Pollywogs!

Don’t they know that if they have a post-surge redeployment, the terrorists have won???

“Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Mr. Bush’s strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Mr. Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.”

Al Qaeda has evidently infiltrated our government. Now, Republican senators are joining the terrorist ranks themselves…how much longer before the President himself betrays mein führer, the exalted Dick Cheney himself?

‘Officials describe the meetings as more of a running discussion than an argument. They say that no one is clinging to a stay-the-course position but that instead aides are trying to game out what might happen if the president becomes more specific about the start and the shape of what the White House is calling a “post-surge redeployment.”’

THAT IS COMPLETELY FUCKING ABSURD! Of COURSE we have to ‘stay-the-course‘!!! The president and mein führer have both time and time again repeated that if we don’t stay the course, the terrorists have won.

I guess it is nearly time for them to bring out the last gag in their bag of tricks.

Praise baby Jesus…

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No. Let’s go into Iraq, mess it up AS MUCH AS WE CAN, build a bunch of gigantic bases, award billions in contracts to private companies run by our buddies and political contributors, and then try to distract the public from the fact that we just donkey punched both the Iraqi and US citizens for our own pathetic short term gain.  Excuse me, I just minivomited…

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COMPLETELY unrelated, here is a picture of a massive roundabout…

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t know which one of us is the antichrist…

For an amusing temporary distraction, click the amusing picture of the head chimp and read the amusing (satirical?) distraction…distraction…

Gotta keep your eye on the ball…as big or small as that ball may be…it’s not hard at all. In fact, it’s quite obvious to see that the dream, well, it dreams me…

To put it another way, right now existence is being led by those with the biggest dream. Those with power and ‘control’, but most importantly a vision and a goal. Those so very few.

Odd that common sense and popular realization can’t manage to climb over that most minor of speedbumps in the inevitable march of domesticated civilization…well, civilization as we imagine it will be, I guess…we’ll never let me down!

As you may/may not know, I’m stark raving mad. One of the things that catch my fancy is energy efficiency. I used to get a wierd kick out of logging the kWh on our meter each day and compare the readings with how we used our household devices.

Kicking this up a notch towards OCD, I recently purchased a Kill-a-watt. A Kill-a-watt is a small device that plugs in-line between your electric outlet and a device, up to something like 120VAC/15A (ie pretty much anything that can go into a standard outlet). It reads current draw down to an amazingly small level, and also performs quite a number of calculations, most interesting to me being the watt consumption of the device (I’d really like to be able to dial in my cost per kW and have it show how much it costs to run devices, but my spreadsheet works alright I guess, more on that later).

So, whereas before I had a rough guess as to why our electric bill has blossomed from $50 a month to $100 a month while the cost for electricity has stayed fairly stable around $0.10/kWh…now I can nail that shit down like a butterfly collector, closely and precisely examining each and every electric device at my leisure.

What I found was pretty close in line to what I calculated via the help of the new and improved PP&L website’s learning center:

That takes some pretty liberal guesses, and likely isn’t balanced correctly although the end result is nearly correct.

I’ve taken things like the pond pump and figured I run the 300W device 2/3 of the year, therefore the average draw per hour is 200W, etc etc. The pond pump is getting replaced with a 40 watt unit which moves half the water at 800GPH (and at $60 will pay for itself before the end of the summer in lower electric bills).

Big surprise was my fucking computer, sucking down over $20 of cash a month. The main problem is that I’m running Folding@Home on it, which bumps up the draw from a standby of around 75-100W up to nearly 300W. I’m running a version which takes advantage of my ATI x1950 Pro video card’s typically untapped calculation capability. Between the CPU and the video card, the system burns like a pile of lightbulbs. As much as I like the idea of helping FAH, I like the idea of cutting that down to $5 a month a lot better, so I’m going to put the comp into standby for the 18 hours of the day I’m not using it, where it is just keeping the memory powered up at about 10 watts (S3 standby mode).

I put a timer on the air filter to cut the run time down to an automatic 4 hours a day while we aren’t there. It is AMAZING how much electricity something uses when it runs 24/7. Same goes for our ceiling fans, I thought they used so little electricity that they were irrelevant and you could just leave them on all the time…80 watts x 24 hours x 365 days a year ends up being a pile of power…now everything is getting turned off when we leave the room…

Finally, the hot water heater has a timer on it which I installed a couple years ago. I can set a number of daily stages up on it, I think I’ll measure the instant draw (the watts per hour) with an ammeter and ‘decide’ how much I want to spend per month on hot water. I’m thinking around $10 a month at the moment, but we’ll see how I feel after my first cold shower. To help reduce the chance of a cold shower, I purchased an ultra low flow shower head, which we both have found is surprisingly adequate. Basically, with the timer and the instant draw, I can take the 1500 watts or whatever it draws, multiply that by the hours per day I’ll let it run (currently set from 5-6PM and 8-9PM), multiply that by 30 days per month, divide by 1000 (as there are 1000 watts in each kilowatt), and finally multiply that by the price per kilowatt of $0.10 per kWh.

Instead of doing this the long way, baby jesus came down from heaven and personally instructed me to create a spreadsheet, which you saw above. I’m still running the Kill A Watt on devices and making sure the guesses are in line with reality, so far things have been looking pretty good. For example, with the help of the PPL website, I guestimated our fridge draws 1.8 kWh per day, and lo and behold the Kill A Watt reported 1.80-something this morning after 24 hours of monitoring. I may run a second day just to get a better grasp on the average, but looks pretty darn close.

Below is an ‘in progress’ estimate of how I’d like the bill to look after some tweaking.

Here is the Power Usage Calculator if you’d like to play around yourself.

The end result of all of this was to see how much it would cost to install a photovoltaic / wind renewable system to help offset or eliminate our electric bill. By taking a couple minor and easy steps, I’m getting closer to a 2.5kWh photovoltaic system being a viable energy choice.

Like in all things, here is the obligatory statement where I promise to update and continue this topic at some later date. Hah! Go see Mozart and the Whale, I found it to be a very nice movie.

Camped down at the creek with some friends this weekend, very glad they thought of it as it was a perfect weekend for hanging out outside, drinking beer and cooking food over a campfire. Except for the birds at 7am. I kid you not, it sounded like there were 150 birds within a 500 foot radius and they were all trying to be louder than the bird next to them…