DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The house is completely dark and silent. It’s midnight. I’m sneaking into the bedroom, anxious not to wake my wife or baby.

In the deep quiet, I can hear only my own breathing. I can see only the merest glow outlining the bedroom door, from a night light on the far side. I walk slowly, consciously relaxing with every step, growing more sleepy, gratefully counting down the half-dozen or so seconds until I’ll be in bed…

And then I plant a foot on some damn squeaky toy in the middle of the living room floor.

The anniversary of my solar electric installation was January 8. I expected a grand reconciliation statement from PG&E, but it never came. I was actually looking forward to my PG&E bill.

Turns out it came in December, and I paid it without even noticing. The bill amount was $6.53.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that my entire year’s worth of electricity cost me less than seven bucks. PG&E bills solar customers about $6 every month, regardless of usage; it’s a service charge of some sort. So I actually paid $63.31 in fees over the course of the year.

At each solar customers’ anniversary, folks who are “net consumers” — meaning, they drew more watts from the grid than they provided to the grid, over the year — get the sum of those monthly fees applied to whatever their power costs are.

“Net producers,” the folks who generated more power than they used over the past year, get nothing. That is, they pay the (approximately) $6 fee every month, but they don’t get it back. It’s PG&E’s way of saying “I love you,” or maybe it’s their way of saying “we’re sort of a monopoly; just deal with it.” (There is such a thing as a free lunch — it’s served at 245 Market Street, San Francisco.)

So, the best thing I can hope for, no matter how much power I generate, is to not have to write a check to PG&E every December. In 2004 I had to write a check for $6.53. That’s pretty great considering our shading problem and the arrival of our son, who does a lot of laundry for only being a couple weeks old.

Following is a chart of my running PG&E account balance from 2004. Negative numbers indicate a credit.

I’d like to calculate the amount of money I saved — that is, the amount I didn’t have to pay for power in 2004. But I’d need an advanced degree in Obfuscational Accountancy to make sense of all the fees and legislated reductions and over-baseline penalties. The closest I can come without herniating my brain is to look at the previous year’s costs.

In 2003 I spent $890 for electricity. Rates have gone up more than once since then. Therefore I’d guess we saved $950-$1000 during the first year with our photovoltaic system.

My weekend to-do list:

1. vaccuum furnace filter
2. brush refrigerator coils
3. wash solar panels

Saving energy is sometimes like using Amazon.com to “save” money.

Over the weekend I finally put some cables onto those microphones and recorded about a million takes of the dulcimer track for Ode to Soup. I was about halfway through when, during a playback with the guitar track enabled, I tapped the “mono” switch on my deck… and was surprised to hear the dulcimer virtually disappear from the mix.

I know a little about phase problems: any time two mics are used to record one sound source, care must be taken that the mics are in phase with each other. If two mics are perfectly out of phase, the signal recorded by one will zero out the signal recorded by the other. Although that never happens (except maybe in lab recordings of pure sine waves), most stereo recordings are probably partially out of phase, especially when the engineer is an amateur.

Listening to playback in mono is, as far as I know, the only easy way to check for phase coherence: if the recorded sound changes tone or volume dramatically when the playback is toggled from stereo to mono, there is probably a phase problem, at least for some segment of the frequency spectrum.

My mic placement was giving me a nice stereo spread, which of course goes away in mono. So I had heard the sound change when I listened back to an early scratch recording in mono, but I attributed it to the fact that the stereo field had compressed to a single point.

With the guitar in the mix, though, I heard a bigger problem: some chunk of the dulcimer’s frequency range must be getting mashed, because the relative volumes of the two instruments shifted in mono.

Focus on the dulcimer in the clip provided below. To my ear, the dulcimer all but drops out in the mono section. The dulcimer sounds forward in the mix at first, but at the repeat the guitar comes out in front.

Phase problem (2 bars stereo; 2 bars mono)

Tonight I tried six new mic positions, in an attempt to find a more phase-coherent setup. Making the phase problem go away is easy; it’s a matter of putting both mic capsules next to one another above the middle of the instrument. But this approach has its own problems: I don’t like the tone captured above the instrument, and the stereo field is too narrow. I much prefer the sound with the mics spread apart as pictured previously.

A bandmate suggested inverting the phase on one of the channels on the out-of-phase recording. Another possibility: nudge or delay one channel by a few milliseconds. I’m hesitant to try either trick, because I’d much rather learn how to record great tracks, than learn how to record deficient and flawed tracks that have to be surgically corrected later.

The ongoing saga of tainted fish makes the news again with the release of the Got Mercury website, a project of the Turtle Island Restoration Network.

It’s a great idea: you type in your weight and the amount of a certain fish you’d like to eat, and the calculator tells you whether or not you’re poisoning yourself.

Startling example: a 4oz. piece of Orange Roughy puts me 30% over the EPA’s “safe exposure” limit. Last Fall, I had a bag of SeaMazz Orange Roughy fillets in the freezer. I’d guess each fillet weighed 4 oz. I had no idea these were unsafe to eat.

I actually traded emails with SeaMazz about the product; their customer service reps correctly noted that “Orange Roughy is not included in the FDA’s key advisory list of highest mecury level fish.” But saying that some other fish are even more toxic doesn’t really address the safety question. (I don’t mean to disparage SeaMazz; I’m quite sure their product meets or exceeds all governmental safety regulations.)

Finally, in case anyone was wondering, the whole “Got” campaign still irritates the hell out of me, even though I once succumbed to its foul pop-culture charms.