DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Charles Fishman stacks the astonishing facts into a mountain of evidence and the most compelling argument for Compact Fluorescents I’ve ever seen, in the latest issue of Fast Company:

• Since 1985, CFLs have changed as much as cell phones and portable music players.
• Compact fluorescents emit the same light as classic incandescents but use 75% or 80% less electricity.
• The typical U.S. house has between 50 and 100 [light bulb] sockets
• The single greatest source of greenhouse gases in the United States is power plants
• if every one of 110 million American households bought just one [CFL] … and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people … to turn off two entire power plants … one bulb [replaced per household] is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.
• a $3 [CFL] pays for itself in lower electric bills in about five months

I’ve thought CFLs were a no-brainer for five years: they cost less, they’re better for the planet; what’s not to love? But according to Fishman, I’m in the minority:

Last year, U.S. consumers spent about $1 billion to buy about 2 billion lightbulbs — 5.5 million every day. Just 5%, 100 million, were compact fluorescents.

Anyway, the next revelation in the article is that Wal-Mart aims to overcome this particular inertia within American society:

In the next 12 months, starting with a major push this month, Wal-Mart wants to sell every one of its regular customers — 100 million in all — one swirl bulb.

This is huge news. Most people will pick the less-expensive option if they know one is available, so a concerted marketing effort positioning CFLs as cheap will absolutely have an impact. There’s a convenience factor at play, too; if the local warehouse store sold recycled paper towels, half the people in the county would use them.

Of course, Wal-Mart has at best a mixed reputation as a steward of the planet or its inhabitants; BuyBlue.org ranks it negatively in 4 of 5 categories. I hope Fishman is correct when he reports that Wal-Mart “aims to change its own reputation, to use swirls to make clear how seriously Wal-Mart takes its new positioning as an environmental activist.” Environmentalists would be crazy not to embrace such a change, so I’ll say this: within 30 days I will buy a CFL at Wal-Mart (and try not to dwell on the donation the company will make to the GOP on my behalf). Solidarity!

The article just gets better. Fishman describes WalMart V.P. Chuck Kerby’s CFL zen slap:

“Somebody asked, ‘What difference would it make if we changed the bulbs in the ceiling-fan display to CFLs?’” says Kerby. A typical Wal-Mart has 10 models of ceiling fans on display, each with four bulbs. Forty bulbs per store, 3,230 stores.

“Someone went off and did the math,” says Kerby. “They told me we could save $6 million in electric bills by changing the incandescents to CFLs in more than 3,000 Wal-Marts. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know I was paying $6 million to light those fixtures. I said, that can’t be right, go back and do the math again.”

Why is all this important? Read no farther than Fishman’s opening paragraph:

Sitting humbly on shelves in stores everywhere is a product, priced at less than $3, that will change the world. Soon. It is a fairly ordinary item that nonetheless cuts to the heart of a half-dozen of the most profound, most urgent problems we face. Energy consumption. Rising gasoline costs and electric bills. Greenhouse-gas emissions. Dependence on coal and foreign oil. Global warming.

I stopped by Office Depot on my way somewhere last weekend, to trade another dead inkjet cartridge for a ream of recycled paper, and I wondered yet again, why would Office Depot offer a ream of paper for an empty inkjet printer cartridge?

Today I saw an AP article that opened with a provocative question:

Ever wonder why office-supply stores will offer a ream of paper or $3 for empty inkjet printer cartridges?

In fact, I have!

The article goes on to explain that OEM cartridge vendors as well as refillers purchase used inkjet cartridges, even broken ones. Some models fetch $7 apiece.

Office Depot’s EnviroCopy paper retails for $3.50-$5.00 per ream; the manufacturing cost is probably half that. So it seems the inkjet cartridge exchange program is a profit center. Which is great news; it’s a useful public service too. I hope Office Depot is making money at it, because then they’ll keep the program going, which if nothing else means I won’t have to buy printer paper for the rest of my life.

Speaking of which… When I put my new ream of paper with the four already in the closet, I realised that an inkjet cartridge probably doesn’t print 500 pages. Which means I’m going to earn another ream of paper before I finish printing this one. And probably part of a third as well.

That’s the story behind the headline. If you own an inkjet printer, you’re almost certainly earning more free paper than you can use.

However, that means inkjet cartridges are the aluminum cans of the ’00s. They’re worth picking out of someone else’s trash. Maybe not for you, but for someone. When I lived in San Francisco, we’d put our recycling on the curb on Sunday nights; at dawn every Monday morning, homeless people would march up the street, picking the aluminum cans out of the recycling bins. The cans had passed a value threshhold, when suddenly they were worth picking through refuse for, stacking into shopping carts, and wheeling halfway across town to the recycling center.

I don’t know what homeless people are going to do with case upon case of recycled printer paper, but you get the idea.

Update, 2007-02-06: Never mind; Office Depot’s inkjet cartridge recycling program has begun to suck.

I needn’t have climbed the roof to determine whether the PV array has a shading problem. The kWh meter on the inverter makes it plain; on a sunny day, output drops from 1500 watts to 50 in the space of 40 minutes.

Unfortunately, this happens around 5:00 PM, so there’s over an hour of the daily peak period during which we’re not only not selling power to PG&E at 3x market rate, but in many cases we’re buying power at that rate. Ouch.

I met with an arborist today. He said he could prune the eucalyptus and birch trees that are shading the PV array, but not until December — cutting them now could damage them, and in the case of the birch, possibly kill it. So, we wait.

Unfortunately, the summer rate season lasts until October 31, and I expect the shade to impinge on production progressively earlier in the day (until the Winter Solstice). So we’re going to take a big hit in production this year.

I managed to reduce our peak-period consumption slightly this week — I found that the thermostat on the attic fan was set way too low, to 85° or something, which meant the fan ran for most of the afternoon and into the evening on warm days. I dialed it up to 110°, reducing the runtime by hours per day. A small but welcome victory.

Dirk E. sent a brief note to accompany the photo of a concert ticket stub I recognize:

I thought you might find this remnant from my first major concert experience interesting ;)

Why do I recognize it? Because 25 years and a couple of months ago I was sitting maybe 200 feet away from him. Although it looks like Dirk had better seats.

In related news, I just ordered a copy of the new RUSH tribute concert DVD, Cygnus and the Sea Monsters, something I’ve been looking forward to since reading about the show in Sean Malone’s blog last Fall. (Here’s a preview.)

And don’t miss the pictures of the replica Neil Peart drum kit Tama put together for the show. (This surprised me, because Peart is a DW endorsee now. On the other hand, Portnoy is a Tama endorsee, so I guess it makes sense.)

And the concert stills under August 13.

What are you still doing here? That’s all you get. Now go order the DVD.

When I took down my studio last September, I published a shopping list of upgrades for the next session. I bought nearly everything I’d hoped for:

• Hypercardioid Oktava MK-012, check. I actually bartered some SEO advice for this mic.
• Large-diaphragm condenser, check. I have one of the inexpensive Audio-Technica AT2020 as well as a hot-rodded Oktava MK-219 from Michael Joly. The latter was used as a room mic for my summer sessions.
• I didn’t get a Really Nice Preamp. I’m eyeing a couple of two-channel tube pre’s with S/PDIF outs for next time, though.
• I tested an Onyx 800R (samples to come, someday soon) and liked it, but opted to buy a different solid-state digital audio preamp, the Focusrite Octopre LE, which is a couple hundred dollars cheaper and to my ear sounds a little better.

I tuned up my good snare for this session. At 92 psi per lug, it sings. In fact it sings for days; I have to use a “zerOring” because it sings too much. It was miked on top with a Beyerdynamic M422, a supercardioid dynamic, through the Octopre, compressed via RNC, patched back through the Octopre and then into the Digi-002. The bottom mic was an Audix D1, a hypercardioid dynamic, positioned with the capsule 180° from the kick drum to minimize low-end bleed. I compressed it with a DBX 266XL, then patched it into the Digi-002.

Toms were miked individually with Audix D2 and D4 via the four mic pre’s in the Digi-002. I’m still using rim clips for these mics, which is convenient but arguably problematic at mix time.

I miked the hi-hat separately with my new MK-012 hypercardioid. It took some time to find a position that minimized snare bleed without getting the capsule so close to the hats that they sounded like gongs (due to proximity effect). We’ll still need to EQ the high-end; the hats lack the crystalline highs I’d like to hear.

The kick was handled as previously, although this time I was able to record the two mics’ signals separately rather than combining them. This allows the mix engineer to vary the signal, from the D112 inside the drum (lots of attack) to the M380 outside the resonant head (tons of bass and sustain). I added an Earthworks “KickPad” inline filter on the D112 signal, which has sounded great in my rough mixes. The D112 was compressed during tracking via the second RNC. The M380 was not compressed, because bass-heavy signals sound distorted through the RNC.

Overheads were MK-012s, as previously, using the Octopre pre-amps.

I recorded two room mics, but not stereo. I thought I’d get more-interesting results by recording two radically different mics. The idea is to vary the gain of each signal across songs or sections of songs to subtly alter the feel. To that end, I put the Oktava MK219 in front of the kit, about 5' off the ground. The second mic was an omni dynamic, the EV 635a, high in a corner of the room behind the kit.

All together this comes to 13 tracks of drums. It’s a ridiculous amount of channels, yes. On the other hand, the Digi-002 has five inputs I haven’t used yet.

My old Powerbook G4 (667 MHz) was not able to consistently process 13 channels of audio at 24 bit, 44.1 kHz. Some days, I could record an entire song; other days the laptop would puke halfway through. I got in the habit of shutting down nonessential services and killing off hidden daemons (iTunes helper?) to maximize the available CPU, but even then I’d get occasional errors. I upgraded to a Macbook Pro before final tracking; it worked perfectly, and didn’t kick its fan into overdrive as the G4 does.

Mic preamp summary (for my future reference):

• Octopre LE
  1. Kick external
  2. Hi-hat
  3. Snare top (dry)
  4. Snare top (wet)
  5. Ambient 1
  6. Ambient 2
  7. OH (L)
  8. OH (R)

• Mackie 1604
  1. Kick internal (insert: RNC)
  2. Snare bottom (insert: DBX 266XL)

• Digi-002
  1. Tom 1
  2. Tom 2
  3. Tom 3
  4. Tom 4

(It adds up to 14, but I didn’t record the dry snare signal.)