News and Views

Yesterday I produced more electricity than I consumed for the first time since spring. At the end of the day I was about 1.5 kWh in the black, having produced 35.5 and consumed 34.

I would have broken even several times over the past couple of weeks (as the need for air conditioning has plummeted) except for the Volt. I typically use 5 to 20 kWh driving around town, but I didn’t go anywhere yesterday.

There is a small window in the fall where I can hope to make more than I use, but as the days get shorter and we start heating the house, these days will be few. Spring is typically better since the days get longer while the weather remains mild.

The turquoise bars show generated power, green is total consumed, and dark blue is net power bought from the power company. You can see the cloudy days, where the turquoise bar is shorter.

With a $40 price I felt it was worth it to try Windows 8. Gisele’s computer was still running XP, and was working fine, but since the rest of the computers in the family already have Windows 7, it seemed like the logical candidate. So yesterday I downloaded a copy of Windows 8 and set to work.

INSTALLATION:
The installation didn’t go easily. At first I tried to install from within XP. It aborted every time, sometimes after a half-hour or so when it seemed like it should be nearly done, and sometimes it wouldn’t even start. There are lots and lots of complaints on the web about how poorly the installer works, and how it doesn’t give any explanation about what went wrong. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this before too many people try to upgrade.

So I put a new hard drive in her computer, burned an installation DVD and installed from scratch. That went flawlessly. It found the network printer, and installed working drivers for that and the video card, etc. Everything except Gisele’s Chinese writing tablet are working fine.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS:
Where’s the start button? Where’s the desktop? How do I do anything?

Microsoft wanted a single version of Windows that would run on a desktop, a tablet and a phone. The result is a weird mishmash of modes. After a while I figured out how to get to the old desktop mode, with icons and the bar along the bottom, but there is no start button on the bar. All the stuff that you normally access through that start button (programs, control panel, printers, documents, help, search, etc. are now spread out in different not very intuitive locations. I quickly found and installed a free third-party start button that behaves the same as the standard XP start button and now feel much more at home.

The touchscreen mode is pretty useless without a touch screen, though you can click on the huge icons the same as if you were touching them on a tablet. Microsoft loaded it with a bunch of their apps, which at first glance seem somewhat useful — Weather, Travel, News, Sports, etc. But when you open them up there are big ads that frequently change. I immediately removed all of those apps. I hate ads

Once you get the desktop configured and add a start button, it looks and feels a lot like Windows 7.

My first impression is that Microsoft made a mistake by trying to integrate a touchscreen UI with a desktop UI. If you’re on a computer, the touch screen interface is pretty useless, but necessary for a few functions (though I hope the Start Button I installed will remove that necessity). If you are on a tablet, then the desktop is probably too small to use without a mouse and keyboard. The only case I can think of where you might really want them integrated is on a convertible tablet like the Surface. And even then I think it should automatically switch UI based on whether you are using it as a tablet or if you have a keyboard connected.

I do have to say that it feels snappy and responsive. I booted from POST to login in about 30 seconds, which is better than her computer did with XP. But the snappiness is probably mostly because it is a clean install without several years accumulation of crapware.

Gisele will continue to be the guinea pig for this, but I’ll play with it too and I may publish an update if impressions change after using the UI for a while. Meanwhile I would say that if you have Windows 7, don’t bother to “upgrade”.

Most of you have probably received phone calls from Rachel before, offering to lower your credit card bill. It’s the most famous and perhaps the most irritating of all the phone scams. “This is Rachel with Cardholder Services. There is nothing wrong with your credit card….”

Well, the FTC has just announced that they have halted operations of five companies that were behind the calls.

But “Goodbye” is probably temporary only, as these not nice people quickly find other ways to perpetrate their scams.

Interestingly, the FTC has offered a $50,000 prize for anyone who can come up with a method to stop these calls. I hope someone wins the prize.

My new Ooma system has community blocklists that will block many telemarketers, but Rachel usually spoofs a continually shifting Caller ID number, so that doesn’t stop this particular scam.

Our new VOIP (internet based phone service) by Ooma is now live, and we no longer have Century Link (né Qwest). Calls to our home phone number will arrive through Ooma. I have it connected to our in-house phone lines so all the phones work the same as before — it is basically transparent. Nothing new for Gisele to learn!

Call quality seems good so far. Black list is nice — we should be receiving fewer telemarketers, surveys and political calls.

We should save more than $30 a month even with the premier service package. All US calls are free, international calls are cheap.

Not me this time. Derek tore the labrum in his left shoulder playing soccer a few months ago. He had laparoscopic surgery this morning to repair it. Everything went well and he is at our house spaced out on pain pills this evening.

The labrum helps hold the arm bone (humerus) in the socket. When it is torn, the shoulder can easily dislocate, and Derek had two tears, one short and one quite long. After about a year of recovery from surgery Derek should have a normal shoulder again. Meanwhile he will be in a sling for a few weeks, and in physical therapy for a few months.

In the picture below (taken during his surgery), you can see near the middle of the screen how the cartilage is peeled back from the bone

In the next picture, you can see how it has been stitched back together. This smaller tear only took one stitch, while the larger one took 3.

You can also see one of the laparoscopic instruments in the lower picture, though I’m not sure what it is for. Probably just a tube for inserting various instruments as needed.

I’ve just subscribed to a VOIP telephone service, Ooma. That’s “Voice Over IP”, which means it uses my internet connection to make phone calls.

The main advantage is cost. The monthly fee amounts to about $4, which includes unlimited calls anywhere in the US and Canada. International calls are cheap too — Taiwan landlines cost about 3 cents a minute, though Taiwan cell phones are about 11 cents. Still cheap. I will probably opt for the $10/month premier package that includes enhanced Caller ID, and a community block list where people share the phone numbers of solicitors so we can block them.

I just set it up this morning, so we don’t have a lot of experience to report on call quality and reliability, but the few calls I have made sound good.

Some people have asked why we continue to have a home phone. International calls is one big reason. It costs a lot to call Taiwan or Australia on a cell phone. Another reason is so I don’t have to give my cell phone out and start receiving solicitations everywhere I go.

I’ll update after we have tried it for a while. Right now it is a separate number, but if we are satisfied with the quality and reliability we will port our existing home phone number over and cancel Qwest.

Gisele and I are off for California tomorrow, spending a couple of days in the LA area before heading up to San Francisco for a few more days.

Derek and Apollo are staying home.

I’m leaving this morning for Florida for a couple of days. Unfortunately not to a nice sandy beach or the exotic Everglades — Gainesville is just about in the middle of the north end of the peninsula.

I’m spending two days at the University of Florida at a meeting about databasing plant specimens. I’ve written some programs at Arizona State University (ASU) that help automate the process and have been invited to Gainesville to share learnings with other herbaria.

Gisele thought about coming with me, but there wouldn’t be much for her to do while I was in meetings all day. If it was on the beach, that would be a different story.

Back home Wednesday, but then going down to the university in Tucson on Thursday with Les to discuss another program I’ve written that helps quantify how plants share similar environments — really just a database query that looks for relationships between geographic coordinates of specimens.

Hooking up with Les has been one of the best parts of retirement — getting to work on interesting projects with no stressful timelines or demands. The pay’s not great, though!

There was an article yesterday from Reuters saying that GM is losing up to $49,000 on each Volt that they sell, and that it costs about $89,000 to produce one.

You have to read the article carefully to realize that they are including the development cost, over a billion dollars, in the price by dividing one billion dollars by the number of Volts that have sold. By this logic, if I invest $500,000 and open a new McDonalds I will be losing thousands of dollars on every hamburger I sell, at least for the first few days, weeks, months and more.

Bob Lutz was head of GM when the Volt was conceived and brought to production — he’s the “Father of the Volt”. He had a pointed response to the Reuters article. Among other things, he called their statements “preposterous”. He claims that the Volt is near or slightly better than break-even based on production costs, and that things will improve a lot with future generations and new vehicles taking advantage of the technology.

Dale has been hiking the Appalachian trail since April 2nd for over 1700 miles, from Georgia to New England. Last week I joined him for a brief 5 day, 67-mile stroll through part of Vermont and New Hampshire. When I compare on a map how far he has come with the distance I accompanied him, it is nothing, a comma in the middle of a long sentence, a sentence he is continuing to write without me.

I flew into Lebanon, New Hampshire on a little 10 passenger Cessna, spent the night in a motel, and the next morning hired a shuttle to take me over the border into Vermont where the trail crossed the highway and Castaway was waiting for me. And off we went into the woods.

The first day we hiked mostly alone, with me frequently leading and setting the pace. No fear of Dale not keeping up with me.

Later in the day we met up with other hikers that Castaway had hiked with before — Kleenex, GoMan, and Bad Penny. The Appalachian Trail is not a wilderness experience, at least not the way we think of wilderness out west. It is common to cross a road or pass by a farm house. Towns are frequent, and it’s common to eat in delis and spend the occasional night in a motel. That first night I bought a Philly cheese steak, and we pitched our tents in the back yard of a “Trail Angel”. Trail Angels are people along the trail who do helpful things for hikers, such as leaving Trail Magic (candy, Coke, fruit, etc.) for hikers to take, or providing them a place to stay or giving free rides to town, that kind of thing. In the 5 days I hiked, we met at least 4 trail angels, though Dale said that was a little more than usual.

On the second day we saw Kleenex stopped by the trail ahead talking with a woman. The woman was offering a free lunch in return for stacking wood, an offer that we accepted and expanded to include a shower and laundry.

On that same second day I kept tightening the laces on my boot without really looking closely, until I saw with shock that there was a two-inch separated seam in my boot, gaping more than a half inch wide. Clearly I couldn’t expect many more miles out of these boots. Fortunately the AT passes down the main street of Hanover, New Hampshire and there had to be an outfitter in a town like that. There was, but… I saw a nice rack on the wall with about 10 sample boots. “I want one that will be easiest to break in.” “Oh, this one is perfect, but… we don’t have any in stock.” Nor did they have the next best one. The third easiest to break in — they had them in stock, but not in my size. And so it went, until I ended up with a $140 pair of Vasque boots. Nice boots, but not what I would have chosen nor what they should have cost. Fortunately they were pretty comfortable and didn’t give me any blisters on the following days.

Castaway, Kleenex and Bad Penny at the Vermont-New Hampshire border.

The next day we ran into the Troverts, X-Trovert and N-Trovert, a retired couple who had started in Georgia about a week after Castaway, though Castaway had hiked with them before and knew them well. Kleenex was especially delighted to see them, since it meant another woman to hike and chat with. We all ended up hiking together the rest of the days I was there.

So there I was, fresh from the city, suddenly thrown in with a herd of seasoned hikers who had already walked – marched – over 1700 miles in the past 4 months.

One motto of the AT is that everyone should hike their own hike, meaning that you walk at your own pace, for as long each day as you like. But we were with a group that Dale had hiked with before and he wanted to stay with them, especially through the formidable White Mountains. So falling behind really wasn’t an option. I had stayed in shape by playing basketball, but I quickly realized there are three main differences between basketball and hiking: the basketball court is flat, you don’t carry 30 pounds on your back, and you don’t play basketball for 8-12 hours a day, day after day. Those three differences are significant.

After struggling up steep hill after hill, watching the back of a 65 year old man, N-trovert, disappear into the trees in front and almost have to run on the flats to try to catch up, I was ready for bed in the evenings. Dale stayed with me most of the way, though a couple of times he had to stretch his legs and almost run up the mountain, where I would find him waiting for me at the top, all rested and ready to go again.

We camped in the back yard of another Trail Angel near Lyme, New Hampshire. Bill was an 84 year old retired psychiatry professor from Harvard Medical School who lived next to the trail and loved to meet and treat hikers.

The Troverts and Castaway in Bill’s back yard.

It wasn’t all delis and back yards. There were nights in the woods and meals cooked over camp stoves too. The New Hampshire mountains are rugged and beautiful, and there were many hours of pleasant chatting with Castaway or silently contemplating the quiet of the forest, or just losing myself in my thoughts.

On the fifth day we stopped for lunch at a deli, and I ordered a hamburger. I wasn’t expecting the greasy one pound monster burger they put on my plate, but I gamely ate it all. That was a big mistake. I immediately felt queasy, and within a couple of hours I was glued to the toilet. I’m so glad we spent that night camped behind a hostel with a flush toilet. A few doses of Imodium and things were settling down, but I still wasn’t in any shape to hike the next day, so they went on without me.

Kleenex’s sister was helping them shuttle their packs and took me to the next town where I met them that evening for the last night.

And today they left early in the morning to go climb a couple more mountains on their journey to their final destination in Maine, less than 400 miles away now.

I have known he was out there hiking, and have heard the names he mentioned. But now I have a little feel for what it’s like, and can put faces to the names Kleenex, Troverts, Bad Penny, Tall Oaf, Go Man, Loner, Tarzan and Jane, and many others. What an adventure he is on, and will remember all his life.

I envy him, and doubt that I could do it. Only about 10% of those who start actually finish. I was so struck with their determination and persistence, traits you would have to have to complete something like this.

My hat is off to all of them.

Taken from my motel bed on the last morning.