DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I don’t know what it is about this thing that so appeals to me. I think it’s the something-for-nothing aspect of it: if you’re burning candles for ambiance anyway, you might as well also heat up the room with them. It’s low-tech, it’s earth-friendly, and very very clever.

47% of your energy bill goes toward heating your home… yet for every degree you turn down the thermostat, you knock ~5% off your bill. This simple device, like compact fluorescent light bulbs, would not only save money, but pay for itself, over and over again.

Let’s do the math. The average US heating bill for 2005 was $989, or $82/month. If you could turn the thermostat down 2 degrees, you’d save about $8 per month. You’d save enough in heating costs to pay for the heater within four months.

Basically it’s a steel and ceramic radiator suspended above a small “jar candle.” It looks like an inverted flower pot, but it acts like a space heater. When in use, the steel bolt in the middle of the nested stack of flower pots heats up to 300+° F.

If you buy one, I recommend the use of beeswax candles. Paraffin candles cost less, but emit toxins like benzene and toluene. If you’re going to go to these lengths to help save the planet, you might as well stick around a few extra years to enjoy it.

(Soy candles are also nontoxic, but burn cooler, which is not what you need when you’re trying to heat your room.)

Yo, Treehugger, check this out.

I enjoy filling out credit applications about as much as I enjoy tooth extraction (erm, that’s safe for work, unless you just ate breakfast), but I finally succumbed to the logic that we’d benefit from putting most of our expenses on an airline-miles card, considering that most of us fly to Germany every year.

As is now typical, the cards arrived with a “convenience check,” the idea being that balances outstanding on other accounts can easily be transferred to the shiny new credit card whose benefits are superior to whatever stinky old account is about to be replaced. The text reads:

• Write this check as you would a personal check.
• Make a large purchase you’ve been putting off.
• Complete home improvements and other projects.

It seems like a great deal for the consumer — consolidate debt in one place; escape the karmic weight of old debt, even if only temporarily; cancel old credit accounts that have come to represent guilt for poorly-considered purchases in months past, etc. (I’m just hypothesizing here, of course. Nothing to see, move along…)

But it’s a scam. There’s a tiny footnote symbol, about a millimeter tall, after the words “personal check.” The referenced note is on the back of the page; it’s 18 lines of rules and limitations, including this flashing neon red flag/klaxon: “Please see your Cardmember Agreement for any applicable transaction fees.” The Cardmember Agreement is three pages of mousetype filled with phrases like “fees may apply.” Not until the last page will you find the actual fee table which shows the transaction fee for these advance checks: 3% of the transaction amount, up to $75!

Yeah, I’m sure they love it when new cardholders spend a pile of money on one of these checks. I’m surprised they only sent one.

The other thing I’m bitter about is the Chase privacy policy. They provide a marketing opt-out via phone, but they say it will take four to six weeks to take effect. I’ve written enough database applications to know that it doesn’t take four to six weeks to update a binary value in a database table… even if you’re running Oracle (heh). So what that really means is, “We’re going to sell your name, address, and purchase history as many times as we can, per day, 24x7, for the next 40 days, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

You know, I don’t really like travelling all that much…

The really funny thing about this is that the letter has two typos — the kind you can still see after they’re fixed. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

The software review I’d submitted was written using SpeedScript — which I had typed in from the code listing in COMPUTE’s Gazette magazine. But the letter rejecting my article had been created on a typewriter.

(Yeah, OK, so I’m old. My cane is on order.)

I haven’t wasted this much time since I saw the earth sandwich video from Ze Frank — and spent a couple hours over the next few days watching every previous episode of The Show.

My friend Pete, former recording engineer to the stars (and to my band too) sent me a link to an episode of the death-metal comedy cartoon Metalocalypse. It’s been on the Cartoon Network since August, so this may not be news to you unless you also live in a cave. Fortunately, either way you can see most of the episodes online.

Update 2008-01-07: The bleenks.com site appears to have gone away. Sorry, no more episode archive. But see http://www.diefordethklok.org/ for plot summaries and stills.

Some of the characters are all but unintelligible, but they’re funny anyway.

Update: whoa, things get dark midway through the first season. Or maybe I just have a limited appreciation for severed-limb humor.

I have to admit that buying carbon offsets feels a little like buying indulgences — as if making a donation over here clears one’s conscience of committing some sort of eco-atrocity over there. Wouldn’t it be better to just not trash the planet in the first place?

But of course everyone with the equipment and free time to read this website, including you, including and perhaps especially me, is doing more damage than can be sustained. It’s disturbing but true; just take the ecological footprint quiz to see what I mean. If everyone lived like me, we’d need 3.1 planets. (But a lot fewer roads.)

So, financing a group of people whose mission is to support zero-carbon energy sources, improve industrial energy efficiency, and plant trees seems like a pretty good idea.

Working Assets, my telco, sent an email promoting an offsets program from Carbonfund.org. The timing was right; I’d been meaning to do something along those lines since seeing An Inconvenient Truth. I didn’t comparison shop like I usually do, because Working Assets was willing to throw in an extra 5 tons’ worth of offsets for free — approx. $27 worth at Carbonfund’s rates ($55/10 tons).

I paid the $99, and got the 5 free tons. So, for 2007, I figure I’m carbon-neutral.

I’ve been trying out a couple carbon calculators while working on this article, and unfortunately it looks like the real planet-killer is air travel. Gah. Another reason to stay home!