rebron.org: Everyday Life, Work, Ironman Training

Summary: Solar panels for a small home needs to get down to a $4,500 to $7,000 price point for it to make economic sense for home owners — a 7 to 10 year break even.  It may get to that price point eventually due to demand, decrease in prices of solar panels, improvements in technology (like solar roof shingles), group/community price breaks, and continued tax breaks and rebates.

Details: For 2 to 3kWh systems, current price point is estimated to be about $20,000 for installation.  With State rebates and Federal Income Tax credits totaling $5,000 to 6,000 you’re looking at $14,000 - $15,000 for the system.  You’re getting about 300 to 450 kWh a month.  If you are currently using 400 kWh a month, that’s about $50 a month or $600 a year.  This means your break even point is about 25 years.  This doesn’t include the home value appreciation due to your solar panel investment.

We average 325kWh a month, about $35/month.  Other info:

• How Residential Solar Panel Works
• Maintenance includes washing the panels periodically, seems like that’s all
• Estimate included 10 year warranty on full system, 25 years on panels themselves
• Estimate from Borrego Solar, for a residence in Oakland, CA - low energy use
• Installations should take about two days
• Home Depot is coordinating installations through BP Solar
• Temescal, Rockridge, and Berkeley residents (45 people) teamed up with Solar City for a group discount
• PG&E apparently increases the cost of electricity/energy 5.5% a year (not sure if that’s true)
• PG&E gave Far Niente Winery a nearly $2MM cash rebate for their solar installation
• But, PG&E has also given out cash rebates to California schools like Peralta Elementary

Borrego Solar seems like a good company.  I’ve seen Solar City around the area as well.

For my reference:

To try:

• Pownce, Twitter - (not too interested though, network effect/usefulness?)

Backend

• Bugzilla (bug system)
• MediaWiki (Wiki system)
• OpenX (ad system)
• Plone (CMS)
• Simple Machines Forum (forums)
• WordPress (blog software)
• ZenCart (shopping cart)

Frontend

• Search, Gmail, Groups, Calendar, Maps, Docs

Fat clients (while I’m here…)

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• iTunes, iPhoto
• iChat
• CyberDuck
• Photoshop, Fireworks
• Numbers, Keynote
• TextEdit, Grab, Flickr Uploader
• Mac OS X 10.5.x, Windows Vista xx

Some recent discoveries on the “libation” front:

• The Wine Mine - low cost, good wine
• Marc 49 - a restaurant wine/bar in Temescal, opened last week
• The Trappist - Belgian beer bar on Broadway
• Luka’s Taproom & Lounge - Oakland’s new “it” place, not sure
• Water Lounge and Raw Bar - Might be too hip and expensive for me

[Calorie Restriction Society] Our goal is to help people of all ages live longer and healthier lives simply by:

• eating fewer calories
• maintaining adequate nutrition

NYTimes article

Might be worth trying out for those seriously thinking about wanting to drop some weight.

My approach was to exercise like crazy.  I turned eating too much into working out/exercising too much.  Just a matter of getting into a routine and surrounding myself with like-minded people.

[Calorie Restriction diet is not good for people who work out a lot, who are likely on some sort of workout diet anyway.]

There’s discussion about bringing in the CompStat system into Oakland.  As part of the increase in the parcel tax to Oakland residents to pay for more police officers, CompStat is something that I think we’ll also be requiring.  Implementing CompStat via the police department will help, but a CompStat like approach with other departments like Parks & Rec, etc should also be implemented.

CompStat is a “strategic control system” designed for the collection and feedback of information on crime and related quality of life issues. The CompStat process can be summarized in one simple statement: “Collect, analyze, and map crime data and other essential police performance measures on a regular basis, and hold police managers accountable for their performance as measured by these data.”

This statement reflects the paradigm of modern policing: accountability at all levels of a police agency. Since the CompStat process was introduced by the New York City Police Department in 1994, it has been widely adopted and is partly responsible for contributing to significant improvements in the way many organizations control crime and conduct daily business. The process has recently been described as an “emerging police managerial paradigm” or “a new paradigm revolutionizing law enforcement management and practice” while others have called it “perhaps the single most important organizational/administrative innovation in policing during the latter half of the 20th century.”

More on CompStat and in Wikipedia

I’m doing the SF Marathon in August.  I’m in week four of my marathon “training”.  I was running a bit before so I was able to jump into a 10 week program, otherwise 20 miles in week 1 would be a pretty rough start.

EZ means Easy.  R = rest.  XT means cross training like swimming or biking.  B means bicycling but disregard that (same with Century, I’m doing the bicycling century in August too).  LSD means long slow distance, basically run slow or even walk when you need to.  Race means to run at a race pace or the actual race itself.

Running 4 times a week is about the max you can do, otherwise performance goes down (but run every day if you’re not training for a race).  Rest is really important.  Supposedly after 3 days of running, you’ve reached the max benefit.

There’s lots of marathon, 1/2 marathon etc running programs on the web.  End of the day it’s just finding one you like, modifying it to your schedule, and sticking with the program.

Jeff Galloway has good programs (the one above might even be his).  Running.com is good.  Also look up Chi Running, not so much for the Chi, but for the form — mid-sole strike (not heel strike) and slight lean forward, running like you’re continuously falling and catching yourself.  This makes running not suck, well not suck as much.

My Gmail address is more or less public and pretty much all the spam is filtered correctly.  I’ve had a couple of Yahoo! id’s but they did a smart thing by opening up the namespace with Ymail and Rocketmail.  So I have rebron@ymail.com now, come spam me!  Email = identity, it’s the user’s GUID for their set of services.  Email is as important as search if not more.

I still also have my Hotmail account rafebron@hotmail.com which is just littered with spam.  This was my first webmail account back in ‘96 or ‘97?  It’s my primary spam account, but I also do use rafebron@hotmail.com for my Xbox Live account ID.

I had rebron@excite.com as a spam account too.  I had/have rebron2000@netscape.net which got converted to something else, rebron2000@aim.com.  I think I did have an AOL email account before I joined NSCP/AOL but didn’t have an AOL account when I actually was employed by AOL.  rebron2000 is still my AIM user ID.

My primary email account is rebron@gmail.com.  I access Gmail through Thunderbird via POP.  I like how Gmail archives all of my emails so I don’t have to worry about saving them locally via Thunderbird.  I don’t use IMAP with Gmail, I did when it came out but it was too slow.  That might have changed.  What’s cool about accessing Gmail through Thunderbird is that any spam that doesn’t get caught via Gmail’s filters, you can train Thunderbird to catch them.  Plus it’s faster.

—

Here’s my quick rundown:

Email is about identity as well as features with the webmail application.  In other words, if a user doesn’t like or can’t get their preferred username doesn’t matter how good the webmail application is.

Gmail - best webmail app right now.  Fast, simple, integration with chat, allows access with other applications.  Threads messages into conversations which takes a bit to learn.

Yahoo!Mail - Acts like a fat client (due to Oddpost).  Integrates with Yahoo!Messenger.  Very busy user interface though.  Have to pay for other features that probably should be free, e.g. POP access.  No IMAP access still?  Calendar is still old school.

AOLMail - Like Yahoo!Mail.  Simpler, integrates with AIM.  Integrates with a better calendar.  The old AOL way of doing mail is long gone, the whacky modified IMAP.  Better than Yahoo!Mail given that mail access is open so can access email via POP or IMAP fat client of your choice.  Deletes your mailbox if you don’t sign-in every six months (others might do the same thing).  They’re on the right track.

Hotmail -  I don’t have anything nice to say.  They don’t program correctly for Firefox.  They just need to do a better job all around.

Yahoo!Mail, AOLMail, Hotmail are all moving towards a Zimbra like experience so will be interesting to see what happens in this space in the next few years.