DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

“26 members of Congress criticized CBS for rejecting the [MoveOn.org commercial].”

“Apparently, [CBS] is more comfortable with dirty old men than innocent kids.”

Four statistics describe how often this site is updated:

• number of days this week
• number of days this month
• number of days this year
• number of days since the site was launched

All are shown as percentages. For example, if I post something to the site on Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, my posting rate for the week as of Friday would be 3/6 or 50%.

I put these counters together so site visitors can get a sense of how frequently the site is updated. There are four counters of decreasing recency so that when taken as a group they would reflect trends. For example, as I write this, my overall (site-to-date) post rate is 55%, but this month I’ve been writing much more than that. So far this month (and this year), I’ve posted on 87% of days.

By subtracting these values from 100, the reader can calculate a related measure, which I call the “Flake Rate” — the percentage of days I’ve flaked by not writing. I chose not to display these counts because I don’t want to tempt Fate. She is tempting enough already.

Current values appear elsewhere on this page, under the calendar.

I saw a comment in a web forum recently that contained this apologetic introduction: “I don’t mean to flog my own site, but…”

I thought: what the hell, usually I do mean to flog my own website. If I stumble into a discussion on a topic I spent three hours writing about last month, of course I’m going to point to it. How is this a bad thing?

And so I decided there should be an acronym or abbreviation for this, to get the tedious and phony apologia out of the way efficiently, clearing the way for immediate inbound linkage.

Thus, NTFMOB: “Not To Flog My Own Blog”

Sample usage: in a discussion about the sweet/salty/sour/bitter tongue-region map you learned about in grade school, I might write:

NTFMOB… but in fact the taste map is all wrong.

Strictly speaking, NTFMOB is not an acronym, I think, just as HTML is not an acronym. It is an abbreviation and an initialism; it’s spelled rather than pronounced.

I think the proper way to render the abbreviation in HTML is:
<abbr title="Not To Flog My Own Blog">NTFMOB</abbr>…

Now, go forth and flog and multiply. And, of course, link back here to ease your karmic guilt for pointing to your own website all the time.

Local power utility PG&E declared bankruptcy in April, 2001. Now they’ve managed to get a plan approved that sticks ratepayers with over $7 billion dollars in debt. In other words, in addition to paying for (expensive) electric power, everybody in the state will also be making payments towards this enormous suckhole of missing money.

$7 billion divided by the 14 million people in utility’s service area equals $500 per person… if it would be paid off right away. Presumably there will be interest charges because they’ll spread that payback out over nine years.

PG&E doesn’t have 14 million customers, though. Some of those people are spouses and children. So that $7 billion will be divided by just 4.8 million families. Assuming a 5% interest rate over nine years, the per-ratepayer cost is $1800.

PG&E had to come up with a palatable way to sell this ridiculous expense — basically an incompetence charge — without causing uproar. They did: they’re lowering rates.

Err, what? How will a 4.1% rate decrease allow PG&E to pay off $7 billion in debt? It makes no sense, and in my opinion the Chron’s reporters have dropped the ball. That $1800 per customer has to come from somewhere… fees or surcharges, maybe. I think the 4.1% rate reduction was just a distraction, some financial smoke and mirrors to reassure the populace. “Don’t think about the $1800 you owe me. Look over here, rates are going down. It will all be OK.”

Speaking of corruption at PG&E, I am appalled that the utility paid its executives $83 million in retention bonuses over the past three years, an apparent reward for, what, driving the company into bankruptcy?

This is the new math: to make money, lower your fees. To punish employees for doing a crappy job, pay them huge bonuses. This is business as usual for PG&E. Is it any wonder they’re $7 billion in debt?

Our time-of-use electrical meter tracks peak-period consumption separately, because for peak hours we’re billed at about 3x the offpeak rate. Watching this number gives us a good idea of our total energy production, because we need to not only zero out our peak usage, but generate enough extra (at a 3x payback rate) to zero out offpeak usage too.

We’re not there yet.

To be fair, we shouldn’t be there yet; if we were, it would mean we bought an unnecessarily big PV system. We only need to zero our balance over a 1-year period. We’ll build up a deficit through the winter, then make up for it in the summer. In fact, by late August we should have a large outstanding credit, to see us through the Fall’s shorter days.

Prior to the solar install, we burned about 4.5 kWh on a typical weekday afternoon (noon-6pm). (Measuring this was part of our sizing effort.) Therefore, in a 13-weekday period, our pre-solar peak-period usage would have been about 58 kWh. But thanks to the PV array, we’ve burned only 16 kWh. Considering the snotty weather we’ve been having, that’s pretty impressive. I think we’ve only had about three really sunny days since the TOU meter went in, yet the solar array has covered 72% of our peak-period needs. And actually it gets dark by 5:00 PM still, clipping an hour of generation time off the peak period even when it’s sunny.

During one of the many rains we’ve had, I discovered water dripping from the bottom of the DC disconnect switch. Further inspection indicated that, against all reason, the water was coming from inside the weather-tight switchbox. I don’t know what a short-circuit in that box could do to my PV array but I was not interested in waiting to find out.

The installer came out right away to open the switchbox. It was disgusting. I should have taken a picture — the inside of the casing was covered with funk and rust-colored grit and slimy mildew-looking stuff. Apparently two grommets had been left out when this box was wired up. The first grommet would have kept water from following the power cable on the roof through its hole in the eave. The second would have kept water from following the power cable into this switchbox. It was an installation error.

The technician replaced the entire DC switchbox. I was impressed with that.

“What’s that slimy black stuff?” I asked him as he was working.

He surprised me by running a finger through it to feel its consistency. Then he looked a bit alarmed, with an index finger full of goo, and hurriedly wiped it on his pants leg. “It’s … I don’t know. It’s grossness.” he declared. “Um, that’s a technical term.”