DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This site has been hosted on a consumer DSL line for the past year or so. I’m happy and relieved to say that that will soon change.

DSL is a great enduser technology. But it’s a lousy hosting solution. The upstream bandwidth, which is the only direction that matters for serving a website, is limited to 128 kb/sec. DSL’s great downstream bandwidth is 99% idle in this situation.

The bigger problem is the hardware. My Alcatel DSL modem has locked up a half-dozen times over the past year. The only solution is to drive across town and power-cycle it. (No, this DSL line isn’t at my house, but in the closet of a building down the block from the phone company’s central office.)

In June, the modem puked when I was out of town. My server was offline for 12 hours. Maybe you didn’t notice, but I did. So did my father, who called me in Oregon to ask why he couldn’t download his email.

On Monday I installed a rackmount 1U server in a local colocation facility. I’d spent much of the previous week configuring software. My evenings since then have been dedicated to transferring DNS and other services. I’ll start migrating websites tomorrow, and finish over the weekend.

The new server is a powerhouse: 2.8 GHz “hyperthreading” P4 with the new 800 MHz bus… 2 10k RPM Ultra-320 SCSI drives in RAID-1… in a case 1.75'' tall with sliding rails mounted to the sides. The blowers on this thing sound like Discount Rinse Day at the hair salon. When I had the server running in my office, I couldn’t talk on the telephone; even with my headset, the fans were too loud.

Sound doesn’t matter in the colo, of course. My server joined countless noisy others, each in its 1.75'' slot, anonymously stacked like the gel pods in the Matrix. Just add a few lightening bolts and you’d have, well… lots of dead servers. Bad analogy. Never mind.

The point is, updates are likely to continue being sporadic.

California’s Senate on Tuesday passed the toughest financial privacy bill in the nation by a vote of 31 to 6, a day after it sailed through the state Assembly, 76 to 1.

As early as next week, Gov. Gray Davis is expected to sign the bill, which requires banks and other financial institutions to obtain customers’ permission before they can share or sell information about them to other companies.

This is great news, and there’s a great story behind it too. In brief, state senator Jackie Speier had been working on a financial-privacy bill for four years, but the banking industry managed to beat it every time. Finally, the CEO of E-Loan, a guy named Chris Larson, spent $1M to get the issue on next March’s ballot — to let the voters, not the politicians, decide.

As I understand it, the ballot initiative would have been much more restrictive: it would have required consumers to opt in. If you’ve never dealt with opt-in/opt-out decisions from the business’ side, take my word for it: nobody ever opts in. So an opt-in model would practically kill the banks’ ability to market to their customers.

Speier’s legislation is based on an opt-out. It gives consumers the right to opt out of information sharing, without making that the default choice.

Once the signatures for Larson’s ballot initiative had been gathered, Larson and Californians for Privacy Now were able to threaten the financial industry: come to terms on the legislation, or we’ll let the voters force you to use opt-in.

According to the Chronicle, “Opponents [of the opt-in ballot initiative] had vowed to spend millions to defeat the initiative, which would have almost certainly ended up in court.”

I’m not certain, but I assume Larson’s group will drop the ballot initiative now. That’s disappointing, in a sense, but I can see that having lesser, but uncontested protections in place is a better result than fighting for stronger protections which may not ever be enacted.

My wife and I made a double-recipe of pita bread for a Greek dinner. In one recipe, I used 50% whole wheat — a finely ground flour chosen so the bran shards wouldn’t poke holes in the gluten membranes. (Successful pita breads depend on the dough’s ability to contain air, because the pocket forms in the oven due to captive steam.)

The other recipe used 25% wholegrain spelt, which I ground myself from berries on the finest setting my KitchenAid can muster. The spelt version also included about 10% oat bran, which I ran through the mill in hopes it too would be rendered less jagged. Why did I use only 25% spelt in this recipe? You might think that because spelt flour contains less gluten I feared compromising the dough’s ability to contain air. But in fact, I just ran out of spelt berries.

Pita bread requires an unusual oven technique. We rolled 100g lumps of dough into thin discs, maybe 1/8 inch thick and 6-8'' across. Placed directly on a hot baking stone, they balloon within three minutes. Ideally, they balloon and then rupture, and settle back down somewhat as the steam inside the cavity rushes out. If they stay inflated, they are susceptible to crisping, which is the death of pita. Better to be flat and pocket-less than crisp!

The finished breads were really nice. Of course it helps to bury them in homemade tzatziki and humous, provided by our hosts and other guests. I think I ate my weekly allowance of wheat last night in one sitting.

Our host, who lived on Crete for several years, said “You won’t get pita this good in Greece.” It’s a sad comment on the decline of traditional culture that, if what he says is true, I can best a Greek baker within a few hours in my own kitchen. And I’m so far from Greek, I might as well be Turkish. The closest I’ve come to Greece is repeated viewings of Animal House. What I know about Greek traditions wouldn’t fill the hole in the olive where the pit came out.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. The stuff they call bread in Italy is crap. The stuff they call beer in midwestern America is crap. The stuff they call food at McDonald’s is crap. I think I’m getting off topic though.

The pita recipe we used is from Crust & Crumb, one of my standby bread references. I’ve only made it twice and it worked well both times. I recommend cutting the yeast amount in half; just give the dough an extra hour to ferment before you put it into the cooler. This cuts the yeast stink in the finished bread.

By the way, I’m sure great beer can be bought everywhere in America, even in the cultural blight that spans from Sacramento to, erm, Philadelphia. My comment above refers specifically to the stuff we drank in college and the starving-artist days that followed (Burgie!).

In April, 2001, I did an analysis of the installation costs and payback term for a solar energy system. My conclusions may not have been valid, because I made some assumptions that were definitely inaccurate (such as the cost of utility power). My numbers, then: for a 2 kilowatt system, installation cost would be roughly $20,000 and take over 25 years to pay for itself.

Yesterday I had an opportunity to get a real-world estimate. We went to a solar energy fair, met with installers, and listened to a panel of homeowners who had recently installed “PV” (for “photovoltaic”) arrays.

The homeowners made a convincing case. There was no sign of buyer’s remorse; every speaker was excited about using clean power. Most spoke of the addiction of watching their electric meters run backward. (These are “grid-tied” systems, meaning that surplus power flows from the PV array back into the electric utilities’ grid. PV users earn credits for grid-supplied power later, e.g. at night when the array’s output is zero.) Each speaker stressed the point that financially this investment is a “no-brainer.”

Well, I have a brain. Whenever someone tells me I don’t need to use it, I grow suspicious, like when Schwarzenegger brushes off a press inquiry with a no-answer answer like “I will fight for the environment… nothing to worry about.” We ran our own numbers.

The basic formula for California residents is this:

• Generation capacity x $8.50 per watt = Gross cost
• Generation capacity x $3.80 per watt = California Energy Commission rebate
• Gross cost minus CEC rebate = Out-of-pocket cost
• Out-of-pocket cost x 0.15 = California tax rebate (a one-time tax incentive)

For a 3.5 Kw system, which would typically supply a family of four, or a family of two if one of them keeps a stack of servers in his office closet… 3500 x $8.50 = $29750 gross; 3500 x $3.80 = $13,300 rebate; this leaves an out-of-pocket cost of $16,450, of which we’d get $2467 back the following year in a tax refund. Final net cost: just under $14,000. At our current usage level, that would take about 15 years to pay for itself. From years 15 through the life of the panels, we’d get essentially free power.

How long do PV panels last? They’re warrantied to produce at least 80% of their rated output for 25 years. After that, arrays can be supplemented with a few new panels to keep the output level consistent. I’m not sure anyone knows how long panels really last, but vendors claim they’ll function for 30-40 years. In other words, we’d have free or very cheap, clean, renewable energy for 10 to 15 years. At that point, I assume there would be incremental upgrades available to replace older, less-efficient parts; if so, the lifespan of the basic system could be extended indefinitely with occasional supplemental purchases.

Building the right size system is the key to a quick payback. PG&E, the local bankrupt energy utility, won’t write a check to anyone generating more than they use, so there’s no point building a bigger PV array than is needed on a yearly-average basis. Most users seem to aim to generate 50-80% of their total consumption.

The window of opportunity is closing, though. The CEC’s $3.80/watt buydown program could end as soon as November. The 15% tax refund drops to 7.5% next year. For a change, it pays to be an early adopter.

I learned something surprising, or more accurately dismaying. I was initially interested in PV systems because of our energy utility’s inability to keep the lights on. The combination of rural highways, aerial power lines, and hayfever-addled pickup-truck drivers means we lose power monthly due to downed poles. PG&E’s mismanagement of funds led to inadequate tree trimming, which allowed a 75-hour outage last December, due to “high winds.” I entertained, even nurtured the fantasy that my PV array would see me through these grid outages.

Grid-tied systems don’t work that way, though. During a utility blackout, a solar array is useless, unless the solar system is set up with a bank of expensive and toxic batteries. Installing several hundred pounds worth of lead and chemicals, which have to be replaced every 8 years, seems like a poor way to pursue a greener, less-toxic lifetsyle.

We’ll have a solar installer do a site review anyway. We’ve wanted green energy for years, and we’re now in a house that we plan to keep forever, so solar makes a low-risk investment — especially considering the subsidies and tax credits. When the power goes out, I’ll just stop typing for a few hours. That seems like a more-green lifestyle choice already.

(Read part 1, in which we shop for speakers and parts.)

I don’t think of myself as being particularly handy. I’ve done my share of furniture repair, painting, demolition, electrical work, plumbing, sheetrocking, and light carpentry, as have all homeowners with limited budgets. I think I’m competent at the basics, even though I’m always extremely (painfully) aware of the things I’ve done wrong, the things I could have done better, and, sometimes, the things I’m going to have to get someone else to re-do right away, i.e. before I reset the circuit breaker.

So why would I even attempt to hang speakers myself? In a nutshell, because our handyman is 6'5'' tall, 200+ lbs, and doesn’t strike me as particularly limber. I couldn’t picture him crawling around in my attic. Frankly I wasn’t even sure I would fit.

There’s a particular unpleasantness to squatting or, worse, laying on joists and breathing fiberglass dust. The light is bad. Maneuvering is tough. It’s hot. All in all it’s not the way I planned to spend my weekend. But the prospect of finishing this installation outweighed other considerations.

The left speaker would have to hang between studs. I planned to attach a piece of 2x4 between the studs (on the back side of the drywall, of course) so the speaker-mount screws would have something to bite into. I’m not an expert on load-bearing hardware, but I didn’t feel good about hanging a 20 lb. speaker at the end of a 4'' arm using plastic drywall anchors.

To install the 2x4, I had to get behind the wall where the speakers would hang. This seemed as if it would be easy, because there’s an access door into the attic close to where the speakers would go. But once I climbed up there I saw that the space was filled with ventilation pipes. I could just about squeeze my hand through the gap to touch the back of the drywall where the speaker would attach, but there was little hope of fitting tools in there.

The other side was worse… I couldn’t get there from the left side, so I went up through the kitchen and crawled across the living room ceiling. Due to the cathedral ceiling, the crawlspace is about a foot wide and ten feet long, and is interrupted by a ventilation fan which I’d somehow have to crawl over without putting my weight on it, lest I drop through the ceiling atop the fan housing and surf the assembly down the basement stairs.

I sensed that special flavor of futility that comes when you’re wedged into a place that took you 15 minutes to get to, only to realize that you can’t go any further and it will take ten minutes to back out. I became aware that what I’d planned to do was beyond my abilities, and even further, beyond my desire. I painstakingly backed out of the crawlspace. I consider it one of the few successes of the morning that I didn’t kick the wires off the HVAC unit’s valve controls in the process. Be grateful for the small things, I told myself, especially when that’s all you’ve got to be grateful for.

It was time for plan B: mount the speakers to the top of the wall cabinet instead.

Fishing the speaker wires behind the cabinet took some time. There are now three large fender washers and assorted scraps of fishing line stuck somewhere behind the cabinet — I was trying to drop a line from above, and it got caught the first three times. After much jiggling I managed to drop my line directly behind the hole I’d cut into the back wall of the cabinet. We tied the speaker cable to the top end of the fishing line and pulled it through: viola! as I like to say. We’d actually made progress.

After that, the rest of the task was simply driving screws. I drove a lot. My only criteria was to not punch through the top of the cabinet — I didn’t need to see screw points and splinters on display among the fancy vases and whatnot. I succeeded on this measure as well. I’ll refrain from publishing the number of screws whose heads I stripped with the Phillips bit in my drill… really, I mean it when I say I’m a software guy.

Here are images of the finished product: front view, side view.

Adjusting speaker position is tougher than I expected. After three corrections, the left speaker is still tipped clockwise. I guess it wants to stay that way. I’m trying to oblige (but there may be a 4th adjustment in the near future). Overall we’re really happy with the result, because, you know, now I get to resume shopping for an amplifier.