DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I wish I’d taken a photo of the image that inspired the title of this story: the UPS guy walking down the driveway with a stack of boxes from Amazon.com in his arms. Brown truck, brown shirt, brown pants, brown boxes.

He was carrying our Christmas gifts: some fancy crystal wine glasses and a new digital camera.

The wine glasses don’t really go with our recycled-glass tumblers, but you have to like the thin rims and the pure, high-pitched sound that resonates for 5 seconds when you clink them together. Also, they were half-price (and still are).

The more exciting gift was packed in the smaller two boxes. After three evenings’ worth of poring over reviews and sample images, we decided on the Canon SD450, an “ultracompact” model that is about a quarter the size of my Nikon Coolpix 995. I debated at length whether to get a more feature-rich model like the Powershot S80, which has a wider-angle lens (28mm), semi-manual controls (apeture or shutter priority), and an interface that seemed more intuitive. But it’s bigger all around and weighs twice as much as the SD450, and in the end we decided to get something really small (assuming the image quality would be good, which in this case appears to be true).

After that, we did another iteration of research to see if we could get a tiny camera with a fold-out LCD. I made an inventory of all the available cameras with that feature, and slowly eliminated every one of them: they’re all too big, or flawed in some other way. The SD450 is about the size of a deck of cards, small enough to carry around in a pocket.

(The third box from Amazon contained a spare battery. Why did they ship it separately? That makes as little sense as, well, not having a second battery for a digital camera. But then, I’m all about backups.)

Our 2005 “trueup” bill arrived from PG&E. My total electricity cost for 2005: $56.68, or about $1000 less than it would be if I didn’t have a PV array on the roof.

In 2004 we paid only $6.53 for the year’s power. The difference is small, but growing. (His name is Raphael.) We’re keeping the house warmer, and doing an extra 4 loads of laundry a week. And our houseguests come more often and stay longer, and use a whole bunch of power when they’re here.

I’ve baked 33% fewer times this year than last, but the savings in oven power have been eclipsed by higher uses elsewhere. I thought my new low-power firewall would have made some small contribution to our conservation efforts, but I can’t see it on the graphs. Computers just don’t draw that much power, unless you have about a million of them.

PG&E keeps a running tally of our outstanding charges, billing only at the end of the annual cycle. The idea for grid-tied systems is that consumption is bigger than generation in the winter, but smaller in the summer, and that after 12 months the balance should be near zero — assuming the system was sized correctly. In 2004, we were only off by $6.53.

The graph for the past two years’ running charges shows the cycle clearly. The 2005 line is offset by about $40, which I guess is the cost of adding a body (even a small one) to the household.

As a sanity check, I graphed our generation for both years. Total generation for 2005 was about 9 kWh higher, so I didn’t expect large differences month-to-month. The array reconfiguration in October, 2004 appears not to have had much impact.

Our installer should soon be running a comprehensive year-end analysis to determine our actual energy savings. I’m interested in this because, in essence, I paid for 10-12 years’ worth of electricity in 2003, and I’m eager to break even — every dollar I don’t pay PG&E now is another dollar’s reimbursement on my initial investment, bringing me closer to those 20 years of free electricity I have coming.

Dec 25 04:02:08 raid1: Disk failure on sda1, disabling device.  
Dec 25 04:02:09 md0: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md2: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md4: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md3: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md1: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md5: no spare disk to reconstruct array! -- continuing in degraded mode 
Dec 25 04:02:09 md: (skipping faulty sda1 ) 

We took a day trip to the northwest coast of Maui, to the “most beautiful beach in the world,” according to no less trustworthy a source than the free guidebook we’d found in the back of the rental car. The beach is called Kapalua Bay, and it’s hard to find unless you know the sekrit sign to watch for, and no I don’t mean the common blue “public beach access” sign because that one was hidden behind a shrub.

It is a nice beach. It was under-crowded, as are most Hawaiian beaches. It’s family-friendly, too; the beach slopes so gradually into the water that kids can ride boogie boards 20 feet into the bay and back simply by laying at the edge of the surf. Also there’s a large shady area at the south end of the beach, perfect for pale-skinned Midwesterners less familiar with SPF ratings than with the ABCD’s of melanoma.

Continuing north, we found lots of amazing scenery, about which I’d write moving and passionate descriptions if I had the time and if this document hadn’t been sitting open on my laptop for about 10 days, inspiring not much scintillating prose but a whole ocean full of writer’s block.

So, just look at the pictures: Northwest Coast of Maui

In case you missed the good news: SUV market slows to a crawl

• GM’s sales are off 7.6% in November.
• Ford’s sales fell 15%.
• Toyota’s U.S. sales rose 13%.
• Honda’s sales rose 8%.

The failure of a U.S. industry is not something I normally celebrate, but I’m making an exception here. U.S. automakers claim they’ve been producing huge luxury trucks because “that’s what Americans want to buy,” ignoring that they’ve manufactured that market. The reality, as documented in High and Mighty, is that SUVs were designed to reduce costs by exploiting loopholes in federal safety and emissions laws, yet be enormously profitable, e.g. $12k for each a Ford Expedition and $15k for each Lincoln Navigator. Whatever pain these duplicitous U.S. SUV makers are feeling has been in 15 years in the making.

If it’s really true that American consumers are recovering from the big-car brainwashing administered by a dozen-plus years of Detroit ad campaigns, maybe the auto makers will begin offering smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, such as Toyota’s Prius or Honda’s Insight.

No, probably not: GM Keeps Its Greener Cars Out of North-America

While GM is in big trouble and ready to do anything to get people to buy its huge SUVs (employee discount, releasing the 2007 models in late 2005, etc), it has many perfectly decent vehicles that it only sells outside of North-America …
Yet GM doesn’t seem interested in importing [the 47 mpg Opel Meriva] or some of its other designs at a time when it’s clearly the direction the market is headed in.