Don't remember what the brand was, but when we bought 'em from Costco,
they were a HUGE disappoint. Started out instant-on to full brightness... but after a few weeks,
it was easily a 60 second delay (and getting longer) as they warmed up - we keep house at 64 degrees.
We have kept the 60-watt replacements in other areas of the house, but for the receessed cans in the kitchen, they just didn't work, so we returned 'em. Ditto the ones from Home Depot that were a different brand. Was real disappointing.
First, hats off to you for actually doing the calculations. But a few significant corrections are in order that reduce the electrical costs to less than $100 for the month... or about $3/day. My electricity (including taxes) is about 10 cents/KWH, the lights are typically operational for only 5 hours/day, and people turn them OFF about as often as they turn them ON. LED lights are still pretty darn expensive, especially when you have thousands of lights to put up and considering I buy my stuff at the post-holiday 50-75-90% off sales. An excerpt from this page is listed below.
November/2006:
A letter was published in the Boulder Daily Camera.
I sent a response, but it didn't get published - both are attached below.
Published in BDC Open Forum on November 21st, 2006
*LIGHTS* -
*This Christmas, less can be more*
Every year, the Daily Camera does a story honoring the beautiful
displays of holiday lights in our community.
In the 2006 Season of Light, I'd like to make a plea that the Camera
seek out the most/imaginative/ displays, not the most extravagant and
energy-intensive. In a year that's seen global warming established as a
fact in most minds, as well as a threat to our kids and theirs, it seems
to me wrong-headed to pile on the lights (unless solar powered!) or to
praise anyone for doing so.
With a little imagination, and encouragement from community leaders
(such as yourself), we can do more with less and be the better for it.
Here was my response to that...
An Open Forum letter a week ago encouraged Boulder residents
to be more imaginative (rather than just have more lights) with their
Christmas Displays in order to reduce the impact on Global Warming.
As someone who is often called Clark Griswold this time of the year,
here's what I'm doing along those lines - may also provide ideas for others:
Less Lights - "only" 15,000 this year - down from 26,000 in 2005.
Xcel Wind Power - Will be the 3rd year I've been in this program.
Carbon Offset - even though I'm using "clean" energy, I made a
contribution to CarbonFund.Org for twice last year's
2 Megawatt-Hours of electrical power consumption.
For the second year in a row, you can (really) view the display
on the Internet via live webcams. I.e. you don't need to
burn fossil fuels by driving to see it in person.
Just like 2005 (but not 2004), environmentally inclined Internet
surfers can go to the website and turn the lights OFF. Be forewarned
that people from around the world (119 countries so far) enjoy
seeing 'em ON... so you will have to "battle" for control.
Lights off after 10:00 - I use a master timer so the display
is typically only active between 5:00-10:00MST nightly.
The overseas web surfers would like 'em left on all night, but I
have great neighbors and figure they deserve a rest from the blinking lights.
Being an open-minded Republic of Boulder resident, I respect that some
people still may not feel that is enough. However, many folks don't realize
that the cost to run the 26,000 Christmas Lights in 2005 was $5/day . i.e.
one Double Peppermint Latte.
And for me, that.s plenty well worth it for the joy it brings to people and
especially the kids when they see the display in person and/or on the web.
"Imaginative" additions this year are giant Inflatable Elmo
and Homer Simpson - D'OH! So while my Christmas Lights might be
a bit tacky, they make an effort to be environmentally conscious;
plus they are just a darn lotta fun.;-)
Finally, the Internet site has garnered thousands of dollars in
donations to charity to help find a cure for Celiac Disease - something
my kids have. So you better believe that komar.org is lit up again for 2006!
As a Slashdot Subscriber (highly recommended BTW), I saw
this story in the "Mysterious Future" and needless
to say, it is
EMERGENCY ALERT on Komar.org as I'm sure Scotty will be saying shortly
"Control Circuits threatening to overload Captain!"
The four dedicated 100 Mbps Apache/Linux web servers (using mod_perl) handled
a doubleheader of DIGG and FARK on December 13th and are already
getting hammered... but Slashdot could
be another level... lets see how high the load factor goes on this snowy Christmas Eve.
People around the world are hammering it allready
(Google Maps mish-mash)
so I'll try to keep the web servers going while everyone
turns the lights ON... OFF... ON... OFF... ON... etc.
Have fun with it and Merry Christmas to all,
alek
P.S. The web site is totally free... but raises
awareness/funds for the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Disease. This is something my kids
have, so it's personal for me... so if you are feeling the Christmas
spirit and want to donate a few dollars, please do so at their site.
Santa DID show up my house last year - see video
on
The Physics of Santa
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The local paper wrote a similar story last year - my response from my Santa Tracker page is attached below... and as noted, the christmas webcams are live again this year looking for the Big Red Guy.
Todd Neff from the Boulder Camera wrote a Christmas Eve article
about the physics of Santa. He included a "Parental disretion advised" notice, but the headline writer argueably got a little carried away.
Needless to say, since I live in the
Republic of Boulder, outraged residents
wrote several
letters to the editor that were published on
December 28th. So I wrote the following which
ran on December 31st.
Great headline by the Camera and they printed my letter in its entirety
(including some subtle attempts at humor) with minor grammatical edits.
HO, HO, HO - Yes, Virginia, as my Web cam shows
As a technologist, I enjoyed Todd Neff's piece on Christmas Eve about the physics of Santa; kudos to the Daily Camera for not just reprinting the AP article, but doing some local embelishment that added a nice touch to the story (and ditto in the Dec. 28 piece about the coming leap-second).
So while it would be (way!) out of place for me to weigh in on journalistic reporting as other letter writers have, I thought I would write to say that while Todd accurately reported that the physics of Santa are a challenge, the conclusion is wrong. Yes, sometimes, the paper doesn't get the story right... and yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
Santa does deliver presents on Christmas Eve to children around the world.
The magic/miracle is still alive, and I would suggest that Camera readers (and their kids) review the video at www.komar.org to judge for themselves.
And you'd better believe I'll be watching next year as Santa returns at Christmas.
A while back, I wrote a quick little Perl script to do geolocation and other misc. info - see the page for more info, but it uses the free Perl Module Geo::IP and the MaxMind database. The free version of the later used to only provide country data, but they now provide lat/long and city info... seems reasonably accurate, although with all of these things, the results can sometimes be way off.
So with that, it wasn't too hard to write another Perl script that parses the IP address from the Apache logs, acquires misc. geolocation info, and then dumps out the lat/long data in Javascript for the Google Maps API - see this graphically shown on my christmas maps page.
That was a damn fine writeup... someone with balls
at Microsoft should send it up the chain all the way
to Bill Gates with a "we have to change our culture" comment.
I won't hold my breath.
The repeated "I can't comment on that, I'm a product marketing guy"
it totally weak and speaks volumes about their lack of accountability.
I was surprised you didn't push Nick White ("Mr. Cut off the Conversation")
to have their "lawyers who make all patent decisions" meet with you guys... since it seems they are the ones who really make the decisions...;-)
My wife just got an "updated" Cell Phone - tons of nice features in a smaller package. But when you turn it on, it takes about 10 seconds to get going versus about 2 for the previous one. Just a lotta stuff getting loaded in... and the amount exceeds the increased speed of the processors/RAM/etc.
On a related note, if you happen to be interested in
the history of Christmas Lights,
check out this site.
George Nelson has a very detailed history of Christmas Lights per his
table of contents.
While my
Controllable
Christmas Lights for Celiac Disease are a bit high-tech & over-the-top,
George's site is a nice trip back in time of the last 100+ years
when even electricity itself was a novelty - one interesting tidbit -
"The world's first practical light bulb was invented by Thomas Edison in 1879, and a mere three years later in 1882 an associate of his, one Edward Johnson, electrically lit a Christmas tree for the first time. The tree was in the parlor of Johnson's New York City home, located in the first section of that city to be wired for electricity. The display created quite a stir"
"Use the halloween webcams to view live images of a buncha halloween decorations & lights and also CONTROL them - heck, you can even inflate (or deflate) the giant Frankenstein & Homer Simpson - D'oh! The webcams run 7x24 and you can turn stuff on & off from 1800 to 2200 MDT (GMT-6). Plus you can send "Instant Messages via Webcam" for everyone to see."
The classic example is a Google Search for miserable failure that returns the WhiteHouse.gov
biography for George Bush. Not surpisingly, Michael Moore's page also
comes up in the first page of results in the tit-for-tat. Read more
about how "ugly"
Democrats and
Republicans are
using Political Google Bombs at
Wikipedia.
I have some other examples of projects like this listed here. Very cool job by the MIT guys... now they just need to add some more of 'em in all of the windows and provide the ability to generate alphanumber (or image) messages that can be uploaded from the Internet - heh, heh!;-)
Yep - Alexa's sample size is pretty small, but skewed toward IE folks and people who install/game it so their web sites rank well... although I think anything in the top-1000 is almost always "something" significant. Unfortunately, there aren't a lotta metrics out there (plus those often provide varying results), and this is easy to understand and free, so it's often used.
Best source is the source - i.e. would be real interesting to know what the web stats (for actual web logs) are like for a site like Slashdot - I can only imagine the number of hits/page-views/etc.
The article mentions that the
Fear of Friday, the 13th is called Paraskevidekatriaphobia...
Google only has
1,650 results with
Urban Legends the first one. I gotta believe a double whammy for those superstitious people to have it fall on Halloween - D'OH!;-)
"Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP... said the current state of the Internet includes a litany of broken items, but with a little help from PHP there may well be some hope for the Web yet."
Ditto what others said - yea, the Kill-A-Watt ain't perfect, but cheap and works as advertised. Note that it has some time history capabilities too as long as it is left plugged in. One interesting thing to do is hook it inline on your PC and watch the power draw change between "idle" and when it's "full on"
I've also used it to measure current draw on my christmas lights to make sure I don't exceed 15 Amps on a circuit - I try to stay under 10 by load balancing.
This is still in the research/development phase as per the article
"Dr. Gervasio recognises that there are still many steps between his prototype and a competitively priced, off-the-shelf, battery-sized fuel cell. Nevertheless, he believes they could appear in power-hungry devices such as laptops, camcorders, and radios within five years."
So until then, I'll be using CnH2n+2 to mow my lawn.
Slashdot Mirror
Have been using for a while ... and yea, be sure to 1.x Beta which is major improvement on what was already a great product.
Don't remember what the brand was, but when we bought 'em from Costco, they were a HUGE disappoint. Started out instant-on to full brightness ... but after a few weeks,
it was easily a 60 second delay (and getting longer) as they warmed up - we keep house at 64 degrees.
We have kept the 60-watt replacements in other areas of the house, but for the receessed cans in the kitchen, they just didn't work, so we returned 'em. Ditto the ones from Home Depot that were a different brand. Was real disappointing.
November/2006: A letter was published in the Boulder Daily Camera. I sent a response, but it didn't get published - both are attached below.
Published in BDC Open Forum on November 21st, 2006
*LIGHTS* - *This Christmas, less can be more*
Every year, the Daily Camera does a story honoring the beautiful displays of holiday lights in our community.
In the 2006 Season of Light, I'd like to make a plea that the Camera seek out the most /imaginative/ displays, not the most extravagant and
energy-intensive. In a year that's seen global warming established as a
fact in most minds, as well as a threat to our kids and theirs, it seems
to me wrong-headed to pile on the lights (unless solar powered!) or to
praise anyone for doing so.
With a little imagination, and encouragement from community leaders (such as yourself), we can do more with less and be the better for it.
...
Here was my response to that
An Open Forum letter a week ago encouraged Boulder residents to be more imaginative (rather than just have more lights) with their Christmas Displays in order to reduce the impact on Global Warming. As someone who is often called Clark Griswold this time of the year, here's what I'm doing along those lines - may also provide ideas for others:
Being an open-minded Republic of Boulder resident, I respect that some people still may not feel that is enough. However, many folks don't realize that the cost to run the 26,000 Christmas Lights in 2005 was $5/day . i.e. one Double Peppermint Latte.
And for me, that.s plenty well worth it for the joy it brings to people and especially the kids when they see the display in person and/or on the web. "Imaginative" additions this year are giant Inflatable Elmo and Homer Simpson - D'OH! So while my Christmas Lights might be a bit tacky, they make an effort to be environmentally conscious; plus they are just a darn lotta fun. ;-)
Finally, the Internet site has garnered thousands of dollars in donations to charity to help find a cure for Celiac Disease - something my kids have. So you better believe that komar.org is lit up again for 2006!
Merry Christmas and HO-HO-HO,
As a Slashdot Subscriber (highly recommended BTW), I saw this story in the "Mysterious Future" and needless to say, it is EMERGENCY ALERT on Komar.org as I'm sure Scotty will be saying shortly "Control Circuits threatening to overload Captain!" The four dedicated 100 Mbps Apache/Linux web servers (using mod_perl) handled a doubleheader of DIGG and FARK on December 13th and are already getting hammered ... but Slashdot could
be another level ... lets see how high the load factor goes on this snowy Christmas Eve.
/.'ers RTFA (hah!) since there
is ... uhhhhh ... a bit of history associated with my
"controllable" Christmas Lights ... ;-)
... OFF ... ON ... OFF ... ON ... etc.
... but raises
awareness/funds for the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Disease. This is something my kids
have, so it's personal for me ... so if you are feeling the Christmas
spirit and want to donate a few dollars, please do so at their site.
Zonker's article is excellent - highly recommend
People around the world are hammering it allready (Google Maps mish-mash) so I'll try to keep the web servers going while everyone turns the lights ON
Have fun with it and Merry Christmas to all,
alek
P.S. The web site is totally free
Todd Neff from the Boulder Camera wrote a Christmas Eve article about the physics of Santa. He included a "Parental disretion advised" notice, but the headline writer argueably got a little carried away. Needless to say, since I live in the Republic of Boulder, outraged residents wrote several letters to the editor that were published on December 28th. So I wrote the following which ran on December 31st. Great headline by the Camera and they printed my letter in its entirety (including some subtle attempts at humor) with minor grammatical edits.
HO, HO, HO - Yes, Virginia, as my Web cam shows
As a technologist, I enjoyed Todd Neff's piece on Christmas Eve about the physics of Santa; kudos to the Daily Camera for not just reprinting the AP article, but doing some local embelishment that added a nice touch to the story (and ditto in the Dec. 28 piece about the coming leap-second).
As reported by the Camera's Kate Larsen a week earlier (Dec. 17), I have three Web cams (three more than last year) at my house watching my 26,000 Christmas lights. Needless to say, my 7-year-old and 4-year-old sons were excited to see if Santa would show up on these Web cams. And, not surprisingly, the Big Red Guy (and especially Rudolph) are quite visible stopping by our Lafayette house on Christmas Eve.
So while it would be (way!) out of place for me to weigh in on journalistic reporting as other letter writers have, I thought I would write to say that while Todd accurately reported that the physics of Santa are a challenge, the conclusion is wrong. Yes, sometimes, the paper doesn't get the story right ... and yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
Santa does deliver presents on Christmas Eve to children around the world.
The magic/miracle is still alive, and I would suggest that Camera readers (and their kids) review the video at www.komar.org to judge for themselves.
And you'd better believe I'll be watching next year as Santa returns at Christmas.
A while back, I wrote a quick little Perl script to do geolocation and other misc. info - see the page for more info, but it uses the free Perl Module Geo::IP and the MaxMind database. The free version of the later used to only provide country data, but they now provide lat/long and city info ... seems reasonably accurate, although with all of these things, the results can sometimes be way off.
So with that, it wasn't too hard to write another Perl script that parses the IP address from the Apache logs, acquires misc. geolocation info, and then dumps out the lat/long data in Javascript for the Google Maps API - see this graphically shown on my christmas maps page.
That was a damn fine writeup ... someone with balls
at Microsoft should send it up the chain all the way
to Bill Gates with a "we have to change our culture" comment.
I won't hold my breath.
... since it seems they are the ones who really make the decisions ... ;-)
The repeated "I can't comment on that, I'm a product marketing guy" it totally weak and speaks volumes about their lack of accountability. I was surprised you didn't push Nick White ("Mr. Cut off the Conversation") to have their "lawyers who make all patent decisions" meet with you guys
My wife just got an "updated" Cell Phone - tons of nice features in a smaller package. But when you turn it on, it takes about 10 seconds to get going versus about 2 for the previous one. Just a lotta stuff getting loaded in ... and the amount exceeds the increased speed of the processors/RAM/etc.
"HP also agreed to maintain the watchdog positions of chief ethics officer and chief privacy officer for five years."
...
Especially because their previous one (and also their general counsel) were involved in the pre-texting scandal
On a related note, if you happen to be interested in the history of Christmas Lights, check out this site. George Nelson has a very detailed history of Christmas Lights per his table of contents.
While my Controllable Christmas Lights for Celiac Disease are a bit high-tech & over-the-top, George's site is a nice trip back in time of the last 100+ years when even electricity itself was a novelty - one interesting tidbit - "The world's first practical light bulb was invented by Thomas Edison in 1879, and a mere three years later in 1882 an associate of his, one Edward Johnson, electrically lit a Christmas tree for the first time. The tree was in the parlor of Johnson's New York City home, located in the first section of that city to be wired for electricity. The display created quite a stir"
Someone needs to contact the Internetional Space Station HomwOwners Association as I'm sure this is against the covenents ...
All that hand waving didn't help Ronnie ...
I think these halloween decorations would be a perfect compliment to your music ... ;-)
"Use the halloween webcams to view live images of a buncha halloween decorations & lights and also CONTROL them - heck, you can even inflate (or deflate) the giant Frankenstein & Homer Simpson - D'oh! The webcams run 7x24 and you can turn stuff on & off from 1800 to 2200 MDT (GMT-6). Plus you can send "Instant Messages via Webcam" for everyone to see."
The classic example is a Google Search for miserable failure that returns the WhiteHouse.gov biography for George Bush. Not surpisingly, Michael Moore's page also comes up in the first page of results in the tit-for-tat. Read more about how "ugly" Democrats and Republicans are using Political Google Bombs at Wikipedia.
over the previous HP ethics officer who approved the pre-texting effort ...
I have some other examples of projects like this listed here. Very cool job by the MIT guys ... now they just need to add some more of 'em in all of the windows and provide the ability to generate alphanumber (or image) messages that can be uploaded from the Internet - heh, heh! ;-)
Yep - Alexa's sample size is pretty small, but skewed toward IE folks and people who install/game it so their web sites rank well ... although I think anything in the top-1000 is almost always "something" significant. Unfortunately, there aren't a lotta metrics out there (plus those often provide varying results), and this is easy to understand and free, so it's often used.
Best source is the source - i.e. would be real interesting to know what the web stats (for actual web logs) are like for a site like Slashdot - I can only imagine the number of hits/page-views/etc.
Sorry 'bout the typo.
The article mentions that the Fear of Friday, the 13th is called Paraskevidekatriaphobia ...
Google only has
1,650 results with
Urban Legends the first one. I gotta believe a double whammy for those superstitious people to have it fall on Halloween - D'OH! ;-)
T-Rex BBQ Grill
Will it run (embedded) Linux to control the solar cells, battery, motor, etc.?
"Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP ... said the current state of the Internet includes a litany of broken items, but with a little help from PHP there may well be some hope for the Web yet."
...
I wonder if he has ever consider using Perl
Ditto what others said - yea, the Kill-A-Watt ain't perfect, but cheap and works as advertised. Note that it has some time history capabilities too as long as it is left plugged in. One interesting thing to do is hook it inline on your PC and watch the power draw change between "idle" and when it's "full on"
I've also used it to measure current draw on my christmas lights to make sure I don't exceed 15 Amps on a circuit - I try to stay under 10 by load balancing.
Wiki has a decent write up on NaBH4 for those interested and mentions the applicability to Fuel Cells.
This is still in the research/development phase as per the article "Dr. Gervasio recognises that there are still many steps between his prototype and a competitively priced, off-the-shelf, battery-sized fuel cell. Nevertheless, he believes they could appear in power-hungry devices such as laptops, camcorders, and radios within five years." So until then, I'll be using CnH2n+2 to mow my lawn.
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