You there! You use too much electricity.

EERE Consumer’s Guide: Do-It-Yourself Home Energy Audits

You can easily conduct a home energy audit yourself. With a simple but diligent walk-through, you can spot many problems in any type of house. When auditing your home, keep a checklist of areas you have inspected and problems you found. This list will help you prioritize your energy efficiency upgrades.

Via Lifehacker, the Department of Energy is offering tips on increasing your energy efficiency at home.  This is especially pertinent to me after getting a $174 electric bill from Pepco.  Our house was profiled in the local DC paper not long after the condo conversion, and the writer gushed about the environmentally friendly principles of the condos.  Aside from meaningless EnergyStar certifications (Nearly everything meets the requirements these days – there is talk of making them stricter) and pretty good natural lighting, there is very little about our place that is environmentally friendly.  Sometimes I wish we had thought more about that when we were buying, but we really fell in love with the place, and it wasn’t until after we moved in that I really thought about it.

Anyway, I think our electric bill is high because Pepco is not actually reading our meter.  They are doing estimated meter readings, and I think they are way off.  I think they are doing a real reading at the end of this month, so I don’t really expect to pay anything for electricity for a month or two.  I went and looked at the six meters – one for each condo, one for common areas – and ours was turning much, much more slowly than any but the common areas.  We don’t run the air as much as we might, and we set it higher than many people would, so I think we use a relatively small amount.

I do actually have a point here, and that is that you should check your house for wasted energy.  You could probably save money on your electric bill, and you could probably help lower greenhouse gas emissions and all sorts of things that are generally good for the planet.  And you can probably do all this without any lifestyle changes or great expense.

No more four car trains at rush hour!

Don’t get me wrong, four car trains are great if they save a little energy at off-peak times.  But how can you use them on the Yellow line at rush hour?  The Yellow line, unlike the Orange line, actually has seats available most of the time.  But not this morning.  This morning, I was waiting as usual at Mount Vernon Square where the Green line dropped me, at my usual spot.  My usual spot is near the back end of the train, because that’s where the Columbia Heights escalator drops me, and I’ve never really had a need to move.  The end cars are usually empty compared to the rest of them.

This morning, the WMATA powers-that-be decided that they’d just skimp a little and send a four car train.  I have no idea why.  It’s quite possible they had a really good reason, but I frankly don’t care.  This means that everyone standing in front of where they expected cars five and six to be has to run down the platform and get onto the last car.  This makes it somewhat crowded.  The fourth car was full by the time a few people pushed on at Archives, but it didn’t get really bad until 300 clowns going to the Pentagon jumped on at L’Enfant Plaza.

I’ve been riding the Green and Yellow line since the end of March, and this is the first time been jammed into a train like this.  Yes, I realize I shouldn’t complain.  But when there is plenty of room on the train for five months, and then suddenly one day I have a sweaty Marine pressed into my back and a large shoulder bag pressed into my groin, someone is wearing really bad cologne, and people are making dumb “stuck in an elevator” jokes, then WMATA has failed.  Perhaps they were too busy playing with their new maps to notice.

But I notice.  And fear not, WMATA, I will continue to notice, and to complain.

Also, a note to people who pile on to an already full train at rush hour – there will be another train in six minutes or less.  Seriously.  You can wait.  You’re just going to work.

Is it just me?

Or is it hot outside? It’s not so bad now, but when I got home from work, there was a hot breeze blowing that made me want to move to San Fransisco.

It’s good to be back home, though. Vacation was nice, but the cat missed me.

And, if I ever get a reasonable internet connection at work, I’ll try to get back in the habit of posting regularly.  I know I’ve been a bad, bad blogger lately.

Away again

Starting tonight and continuing until next Tuesday night, I will have no internet access.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  I will have some internet access through AOL dial-up.  But that doesn’t really count, does it?

Anyway, I won’t be posting.  But I’ll be back next week.

New depths of nerd

Or maybe it’s new heights. I guess that depends on your point of view. I’ve been doing a little fooling around with some C++ with GCC. I’m doing a little baseball simulating, and it’s going well. If it continues to go well, I’ll eventually have a little executable that generates pages and pages of wonderful statistics that I can do all sorts of wonderful things with.

I realize I’m in a very small minority with my obsession with baseball statistics, but those of us here (And by ‘here’, I mean ‘In the crazy minority’) are really into it. The wife doesn’t really understand, but as long as I don’t sit here writing code and ignoring her while she’s talking, I think she’ll humor me.

I’m a little disappointed with Eclipse, however. It was slow, error messages were unhelpful, and code completion was iffy. And since code completion is one of the greatest things about an IDE, its absence is kind of a deal breaker.  It may be partly a function of my crappy computer, though.

So I’m currently coding in Gedit and doing command-line compiling. It’s fine so far, but I haven’t done anything really complicated.

Anyway, it’s fun.

Starbucks is fired

It’s bad enough that Starbucks coffee tastes burnt. I could get around that by ordering, on my wife’s recommendation, the mild instead of the regular. And I can get by the milkshakes passed off as coffee by just making fun of the people who order them (A good general rule – if it takes more than 5 words to order your coffee, not including “please” and “thank you”, you’re drinking a milkshake). I even got past the first price increase that sent the largest coffee over $2 when you include tax. But now the medium coffee is $2.02, less than six months after the last price increase.

I’m done. No more Starbucks coffee. Tomorrow I’ll bring in a coffee mug and start drinking free work coffee.

On an unrelated note, I’m testing out a WordPress tag plugin.  I don’t really know what it does, but this is the first post that has tags on it.  Maybe nothing will be visible to you.  Anyway, we’ll see.

More Wubi and Ubuntu

I’ve been doing some more playing with Ubuntu and Wubi. I got the wireless working Friday, and I haven’t booted up Windows since then. This is something holding back Ubuntu for the masses. It took me four tutorials and about a week to get connected to my wireless network. This isn’t so bad for me – I don’t mind messing around with things on the computer, and now I’ll appreciate the wireless connection even more. But I hesitate to put Ubuntu on my dad’s computer, for example. He’s a perfect candidate – Windows hater, older PC – but I don’t want to have to get things working for him every time he wants something new.

Anyway, I’m very happy with my new Ubuntu install.  And I don’t know how to write a wireless manager that just works.

I wonder if Dell has something.  They’re selling machines preloaded with Ubuntu now, and they must have come up against this by now.  Of course, if the Windows wireless manager that Dell put on my laptop is any indication, they probably just threw the first piece of junk they found in there and hoped that people would figure it out.

Hippies? I love hippies.

HIDE YOUR ARMS » Teetonic are a bunch of hippies

Teetonic is a t-shirt design competition website that has decided to go organic cotton. Not sure if they’re using the omnipresent American Apparel organic cotton shirts, but they’re using something. I like the American Apparel shirts because they’re cut skinny, and if I want to wear some of my favorite shirts, I have keep my weight down.

Im on a roll with the sports stuff

The Soul of Baseball: First Base: Albert Pujols

For instance, a scout friend of mine called a couple of days ago and said that Manny Ramirez is an “underrated defensive outfielder.” Now, first of all, this may be true, in that MannyBeingManny is rated as “Putrid” defensively, and he’s actually “Rancid,” and “Rancid” is better than “Putrid,” so that would make him underrated.

I have to admit that anyone making fun of Manny Ramirez playing the outfield is likely to get on my good side, like people making fun of Condi Rice or Nickelback.  But this is funny, and it gets better from the quote above.

You should go to Fleet Feet

If you need any sort of running gear, go to Fleet Feet. However, unless you really have to (And I know I linked to it), don’t go to their website. It resized my browser window, which is absolutely unacceptable.

However, the service at the store is fantastic. At the end of May I bought a new pair of running shoes. I’ve since put probably 40 miles on them. There is now a hole worn in the heel on the inside of the left shoe. This seems a little ridiculous.

So, I went to Fleet Feet, where they promptly exchanged the pair of shoes for a new one. I hope it was just a defective pair, because I really like the shoes. And I have weird, skinny, flat, bony feet. It’s really hard to find shoes that fit me.

Anyway, I have been very happy with my experience at Fleet Feet. I’ll definitely go back next time I need something. Just hopefully not for these shoes again.