/life/metrics/Is Your Refrigerator Running?
Why yes, it is!
Not only that, but Between January 18th at 12:10 and the 31st at 13:00, it used 32.39kWh, or about a buck fifty of electricity. That's an average about 103 watts. Unfortunately this period was biased by a brief period (12 hours? We're not sure) where the volume of groceries in the freezer exceeded its capacity and it ran non-stop.
When running, it consumes about 236 watts. Assuming this value is fairly steady (it's an old fridge, so I imagine it occupies only two states in the on-off spectrum), it's on about 44% of the time.
Our last electricity bill was 1183kWh over 66 days, an average of 747 watts, so the fridge uses about 14% of our power. Except that measurement problem listed above, but I think that should be relatively small.
Another way of looking at this is that it's about 900kWh per year, or 75kWh per month; the sticker inside says 110kWh per month, so it's actually over-performing, which is surprising. Perhaps it's rated against a higher indoor temperature than we keep.
A quick perusal of Future Shop's refrigerator selection shows that modern fridges seem to be rated between 400 and 480 kWh/year. That's 40kWh/month at the most. So, assuming those numbers are accurate, we'd save 35kWh/mo, or about two bucks. At that blistering pace, the fridge would pay off in about 16 years.
I'll have to take the same measurement in the summer, when things are a little less refrigerator-friendly round here.
New Albums from the Gallery
/life/sabbatical/My First Day On The Job
Today, I woke up early, and awake. I had breakfast, saw Clare off for the day, and started...
..wait, where's all my email? I've started the day for the last 3 or so years reading anywhere between one and a bazillion hours' worth of email. And it's gone. It's like a free hour in my day. Along with the other 8 hours that are also now free.
After I didn't read my email, I proceeded to not go to work. Admittedly, this wasn't my most productive morning -- I spent it getting my address book in order. I'm quite happy to have time to do this sort of thing. I'd like to write Christmas cards this year, since I got enough last year that I can't really continue with this laissez-faire approach. But, to send Christmas cards, I need two things: A list of people to send them to, and those people's addresses. I've decided to build the list based on frequency of flattering blog comments, so get your considered thoughts in below.
I'm sitting in a Quizno's sub place. That wasn't my plan -- I was supposed to be at Chris Tindal's campaign office helping them set up. On my way, I went to file for a new passport, so I can go to New York sometime soon. Turns out that takes like an hour and a half -- twenty minutes in a pre-queue, then being told to go to Quizno's an come back in an hour. Who am I to disobey the fascist passport office people? ("Excuse me ma'am, please step outside or turn off your phone." "Excuse me sir, please don't use that perfectly good pen right now; it's attached to a desk that nobody is at, and your use of idle resources offends us.")
Tonight I have my first day of my media course. I hope it's good. The first lecture in the Friday Lecture Series was about the evolution of man. You'd think that would be a fascinating subject, and it was when I read about it in Guns, Germs and Steel. The audience was mostly older folks, and the lecture was very accessible. Which is obviously good, bt I coulda dealt with something more meaty as it were. Hopefully further lectures are better.
It's almost time for me to go back to passportlandia. Hopefully they didn't lie to me about how long I could go away for.
/life/sabbatical/The First Day of the Rest of My Leave
Today was the first day. Of course, it's a Saturday, and so it felt like any other Saturday. Presumably Monday will be rather more distinctive.
Last night I went out for pints with my office cohorts, and had a good time. After that, Clare and I went to Steamwhistle Unsigned and saw some live music. Some of the bands were okay, but overall I wasn't a fan of the music. It was a cool venue, though.
I had my minor "oh man, what have I set in motion?" freakout on Thursday, but it passed quickly. I dealt with it by writing a giant list of things to do on Monday. Normally when one writes a list, the goal is to keep it reasonable, and perhaps try and have it be feasible to accomplish it all -- in the case I wanted the opposite: a big list of things to make sure I couldn't possibly get them done, so I knew this whole thing wasn't a mistake. Fortunately such a list wasn't hard to come up with.
At work, we divide things up into quarters, and set objectives on a quarter-long timeline. I've decided I'll do the same, and so I also started figuring out what those things might be -- life stuff, like going to the dentist for the first time in a while and cooking some new things; learning stuff, like my courses, and reading; and of course the more focused stuff like Green Party participation, and that sort of thing.
I bought a new laptop today -- a mid-range Macbook -- since I don't actually own any computer right now. I've been using my work laptop for quite a while. It's kinda nice to have my own computer again.
So, not hugely eventful. I'll post my quarterly objectives sometime soon, for comment. And maybe I'll even take it all the way, and score them and take feeback on that, too.
/life/sabbatical/T minus Five
sabbatical year, n.
- A leave of absence, often with pay, usually granted every seventh year, as to a college professor, for travel, research, or rest.
- often Sabbatical year A year during which land remained fallow, observed every seven years by the ancient Jews.
Neither are my fields lying fallow, nor is my leave a full year, (nor am I getting paid!) but I've decided to call it a sabbatical -- at least for the purposes of categorizing blog entries. It's the best word available, I think.
I have five more working days, so you'd assume that I have a detailed action plan ready to go! Woo hoo!
Kinda, yeah.
I've gotten my teeth into the Green Party of Canada -- I'm on the executive of the Trinity-Spadina Electoral District Association. It's a pretty interesting group of people coming from a pretty mixed set of political backgrounds and such. The riding (constituency) next door has a by-election on March 17th, so I'm going to be helping go door to door for that. It should be interesting, although the roll is somewhat reduced from what you might imagine. We're expected to try to avoid policy debates with potential voters, both to provide a consistent message, and to avoid getting slowed down by malicious questioners who are interested only in wasting your time. These seem like reasonable tactics, but will make things a little less exciting.
I'm also working on a WTO transparency project. The WTO has many off-the-record "informal" meetings, where much of the actual negotiating action takes place. A friend of mine did some research-assistant work tracking these meetings, and I'm working on a mashup that plots these meetings over time, shows participating countries on a map, etc. It's pretty interesting -- both learning about the inner workings of the WTO and various trade negotiations, and using some of Google's technologies from outside rather than inside.
I'm taking a course on Working With The Media and a weekly Lecture Series at the University of Toronto.
I hope to step up my Hapkido, which I'm really enjoying, and starting to actually get better at. I aim for three times a week right now, but usually only make two -- hopefully on leave (errr, sabbatical) I'll make it to three.
I have a big stack of books to read, and I hope to try to read some of the IPCC report, as well as the Stern Report. It's not quite first principles, but it's closer than I've gotten so far.
Finally, I'm looking into some other environmental organizations in Toronto. It's hard to figure out what's a good fit, in terms of where I can make a difference, where I'll agree with the approach, and in general avoiding super-squishy fluffy environmentalism, which I have a hard time with.
So, that's my plan. I hope that after six months, I'll feel like I've gotten my foot into all this stuff; my current thinking is that this is essentially a boot-strapping exercise, where if I invest a bunch of time and effort now, it will enable me to pursue this same stuff part-time while maintaining a reasonably high impact, since I'll have learned a bunch of the ropes and the background information.
Five workdays from now, we'll start to find out just how well I can actually motivate myself to get up and do stuff without three hundred emails waiting to be read and a zillion small tasks to be organized at work. Hopefully I won't disappoint myself.
/life/No Repeat Movies
Last night I accidentally watched Paycheck. Again.
I didn't remember it until it was too late and I was hooked into the cheesy detective/MacGuyver plot line, and then proceeded to waste two hours watching a crappy movie I'd already seen. So I decided I'm going to spend two months where I won't see any movies I've already seen. I imagine I repeat-see a movie about once or twice a month, so I should get about six hours back. 6 hours / (2 months * 60 days/month * 24 hours/day) = 0.42% of my time recovered by not watching crap a second time around. Woohoo!
