All posts by MattK

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Darrick’s Geothermal Adventure

Pals, Save.the.world, ,

Darrick is a buddy from up in Rochester. He’s doing something which is the heart and soul of blogging. He’s taking a minor adventure from his life, and chronicling it for the people who care:

I’d like to take a week or two to blog about our experience with researching, and deciding to go with geothermal, and show the process of installing the system. I’ll be posting the numbers that I came up with which showed why geothermal made sense in our case.

There’s two kinds of folks who care – there’s me and the rest of his friends. We want to know what’s happening in Darrick’s life. We care what Darrick is doing because he is our buddy and we bond with people by knowing and talking about our lives. That’s the ambient communication that bonds people over time, and something the internet is good at enabling for folks who don’t live in close proximity anymore.

The other audience is people who are looking for info on geothermal. Darrick talks about how he chose a contractor for his project and how he calculated the payback on geothermal. Darrick’s way of breaking down the numbers is very useful.

According to all of the estimates our calculated payback time was about 5-7 years, with an annual savings of about 60-70% our existing heating cost. This was assuming that heating oil prices continued to rise, the heat load calculations were accurate, electricity prices continued to increase at the historical rate, and the historical weather patterns continued. These calculations assumed that I was replacing an existing heating system, which I wasn’t. None of the calculations used the cost of borrowing the money, and the cost of repairing the lawn after the job was completed. After adding in these additional factors, and removing the replacement cost of existing heater I came up with a more accurate payback time of about 9-10 years. This was still a worthwhile payback as we were planning on living in this house for at least 20 years. After 25 years it was estimated we will have saved about $100k (assuming oil prices continue to rise). Considering these savings, and the addition of air conditioning to our house, geothermal seemed like a great investment!

Here is giving other people the factors he considered and the way he justified the decision. That’s useful and it’s good for people who he might never even meet. This is the great sort of thing that delicious revealed back when it first started. Lots of people aggregating things just for themselves produces a resource that is greater than the sum of its tiny little parts. Like a nation, or a blogosphere, or a person, or a mind…

JME is trying Veganism

Pals, ,

She’s been vegetarian for a long time, but is trying veganism as a sort of cleanse. Sure, she thinks her body is revolting, but I think it’s just the light. Sorry, can’t resist a groucho marx bit!

She’s also giving up booze for a bit. I can understand doing that as well.

I like to play with these same things. When I originally gave up meat, I did it because Sam and I had overdone it so much on a trip to Las Vegas that we couldn’t look at flesh without feeling ill. We discovered that if you stayed away long enough, you didn’t miss it. Anything that you think you crave, that consumes you – that’s a thing you want to be careful around. When I’ve found myself constantly out drinking with folks and having a wonderful time, that’s when I eventually want to pull back and show myself that I can have a great time without all that.

I think we all move in waves of moderation and indulgence and asceticism to some degree. It’s healthy to pour yourself into joyous pleasure. It’s also healthy to take a break, to pull back and realign yourself. Recalibrate. Give the old machine you ride in a bit of a cleanup and workover.

The saddest part of her excellent post:

Unless you can explain that you have a problem (and they’ll probably try and talk you out of that as well) if your friends drink, they will be highly disturbed by this decision. Just telling them I wanted to clean myself (read: liver) out a bit and get into shape brought on looks of ridicule. My partner has absolutely no problem quaffing beer while I drink sparkling water or unsweetened Iced tea but others will not even hang out with me one-on-one if I’m not drinking and they are. I think that’s sad.

If you find yourself being this person – it’s a good time to take a look at why you need someone else to take a drink.

WordPrss – Subscribing to feeds is done

Dev, Software, wordpress,

I’ve been plugging away at WordPrss on hacknights and subway rides and I have some progress to show for it.

I can show a feed, and shortcut keys help you navigate backwards and forwards through them. Clicking on a feed marks it as read. By default we hide read items, but you can always show them if you want.

You can manage the details of individual feeds – you can rename them etc.

Adding new feeds works and while I was at it I put in feed autodiscovery. Say you want to subscribe to a site but you just have the URL for the site.

Wordprss will do its best to figure out what feeds the site offers.

Choose one and away you go!

Now that this bit is done I’ll be working on getting the updating to work properly. Soon I’ll be ready to install it up on a server. Just got to sort through security and make sure the upgrade process is sorted…

Are all games stupid?

Art, Pals, , ,


Hit play, and start reading.

This piece from the NY Times about stupid games really rung a bell in my head:

Stupid games, on the other hand, are rarely occasions in themselves. They are designed to push their way through the cracks of other occasions. We play them incidentally, ambivalently, compulsively, almost accidentally. They’re less an activity in our day than a blank space in our day; less a pursuit than a distraction from other pursuits. You glance down to check your calendar and suddenly it’s 40 minutes later and there’s only one level left before you jump to the next stage, so you might as well just launch another bird.

Continue reading Are all games stupid? →

Save Crush3r – an open letter to Ericson de Jesus

Pals,

Hi Ericson,
Crusher was my favorite invite service.  I used it once or twice a year for my parties and thought it was just dandy.  I want to avoid big services because I didn’t like the way they were monetizing me and my friends. They felt gross.

I am an open source developer.  Not a great one, but a persistent one. If you are shutting down crusher and you don’t have a way to make enough money off it to support it, why not get some credit for what you made? If you want to make it an open source offering from Particle, that would be awesome.  If, instead, you’d like some help, I’d be willing to offer some hours from my side to open source it and make it easier for other folks to self-host and contribute.

I think it would be a shame if the great work you did just went poof!  I’m willing to chip in some effort to make this usable to lots of other folks.  If you can’t open source it, I’d love any advice or patterns you can suggest if I want to take this on as a project after I finish up Wordprss – an feed reader for wordpress. I’d like to have an easy evite alternative that I can self host and trust with my friend’s info.

So I’d love to hear from you – any thoughts on how to do this?

Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., and the Humble Bundle

Pals, Video, ,

This is an awesome time to be alive. Everything keeps changing. I remember when it was common knowledge that you had to cripple the movies and games you sold to keep people from copying them.

These days, that old myth is falling apart and people are realizing that alot of that was a pricing issue. Louis C.K. took a chance on his fans and sold them 100% DRM free comedy at $5 a pop.  His fans made him a million in 12 days, because he is genuine and treated them like people.

The Humble Indie Bundle was a crazy idea that you could offer fans 100% uncrippled games for windows, mac and linux – and let the fans pay whatever they want. They also let fans decide where the money goes – to the developers or to a charity!  They stomped it, raising buckets of cash for the developers / the Child’s Play charity,  and have gone on to release many more of these, now including Android versions as well.  Sadly, Apple’s rules prevent the team from offering iPhone games.

Now Azis Ansari is offering the same deal Louis CK offered: Stream or download a 100% DRM free HD video of Aziz Ansari’s latest comedy set – for just $5.