McDonaldization of America

This has been brewing since Thanksgiving... I've been thinking a lot about local Economy (after reading stuff by Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben), globalization, peak oil, etc. On our trip home from Plymouth, MA after Thanksgiving I was particularly sick of the fact that it is difficult to eat good food at a local establishment when you're travelling. So armed with my brother-in-law's Nuvi I *commited* to eating dinner at some place local.

We were near Wilkes-Barre / Plains on I-81 in Pennsylvania and there appeared to be lots of options. Here's what we tried.

• Chicken Coop (out of business)
• That Dough Guy (out of business)
• Two Gals Pizza and Subs (closed)
• Antony's Giant Hot Dog (closed)
• Michael's Family Restaurant (closed)
  

After 30 minutes of trying we gave up and ended, in defeat, eating at Subway (at least it was marginally healhy). The subway closed at 10PM!

McDonald's within 10 miles: *9*!!!!

Massive Small-scale Conservation

It's been a while since I've said anything here (almost a year!) but recently I've had a bunch of thoughts about conservation, local economy, sustainability, environment etc. with the election of President Obama, the turbulence in the financial markets and unprecedented government involvement in the free market. My friend Don gave me a book called Deep Economy too and after reading only the first couple of pages I'm SURE I'll have a bunch more to say. Stay tuned...

That said, here's my first installment.

I've been wrestling with how to power my cabin. It's a long and involved story and I won't bore you with the details. In a nutshell getting grid-power (which was supposed to be provided to me by the originally land developer) will cost me around $15k so I started looking into alternative solutions (solar, wind, propane generator, etc.). In doing so one thing has become clear and that is a typical grid-based electrical household uses A LOT of energy (if my household is typical) To provide the same wattage to your house in the form or solar would require a significant amount of money (I'd guess well over $100k). Some packages that I've looked at seem great but they all produce a small amount of watts (less than 1000W) and they way they make it work is by using DC current. I'm far from an expert but the reason for this is that is solar generation only happens when the sun is up (duh) and so a solar energy system relies on batteries to store up energy during the day for use as night and batteries are DC. Furthermore DC is much more energy efficient than AC because AC requires stepping the voltage up to very high voltages for transmission and then stepping it down to use in your house. In fact all of those big bricks that you have for your electronics in your house.... That's what they're doing; stepping down the 120V AC power coming out of your wall down to 12V power to go into your wireless phone, laptop, etc. (read this great idea for more insights). So to keep your house on AC current with a solar energy system you'd have to use an inverter to turn the DC current into AC (like the things you can buy for your car cigarette lighter that provides 120V plugs) but that is inefficient and even if it were perfectly efficient you'd get something like 1000W enough to power a fridge and 6 100W lightbulbs. Forget your air conditioning and heating, television/DVD, computer, dish washer, clothes washer, dryer, etc.

But, the point of this post isn't to complain about how much energy a typical home uses... Instead as I was thinking about this problem I looked at compact fluorescent lights and started thinking about the electricity required by *one* 100W lightbulb. Generally a CFL bulb requires 4-5x LESS electricity than a standard incandescent light. This is because incandescent light bulbs make light by generating heat with resistants in the filament and that is very inefficient. So switching *one* 100W bulb to a CFL bulb would save about 75W of energy *per hour*; plus CFL bulbs last MUCH longer (see this FAQ from GE).

That doesn't sound like much, but it's a *small* sacrifice to make to conserve energy. What if we could do that for every household in America (nevermind the world)?

If every household in America switched one 100W lightbulb to a CFL bulb then we would save 7.5 Gigawatts of power in an hour! For reference one megawatt of energy is enough energy to power 800 households for a year (under current energy assumption... i.e. assuming no one switches to CFL). In other words saving 7.5 Gigawatts is saving enough energy to power more than 6 MILLION homes for a year. That's crazy (either that or my math is somehow wrong ;)!

How can we not try?

Customer Service in a High-latency Environment

A couple months ago I sold some stuff on e-Bay and I got an invoice from them for my seller fees. I logged into my account and verified that it is setup with automatic payment via PayPal and I ignored that invoice. Yesterday, I got the same exact invoice. So it would appear that the "automatic" part isn't so "automatic" and I decided that I needed to contact their customer service.

Like all customer service these days (even for good companies) you have to wade through a mine-field of options that are structured to stop you from asking a question to a real human being. So rather that hunting longer for a phone number (or just finding it on wikipedia which I'm sure has it) I just tried out their "Live Help" functionality which is simply instant messaging.

Either they've got a few superheroes handling dozens of simultaneous conversations by multi-plexing them or they've got a bunch of two-fingered typers because it's SLOW. Every question that you ask takes a couple minutes to get a response. Even still, that's not the main thing that I noticed...

And that is, that when it takes so a long time to respond, typical courtesies that CS reps use are actually annoying. For example:

bq. "Hello, Andrew, I'll be happy to assist you"

bq. "Just a minute while I look that up."

bq. "Hold on while I transfer you to the Billing Department." (the "rep" that I'm talking to should be virtual and they may transfer under the covers, but don't let me know that)

It seems to me that answers in an IM/chat-based customer service system need to be FAST (why would I go through the hassle of using it if it's more of a pain that talking to a REAL person) and they need to prize word economy (cut the pleasantries and just get me the answer... I'm not chatting you up because I saw your latest change on Facebook).

Steve Yegge Makes You Smarter

I worked "near" Steve while he was Amazon. We were on interview loops together and occasionally sat in meetings together etc. I also started reading his blog when it was just an internal company blog.... I never had the chance to work on his team, but every time he says something publicly I regret that.

In his most recent rant he tackles the "problem" of code-base size. I've done my fair share of refactoring in Amazon's massive code base, and after having been working in Ruby for the past couple years it's crystal clear how VALUABLE concision is. It's really amusing all of the commenters on the post who say "the number of lines isn't a problem when you have nicely modularized code...." They have a point when they argue that Steve doesn't count the number of lines of code in the kernel's of our OSes, etc. but generally I think they miss the general point that he's making which I would characterize as "your language and the expressiveness of that language affects how much code you'll be responsible for" and "the more code you have the less possible it is to keep it in your head" (reconsider his point about 1M lines of code with 50 lines per "page" being equivalent to a 20,000 page manual. He seems to echo some of what Paul Graham has said.

Either way, if you're into software. Steve is well worth reading and thinking his thoughts.

Kindle Review

A couple of weeks ago I bought Amazon.com's latest product offering, the Kindle. I got it primarily to experiment with a new technology but secretly my hope would be to consolidate all of my reading into one little device. I'm typically reading 3 or 4 books , several magazines, the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and a dozen PDF papers at any given time (obviously not all at once). The prospect of having them all available simultaneously in a little form factor was pretty cool. If my experiment didn't work then I was planning to sell it on Ebay and take a loss if necessary. I haven't sold it and I'm not sure that I plan to however it's far from perfect. Here's what I like:

1. I *love* the fact that I can e-mail myself documents and they appear in the device (e.g. send something to aharbick@kindle.com). It takes PDF, DOC, HTML, and a bunch of other formats. Many people complained about apparent lack of support for PDF, but it's just not true.
2. Shopping on the Kindle is pretty flawless though selection isn't amazing (particularly in periodicals).
3. The screen provides a great reading experience.
4. I love the fact that it's about the size of a paperback.
5. The search, clipping, and highlighting functionality are great.
   

Here's what I don't like:

1. There is no way to match a page in a physical book with a "Kindle location" If you have a friend reading the same thing and they say "could you believe page 25!!" you're out of luck unless you respond "can you tell me a phrase from that page" and then you search for the phrase.
2. Similarly it's incredibly hard to tell where you are in a book. There's the little meter at the bottom of the page that records general progress through the book, but there are no indicators for chapter, etc. This is particularly hard in reading something like the Bible. You turn to Genesis chapter 8 and start reading... The only clue that you've moved into chapter 9 is a tiny little "9" and the fact that the verse numbers have recycled back to 1,2,3...
3. Also related is navigation... Again, this is mostly related to reading something like the Bible where you jump around a lot. If you're lucky the thing you're reading has a Table of Contents. So from any given page you click the scroll wheel and choose the "Table of Contents" navigate through a couple of pages of ToC, choose one of the chapters and navigate to it. It's about 6 clicks and scrolls to jump around and as far as I can tell there are no "Next Chapter", "Previous Chapter" functions.
4. The display is pretty weak for anything but text. It's grayscale which would be OK, but in a PDF (that you mailed to yourself) graphics are often stripped presumably because they're vector-based and the Kindle can only do pixel-based images.
5. The digital edition of Time has absolutely NO GRAPHICS. It's all text. This makes reading the magine pretty hard when the text refers to a chart, etc. It's a pretty poor experience. That said, reading it made me in the "know" for my other Time-addicted friends.
6. There's a bunch of lame hardware things. a. The battery life isn't amazing. You get at most 7 days if you never turn it off. b. There is no "lock" feature to disable buttons (big pain if you leave it on while it's in a bag). c. the power button is awkwardly located on the back of the unit which makes it very difficult to shut off it it's in the supplied carrying case. d. the previous button should be the entire left-side so that right click is next and left click is previous. Instead the previous button us only the top left and there is duplicate next functionality at the lower left side. e. It's WAY to easy to click the paging buttons while handling the device. f. the navigation wheel is hard to use... too easy to scroll and too hard to push (makes it incredibly hard to click precisely). g. the menuing system is pretty lame. h. The iPhone is a game changer and not having a touch screen feels the same psychologically as using a 28k modem to get on the Internet now.
7. The selection of materials isn't that great. Of the books I'm currently reading I could only get about 25% on the Kindle. I read a bunch of "theology" books, but even books like "Emergence" or "Cub's Nation" or "The World Is Flat" can't be found. The periodical selection is really poor. There are only 10 papers and not a whole lot more magazines. Basically, I'll have to carry a Kindle and a book for the foreseeable future.
8. It's proprietary... Once there's a better device than the Kindle how do I port my content? This problem isn't possible with physical books.
   

So... Now that I look at it, I should probably sell mine ;)

I think that Apple could totally clean Amazon's clock at least hardware-wise. If they launched an iTablet computer similar in functionality but larger in size than an iPod touch it would be vastly superior from a hardware standpoint. Perhaps this is the whole end-game of Amazon? Amazon could be jump-starting a market. Get people talking about the "future of reading"... Get people passionate about it... Apple swoops in a builds a GREAT device and Amazon is there to sell content because they already have the relationships with the publishers.... Hmmm

Cabin Update

Jeremy just pointed out that I never wrote about what the engineer had to say. On the whole it was great news! The holes through the foot of the scissor trusses (in the great room) don't need to be repaired, nor do the holes in the diagonal beam of the bonus room trusses, nor do the holes in the porch trusses. Basically the only holes that need to be fixes are the ones in the 2x10" bottom beam of the bonus room trusses which totally makes sense since they form the joists for the loft floor. The fix is easy too (though time consuming). Basically I have to pull out the wire and re-route it (which means that I'll have to replace some of it) then I need to cut 4' "scabs" out of 2x10" boards and center then over the holes nailing it in place with 10d nails 3" "on center" (OC). I'm trying to find a time when I can get down again to do the work. Hopefully sometime during the middle of next week, but if not then I'm thinking that the Friday after Thanksgiving, I might make it down with my Dad and Brother-in-law.

Don't know if I mentioned it, but the roof is done. However, the siding is pending. The guy I'm having do that work broke his foot and is out of commission for a bit. No worries really since it's not blocking anything else.

The septic system is supposed to be installed any day, but contractors have a bad habit of saying they'll do something on a given day/week and not doing it. I need to call them.

Also, now that the leaves have fallen the view is great (though pictures don't do it justice)... I'm definitely going to have to have a chainsaw party to clear out some of those little trees that block the view other parts of the year.

First Leopard Complaint

I installed Leopard yesterday with an "Acrhive and Install" installation (it basically moves everything over to a /Previous System folder and then does a clean install). Everything went pretty smoothly and I'm more or less up and running as before except with the new features.

Here's my first big beef... There is a new feature to the dotmac integration that synchronizes system settings/preferences. That new feature adds a little "rotating arrows" icon to the menu bar and periodically trys to sync with your dotmac account. I don't have a dotmac account and I didn't particularly want one. HOWEVER there doesn't appear to be a way to get to the configuration options for dotmac without first entering in account information. So I ended up having to get a dotmac trial account so that I could get to the "Sync" tab in the dotmac configuration which allowed me to make synchronization only manual and to remove the icon from the menu bar. Now I'm stuck with this bogus dotmac account that I'm sure I'll be pestered to upgrade.

As I wrote this, I've uncovered a second big beef... I used a "PC keyboard" hooked in through USB to my MacBook. It appears that Apple apps like Mail, iCal, etc. no longer recognize the Backspace key as "delete on character backwards" and the "Delete" key does what it traditionally does on a PC ("delete one character forwards"). I'm gonna have to fix this (or get an Apple keyboard)...