicaion and dealing with the rage-making permissions issues that inevitably ensue. Anyhow, let’s end the nerdery there. More later, possibly.

In October I posted about my electrical consumption. I’ve gotten a few more bills since then, so I can give the complete picture for 2008:

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:

I’ve always liked to take things apart and see how they work. (Yes, I’m a dork.) I’ve pried apart a computer, a VCR, a TV, and, once, a whole washing machine, among lots of other smaller items. I’m not trying to fix them, just to see what the inside looks like, and how they work. Weird, I know, but the point is that I get a kick out of opening up machines and seeing their guts, and I’m not afraid to pull something apart. Which comes in handy when the office espresso machine goes bust.

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.

Those who know me know that I have an unnatural love for Google Earth. It probably ties to my attraction to maps and travel in general, but the upshot is that I can get lost for hours soaring from place to place.

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.

Google sits on top of a gold mine of information. They can essentially tap into our minds whenever we go online to learn something. They can see what we’re thinking. For example, check out their list of hot trends, which shows the top 100 fastest-rising search terms as of right now. For today, #24 is “is there mail on veterans day” and #53 is “is the post office open on veterans day.” Another example is Google Trends, where you can explore the search volume for any term you choose. (Check out foreclosure.) Not only can Google tell what people are searching for, they can also identify roughly where the searches are coming, so these trends can be explored on a regional level.

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.

[caption id=”attachment_70” align=”alignnone” width=”500” caption=”Graph of search data from Google Flu Trends”][/caption]

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.

I was lucky enough to attend Obama’s election night rally in Grant Park. It was both dull–I could have watched CNN at home, and that’s what I did for most of the rally–and awe-inspiring. How often does it happen that so many people come together to celebrate something other than a sports championship? The number of bodies standing in the southeast corner of the park was impressive, but my eyes really got wide when we left our little gated community of 60-70,000 near the stage and found Michigan Avenue–from Congress up to Randolph–full of people, with more streaming west to get to the L. And despite the vast crowds, heavy police presence, and dire reminders of Chicago in 1968, I didn’t see a single unpleasant altercation; everyone was there to revel in the fulfillment of a dream.

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.

[caption id=”attachment_59” align=”alignnone” width=”300” caption=”Butternut Squash”][/caption]

I got the outline of this recipe from a fellow on the Fixed Gear Gallery forum. Because of the quantity of CSA leeks I had lingering around the crisper, I modified it slightly. It’s a simple recipe with few ingredients, but hearty and slightly sweet, with a faint tang from the goat cheese.

• 2 butternut squash
• olive oil
• 2 leeks
• butter
• ~6 cups stock
• 200g goat cheese
• ¼ cup cream
• milk
• salt & pepper

Cut the squash in half and scrape out the pulp and seeds. Brush the cut surface with olive oil, sprinkle on some salt and peppr (I added some dried sage too) and place on a baking sheet. Roast in the oven until very tender; 45 minutes to an hour. Once the squash is done, pull it out and let it cool for a few minutes.

While the squash is cooling, cut off and discard the green part of the leeks. Clean the white ends and then chop them up. Melt a few tablespoons of butter over medium-low heat, then add the leeks and cook slowly. Meanwhile, scoop all the squash flesh out of the skins. Once the leeks are well softened, dump in the squash and the stock.

The amount of stock is somewhat variable. I used about six cups, which resulted in a pretty thick soup. More of a thin puree. Add more if you like to sip your soup. Anyway, after adding the stock, bring the soup to a simmer and cook it for fifteen minutes or so. Then puree it in a food processor or blender until smooth.

Pour the blended soup back into the pot and stir in the goat cheese. Keep stirring as the cheese melts until blends into the soup. Add a bit of cream, and some milk if the soup needs to be thinned. Also salt and pepper to taste.

I’ve had a pretty set filing system for quite a few years. Bank statements, paid bills, and anything else more important than the average newspaper get filed in the appropriate slot in the cabinet. I’ve cleaned things out once or twice, but in general that just seems like more effort than its worth, so the folders have slowly gotten fatter over the years. This probably seems pretty dull thing to talk about, and it is, but it’s also what allowed me to go back over the four years of electric bills I’ve paid in my current apartment and analyze how much electricity I use. Each bill states the kilowatt-hours used in the previous month, so after ten minutes of leafing through them, I had all the data in a spreadsheet where I could take a look at it.

My yearly usage has been going up, but seems to be leveling off. There was a big jump from 2005 to 2006 and a smaller one from 2006 to 2007. 2008 isn’t complete, of course, but I’m on track for about the same amount as 2007, unless something unusual happens.

[caption id=”attachment_40” align=”aligncenter” width=”284” caption=”My yearly electricity usage, 2005 to 2008”][/caption]

Averaging out the data by month also leads to some insights. There seem to be two major seasonal effects at work. Running the AC in the summer has the biggest impact, causing spike in July and August. I also want to say that there’s a smaller bump in the winter due to the increased need for artificial light, but the data’s a little too uneven to say for sure. In particular, I’m not sure why it’s lower in September than in October, and why the trend is downward from October through December. Perhaps it’s because I’m often away for the last week or so of December.

[caption id=”attachment_42” align=”aligncenter” width=”463” caption=”My average electrical consumption, by month”][/caption]

The big picture is that I consume about 160 kWh per month, or 1,900 kWh per year. According to government statistics, the average household in Illinois consumes 770 kWh per month, and for the U.S. as a whole, that goes up to 920 kWh. I’m way below average, but I probably shouldn’t brag too much, since I have some built-in advantages which I can’t really take credit for. I don’t have to account for a washer, dryer, dishwasher, hot water, or heat. The only major appliances that show up on my electric bill are my refrigerator, my AC, and my 1400W espresso machine.

What could I do to get this figure lower? I’ve already replaced most of my bulbs with compact fluorescents. The only incandescents I still have either are used rarely, or are harder than the average bulb to replace (odd base sizes, on dimmer switches, or decorative bare bulbs).

My computer stays on (although asleep) all day. If I shut it off while I’m asleep or at work, I could probably save a few watts. Only a few though, since according to Apple in sleep mode it uses just over two watts, only slightly more than it uses when it’s off.

Addressing ”vampire power” (devices such as power adapters which consume energy even if they’re not being actively used) might save me a few more watts. I have a bunch of little electronic devices that don’t get used very often, but stay plugged in all the time. If I plugged these into a single power strip then I could turn them off when I wasn’t using them. Something like a Kill A Watt meter, or its DIY equivalent, would allow me to measure how much power is actually getting used by these devices. I’m going to think about this and see if it would be practical for me. If I have to dig around under my desk half a dozen times a day just to save a few watts, it’s not going to be worth the effort.

I’m going to try very hard not to overload B&S; with political crap–who really needs more of the stuff?–but this is just too good to pass up:

The Daily Show at it’s finest. The researchers on their team who come up with this stuff do great work.