The Mandelbear's Musings

A pretty good day, mostly spent puttering. Colleen needed to buy some fabric and patterns, so we went to Jo-Ann's and added a drive and a trip to Ross. I was sorely tempted by some very lightweight luggage, but had doubts about its durability. We did re-arrange Colleen's scooter bags, moving the black-and-purple shoulder bag to the front, and moving her supplies to the purple SwissGear mini-duffel in back (where they'll be much more accessible).

I also moved the folding cup-holder from her cane (where it wasn't particularly useful) to her scooter.

I spent much of the evening sitting out in the living room with Colleen, watching the news and cleaning out my netbook so I can give it to the Wolfling. I inadvertently deleted more than I intended, but no harm done: I just restored the deleted config files from git and my home directory on the fileserver.

Thinking about my experiences in junior high seems to raise my anxiety level. A lot. It wasn't exactly a geek-friendly environment. Or maybe it's anger; I got a similar reaction from Police officer pepper-sprays seated, non-violent students at UC Davis

More links down in the notes.

Yesterday's main event, besides getting the shell script that I've been working on working, was a power outage at home. Wherein I discovered that the external disk on the router was what kept it from coming back promptly when the power finally came back.

It's less obvious why the net connection went out immediately instead of waiting for the UPS to time out; I suspect that a power strip isn't on the UPS that I think it's on. Growf.

An amusing link: How long until Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent?

Want to bet that, a year from now, IE has dipped well below 50 percent, and Chrome (including native Android browsing) sits around 20 percent, with Apple products not too far behind? I'd even venture a guess that IE6 will still be gunning at 10 percent or more. Old habits -- and old proprietary systems -- die hard.

In all, a pretty good day. Even managed a short walk.

The two things on the schedule yesterday were working on taxes, and acquiring a new UPS to replace the one whose battery died on Friday. The taxes aren't done yet, but I did get most of it entered. At this point only dividends and deductions remain. The Schedules C were easier than I expected, thanks to better tagging during the data-entry phase. I'm still running late, though.

I picked up the UPS, an APC BX1500G, at Fry's on the way home from taking the YD to her modeling class. It's taller and narrower than the older 1500's; I put it in the bedroom because it has an explicit mute button; it also has more outlets, which allowed me to replace the old power strip as well. It just barely fits on the shelf, though; I may want to move it to the floor. It also has a master-slave arrangement that allows something like a computer to control power to other devices like monitors. I'd really like that for the desktop, at some point.

The fileserver now has 170min of runtime, up from 11. Whee!

I appear to have no more serial-port UPSs in service; even the little 320VA unit by the phones is USB connected.

How to be Happy (the free e-book from 17000 Days that I finished yesterday) has a section on flow, starting p. 51. It points out that happiness comes after the flow state; while you're in flow you're totally absorbed in what you're doing. Wow, does that ever resonate! Especially with this last week at work. C.f. "The Little Computing Machine".

Several excellent links up there in the notes.

There was a power outage yesterday evening at the Starport; no harm done, but it triggered some thoughts. Here's the raw data:

  : UPS battery life on nova is under 15min.  That's miserable.  
    stargate:  107min,  5.0% of 865W = 44W  (includes DSL router, switches) 
    nova:       13min, 16.9% of 260W = 44W  Oh.  (varies down to 33)
    trantor:	70min,  9.0% of 780W = 70W
    CPAP rated at 48W, but hopefully uses less -> 30 open; 6 idle  Eeep!  
      That's maybe 3h on its XS1500 UPS.  The alarm had better wake me up!

Ok, so there are two obvious problems here. The first is that Nova, the fileserver, has a miserable uptime. That's not so bad, since the network is perfectly usable without it as long as all you want to do is surf. The other is that my CPAP, which is on the same kind of UPS as stargate (the router) has a much higher power consumption than I thought. The battery wouldn't last the night. Which means that I would probably die in my sleep if the power went out. Not so good.

There are two less obvious problems: Nova's disk took over an hour to fsck. That's a long time to boot, but not not too bad because, as I mentioned, the file server isn't all that essential in the short term. What's more of a problem is the backup drive on stargate. I really don't want my router taking half an hour to boot.

I also discovered that my wireless phone base station is on its own UPS, a 500VA APC that beeps when the power goes out. One of the thing I really like about the XS series is that you can turn the power-fail alarm off. Great in the office. Not so great for the CPAP!

So the current plan is to move the bedroom UPS into the office for Nova, and for the short term move Nova's SmartUPS 420 into the bedroom. Because it beeps. Eventually I'll want something bigger.

I also want to put the big partitions on a once-a-week unmount / fsck / remount routine. Easy. Along with that I want to move the router to a 2.25" drive (which I just happen to have sitting around) for lower power consumption. (I'd rather move the router to a solid-state drive and make the laptop drive external. But that will have to wait.)

ETA: I just found a stack of unpaid bills including this month's energy bill -- 28.2KWh/day, as opposed to 35.1 last year, so a little under a 20% improvement. (The gas bill was 63% more, but we won't go into that. yet.)

ETA: (0403) Actual measurement on the CPAP shows that it uses between 6 and 12 W in normal operation, so the XS1500 will keep it running all night, barely. That's encouraging. May keep things as they are for a while.

Sunday was good. Not productive, but good -- Colleen and I went up to San Francisco for the Lamplighters' production of Trial By Jury and a condensed version of Gilbert's play Engaged. Trial was unmitigated fun -- pure musical fluff. Engaged was... mostly amusing, but my vicarious embarrassment kicked in at a couple of points. It was raining hard on the way home, and I had a nasty skid coming down the offramp onto Woodside Road -- we had dinner at Buck's.

Oh, yeah; Sunday was my 64^th birthday. I didn't notice any hill.

Monday was also very unproductive, without most of the good part; I slept late, and spent the day at work mostly catching up. Some progress, but not as much as I needed. And there was a power failure at home that, for some weird reason, knocked out our WiFi router. Which had also been serving as the gigabit switch, ever since my 8-port switch croaked last year. Fortunately, all the router needed was a very hard (30-30-30) reset to factory settings and a reconfigure.

I think I'll abandon my idea of making the Netgear our main router -- I want the power saving, but not at the expense of an hour's worth of fiddling every time the power goes out. The routers stayed up for 50 minutes on UPS; that's pretty good. The fileserver only stayed up for 30 (it's on a separate, smaller UPS); that's probably ok.

Links, as usual, under the cut.

The year's second utility bill wasn't quite as impressive as the first in terms of gas, but electricity usage continued to improve. I am now under 300% of baseline, which puts my marginal rate at $0.28, down from $0.40.

    Gas:  this year: 4.3 therms/day	  last year: 4.9
    Elec: this year: 24.5 KWh/day	  last year: 33.7

So on the whole I'm still pretty happy about the household's power consumption.

My latest power bill is $100 less than it was in August. Of course, some of that reduction is due to the switch from air conditioning to gas heating. The more significant number is the comparison to October of last year: 747 KWH vs, 1080 last year, 26.7 KWH/day vs. 38.6. Only 62KWH were charged at the top rate of $.40.

This may still be partly illusory -- it's possible that my meter gets read only every other month, which would mean that this is partly compensating for an overestimate in September. We'll see how it settles out. But it's still significant.

62KWH at the top rate is a full-time load of 8.6W. One hard drive 86W. *eyes the router/gateway server dubiously*

Some progress has been made on saving power.

Nova, the fileserver, is now using 13% of 260W = 33W, down from 54. That's about $70/year; I was hoping for more.

Trantor, the desktop, is using 9% of 708W = 63W, down from 93. That's more like it: 30W=$105/year savings. Total saving on the swap: 50W=$175/year; total spent so far, $90. Getting the new desktop configured is a non-trivial undertaking, but that part needed to be done anyway because Dorsai's disk was dying. Turning the desktop off when I'm not using it will probably save an additional 50% or so.

I measured the power usage of the living room TV: 2.2W idling, and 37W when running. It's not on full-time, either, so switching to an LCD wouldn't be worthwhile unless I can get a really good deal on one.

The LED therapy light I got used for $25 is only on for an hour or so in the morning; what it really does is free up a full-spectrum floor lamp for someplace else in the house.

Probably the biggest further savings I could make with computers would be using the wireless router as my main firewall. Actually I could probably get a lot of that by going to a solid-state disk. Hmm.

There was a brief power glitch this morning; the Bay Area is in the middle of what's predicted to be a three- or four-day storm. UPSs carried the household servers and my workstation through it with no problems, but I need to make sure the kids have UPSs. The recording box is on a UPS but seems to have croaked anyway -- I see a trip to Fry's in my immediate future.

The chumby simply turned off and had to be restarted using its power button, making it clearly unsuitable for use as an alarm clock (though there's almost certainly an auto-restart hardware hack for it). I need a UPS for the CPAP, too. Last thing I need is to wake up in the middle of the night with a dead facehugger gripping my nose.

Oddly, I've noticed that some (all?) LCD monitors turn themselves on after a power glitch even if they'd been turned off.

10:00 Terrific. The most recent power glitch seems to have knocked out my DSL connection. The old connection, which I never got around to getting rid of (because I'm still using it for email), is still working, but it's slow and just barely usable. Knew I should have bought into the Meraki mesh network...

11:20 Dumb bear. The recording box died because it was plugged into the surge protector side of the UPS, not the "surge protector + battery" side. Figures. There was stuff blocking my view of the labels, but still...

Had a power failure at home today -- some idiot ran into a power pole, most likely. Fried lisa_marli's husband's computer, a block away from us, but we were fine. There are two of the cheap Windows boxen that are not (yet) on APC UPSs, (one ancient Tripplite supply just up and croaked, and the one in the Y.D.'s room died when some idiot person who thought they were being helpful plugged a vacuum cleaner into it).

Unfortunately, getting the network back up was another matter. The gateway box tends to hang -- waiting for a BOOTP packet, I think -- instead of rebooting, the firewall seems to come up in an odd state sometimes, and in any case the ADSL modem came up weird and had to be power-cycled. Everything needed to be smacked upside the head for a while before it all settled down and worked. I'd work on the gateway some more, but that means taking it down, so I'll have to wait until I'm alone in the house, or at least the only one awake.

I really need to set up off-site backups, don't I?