DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could listen to music while you were sleeping?

I tried it a few times in college. I’d figured, so long as I’m just laying there sleeping anyway, I might as well enjoy some tunes. But it didn’t work very well, for the obvious reason (I had to keep waking up to change the CD).

(On the subject of college-era musical experiments… I remember once cranking 99 Luftballons to about 120 db while I walked across campus to see how far away I’d be able to hear my own stereo through the window. Did it even occur to me that my neighbors on 4 sides might be cursing my name while their teeth shook to the fat synth-bass of 1980s German pop? Yes, of course, but I did it anyway. I mean, come on, it was Nena. None of my neighbors ever said a word about it.)

I dreamt the other night that I took my parents and most of my local friends out to dinner at the French Laundry. I think I’d eaten too much that day, and as my overburdened system tried to cope with the masses of surplus food, a deep memory was triggered — of another night of masses of surplus food. In the dream, waiters kept coming and coming, an endless stream of photo-perfect gourmet bites of saffron-scented, brown-buttered, reduction-sauced artfood. We ate and ate and ate and felt not well at all. But at least I woke up before the bill came, because otherwise this dream would have been a nightmare.

Is this what they mean by wireless networking?

To their credit, Netgear Tech Support promptly offered to ship me a replacement unit. This switch is 22 months old but is apparently still under warranty.

(The problem, if you’re unfamiliar with networking hardware, is not that there are six link lights lit even though no cables are plugged in. The problem is that one of those six phantom connections is reading at only 10 Mb/sec! Appalling, just appalling.)

The sound of thumping from upstairs could mean only one thing — it was finally that time of the morning when I can turn my office stereo up real loud.

I sprinted upstairs to greet the thumper, before settling back into the day’s work and some high-volume speedmetalthrashfolkpianosolos… but stopped short at the top of the stairs. The windows were all purple. That is, the white shades were all glowing purple, as if on the other side was a really great sunrise, or a nuclear fireball that was about to vaporize my windows, their shades, and the guy tottering at the top of the basement stairs wishing he had a camera in his hand.

Anyway, it was a great sunrise after all. The colors were already fading when I finally had my camera ready, but still, it was amazing.

The other day I read in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone that asparagus is a spring crop, although it “appears again for the holidays.” I thought that was odd, that a particular vegetable would show up for the holidays like a weird cousin with bad hygiene who will pollute the bathroom but nevertheless wants a place to stay for a few days.

Ms. Madison is correct, though — I went to the grocery store, and sure enough there was a big display of asparagus, imported from some distant place like Anaheim. Heh. Actually it was from South America. I guess it’s not so much that the stores import asparagus for Christmas; more likely, the crops in the other hemisphere are just now being harvested.

Our photovoltaic array went online Friday, a day of overcast gray skies and rain. Our shiny new solar electric system produced an underwhelming 5 watts… enough, as a coworker said, to pop a bag full of popcorn, so long as you don’t mind waiting three years.

If you have any control over the timing, I recommend you schedule your PV install for a day without rain, because you’ll want to see your investment go to work immediately. (You probably wouldn’t buy a new car during a hailstorm, either.)

I begin to get a sense of the scope of this project when I think that these panels will be here for the next 30 years, enduring hot summer sun and cold winter squalls repeatedly while everything else about the house, and about our lives, changes underneath. We’ll probably even need to get a new roof at some point in the next 30 years. That will be “interesting,” in the American sense of the word, i.e. “difficult and/or unpleasant.”

The panels are impressively solid-state; they just lie there, stoically, working when they can.

The magic happens in the inverter, which converts generated DC to AC, and which keeps track of the amount of power coming out of the array. Sunday’s peak was just shy of 2kw, enough to spin my electrical meter backwards at an impressive rate.

That was the moment of epiphany: solar power is smart. I’d worked the numbers, read the articles, talked to the salespeople… but once I had a system on my roof, generating electricity from sunlight, I realized that every empty roof is a waste of energy. If there’s enough sunlight falling on my roof on a winter afternoon to power my house and my neighbor’s too, why the heck are we still burning oil for power?

Critics will point to the high initial investment. I find that argument specious. I guess it depends on one’s priorities. Buying energy from the utilities is certainly the easier way to go, but it’s clearly not the cheapest — not in California anyway.

And the environmental issue can’t be argued: solar energy is clean.

Anyway, we’re extremely pleased with ourselves. I will admit to frequent checking of the skies and the inverter and, yes, I enjoy watching my electric meter spin backwards, because frankly I feel like I’m getting away with something.