DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I made a timelapse video during a recent drum session, showing the kit going up and the recording gear swarming into place. It’s a promo for my new website, which is a audio recording blog and microphone database and search engine. Tune in for gear reviews, mic shootouts, and studio tours… and if you’re comparison-shopping for microphones, try the mic database, which has over 400 mics with more coming daily.

(Contact me if you want to help out — there’s a free T-shirt with your name on it.)

Anyway, the soundtrack on the video is an excerpt from one of the songs I recorded during the session. The full song will be released later this year on Andrew Thomas’ new CD.

If you know anybody who owns an iPhone, you’ve probably seen this at the bottom of their emails:

Advertising via the email “signature” is nothing new; it was probably invented by Hotmail in 1996, and is used widely today. Lots of webmail and message-platform vendors promote their products this way.

With that in mind, check out the signature on the email I just received from my little sister, a Gmail user:

Is that not brilliant? Apple bought the signature line from Gmail to promote the iPhone!

That single line of text beautifully captures the sense of lust the iPhone inspires.

I was in awe of this little line of text. Was Ridley Scott in on this?

But no, it’s not a real Apple campaign. Not yet, anyway. My sister made it up, in sarcastic protest to all her hipster friends who can afford iPhones.

It’s too good not to be real, though, so (with my sister’s blessing) I’m offering it to Apple. Give TBWA the afternoon off. We got your iPhone campaign right here.

But please send an iPhone to my sister.

Dear PG&E Customer:
Pacific Gas and Electric Company is constantly striving to improve products and services for its customers. We are excited to introduce to you our latest improvement.
Beginning this month, the “detail of bill” section of your energy statement will be double-sided. This new format will reduce the amount of paper used for each statement creating a better, more environment- and customer-friendly bill.
…

So, my 2-page electric bill now fits on a single sheet of paper.

Unfortunately, the letter proclaiming this savings was printed on a second sheet.

Most interesting article I’ve seen in the paper in a while:

French horn player Meredith Brown had a busy weekend.

Last Saturday morning, she drove from her home in Vallejo to San Rafael for two back-to-back rehearsals with the Marin Symphony, then played an evening concert in San Jose with the Symphony Silicon Valley. Sunday’s schedule was more grueling: morning rehearsal in Marin, afternoon concert in San Jose, evening concert in Marin.

And you thought your commute was rough.

The headline was have violins, will travel. The story describes the crazy lifestyles of the classical musicians who populate the Bay Area’s part-time orchestras. None of these orchestras employ full-time players, so the musicians have to work with more than one. Sometimes six or eight.

The pay isn’t great. The days are long. The oil changes are frequent. I’m not sure grueling would cover it.

But the players love it. I mean, they’d have to.

While Meredith Brown was putting in the 5000-10000 hours of practice she must have put in to become a professional classical musician, I was writing assembly code to draw Backgammon screens on my C=64 and solving Rubik’s Cube and so on… which leads me to the following analysis of her weekend commute.

Vallejo to San Rafael is 30 miles… San Rafael to San Jose is 65 miles… San Jose to Vallejo is 70 miles. Her weekend total would have been 30+65+70 (saturday) plus 30+65+65+30 (sunday) or 355 miles, assuming she didn’t go home between services. Drive like that 7 days a week for a year, and you’ll put 62000 miles on your car.

When you commute, you pay twice, both in dollars and in hours. My 80-mile drive to the office regularly takes 120-160 minutes. If these musicians ever run into traffic, there’s a good chance they’re spending more time driving than they are playing music.

Anyway, here’s the documentary, already on DVD: Freeway Philharmonic, the classical road warriors. At $25, it will cost you less than Ms. Brown spent on gas last weekend.

PS. I used to work with Bruce Chrisp, who, with his wife Meredith Brown is featured in the SFGate article and the Freeway Philharmonic documentary. If I recall correctly, Bruce retired from a very promising career in web design to pursue music full-time. Knowing what he sacrificed, I’m awed by his dedication.

Update 2008-02-09: Bruce got in touch to announce a new website, Freeway Philharmonic, which names the local musicians and orchestras, announces news and auditions, and more.

52 hours with no light and no running water. 52 hours of early nights, of dirty dishes that can’t be washed, of hauling buckets of rainwater to flush toilets. 52 hours of the walls closing in. 52 hours of sweaty lunchmeats in a dank refrigerator, assaulting the senses of anyone who dares to venture inside.

52 hours of the beer smelling like salami.

We coped with the outage fairly well, and when I say “fairly well,” I’m lying. We depend on electricity to live, and I bet half the population would begin hunting their neighbors for sport within 72 hours if the lights ever went off for good.

Photos from the Great Storm of 2008

Five years ago, we lost power for 75 hours — just over three days with no lights, no heat, no running water. It was miserable, but I was home alone at the time, and I coped reasonably well (as far as you know).

This time it’s worse. We’re only 30 hours in, but we have three extra bodies in the house, including two houseguests and one toddler.

The electric utility hasn’t even given us an estimate of when they might restore service. They haven’t even come out to assess it. PG&E reports 450 separate outages, and ours apparently doesn’t rank high enough to warrant any attention.

I figured out today what the problem is. It’s nothing mysterious or difficult to diagnose — there’s a live electrical wire laying in the street. Some thoughtful neighbors have strung yellow “CAUTION” tape across a couple trash cans to prevent folks from driving over the cable and electrocuting themselves.

Just above are a couple of extremely tall redwoods leaning about 2045° off of vertical. If the tree they’re leaning on gives way, the whole lot will end up on the road, which among other things means I’ll have to walk the last mile home (with 20 lbs of ice and six gallons of water).

Anyway, you have to figure that if PG&E can’t spare a crew to come out and coil up a live wire that’s been laying on a wet street for a day and a half, then the power situation must be pretty bad.

During the last long blackout five years ago, I commented that I’d rather spend money on a solar-electric system than a generator. I’ve done that, and just like last time, sunny skies have returned long before the electricity. But I’ve since learned that grid-tied PV systems don’t work without the grid. So although the system on my roof could easily power us through a houseful of warm showers and overdue loads of laundry, it’s as cold and dark as we are inside. We’ll end up buying a generator anyway.

Your mom sent you a Psycho Kitty kard.

What would you say to someone whose goal is to plant 8 million trees in an African desert?

Fortunately nobody asked me, and they’re proceeding with the project. It got a kick-start last week when the folks behind the Web2Summit conference — O’Reilly Media and CMP Media — purchased a tree for each of the conference’s 1200 participants. I love the idea; it’s the most thoughtful and most environmentally-conscious conference schwag I’ve ever received. Read more about it.

(I wonder if Dale Dougherty had something to do with this decision? His post from April about wasteful conference schwag may have been a tipping point. The Web2Summit did have a schwag bag, but it was much emptier than normal — significantly less paper waste — and the bag itself was meant to be reused.) (photo credit: violet.blue)

Anyway, kudos to O’Reilly and CMP and whoever sold this idea to the conference organizers.

I planted a second tree just now. Here’s my Tree-Nation profile.

For each of the past three years, I’ve spent the Summer and Fall on rehearsing and recording drum parts (resulting in this CD and this one plus one tune on a sophomore release from the same guy — watch for a record announcement here shortly — and a couple other songs (1, 2, 3)).

I call my studio “Borrowed Time” in part because it’s a terribly clever play on words, but mostly because it was only a matter of months until my son was old enough to move into the space I’d been using as a live room. That day came last March. It was a great move for his independence and maturity, but not so great for my two-bars-a-day recording habit.

Nonetheless, the recording projects continue. I’m only about 40% through the material for my upcoming solo record, and my prolific friend Andrew has already written the material for his second CD, the drum tracks for which are due by the holidays.

Fortunately I had the foresight to pick up an electronic drum kit late last year, so I’ve been doing all the preproduction work in headphones. The plan was to rent a local room, move in for a long weekend, and do the final tracking on my acoustic kit quickly.

It would mean less tweaking, fewer takes, and hopefully a little more spontaneity.

Last weekend was the first of the season’s two recording sessions. I spent about two hours getting the drums in and up, about four more hanging mics, routing cables, and getting sounds.

Click to see photos from the 2007 sessions.

Needless to say, due to time constraints I had to make a few compromises. I didn’t sound-check my second snare drum or the other two of the three available snare mics, or spend a day experimenting with room mic position. But, having done this several times before, I think the sounds I got were better than in any previous session.

The kick-drum sound this time was far superior, due to a mic-positioning tip I picked up from Marc Senasac. (In a nutshell, the external or ambient kick mic needs to be a couple feet away from the drum, not up against the resonant head.)

I got bit by a few gremlins on my first day. One of the room-mic channels had an audible, pulsing white noise problem that I first attributed to the mic’s proximity to a breaker box in the corner of the room. However, moving the mic, then swapping the cable, had no effect. Then by happy chance I discovered that the channel was producing the white noise even with no mic plugged in. It was my first bad-channel experience, but no doubt not the last. I’ll identify it faster next time.

The other gremlin was pure user error — a couple new insert cables have a much tighter fit than I’m used to. Two of the four didn’t get plugged in all the way and caused some bad hum in my compressor chain. I diagnosed this quickly on the second day of the session.

In terms of gear, I had only three new pieces:

• PreSonus DigiMax FS 8-way preamp, replacing the Focusrite Octopre LE, which I never liked. In close listening tests, I can’t tell one from the other, but I liked two features of the DigiMax:
  1. stepped attenuators allow easy gain-matching of overheads and room mics
  2. each channel has an insert chain. The Octopre LE required me to patch compressed signals back in through an additional input, muddying the signal path and burning twice as many inputs as should be necessary.

• New TRS insert cables custom-made from Canare cable, replacing molded consumer-grade Hosa gear. I honestly doubt I’d be able to hear a difference here, but I needed more of these anyway and, what can I say, I’m a tweaker.
• a Crown PZM mic. I was hoping to get some interesting room sounds through this, but it sounded really trashy to me. It’s not a defect of the mic, which sounds beautiful for casual voice recording. More likely, it was a combination of the room and the placement. If I could have put this out of line-of-sight of the cymbals, or even outside the live room, it would have been much more interesting. But these options were not available, so I replaced it with a large-diaphragm condenser in case anyone downstream in the production process wants a mono, retro kit sound as an effect.

On the 2nd and 3rd days of the session, I knocked out four songs, one of which I’d literally never played before — the album’s cover tune, an old Paul McCartney song. Overall I think it went well, and it should be very interesting to hear how these songs get built up on top of the drums.

This was the input distribution (for my reference):

• Digimax FS
  1. Kick, internal (insert: RNC)
  2. Kick, external
  3. Snare, top (insert: RNC)
  4. Snare, bottom
  5. OH, left
  6. OH, right
  7. (dead)
  8. unused

• Mackie 1604
  1. Tom 1
  2. Tom 2
  3. Tom 3
  4. Tom 4

• Digi-002
  1. Hi-Hat
  2. Ambient LDC
  3. Room, left
  4. Room, right

Shopping list for the next session:

• Studio-style telescoping boom stand — one of the professional models with a 20-lb stand and a 10' boom
• I’m having my three Oktava MK-12s hod-rodded by Michael Joly.
• I want a new high-hat mic. Not sure which way to go here yet.
• I want a ribbon mic too; maybe a Karma K6.

I’m delinquent on my promise of a couple weeks ago to reveal the solution to my PV array’s under-production problem. I hadn’t wanted to chatter about the issue until we’d actually solved the problem. Our installer, SPG Solar, and the panel manufacturer Kyocera have since come through with the ultimate solution, so I’m ready to tell the tale.

Back in August, we thought we’d found the problem right away when we flipped open the DC disconnect switchbox and a gallon of brown water jumped out.

Yes, jumped. It was alive. And seriously nasty… we’re having to repaint the splash zone.

Long-term readers may recall that the DC switchbox flooded once before. Statistically speaking, this is nearly impossible. As the field supervisor and chief system debugger from SPG commented, “I’ve only ever seen this problem two times in six years… and for both of them I was standing right here on your porch.”

The problem, this time, was different — not so much that water was getting in, but that it couldn’t get back out. The counterintuitive reality is that outdoor switchboxes like these are built on the assumption that moisture will get in, so they come equipped with punch-outs to allow for draining and ventilation. In January 2004, when our first DC switchbox was replaced, the installer (who is no longer with SPG) failed to pop open the drain holes. Ironic, no?

So, the first step was to replace, and actually upgrade the DC disconnect switchbox. We were confident that this would solve the problem. But it didn’t.

SPG’s crew then tested each module on the roof. One was found to create a voltage drop, and was removed, but this didn’t affect total system output.

Next they tried a spare inverter… no change.

Next they bypassed the original wiring harness… still no change.

Yet under full sun, the array was producing significantly less power than it should have, even when correcting for the angle of the sun (using an irradiance meter). To confuse matters, the array worked fine up to a certain level of generation, and then fell off as the sun climbed in the sky. All very mysterious, and frankly, frustrating.

SPG finally called Kyocera’s regional office for assistance. We’d replaced or bypassed every component in the system except for the modules on the roof. There wasn’t anything else to do but pull down the 23 remaining modules and put up new ones.

So that’s what they did.

The modules are warrantied to produce 90% of their rated power for 10 years, and at least 80% for the next 10 years. We’re well within the first decade, yet clearly below 90% production, so Kyocera stepped up or a full replacement, including the labor costs. I’m impressed with this level of service — warranty or not, to see any company do the right thing without a fuss seems remarkable, and worth noting.

SPG deserves a commendation too. They have north of 70 man-hours invested in the diagnosis and repair of my PV system, yet I haven’t paid them a cent since October 2003. But I’ll say this: PV is a long-term investment, so if you’re considering it, choose a company that’s going to be around in 20 years. Sure, you might save a few dollars now buying through a co-op, but before you do please find out who you’re supposed to call five years down the road when production is off.

That’s not to say that most PV systems fail. You sort of have to figure that the reason manufacturers offer 20-year warranties is that most systems work fine for that long. Still, I recommend using an installer with a track record, and more importantly, a future.

Here’s the money shot… 15 minutes after turning up the new system, production hit 2531 watts, the highest I’ve ever seen.

My buddy Darell, accomplished motorcyclist and true EV nut, got his hands on the new Vectrix Maxi-Scooter.

It’s a plug-electric scooter that’s highway-legal. It has a variable regeneration control that’s basically like a reverse throttle; Darell says you can just about not touch the brakes because the reverse throttle is so good. Note the “regeneration” aspect — just like the Prius, the Vectrix recharges the batteries when you slow down. And there are front and rear brakes, too, in case things get hairy.

Here’s an excerpt of the writeup:

I have owned and ridden a variety of different motorcycles (and scooters!) over the years, and none of them - regardless of cost - have been as smooth, responsive and as pleasant to pilot as the Vectrix. I searched pretty hard for corners that were cut, and came up empty. This thing is simply stellar in all aspects: design, build and performance.

See the full review for photos and video: Vectrix Maxi-Scooter review and driving test

I don’t actually commute, but I’d love to have something like this for grocery runs into town. Too bad there’s no sidecar for Raphael.

Lane-sharing is legal in California, or at least officially tolerated, because otherwise they couldn’t have filmed all those awesome two-shots of Ponch and Jon.

I did a fair amount of lane-sharing when I owned a motorbike. I commuted from the City to Oracleville, as I’ve noted previously in a story that’s probably a lot more entertaining than this one will be. And for 10 months I was doing 80 miles a day, to Palo Alto and back. No way I could have survived that drive at the pace of the cagers. I’d still be out there right now, hoping to get home in time for some distant-future dinner.

My mindset when I began lane-sharing was basically, I’m about to be killed. Certainly that felt true for the first couple weeks.

Once I’d gotten more comfortable and a little more skilled, I settled into a more-relaxed mindset: with a little luck, I’ll probably survive.

Yes, most people driving cars are really that bad. I saw a guy eating cereal one time. With milk.

So, when the one driver out of 100 would see me coming and ease his car slightly out of my path, the feeling of gratitude was immense. These few people had granted me a brief reprieve from the near-certainty that I was moments from exercising the “dismemberment” clause of my life insurance policy.

It didn’t take much effort: they checked their rearview, and then adjusted the steering wheel about a half a degree. They’d slide their cars a foot or so away from the edge of the lane, not so much giving me space to pass, but simply telling me they weren’t going to try to clip me if I did.

I always waved as I passed. It was a simple thing, but motorcyclists do it to each other all the time — from the cross-country BMW pilots to the skinny guys sitting six feet in the air on Enduros, I’d get a little wave of solidarity, part shared celebration of the open air, part acknowledgement of survival against considerable odds. It was a friendly and welcoming thing, a gesture of fellowship that I was glad to extend to any cager who had pulled his head out of his tailpipe long enough not to run me over, at least for once.

I liked the feeling of connection across a distributed community, but also I liked the idea that maybe some of those people in cars would pull over for the next biker too, if only to earn another wave. Yeah, it was a tall order, retraining the 600 million drivers on California’s roads, one at a time, but I figured I had 80 miles a day in which to do it.

Fast-forward a bunch of years and a couple of career changes… I haven’t ridden or even owned a motorbike in three years, and I only commute once in a while, but I’m still conscious of all the motorcyclists fighting the good fight between lanes 1 and 2 on the highway. I see them coming, I slide a little further left… but not once has any of them waved at me.

(It’s a lack of foresight, guys, I’m telling you. I must have gotten to at least 10 of the 600 million in my day. You need to pick up where I left off!)

So today I’m trapped in my cage, lamenting my sorry condition (no A/C, no CD, and my standby driving tape is warbling like a vinyl record that got left in the sun) when I see a new commute-time readout above the road, predicting that the remaining few miles to the bridge will consume 27 minutes of my life. I could sense the mass evaporation of attention around me as all the other drivers stared slack-jawed at the sign as if believing they’d misread the number… 27 more minutes?!

Cars that stop being actively driven tend to continue at speed in whatever direction they were already pointing, lane markers be damned, so the biker on the slick new FZ1 who was approaching from behind was no doubt thinking OMGWTFBBQ and wondering if his health insurance would cover full dental reconstruction.

But I’d seen him coming, and I slid over far enough to give him a place to ride for the couple seconds it took everyone else to swerve back between the white lines.

He didn’t wave when he passed, but he nodded in a sort of strangled way. I understood his response. I wouldn’t have taken a hand of the bars either.

It’s been a dismal year for our PV array; after a best-ever January, production has fallen off and stayed down, 20% lower than expected.

At first I thought the low generation was due to dirty panels, so I stepped up my cleaning routine. Then I thought it was due to shading, so we had some more branches trimmed. Neither of these remedies addressed the production shortfall, so finally I resolved to have our installer investigate. I began gathering numbers on our monthly production.

But this takes time, a commodity as rare around here as free electricity. I finally gathered the necessary documentation and submitted it for review in July.

In various dark periods in my past, I have done some customer support work and some system testing work, and I know that the vast majority of technical problems reported by users are their own damn fault. Here is a classic example, from my semester on the graveyard shift in the Mac lab in college about 100 years ago: a thick-necked football player who probably went on to make more money in his first two years out of school than I’ve made ever waved me over to complain that his mouse wasn’t working — when he pushed it forward, the cursor on the screen moved down, and when he pulled it back, the cursor moved up. He’d spent enough time pecking his way through the semester’s various essay assignments to have acquired some mastery of the pointing device, so its apparent misbehavior was discomfiting. Every mouse movement broke his concentration, as he had to consciously override well-established muscle memory to put the cursor where he wanted it. This required so much mental effort that it never occurred to him to pick up the mouse and rotate it 180°. (The cord is supposed to come out of the top, you know.)

So I fully expected to be put off by our installer with inquiries about cleaning, weather, and tree cover, and I was working up solid answers for each in hopes of minimizing the delay of any sane CS agent’s justifiable evasion techniques.

Then I realized that the best way to identify a generation shortfall is not by measuring multiple months’ worth of production data for comparison to previous years or to other systems in the neighborhood… the best way to identify a generation shortfall is to take a spot reading when the system should be maxed out.

My PV array was designed to produce maximum power during the peak hours of the peak season: noon-6pm, May through October. If at 2pm on a bright July afternoon the system wasn’t cranking out 95+% of its rated maximum of 2500 watts, then something must be wrong.

Giving the system every possible advantage, I washed the panels first, then waited for them to dry. The inverter showed a measly 1800 watts. We were missing 28% of our generation capacity.

I sent a brief email to the installer. Within a couple hours I got a reply: someone would be out to inspect the system the next day.

(Tune in next week for Part II)