Actually, Kermit, I think it is.

For quite a while, I've been concerned with reducing my energy consumption, for both economic and environmental reasons.  I've actually wanted to invest in a home energy generation system, but the upfront cost of doing so is rather prohibitive at the moment.

For the time being, however, I have done what I can to reduce my energy consumption.  I bought energy efficient compact fluorescent lights (insert side rant about cheaper CFLs' startup times and the still ridiculous cost of far superior LED lighting), turn off computers and other devices when they're not in use, and program my thermostats to lower the temperature in my house when I don't need it.

Several months ago, I learned of The Energy Detective, from Energy, Inc.  TED is basically nothing more than a electromagnetic induction transducer, the same type of ammeter used in any number of portable power meters, or the one the utility company has on the mains coming into a building, but like the power company's meter, TED is designed to measure usage of a whole house.  TED's receiver unit stores and displays long historical data, along with making estimates for future usage.  Their new model, the 5000 series, is also Internet connected.

Sarah decided to get me a TED 5000-C for Christmas, though due to a recent surge in popularity and an issue with their manufacturing, I didn't actually receive it until last week.  This model has three parts; the Gateway (the device that collects the data and connects to a home network), one Metering and Transmitting Unit (MTU), and one display unit (to display information without the need for a computer).

The MTU includes the clamp-on transducers that get installed inside the service panel.  For more complicated power systems (like those that generate power), up to 4 MTUs may be used in a single system, but my system doesn't need that (at least not yet).  Because it's not safe to put low voltage communication lines in the power service panel and a wireless transmitter wouldn't work through the grounded steel cage, the MTU sends its data using the home's power lines, in a similar manner to how many home automation systems work.  The MTU installation was pretty easy, with Sarah's help.

Once installed and turned on, it was simply a matter of plugging in the receiver and I was good to go, or so I thought.  Unfortunately, powerline communication systems are easily interfered with by switching power supplies, which, unfortunately, my house has many of.  A temporary move to a clean circuit (fixed later with a handy noise filter I picked up online) solved that problem.  All that was left to do was configure the software and it was all set.

After about a week of monitoring my power usage, I've learned a few things.  First, just how much power some of the large appliances in my house consume.  For example, my oven draws about 5 kilowatts (when the element is on), my range draws about 3 kilowatts _per burner_, my apparently very efficient refrigerator draws a measly 200 watts, and as I just learned while writing this, my clothes dryer uses a tremendous 5.5 kilowatts (or a little under $1 worth of electricity per hour).  On the other hand, I learned that I've already taken some good steps at making my home energy efficient, and there's really not all that much I can do to improve on it.

My base load (the amount of power used all the time by devices that are effectively never off) is about 430 watts.  This is a bit higher than the average home in the US, but this includes about 300 watts consumed by my 3 servers that live in my basement and all of the communication gear associated with them.  The remaining 130 watts is a combination of all of my electronic devices, constantly using power in "standby" mode, the various chargers that are always plugged in, and a few other things that are always on, like the recirculating pumps on the fish tank and the cat's water bowl, etc.  This figure is actually reasonably low, all things considered, and there's not really all that much I can do to reduce it.

So is the TED going to help me save power?  Well, probably not.  But it's still a pretty nifty gadget, and I like it.  And for some reason I wrote this five days ago and am just publishing it now.

Damnit.  The drop shadows on my images don't render properly in IE.  Damn you, IE, and your lack of standards compliance.

Woo!  I have successfully defeated updating my website.  The theme now works correctly and everything looks how I want it.  I still need to fix some stuff on the administration side, but as far as the appearance, it actually works correctly now.Yay!

I'm finally getting my website off of Drupal and onto Wordpress, like I've been meaning to do for months. Right now the content is copied over, but the site is still raw. Need to find a theme and customize stuff.

Edit: Sorry if my RSS feed is going all wacky.

Inspired by this, I've created another awesome flowchart...

Ugh, what a month...

The house became a ridiculous ordeal that I don't really want to go into again.  If you want some more info, take a look at my Facebook.  Long story short, we're still not closed (probably happening next week, maybe Wednesday), but we are moved in already, our stuff is there, mostly in boxes (after 5 days of being stuck on a moving van (not the mover's fault)), and life is slowly returning to normal.

Lessons learned: Bank of America sucks.  First Niagara does not suck.  Lawyers would probably suck less if they were more communicative.  Mabey's Moving and Storage KICKS ASS.  My Realtor also kicks ass.  Sleeping on an air mattress sucks.

Summary of lessons learned: Support local, independent businesses.

Shameless plug: My web hosting company is a local, independent business.

I've been ridiculously busy lately.  Like... way more busy than normal.  Why, you ask?  Because we're apparently buying a house!

Sarah and I had this reasonably well thought out plan regarding home ownership.  As it stands right now, Sarah's parents own our house, and we rent it from them.  A few months ago, we decided that we'd buy the house from them, since a mortgage on a house you live in is significantly cheaper than a mortgage on a rental property, and we thought we'd be eligible for the $8000 federal first time home-buyer tax credit.  A few weeks ago, however, we were looking at the paperwork, and determined that we wouldn't be able to get the tax credit, as properties purchased from close relatives are not permitted.

We did, however, get prequalified for a mortgage which had a very low interest rate.  We also noticed in our research that housing prices in the Capital District really haven't recovered from the downturn several years ago.  So this got us looking into the possibility of buying another, nicer home in a nicer area.  We'd planned to do this at some point anyway, but that was more of a 5 - 7 year plan.

After looking at a few houses, we decided to make an offer on one.  Unfortunately, on the day we'd set up to meet with the real estate agent to actually make the offer, we got a call saying that someone else had put in a cash offer with no contingencies the day before, which the owners accepted.  That was annoying, to say the least.  But we ended up putting in an offer on another house, which was accepted after a counter-offer.  So now we're in the fun process of finalizing mortgage stuff, inspections, appraisals, talking to movers, and all of that.  We're probably going to be moving in about a month.

So the next month will be ridiculous...  And then we'll have a new house.  Yay?

Some of you who know me well (especially those that have lived with me) know that I'm kind of anal-retentive about wires.  I hate them.  Stray wires drive me nuts.  If you look at photos of my desk at home or work, you'll see that they always have cables tucked away in cable runners on the underside of the desk, and I use wireless keyboards and mice.

So even though  I got a really nice home theater unit that does a reasonable neat  job of keeping wires out of sight, the mess that existed behind my subwoofer (where the power strip was) constantly bothered me, since it was visible from some angles.

I have found the solution, though.  I bought a blueLounge Design CableBox.  Yeah, I know, it's pretty much just a plastic box with some slots cut in the side...  Ok fine, it's just a box with slots cut in the side.  But it helps, damnit!

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After:

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I'm not crazy!

I just arrived back from what was probably the most insane trip I've ever taken.  Two friends and I decided that we'd make a trip to the Steam Railroading Institute's Train Festival 2009.  We also decided that to save money, we'd be taking this trip by car.

So Tuesday afternoon, I left my office in Albany, headed to Saugerties to grab my friend Rob, then headed down to New Jersey to get our friend Matt.  At Matt's place, we transferred our stuff into his 1992 Buick Roadmaster wagon (a.k.a. the Road Monster), and headed out.  After leaving New Jersey, we drove through the night across Pennsylvania and most of the way across Ohio, to a little town called Fostoria.

Fostoria is an interesting town.  And by interesting, I mean that it's probably one of the most awful places in the country to live.  There's pretty much nothing in the town, with the exception of the THREE double-track main lines that pass through it.  On an average day, Fostoria will see 100 or more trains pass through.  We arrived at 5:15 AM and stayed only 3 hours, but caught 18 trains passing through, including one made entirely of Triple Crown bimodal RoadRailer trailers, which I'd never seen before.

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The rest of Wednesday consisted of driving the rest of the way to Owosso, MI, where the festival was being held, finding our hotel in Flint, MI, and recovering from our ridiculously long drive.

Thursday morning, we got up at about 6:00, got dressed quickly, and headed back to Owosso.  After breakfast at Tim Horton's (why are there none of these around here!?), we went over to the station to get in line to board our excursion train, pulled by the Southern Pacific GS-4 #4449 "Northern", the only operating streamlined locomotive remaining anywhere in the world, which is painted in the SP's beautiful "Daylight" color scheme.  The weather was absolutely terrible while we were waiting to board, but as the train traveled to Alma, the skies brightened, and it turned out to be a rather nice day.  After a three hour layover in Alma, we got back on the train and headed back to Owosso, with a nice photo run-by in the middle.

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After arriving back in Owosso, we looked around outside the festival to see what else was there, but didn't go in, since there was only about half an hour left that day.  Running near the edge of the property was a 7.5" miniature railroad line, which had some neat equipment.  After leaving, we headed down to Durand, MI to see the old station there and see whatever trains we could.

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Friday morning, we headed out to Owosso again, this time to actually go to the festival.  In the yard, we saw the other 7 steam locomotives that were at the festival.  There were sister "Berkshire" 2-8-4 engines, Nickel Plate #765 and Perre Marquette #1225, three 0-4-0T tank engines, Flagg Coal #75, Little River Railroad #1, and Viscoe #6, the smallest 2-6-4 in the US, Little River Railroad #110, and the newest steam locomotive in the world, the hand-built near-perfect recreation of the circa 1860's Central Pacific #63 "Leviathan".

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Also at the festival were several model railroads, including an 'L'-gauge layout owned by the Michigan LEGO Users Group, who had their own version of the SP 4449.

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In the afternoon Friday, we drove up to Alma to chase the 4449 back to Owosso and get some nice pictures of it and its beautiful trainset in operation.

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Saturday, after checking out of the hotel and doing some shopping, we headed up to Alma again, this time to chase the train being pulled by the Nickel Plate #765.  This trip was supposed to be behind Perre Marquette #1225, but apparently one of its superheater pipes burst and it was unable to operate, so the 765 took over for it.

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And that was it.  We loaded back up into the Road Monster and set off to return home.  We made a quick detour to see Norfolk Southern's Bellevue, OH yard, and arrived back at Matt's at about 6 AM on Sunday.

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Tuesday was fun.  In that not fun way.  After getting home from the ballet, I found my home network to be... less than functional.  After some prodding at various things, I determined that my firewall's hard drive had given up the ghost.  Of course, the machine that I set up the longest time ago and had absolutely no backup of.  Of course.

After several hours of trying to convince the drive to work so I could extract my precious configuration files, I determined that it was a lost cause and went to bed, still with no home network.

A little background...  My home network is pretty sophisticated.  Different machines at home are connected to different subnets, with specific rules regarding how traffic can flow between them.  I have traffic shaping, quality of service, authentication and access control (though I got rid of that recently as it was more annoying than it was worth), and even fully deployed, fully routable IPv6.  You can't do most of this stuff with a $40 Linksys box you pick up at Best Buy.  No, you need to spend several hundred or thousand dollars to buy enterprise-grade equipment from the likes of Cisco, Checkpoint, or Juniper.  Or... you can spend absolutely nothing and do it all with open source software, if you know how (plus the cost of the hardware, but honestly, who doesn't have at least one old computer lying around somewhere).  My home network was built around my firewall, a PC I built several years ago (and had consequently evolved from one piece of otherwise discarded hardware to the next), and ran the FreeBSD operating system.

So fast forward back to Tuesday.  Because my firewall ran on conventional PC hardware and ran a PC operating system, without a hard drive, it was... pretty useless.  I contemplated taking one of the other hard drives I had laying around the house and rebuilding the machine the way it was, but it occurred to me that I built that machine at least 5 or 6 years ago, and had basically done nothing to it in the interim.  To set it up again, I'd have to look up everything that I did, learn it again, and hope that I get it all right.  And this process would take, well, much longer than I wanted to dedicate to fixing a computer.

A few years ago, I'd heard of a project called m0n0wall, a firewall/router distribution built on FreeBSD, designed to run on x86-based embedded hardware systems, but can also run on most generic PC hardware.  Doing a little more research, I determined that m0n0wall provides all of the functionality I want, in supposedly an easy to use package.  Even better, you can apparently use it on a system that doesn't even have a hard drive.  It can be run from a CD (and store its configuration file on a floppy disk or USB flash drive), or from a compact flash card (which only needs to be 32 MiB).  I chose the CD route, and downloaded the 17 MiB ISO and wrote it to a disc.

I have to say, I am very impressed with this distro.  After booting the machine using the new CD, I had everything, and I mean EVERYTHING I wanted set up in about half an hour.  If my network wasn't so complicated, I could have had it all done in under 10 minutes, but it took me a while to get all of the firewall rules set up, and to configure my IPv6 tunnel (insert side rant about not being able to get IPv6 transit from any residential ISPs in the US).

So now everything is back to the way it was.  And I did make a backup of my configuration file, just in case.  Woo.

And as always, bonus points for picking out the title reference.

So the day finally came.  Yesterday, the Palm Pre, announced in January by Palm at the Consumer Electronics Show, finally went on sale.  This device is supposed to be Palm's savior, helping right the company after years of declining sales.  It may also provide the support to Sprint that it desperately needs, as the telecom provider has been hemorrhaging customers as of late.

Following somewhat significant hype, and apparently some manufacturing issues, it became obvious that in order to acquire a Pre at or near launch date, getting to a store very early was required.  Despite the repeated suggestions of insanity from our family, friends, and colleagues, Sarah and I woke up at 4:30 yesterday morning, threw on some clothes, and headed over to the Sprint Store at Mohawk Commons in Niskayuna, NY.  We arrived at just about 5 AM, to be greeted by another couple that was apparently there since 10 PM the previous day.

In the three hours prior to the store's opening, additional customers arrived, and by 8, a total of 10 people were in line.  The store opened promptly at 8, and we were ushered in by the rather excited Sprint employees.  The in-store process went very smoothly.  The only minor issue was that the salesperson accidentally swapped our phones, so we ended up having to go through the setup process twice.  No big deal.  After an hour in the store, we left with our phones, very happy.  I also left with a leather holster-style pouch, and Sarah got a Touchstone.  Although the phone was finally on sale, the employees were still not permitted to tell us how many units they actually had, though everyone that was in line did appear to get one before I left.

After leaving the store, a large portion of the remainder of my day was spent playing with my new gadget.  I was just about to call the Pre a phone, but that moniker is becoming increasingly inaccurate.  Yes, this device functions as a cellular telephone, and does so apparently better than the other two "smartphones" I've owned, but calling it a phone is a misnomer.  This, like most other smartphones, is much more than a phone, and I agree that we need to come up with a more appropriate name.

My initial impressions are somewhat mixed, but generally positive.  There are many areas that make this by far the best mobile device I've ever used, but there are definitely still others that require further work.

As other reviews have stated, the build quality is good, but not as good as I'd hope.  It's not quite as sturdy as I'd like.  The physical appearance of the phone is stunning... if it's clean.  That's a pretty big if.  The high-gloss plastic exterior smudges extremely easily.  The inductive charging back plate that comes with the Touchstone is rubberized, like the exterior shell of my previous Palm Treo 800w.  I'd actually consider getting the Touchstone only to get that replacement back, since it doesn't show all of my greasy fingerprints.

The physical size and shape is great.  The phone feels great in my hands.  It's compact, light, and the curved shape just feels... right.  I'm not sure I can properly convey this.  It's obvious that the physical design was carefully considered.  It really doesn't feel like you're holding a block of plastic and metal.  It feels like you're holding something that was meant to be in your hand.

I'm not totally sold on the keyboard yet.  The keyboard is similar to the keyboards on the Centro and Treo Pro.  I was hoping it would be more like the keyboard on my Treo 800w.  The keys are the same physical size, but whatever it is they're made out of has a tacky feel, which I suppose I'm just not used to.  Since the keyboard is recessed into the shell, I find the top row of keys a little difficult to type on, even though I don't have very large fingers.  I hope that this is something I will grow to get used to.  I also hope that as the keyboard wears in, it will require less force to depress the keys, as they are a little stiff for my tastes right now.

The screen on the Pre is great.  It's bright, vivid, and very, very sharp.  Even small text is extremely readable, and photos look fantastic.  Without having one side-by-side to compare against, I'd say that the Pre's screen is at least as good as the iPhone's.

There are a bunch of other subtle little things that are really fantastic about the Pre hardware as well.  For example, there's a proximity detector near the earpiece.  When in a call, the proximity sensor activates, and when you bring the phone to your face, the touchscreen locks so you don't hang up on your caller by bumping the phone into your cheek, and the screen turns off, so it's not just pointlessly shining at the side of your head.

As nice as the hardware is, it's the software that really makes the Pre shine.  As good as Palm's previous offerings were from a hardware point-of-view (and they were, for the most part, great hardware), they were all held back by their software.  PalmOS was designed in 1996, and while it was great at the time, never really changed all that much.  The user interface had nearly exactly the same look-and-feel in 2007 as it did in 1996.  This had become blatantly obvious to Palm, which I'm sure is that convinced them to start offering their products with Windows Mobile in 2006.  In my opinion, this decision wasn't great for them either, as it took their phones and simply lumped them together with the seeming endless supply of mediocre smartphones that all ran the not-very-awe-inspring operating system.

webOS changes all of that for Palm.  It's fresh, modern, and is truly ready for "now".  The look and feel is as good or better than the iPhone's operating system in many places, but still has a few rough edges here and there.  The most widely touted feature, Synergy, is a major step forward in data management.  Simply enter in account information, and bang, all of your information is right there, right in one place.  Contact, calendars... everything.  The only problem with this is that by everything, I truly mean everything.  Every Gmail account, Facebook friend, everything.  There's no way to filter who and what gets in and what doesn't.  There really needs to be filtering here.  Just because I know someone and have them listed as a friend on Facebook, I don't need their account showing up in my contacts list on my Pre.  And I especially don't need their record there if all that their profile allows me to see is their birthday or other useless piece of information.  Filtering of contacts definitely needs to be added.

My other big complaint about the software (possibly bigger than my complaint about Synergy) is Universal Search.  Universal Search isn't nearly as universal as it needs to be.  The lack of searching in calendars and email is big.  Right now, finding the message or appointment you're looking for requires manually scrolling through your Inbox or calendar.  Not good.  If I want to find out when I scheduled that doctor's appointment, or the confirmation email from the concert tickets I ordered, I don't want to go thumbing through months of calendar lists or hundreds of emails.  Calendar and email searching (while not fast) was there in Palm OS and Windows Mobile.  This functionality is absolutely necessary, and right now is a big stumbling block for the platform.  I sincerely hope that this is added in a software update, and soon.

Also a side note...  Palm, get the webOS SDK out the door.  NOW.  Downloadable apps are what really makes the iPhone.  Apple's iTunes App Store has something on the order of FORTY THOUSAND apps available in it (yeah, most are junk, but that's not my point).  Palm's App Catalog has eighteen.  Developers are desperately trying to develop more apps for this fantastic platform, but without that SDK they can't.  A lack of app availability could cripple the webOS platform before it's even fully out the door.

Those issues aside, this is a great device, and it's a great platform in general.  I think it has the potential to bring Palm out of this slump they've been in, and if Sprint can keep it exclusive for long enough, it can help them out as well.  So... let's see.

I do, however, know when I'll be back again... Saturday.

Sarah and I are leaving for NJ tonight so we can get up at ass-o'clock tomorrow morning to go to Newark Airport and fly to Houston for our friend's wedding.  Oh, the joys of flying.  And airport security.  How I love both of those things so much.

I finally found out that the long awaited (by me, at least) Palm Pre is finally being released on June 6th.  I'm probably going to go to the local Sprint Store like an hour before it opens.  Yes, I'm crazy.  I don't care.  I want this phone and don't want to not get one because it's sold out.  And actually, I need to get two, since Sarah wants one as well.

My web hosting business is definitely in the black now, since I moved to a new datacenter that's cheaper than my old one, though I'm still dealing with a few annoying issues related to that move.  Hopefully they'll be ironed out in the next few days.

Nothing else interesting to report right now.

I just got the most awesome email from Twitter.

Hi, staypuft.
Peter Venkman (PeterVenkmanPhD) is now following your updates on Twitter.

After some thought, Sarah and I have decided that we were spending entirely too much money on services from Time Warner.  Our bill from them tops $160/mo, for digital cable TV (with two boxes), home phone service, internet access, and home security monitoring.  Now, internet access is a necessity, and the security monitoring gives us peace of mind...  But the TV and phone... well...

I looked at what we usually watch on TV, and the vast majority of it is on the broadcast networks.  The small amount of remaining programming we can live without, certainly at a savings of $50/mo or more.  So as an experiment, I drove over to the local Radio Shack and picked up an antenna to see how well it would work.  Turns out, it works great.  I get all the broadcast networks in perfect HD (actually higher bitrate than I was getting over cable), plus all the silly sub-channels.  I ran a cable from the antenna to the HD tuner card in the MythTV box, and all appears to be well.  Only minor issue is that I only have one HD tuner in the MythTV box, so I could only record one show at a time, but that's easily remedied with the second card I ordered (due to arrive today).  Cost: $20 for the antenna (though I might need to exchange it for a more expensive model), and $50 for the additional card for the MythTV box.  Savings: about $50/mo.

So then there's the phone, which is a little more tricky.  The home phone service costs us $40/mo.  Sarah and I both have cellphones that have a ludicrous number of extra minutes every month, in addition to the fact that we're usually only home at night when minutes are unlimited anyway.  But... the home security system ties into the phone, and because of the location/construction of the house, the cell phones don't work as well as I'd like inside.  Problem 1 is solved with a cell modem for the security system that the security people sell.  Problem 2 actually has a cooler solution.  Sprint now sells a device called Airave, made by Samsung.  It's a femtocell.  Basically, it hooks up to your internet connection and acts as your own private cell tower.  So I picked one up and tried it out, and it seems to work great.  Calls are now perfectly clear.  Cost: $100 for the cell modem for the security plus $12 extra per month for service, and $100 for the Airave plus $5 extra per month (yeah, I'm slightly annoyed that I need to pay to improve Sprint's network for them).  Savings: about $23/mo.

So in total, this experiment will cost $270 up front, but will save us somewhere on the order of $80/mo.  So after 4 months, we'll make up the initial cost and will be saving a decent amount of money.  Not too shabby.

We're back from Canada.  The weather wasn't great, but it was a good trip.  I haven't finished processing all of my photos yet, but here's a sample...  This is the view out our hotel window in Niagara Falls...

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(you obviously need to look at the full-size image)