DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We closed out the 2006 “trueup” billing period with a disappointing $94.48 charge, after the ~$65 rebate for “distribution” fees we already paid. So our total out-of-pocket for the year’s electricity was about $160.

Our production was down this year, most likely due to shading; we generated only 3440 kWh in 2006, as compared to 3898 kWh in 2005 — a 12% drop. The graph of our monthly power generation makes this clear. We’ll be trimming some trees here in the near future in hopes of regaining some of our late-afternoon sunlight.

The graph of monthly unbilled charges is interesting. As it is based on fees, it reflects both generation and consumption; an expensive month could be due to low generation or to high usage, or a combination. We started 2006 well, beating our 2005 rates, but for the middle six months of the year we lost all early gains. The middle months were dismal; we didn’t build up nearly enough surplus to ride out the Fall. In fact, we didn’t come near to the zero line, much less cross it as we did in the summer of 2004 (when our final trueup bill was a mere $6.53). I’m looking forward to some additional conservation measures for 2007.

To put this in perspective, I’m quibbling about numbers in a way that masks the awesomeness of photovoltaic power generation. The critical takeaway is that we produced 50%* of our own electricity this year, and prevented 4544 lbs of carbon dioxide from being blown into the atmosphere on our behalf**. I feel good about that. Even better, we produced 100% of our peak-period electricity, plus 544 kWh surplus, which creates disproportionate benefits to the stability of the grid and to atmospheric effects of fossil-fuel power generation.

Previous anniversaries: 2005, 2005 breakeven calculation, 2004.

*The TOU meter-reading data on the trueup bill shows we burned 3413 kWh, but I believe that is the total after deducting the 3440 kWh we produced, as the meter runs backwards when the sun shines.

** “The output rate for CO2 from natural gas-fired plants in 1999 was 1.321 pounds CO2 per kilowatthour.” 3440 kWh * 1.321 = 4544 lbs.

Back in September, security guru and common-sense advocate Bruce Schneier recommended that US citizens renew their passports before the end of the year. The reason? To avoid the risks of the new RFID passports, initially slated to be rolled out by January 1.

Schneier described potential consequences of carrying around a radio transmitter in one’s passport:

The risk to you is the possibility of surreptitious access: Your passport information might be read without your knowledge or consent by a government trying to track your movements, a criminal trying to steal your identity or someone just curious about your citizenship.

I called the Passport Agency earlier this month to ask whether they’d begun issuing RFID passports yet. I was told that the main Passport center in Philadelphia — the one that all mailed-in renewal requests go to — had a warehouse full of the old, non-electronic passport jackets that they would need to use up before rolling out the RFID model.

That’s good news in at least two respects, the less obvious one being that the government had avoided sending tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of perfectly useful passport jackets into the local landfill.

The Agency representative couldn’t tell me how long their stock of radio-free passport jackets would last, but she speculated that they’d still be issuing them for at least a few weeks, and likely past the first of January. So, despite the fact that my old passport wouldn’t expire for four years, I sent in a renewal request two weeks ago.

Today I got my new, radio-free passport in the mail. RFID hax0rz can kiss my analog butt, at least for 10 more years.

If you want to avoid the frog-march of progress, start at the passport renewal page at the Dept. of State website. You’ll need a pair of passport photos; I recommend Fedex Kinko’s. Most offer Passport photo services. You’ll probably also want to pay the extra $60 for “expedited” processing, to jump your application to the head of the line.

But you may want to call the Passport Agency first, because at this point your attempt to be one of the last people to get an old passport might lead to being one of the first to get a new one. Call 1-877-487-2778 and ask to speak to a passport agent.

Tell me this isn’t the dumbest thing you’ve heard all day.

The California Condor was so close to extinction in the mid-1980s that the remaining 22 (!) were captured, bred in captivity, and have been slowly reintroduced into the wild.

Yet they’re still highly endangered due to lead poisoning: hunters shoot big game in condor territory, leaving carcasses behind. The carcasses are full of lead bullet fragments. Condors eat the carcasses, and the lead, and then die.

So on the one hand, the government is willing to spend a pile of money ($40MM) on condor breeding and monitoring, but not willing to give the re-released birds a fair chance at survival, e.g. in 2005 the Fish and Game Commission rejected a petition to phase out lead ammunition.

I’m not a hunter, but I understand that alternatives to lead ammunition exist. Why not ban the lead? If we care enough about not letting the condor go extinct, surely we can face down the NRA and whoever else is fighting the ammunition phase-out. Nobody is trying to ban hunting… just the lead bullets.

More info at SaveTheCondors.org and the new Get the Lead Out campaign, courtesy the Center for Biological Diversity.

They’re not having a very merry Christmas at NoKa Chocolates.

A writer at dallasfood.org put together a 10-part expose and smackdown on the exclusive chocolatier, determining after extensive research that NoKa staff are simply melting down and repackaging $34/lb Bonnat couverture to make their $2080/lb NoKa chocolates.

In the process, the author coined* an amazing new word: sneetchcraft. In case you don’t have a two-year-old, this is a reference to The Sneetches, the Dr. Seuss story in which Sneetches with stars on their bellies feel superior to the Sneetches without. The story is about racial discrimination, but the point of the metaphor is that the packaging doesn’t improve the product. In an ironic twist, photos suggest that NoKa is actually damaging the chocolate while putting the virtual star on its belly.

I think NoKa will go the way of Milli Vanilli. Nobody likes to be deceived, even if there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the product.

*Is the word “sneetchcraft” original with the dallasfood.org article? I think it is; Google turns up only 52 references to it as of this writing, all of which point back to dallasfood.org or to Seth Godin’s blog post about the series (which is where I learned about it).

Unable to withstand the allure of Rogue Amoeba’s MacSanta promotion (a 20% holiday discount on dozens of great OS X applications), I took some time this morning to test-drive an app that promises to help Get Me Organized.

(This is no small feat. A year and a half ago I purged my desktop. I loved the spartan appeal of it, the austerity of blank space. For about a month. Then the convenience of fast access buried my good intentions under 87 icons, a couple of which were folders containing yet more disorganized items that resisted proper filing. Like I said then, my clutter is recursive.)

The organizational app that had caught my eye is EagleFiler. It puts a 3-panel browser interface onto any folder of documents, providing a common navigational and viewing mechanism for disparate document types. It provides grouping, tagging and searching features as well, allowing the user to impose additional layers of organization and accessibility not normally afforded by the filesystem.

I have a folder of 8 years’ worth of work documents that are not as accessible as they could be… and the idea of storing them all under one UI, with tagging, definitely appeals. Currently I need at least four apps to view these documents: Preview (images and PDFs), OmniOutliner (I’ve used an outliner for all my note-taking, list-making, and project planning, dating back to Dave Winer’s re-release of More 3.1 in 1999), OpenOffice (Word and Excel docs), and BBEdit (text docs). EagleFiler could replace them all, and the Finder too.

Except that it doesn’t. At least, not yet. It thinks my OmniOutliner documents are folders. It can’t display the outlines, nor can it display OpenOffice spreadsheets (.ods), nor Excel spreadsheets (.xls), nor the contents of compressed tar (.tar.gz) archives.

I have no doubt most of these file formats will be supported by EagleFiler in the future, but at the moment, the app can’t display the 20% of documents I use the most. So for now it’s not a good fit.

Reeling from this letdown, I started shopping for a new task timer. I’ve been using BK Task Timer, which bothers me for three reasons:

1. It seems to have a terrible memory leak; e.g. I recently noticed it sucking up 150+ MB of RAM.
2. It’s slow; bringing the app to the front takes over a second, and starting the timer takes 2 more. On a dual 2GHz G5. WTF?
3. The “no frills” interface is hard to love. There’s so much Mac software that looks cool. This does not. And I have to look at it a couple times a day.

Unfortunately, everybody who makes task timers ends up writing invoicing applications too. So the timer apps get bloated with client data and expense records and a bunch of features perfectly suited to freelance developers and designers who juggle a dozen clients at once — in fact those are the guys writing all these bloated timer apps. I just want to put time into a couple buckets so I don’t inadvertently work 12 hours a day (one of the risks of telecommuting).

I scanned a half-dozen timer apps, downloaded the two that seemed least likely to suck, and within moments eliminated both. Sigh.