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As a followup to my previous post, I've been testing two whole-house electricity monitors for close to the last month. As I mentioned previously, I ordered a TED1001 Energy Detective Monitor, and planned to just install/use that. After my previous post, David Olsen at Black & Decker contacted me, and offered to ship me a Black & Decker EM100B Power Monitor. Actually, he shipped me two of the devices, and I gave the second one to my parents, who are trying to figure out why their electricity bills are higher than their neighbors. Big thanks to David and Black & Decker.

So, I have both monitors installed now. I was able to install the Black & Decker monitor myself, but needed help from a friend to install the TED1001. See my previous post for the differences in how the monitors are installed. The TED samples usage once a second. The B&D appears to sample every 30 seconds or so. The TED connects to your Windows PC and lets you graph energy usage through a Flash-based desktop app. The app does work under Parallels on a Mac (which is what I used). I emailed the manufacturer asking about a native Mac version, but never heard back.

The B&D talks to the sensor wirelessly. The TED uses the house circuitry to communicate with the sensor. This is one area I had a problem with the TED unit. It's only able to work when plugged into some of my power outlets. Unfortunately, none of the outlets near my computer worked, so when I wanted to use the app, I needed to run an extension cord from another part of the house to my Mac. But most of the time, I don't bother with the app and just watch the electricity usage in real-time.

Of course the big question is, are these devices going to lead to a lower electricity bill for me? I think I can answer that in two ways. First, did I discover anything in particular that was taking too much electricity? To that I'd say a qualified no. The qualification involves my refrigerator. It runs not quite, but almost, all the time. In talking with an appliance repair person, this suggests that I need to clean the condenser coils, which I haven't had the chance (or, umm, desire) to do yet. Everything else appears to use an expected amount of electricity, I think, although I'm not sure, and perhaps that's a second qualification. For example, I have no real idea how much electricity my pool pump should be using, other than, I assume, "a lot". If there's a page on the 'net listing the amount of electricity various devices/appliances can be expected to use, I'm not aware of it, and that'd be a very helpful resource.

But this leads to the second way I can answer the original question of whether these monitors will lead to a lower electricity bill. By having one of these devices, I've become hyper-aware of the electricity usage in my life. I know that with the house quiescent, and only clocks/timers/DVRs/hardwired appliances running, I use about 500 watts (aka my minimum electricity usage). I know that running the pool pump uses a lot of electricity. I know that my computer and monitors use around 400 watts. I know that my TV uses something similar to that. I know that the halogen lights above my bar use a lot more electricity than some of my other lights. I have to believe that this awareness will at least indirectly lead to me using less electricity.

Over the past year or two, my electric bill has ranged between $300 and $600, which seems, umm, high to me. I want to know what's using all that electricity. Maybe I have a refrigerator that's running all the time, using too much electricity. Maybe some of my numerous toys are acting as energy vampires, and simply unplugging them will significantly cut my electric bill. But right now, I have no idea.

So, this afternoon I researched and purchased a whole-house electricity monitor. These devices function as your electric meter does, tracking how much electricity you use on a real-time basis. The difference is that you get the data inside your house on a handy digital readout, and in some cases, on your computer, making it much easier to figure out what devices are hogging electricity.

It appears that there are two main whole-house monitors, the Energy Detective Monitor (aka TED1001) and the Black & Decker EM100B Power Monitor (which appears to be a rebrand of a device called the Power Cost Monitor). Both devices track your whole-house energy usage, but they do so differently.

The Black & Decker has what appears to be an optical sensor that you simply attach to your electric meter. The sensor box includes a battery powered wireless transmitter, which relays the data to a hand held unit (also battery powered) that you can place anywhere in your house. Installation of the sensor box looks easy and can be done by the homeowner. The TED measures electricity consumption by attaching a sensor to your electric mains. The sensor transmits data to the indoor unit through the electrical lines in your house. Installation looks more complicated and they recommend having an electrician do it for you.

Both units appear to measure the same things. The advantage of the TED unit is that it connects through a USB port to a Windows PC. Using the included software, you are able to track energy usage over time, potentially making it easier to figure out which devices are hogging electricity.

I ordered the TED unit, even though it's more difficult to install, because of the ability to track data on my PC. I'll post again when I get things set up.

Well, not really, but I am quoted in this article on straight, single men who own cats. It's a silly piece, which the author Abby Ellin fully admitted when we talked. And actually, I think I laughed through the entire interview, which I'm sure didn't make me a good interview subject. Having never, you know, been interviewed about my cats before, it was an interesting experience.

I can't say that I necessarily agree that it's only now becoming socially acceptable for a straight single man to own a cat (or two). But who can argue with the quote that "[t]hey make the best boyfriends..." and that "straight men with cats seem to be really secure and stable." Hey, if it's in the New York Times, it's true!

For those interested, I'm doing most of my blogging these days on Twitter. And I'm posting my pictures on Flickr. Alternatively, I do have a FriendFeed account which aggregates these other accounts, but I don't actually spend time on FriendFeed myself.

Continuing my experiments with iPhone panoramas (and risking turning this blog into just a photo-blog), this was stitched together using Photoshop CS3 from three pictures I took this weekend. I'm not terribly happy with the colors, but I'm a bit limited with the iPhone.

Every spring, the county brings in this herd of goats to munch on the grass across from my house. The furry lawnmowers devour a prodigious amount of grass every day, and they make quick work of the area. It's difficult to see in this picture, but there's a goat walking across the pipe. This group is about half of the goats working the hill. When they're all concentrated in a smaller area, it looks like a sea of fur and horns.

Last night, Amazon announced that they're adding a persistent storage capability to their EC2 service. To review, EC2 provides the ability to create virtual servers on the fly. These servers are a bit ephemeral, however. They can fail at any time and don't provide any persistent, local storage of their own. If an EC2 instance fails, you have to completely restart it, losing any data it may have been working on. Amazon's S3 service is persistent storage, but it is not designed to be accessed as local storage by EC2 instances. The newly announced persistent storage capability is designed to solve this issue. It's like an on-demand S.A.N., but with more flexibility. One of the really nice things about it is the ability to checkpoint a persistent volume to S3. This is great for database backups, among other things. No performance numbers have been published yet, but those who have been using it say the performance is good. This makes Amazon Web Services even more interesting, because it's now easier to run a normal MySQL instance without having to do something like running some kind of replication just to deal with the non-persistent local storage. And it scales up.

See Werner Vogels' announcement of the persistent storage service, and RightScale's analysis of it, for more information.

A friend, seeing my panorama pictures yesterday, said I could have done a much better job using Photoshop CS3. He offered to redo one of my panoramas to show me how much better Photoshop was at blending the exposures of the individual images. I have to agree, it definitely looks better. The resulting picture doesn't have any of the banding or abrupt transitions seen in my original panoramas. Time, perhaps, to grab a copy of CS3. The only question is whether it's worth spending $1000 on.

I've been experimenting with panoramas over the past few months, with varying degrees of success. Panoramas are multiple pictures of a given scene, from different views, combined into one larger, (hopefully) coherent, image. Since I'm only using my iPhone, the individual source pictures aren't that great (fingers crossed that iPhone 2.0 has a better camera), but I like the results. I'm using Calico to assemble the panoramas, and I think it does a good job. One of the challenges is adjusting the exposure/colors of the individual pictures. Calico does some of that automatically, but as you can see in these, there's still some variation. A second challenge is getting enough 'coverage' of the scene. As you can see in these panoramas, there are some black spots indicating where I didn't get enough coverage (ie. take a picture). Click through each picture to Flickr for other sizes.

The first panorama was taken in Kauai last month:

The next two panoramas are from Northstar, Lake Tahoe. The first is from off the top of Comstock:

And this one is from mid-way down Prosser. It's difficult to see, but in the upper, middle of this picture is the Truckee, Tahoe airport:

The concept of aggregation is increasingly important on the Internet, as the sheer number of information resources increases. The average user wants to track more and more things on the Internet; an aggregator quickly becomes necessary as one's bookmark list grows to infinity. The first aggregators, what I call 'general purpose' aggregators, like Bloglines, Google Reader, and Newsgator, are focused on tracking blogs and news feeds, making it easy to subscribe to whatever blogs the user came across.

The new service FriendFeed has been getting a lot of attention the past couple of weeks. It's the latest in the line of what I call 'individual aggregators,' services that aggregate all the distributed parts of a person's on-line presence in one place. A person may have a blog, a Twitter account, a Flickr photostream. These services combine all of these items in one place. This trend started with Facebook's newsfeed, continued with Plaxo's Pulse, and then several other services, including Tumblr can do most of what the individual. These services are different than the general purpose aggregators in that they're focused on tracking individuals, not feeds. But the general purpose aggregators can do what the individual aggregators can do, because the underlying technology, RSS, is the same. It's really just a matter of user interfaces and a key bit of information.

The Problem

The individual aggregators collect a list of all of the distributed parts of a person's on-line presence. They ask each user to list their Twitter account, their Flickr account, their YouTube account, their blog. This list doesn't exist anywhere in a way that's machine readable. Each of the individual aggregators has to deduce this information and then maintain it. Or more specifically, each user has to maintain this information on each of the individual aggregators. Wouldn't it be better if this list existed somewhere under direct control of the user in a way where it wasn't siloed in a centralized, proprietary service? That way, every aggregator could take advantage of it and users would only have to update the list in one place.

A Modest Proposal

This problem is actually a general purpose version of a problem already solved by something called RSS Autodiscovery. In order to make it easier for general purpose aggregators to find RSS feeds to subscribe to, many publishers included a special line of text in the headers of their HTML. I have one on my blog:

Aggregators know to look for this line, which tells them where the RSS feed for that blog exists. Can't we just extend this to include a list of all the other aspects of a person's identity? Have one line for each service the person uses, and change the title accordingly. So, I could include:

for my Flickr feed. This doesn't have to only apply to services that publish RSS feeds. I could even do something like:

to indicate my Twitter account.

By doing this, the list of all the parts of a person's on-line presence is kept under the control of the person, associated with their blog. It's distributed, open, and easy to implement.

How To Make It Work

For this to work, a couple things need to happen. Blog publishing software has to be modified to ask for and then insert this information into the headers of a person's blog. Then,aggregators need to be modified to look for this information, and to periodically recheck it. The general purpose aggregators need to augment their interfaces to allow people to subscribe to these new feeds. But none of these things are terribly difficult to do.

Dear Lazyweb,

I'm in need of a new laptop bag, something on the smallish side. It needs to fit my Macbook Air and its power adapter, my Kindle and its power adapter, my Bose headphones, possibly a small mouse, and a couple of cords. So, not much. Any recommendations? I'd like to see it in person before I buy it, and I'd like to get it this weekend, so that eliminates mail-order places like WaterField.

From outside a bar in downtown Aspen.

I've just finished off a nice bottle of Lagunitas Maximus beer. It's a higher alcohol content version of their IPA, and is quite tasty. I have also been known to enjoy a bottle of Spaten Optimator, which also is a higher alcohol content version of their regular lager. Maximus. Optimator. Sensing a theme? With that in mind, I have some suggestions for other possible beer names:

• Mess-you-up Quickinator
• Throbbing Destructor
• Gigantinous Hugenator
• Stupendous Mistake
• Destructimus Relationships
• Hangover Extremus
• Penisious Compensator
• Markus Shouldn't Blogimus After Drinkingatoring

Clearly I have a future in beer marketing. Other suggestions? Leave them in the comments.

I hope you enjoyed your leap day.