Blessed by the Potato

I wrote a short rant not too long about about the ban of indandescents in Nunavut. I think that reducing the use of incandescents would be a step in the right direction, and taxing incandescents (or subsidizing CFLs) so that it becomes easier for consumers to choose the “right” one without having to do a long-term cost-benefit analysis is a good thing. Banning them, though, is not such a bright idea, since there are a small number of situations where fluorescents are not ideal (see previous rant or below for details).

After writing that rant up, I rewrote it as a letter to my MPP, kicking myself after I sent it since there was no way Ontario would actually follow Nunavut’s lead and ban incandescent lighting…

Whoops.

I was happy at least to see this paragraph in the CBC report (the other news sources I skimmed didn’t have it — the Toronto Star even said that Ontario was “the first… jurisdiction in North America to commit to such a ban” — perhaps technically true, since the legislation hasn’t passed in Nunavut yet, but a somewhat disingenuous statement):

The ban, part of a wider energy conservation program, would allow for exceptions, such as the use of incandescent bulbs in fields like medicine.

This is the letter I sent my MPP last month. I never got a response (at least the last time I went crazy-go-nuts on my MPP, she sent me an acknowledgement!).

Dr. Matthews, I recently saw the news that Nunavut was planning on banning the sale of incandescent light bulbs in the territory to save power and reduce emissions. (story: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/03/22/nu-lightbulb.html)

I am writing you to encourage the province of Ontario to not follow Nunavut’s lead in this matter — a ban on incandescents is not the way to go.

Taxing them however is, in my opinion, an excellent idea: make some money for the government, and make the initial purchase price of an incandescent the same as a fluorescent — even those with a short-term focus can then make better decisions about which to get, rather than having to try to weigh the initial costs against the long-term energy savings. That should help dramatically shift the usage away from the incandescents. Compact fluorescents are a good thing, and I’ve been putting them in nearly every room in the house here. However, they do have a few short-comings, and for these reasons it’s important to have incandescents as an option:

* CFLs can not be used in completely enclosed light fixtures, such as some pot lights.
* Many CFLs can not be put on dimmer switches (though some specific models can be).
* Some types of CFLs (I do not know if this applies to all of them) do not handle extremes in temperature well, and may not be suited to use in stoves, range hoods, or outdoor lighting.
* Almost all CFLs have a delay between turning on the switch and lighting up. There is a further delay between the first spark and full brightness. While this is not a problem for most applications, it is slightly less than ideal for some uses such as motion-detector-triggered security lights (compounded by further delays in cold environments).
* A small minority of people find that the flicker from fluorescent lighting (though CFLs don’t seem quite as bad) gives them headaches.
* CFLs have less-than-perfect colour fidelity. While it’s good enough for almost all uses, some specialized cases (certain science experiments, artists) may find that they prefer to use incandescents for their broad-spectrum output.
* Some sensitive electronics can experience interference from some types of CFLs (I believe the kind with magnetic ballast) due to proximity or being on the same circuit.

For the majority of cases, CFLs are great ways to save tonnes of energy, but for these situations, we should aim to have incandescents as an option (even if it is an expensive one).

Now, it looks like while you won’t be able to buy an incandescent in Ontario under the current plan, you could go to the States or Quebec and bring one over without any trouble, if you had to (so they’ll be unavailable, but not illegal).

At first, I vigorously opposed Windows XP as an operating system. It just moved so many things around, buried settings in the control panels behind a number of extra layers of opacity that one simply didn’t have to bother with in 98/ME. It wasn’t just something else to get used to — it was a pain providing long-distance support for relatives, and even to this day I still sometimes wonder why it is that after finding my way down to the network connections page (and not internet options), then clicking properties on the connection whose IP I want to change, I still need to go through another level of clicking “properties” when having to change IP settings is a pretty common task…

However, over time, it really grew on me. In particular, its stability. I always used to have to plan on when I would have to shut everything down and reset the system; could I safely leave it until morning? If I pushed it, then I might lose a bunch of open work, or at least suffer through a lot of slowdowns until I did… with XP, a lot of those concerns went away. I can pretty reliably leave it going for weeks at a time now (though sometimes I’m limited by the automatic updates that install themselves and then want to reset the computer right then, user input to the contrary or not). In fact, I’ve gotten a little too cocky sometimes in terms of forgetting to save my work frequently.

Tonight, though, all that good will went down the toilet as I faced several old school Blue Screens of Death. I wasn’t even doing anything to get them. I was running BrainVoyager, and with the program idle, walked away for something, and when I turned back there it was.

BSOD.

Of course Brain Voyager is likely to blame since it is limited-production scientific software, but nonetheless, XP generally handles errors better than completely seizing up and crashing. Ordinarily, I might have just thanked whatever minor office deities were around at the time that I had saved my work just before getting up, but tonight I got really mad at the computer. What right did it have to force me to hard boot it and start from scratch? Even saved, it takes time to load all the brain images back into memory, and time just for the system to come back to life. Time to click on the annoying “your system recovered from a serious error, tell MS about it!” message. What’s with that message, anyway? I wish there was a way to turn it off, because I never send my error reports to MS. It’s not like they’re going to up and try to fix XP now, or try to make 3rd party software cooperate better. It’s just more time before I can recover from the error and get back about my business. I am, of course, lamenting all this lost time because I’m still at work and it’s closing in on 3 am.

A lot of the bitterness, though, I suspect comes from the Animal Crackers. It has been my experience that Animal Crackers are an angry food (though this is a realization I’ve only come to tonight). Almost every time I eat them, I find I get excessively annoyed at almost everything. It’s strange, because they sort of start out as comfort food, and they’re just so cute. They’re also somewhat bland and easy to just keep popping in your mouth in an unthinking way. But before long you’ve got this whole cookie menangerie in your insides, seething with hate and rage.

(Part of that, I suspect, may come from the fact that I really only ever eat them when I’ve got all-nighters… but nonetheless, I’m not impressed with the BSOD tonight.)

With the coming of spring came the biannual changing of the smoke detector batteries. This lead us to actually try to find our smoke detectors, since this is the first time we’ve had to do it since moving in. It turns out they were in less than ideal locations: the one for the centre part of the house is behind a drop ceiling concealing the bay windows, and the one for the back half is in the back closet. Not just any closet, of course: to it’s credit it doesn’t have a door we never close the door, so at least the airflow — and smoke detecting properties — aren’t completely inhibited; but it’s also a sloped-roof room, and the detector was right up at the top, in the dead space that the smoke detector manuals say never to place one. The basement, which was just recently renovated to be livable, had none (which is against the firecode, the part of the lease saying there were sufficient detectors notwithstanding).

So, having just got some coupons in the mail for rebates on smoke detectors, I went out to supplement our arsenal. First off, I picked up a photoelectric detector, which is good for placing in or near the kitchen (the two we had were ionization). I should back off a second to elaborate: there are two basic types of detectors: photoelectric and ionization. Different types of fires are detected more efficiently by the different types. The fast-burning fires that occur in most homes, especially bedrooms, (my smoke detector literature says 70% of home fires) are best detected by ionization type detectors, and recommends one of those outside the bedrooms. Slow, smouldering fires are better detected by a photoelectric type; the photoelectric types are also less likely to go off from steam and regular cooking particles (fewer kitchen false positives), so they’re recommended for use near the kitchen.

Anyhow, I bought this detector for the kitchen, and had this rebate form for spending $25 or more on a detector; of course, it came in at $24.99. Which was a bit of a bummer, but even moreso was the realization that the detectors we already had required two batteries each to refresh. So after changing the batteries and putting in the new detector, we decided that the one in the back closet really wasn’t ideally located, so it would have to be moved to someplace that wouldn’t be the absolute last part of the house to fill with smoke. I got up on the ladder, and started to unscrew the base. And unscrewed…. and just kept unscrewing. The thing was held in by 3″ wood screws! I just couldn’t understand why they would go and use screws like that, especially since the detector itself should have come with a pair of much more reasonably sized screws.

In fact, the entire house seems to be constructed from comically large screws. They’re not even all the same length, so it’s not like they bought a bulk case of 3″ screws and just started using them everywhere. The cabinets in the kitchen all have screws coming out the sides and bottoms, the legs for the laundry tub in the basement are maybe a quarter-inch thick, and are held together with 1.5″ screws. Even the picture hangars have nails and/or screws holding them up that are far larger than the task requires.

On the other end of the spectrum is the bed frame we just assembled for the guest bed (and it’s a comfy bed: if we don’t have anyone out to visit soon, I may swap it with my own) and the bolts for it were only about 1/4″ longer than the minimum length needed to get the nuts on…