hero orca

I found Patric's video interesting because last night I had a dream about sharks.

In the dream I was with my friend Brassy (JoJo) and we were driving through this beautiful gorge to get to my vacation home (which only exists in my dream, of course). I was telling Brassy how relaxing it would be at the home and how everything would be perfect there (Brassy and I have been having some bad attitude times lately).

There was a river running through the gorge, but it was like the ocean, and it was full of sharks, dolphins, and orcas. We stopped the car and watched them jumping out of the water. I was very happy.

But then this busload of teenage kids pulled up. All the kids got into the water with these hideous inflatable toys. I was so pissed because they were ruining the view. Then a bunch of the boys started picking up the sharks and punching them, or holding them out of the water so they couldn't breathe.

I started getting upset so Brassy yelled at the kids, but they were making fun of him. I said to Brassy "our beautiful vacation is ruined". But then a huge orca came out of the water. It's head filled the entire gorge. All the kids started screaming. I was like "good, the monster will eat everyone and then we can relax".

Then I woke up.

Note that my house has been filled with paint fumes for the past two days. No idea what this dream means...

cool vid of a redneck getting a lesson about the pointy end of a shark

I just watched this hilarious video from my friend Patric's shark blog:

http://sharkdivers.blogspot.com/2011/03/sunburnt-redneck-and-sharks-bad-combo.html

Ouch, quit it.

Safety first, indeed.

It's not that I'm bored today, watching internet videos. I'm stuck in my office because I have painters here painting my ceiling...

ever wonder about your energy efficiency?

I got this from my brother, and decided to post it because I found it interesting, and I want at least a few of my postings to be intellectually interesting...

From Steve:

I’m glad to see that I’m writing your blog now.

 

Maybe we can jazz it up a little bit, the RSS feed was a good first step.  This means I can monitor your/my blog now.  We should talk more about energy issues.  Here’s an interesting email I wrote to a Virginia business woman.  She was wondering about the cost and consumption of electricity compared to natural gas for residential homes in the Richmond area.  She found my information though our Virginia Energy Patterns and Trends project (VEPT).  Several links are Virginia specific, but the information can be generalized to any location. 

 

VEPT is currently an inactive project and data for 2011 is not available.  Assuming that residential efficiency hasn’t changed dramatically, there will be little difference in the information from 2007 to current.  I would direct you to these two tables:

 

http://www.energy.vt.edu/vept/electric/showtable.asp?headerid=2

http://www.energy.vt.edu/vept/naturalgas/disposition_eia.asp

 

These show total consumption of electricity and natural gas for the state.  We do not have access to more detailed, like county specific data.  This isn’t data like “gas used for heating air” or “electricity used for heating water.”  Consumers don’t report these values to anyone, and most wouldn’t know the percent of their electricity bill that goes to the end use.  DOE attempted to provide guidance with reports such as this one:

 

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/reps/enduse/er01_us.html

 

Virginia has taken a similar approach and published the energy saver’s handbook also the Virginia Energy Plan. You can get this from DMME or from here: http://www.energy.vt.edu/vept/energyover/index.asp

 

The comparison you are asking about is difficult to do without making a large number of assumptions.  If the house is built to identical code standards with equally efficient

appliances there will be negligible difference in energy (i.e. capacity for work) consumption.  This energy will be delivered in the form of natural gas or electricity meaning that the price paid difference will simply be the per unit energy cost of the fuel.  The major factors are the insulation factor (this includes windows and insulation), HVAC efficiency, water heater efficiency and appliance efficiency.  The usage, of course, is also important, but not relevant to your question.

 

Unfortunately, this means that one cannot make a definitive statement about the benefits of one fuel source over another.  I find resources like WellHome (http://www.wellhome.com) and Energy Savers (http://www.energysavers.gov/) to have good articles that are targeted for the general consumer.  They have several nice graphics like:

http://www.wellhome.com/blog/2010/03/whi23-energy-of-appliances-infographic/

 

GE has an excellent tool to describe appliance efficiency here: http://visualization.geblogs.com/visualization/appliances/

 

There are several companies in the commonwealth that specialize in doing energy audits of houses.  See: http://www.energysavers.gov/your_home/energy_audits/index.cfm/mytopic=11160

 

This sort of audit on specific houses will let you do an apple to apple comparison.  A company that does energy audits in your area should be able to offer generalizations based on their experiences.

helpless desk

Considering I'm a consultant for a huge IT company, it does not seem unreasonable that I would expect the help desk to provide help for my laptop.

What the hell was I thinking...

I submitted a trouble ticket on Friday (I tried to CALL the help desk, but after being transferred to four different numbers, none of which was the right number, I gave up - stupid me, calling the number listed on the IT help desk web page) because a virus shut down my firewall. Seems like a CRITICAL problem, right????

Wrong. I never heard back on my ticket. So yesterday I did some research (not on the help desk web page - it was full of useless information and broken links) and fixed the problem myself. Today I got a bitchy email from the help desk saying my ticket was going to be closed due to inactivity.

What the fuck?????? They don't respond back to my ticket, which allows them to close it because no activity has been done on it? I fired off an email back to the help desk saying the reason there was no activity on the ticket was because they never responded back to it. So then the help desk called me to show I guess that they were doing SOMETHING. And what they did was transfer my help ticket to another organization because they want me to re-image my laptop. Though, having researched doing that last week, I found out that you have to download a bunch of software for re-imaging (they don't send out CDs anymore because that would be helpful) and the files for download are either missing or have errors. One guy had his hard drive wiped clean and then couldn't re-install Windows XP on it, nor could he access the help desk web page as he was being told to do because he couldn't install anything on it. He put a crazy message on the help desk blog about his problems (from someone else's laptop).

Poor thing. I wonder if he's in a padded white room salivating on himself and singing christmas carols.

I'm glad I work at a company full of unhelpful fuckers. Meanwhile my laptop is operating at half mast. Not like I have real work to do...assholes.

a slight correction

From my brother Steve (meant to post this on Friday but my computer crashed):

I did notice an error in my email.  I removed a sentence that made things more complicated, and inadvertently used the word combinations, instead of permutations.  It should be obvious which one is which, but you can flip a coin when you fix it.

 

http://betterexplained.com/articles/easy-permutations-and-combinations/