DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Ways to use del.icio.us:

del.icio.us is an open-ended system. You decide how you want to use it.

I think most bloggers and journalists have two primary uses for it:

• Store bookmarks for future reference/research
• Tag one’s own blog entries / articles, both to promote them to anyone monitoring those tags and to track the articles’ reach

I’ve done some of both, and I think the result is clumsy: my own blog posts appear in the same list with the rest of my bookmarks. Mingling these two disparate data types seems nonoptimal, as if Flickr wouldn’t distinguish between “my photos” and “my contacts’ photos.”

I spoke about this briefly with Jon Udell at Etech. He distinguishes the two data types by tagging his own articles with his name. It’s an easy solution for accessing “stuff I wrote” quickly, but doesn’t address what I think is the more interesting question: “show me my bookmarks but not the stuff I wrote.”

del.icio.us has a tag intersection feature to allow retrieval of bookmarks tagged with both of two terms, but it doesn’t currently have a negation feature. There’s no easy way to tell del.icio.us “give me everything tagged ‘foo and not bar’.”

Yes, I could write my own filter, sigh.

The pastry chef at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego does a pretty phenomenal job. In my four days at Etech I witnessed over a dozen varieties of coffee cake, cheesecake, cookies, petit fours, frangipani, croissants, napoleon, upscale Krispie treats, on and on and on, a heart-stopping convoy of white flour and sugar and eggs and an occasional taste of nuts or berries as if just to break up the monotony.

I like desserts, but not the first thing in the morning, which is when they served half these pastries, with three kinds of coffee and no juice. I don’t like eggs so much, but I’d have strangled a chicken if it meant not eating a half-pound of banana bread for breakfast again.

You could argue that the conference organizers really know their audience. What refreshments would 1200 alpha geeks desire more than sugar and caffeine? In retrospect it was surprising they didn’t serve Bawls for breakfast.

I commented to one of the O’Reilly staffers that the food at the Web 2.0 conference was far and away better than what we’d been served at Etech, and he pointed out that Web 2.0 costs twice as much. It’s O’Reilly’s flagship tech conference, I guess, so it comes with a high profile, a full bag of schwag, and a plate of eggs.

I don’t get out much. I work at home; my commute is about 12 seconds, even when I stop to put shoes on. For years, the farthest I’d get from my front door in a typical workweek was the end of the driveway, which is where the mailbox was. Now that I’ve moved, the mailbox is a solid eighth of a mile away, and up a mean hill, so I don’t even retrieve the mail any more.

One of the unexpected consequences of being within maybe 20 feet of a landline about 98% of the time is that I am only barely cellphone-literate. I own one, but I’m happy to leave it in the cabinet with the car keys, because I only use them together and then only every once in a while.

This week is exceptional, because I’m (a) out out town and (b) carrying a cellphone all day. I keep the phone in vibrate mode now, after an embarassing cellphone-novice experience at a conference last year in which it rang, at maximum volume, while the phone was in my shoulder bag, and it took me two rings to realize it was my phone making that terrible noise, and another two to realize that whether or not I realized it was mine, everyone within fifteen feet did, and two more for me to dig it out of the bag and frantically silence the thing. And then about a minute later, it rang again to tell me I had a voice message waiting. The withering stares from other conference attendees had already shamed me out into the hotel lobby at that point, fortunately.

So anyway, I was sitting at lunch today chatting with a guy about his new startup. I guess I was leaning forward because my traitorous phone was smashed up under my hip, affording it excellent bone conductivity. The phone rang, in vibrate mode, and I nearly jumped out of my seat. I actually yelled. I had no idea what was happening, but my adrenal glands were pretty sure that running away would be a good idea.

All things considered, the fact that I work with computers all day is pretty surprising.

I remember an episode of Fantasy Island where someone faked his (her?) own death in order to find out what his friends and family really thought about him. He attended the funeral in disguise to eavesdrop on the impromptu reviews of his ex-life.

I feel the same way about reporting that a couple people on the everythingdulcimer.com discussion board have checked out my song, Ode to Soup. The reviews thus far are somewhat mixed — too much guitar, not enough dulcimer, not very soup-like. I guess it wouldn’t be a big hit at the Ren Faire (nor the Campbell’s office party).

But I’m grateful for the attention. Special thanks to Marcy (a real dulcimer player) for the nice words and traffic.

Here’s the link: Hammer Dulcimer in rock music

At the time of my second solar anniversary, I posted my analysis of power generated and electricity fees incurred during my second year with grid-tied PV. It’s easy to monitor the amount of electricity we generated, but much harder to track some numbers that are even more interesting, e.g.:

• electricity consumed
• dollars saved

Why? Mostly because PG&E’s “trueup” bills are a frickin’ nightmare — a dozen pages of mousetype arranged in incomprehensible tables showing daily fluctuations in “unbundled rate components.” I can’t make any sense of it at all. Presumably this was PG&E’s design goal (obfuscating usage and cost data), for there’s no other reason to inflict this sort of mind-numbing minutia on a paying customer. It’s worse than bistro math.

Fortunately, the good folks at Sun Power employ a crew of photovoltaic gnomes who crunch all the numbers and spit out an annual report that answers the interesting questions:

My total out-of-pocket cost for the year was $105, which includes the $65 reported earlier plus the monthly annoyance fees PG&E charges all grid-tied PV generators.

The total electricity cost I would have paid PG&E had I not installed solar is $936. This figure is lower than I expected. My 2003 actual figure was $890; between higher usage and rate hikes I would have expected my non-PV costs to exceed $1000 for 2005. Perhaps Sun Power’s calculations don’t cover the over-baseline penalties that PG&E applies to the electricity bills of everyone who doesn’t happen to be photophobic, cold-blooded, and/or live under a bridge.

The $936 I didn’t pay, less the $105 I did, yields an $831 credit toward my photovoltaic breakeven date — previously projected to January, 2015. Again this is smaller than I expected, but as rates continue to rise I have to conclude that future years’ savings will grow disproportionately large.