New Tank Record

I drive a hybrid - a Toyota Prius. For the last year or so, I've had a bike rack attached to the (custom installed) trailer hitch which I didn't bother to remove when driving around. I finally got around to removing it during my last tank of gas. I went and made sure my tires were inflated, removed unneeded heavy crap from my car, and didn't use much A/C (the weather has been good). Today the experiment ended as I had to fill up again.

My goal: maximize my MPG for this tank.

Result: 475 miles even on one tank of 8.814 gallons = 53.9 MPG

I was hoping to get to 500 miles on the tank. I probably could have, I think the tank is 10 or 11 gallons, but the gauge was showing me the blinky bar wednesday (2 days ago) which means that the Prius won't tell you how much you have left any more. Interestingly, I didn't have the rack off for the entire tank, maybe about half of it, so I'm interested in seeing how well I can do on my next tank.

Google Traffic

I sometimes find it surprising which google queries this blog ranks well for. I'm #3 for [metric vs. imperial] which is quite a fun one since I argue that neither is ideal and we should all switch to a base 12 system. I do fine for my own full name [greg grothaus] of course, and I get a bit of traffic for [garmin nuvi geocaching], [nuvi 350 geocaching], and [nuvi geocaching]. My largest traffic comes from the query [mygoogle] because I used to run a google api site called "my google search" which was a cool little experiment. That site (mygooglesearch.com) now redirects to my blog.

Apartment Solar Update

In my previous post on apartment solar, I asked how to set up a solar-powered fridge. Still no answers have presented themselves exactly. My sister pointed me at the Harvester Solar Electric Generator which has a battery, but would probably work. I asked the same question on yahoo answers, and someone proposed a grid tie-in system but I'm not sure that will fly in my apartment.

Another idea I came up with was simply lobbying my apartment complex to get them to do a real solar installation on the complex's roof. I'm not too optimistic about this option though.

I still need to do more research.

Where can you hide a bus in the Bay?

A couple mutual friends of myself and Cristin bought a used diesel school bus last week. I should have gotten a picture, but it is a full-sized (40ft long) yellow school bus. They drove it down from Washington state down to the bay. The plan was to convert it into a motorhome and drive it to Alaska. Fun plan.

They found someone on craiglist with a big backyard that was willing to rent them some space in it to work on the bus. They recruited our assistance in getting the bus there (basically needed a car to get picked up with). Anyway, we got to the backyard with said bus and it turns out it wasn't going to fit. The bus is 10ft tall, there was a tree branch in the way.

So, here we are in the bay area with a full-sized school bus and nowhere to put it. The bay area isn't known for large open spaces where one can leave things. It is temporarily parked (probably illegally) amongst some trucks in Mountain View. If anyone knows of somewhere we can park a bus nearby for longer periods of time, let me know.

Interesting adventure.

Since the number of pirates inversely correlates to well to global warming, we should most definitely start some pirate schools. Yar!

Presentations ... About time

I've been really enjoying this tool at Google internally for quite some time now, but I can now finally mention it to folks. Google just launched Presentations as part of the online documents suite.

For me, the other documents stuff didn't mean as much - firefox on linux has a hard time with the heavy DOM in Google Spreadsheets, and while docs was nice - I didn't really collaborate on documents much (and when I did, there is the wiki). Besides, I prefer the HTML document or better yet the *gasp* plain text document.

However, presentations are more difficult to manage and lend themselves to collaboration. So many times have I worked with more than one person on a presentation, mailing the file back and forth and having to manually merge changes. This is much much better.

Apartment Solar - What is the '?'?

I live in an apartment (insane Bay Area home prices are for a different blog post). As a result, I can't buy solar panels and put them up on my roof like I want to. I do get alot of sun on my patio though. I really want to go buy a large solar panel somewhere and use it to power some part of my house (see technical diagram). I know where to get all of the pieces in the diagram except for the '?'.
See, the '?' is a the piece that takes the green power from my solar panel on my balcony (DC, variable current) and supplements it with the brown power from my wall outlet (AC, constant current) and outputs constant AC current to my refrigerator (or computer/washing machine/whatever), always using as much power from the solar as possible and as little as needed from the wall to finish the job. I don't want to buy a battery or sell to the grid - if I have too much solar power, I am happy to discard it. I don't want to rip out my wall or otherwise alter my apartment, and I don't want anyone to "install" this. I want to do it all myself. The internet knows everything, so I am asking you internet: What is the '?' I need to make my apartment solar?

Update: I wrote a response to this in a later blog post (Apartment Solar Update)with a few updated ideas. Still not a perfect solution though, if you have ideas, leave them in the comments.

Green Oil Refinery Deal

California's Attorney General, Jerry Brown, just negotiated a deal whereby ConocoPhillips can expand a CA refinery as long as they pay a fund an amount calculated to be able to offset the emmissions of the 500,000 metric tons of CO2 they will be adding to the atmosphere through the project, effectively making this possibly the first carbon-neutral oil refinery. Its a pretty cool option. See the writeup in the SF Chronicle for more details.

Greendimes - Now thats a startup.

I wrote in the past about Greendimes as well as Terrapass and Carbonfund. About a month ago, I got an email from greendimes.

They have had great success: In 10 months of existence, tens of thousands of households, stopped over 1.3 million pounds of junk mail. 1.3 Million . Seriously though, that is sweet. They also planted over a quarter million trees.

They gutted their own business model and made a crazy fun big stand. Old and Busted Business Model: Charge customers $3/month to keep their physical mail less junky. New Hotness Business Model: Charge customers $15 for life to keep their physical mail less junky. That is great, but it gets better. Here comes the money quote from the email:

It's hard to stand for something only if we stand to make money off of the problem-so if we don't like junk mail, which we don't, we're going to fight to end it. ... That's why we're starting a national Do-Not-Mail Petition.

Think about that for a second more. They are spending money and effort trying to legislate themselves out of a job. Props. Mad Props. They have even created a map of where people are petitioning from so you can root for your home state. Click the link in the quote, fill in the form, and get the ball rolling in your state.

Gregable - The Domain and MyGoogleSearch

You may have noticed, I just moved over from gregable.blogspot.com to gregable.com. I'm all about reducing global warming, so I figured if the domain was shorter you could type it faster and hence turn off your computers sooner. Yeah right. For the moment, www.gregable.com isn't working, so leave off the www.

MyGoogleSearch
Also, if you arrived here after clicking a link to MyGoogleSearch.com, I just started redirecting that traffic over to my blog here. The website hasn't been working right for months now and I wasn't too interested in fixing it. If you don't know what mygooglesearch.com was, I used the Google Search API to build a customized search demo - you type in a search, say [chips], and then on the following page if you check boxes for the results you like and don't like, mygooglesearch would then suggest a different query based on the words on the pages you found relevant - for example [computer chips] or [potato chips] - depending on which pages you picked. It was a neat demo that I hacked up in one night several years ago (before I worked at Google), but it since went into disrepair.

Used Books

This post is mostly for my own reference. I went into a bookstore today and saw a book I wanted - Bay Area Bike Rides by Ray Hosler. It was about $15 but wasn't brand new and I was in no rush to get it. I jotted down the isbn and went to half.com to buy the book. On half the book was about $3 plus $3 shipping. It arrived today and my officemate Sushrut whom I told the story to told me about a meta site that searches half.com and others for used media: ugenie.com. It worked, so I was relieved to find that half had the best deal.

Monterey Bay Equestrian Center Directions

Cristin and I went Horsebackriding in Monterey Bay earlier today with an outfit called the Monterey Bay Equestrian Center. I would indeed recommend the company and the ocean ride. They have some great horses, and were easy to deal with logistically. With one exception. They couldn't give me an address to use to get to the beach we were supposed to meet on, so I had to print out their map and directions on the website and navigate using paper. No GPS, no Google Maps, dead trees.

So, if you find this blog post while looking for directions to the ocean rides, here are some GPS coordinates. Our GPS actually did get it by searching for "Salinas River State Park", but here you go anyway, click the link to get a google maps direction box:

36.774041, -121.793071

California Power Conservation Graphs

I recently signed up to get "Flex Alert" emails from PG&E which tells me about when power in my area in california is dangerously low and asks me to conserve extra on that day. You may have seen "Flex your Power" advertising around the bay area - this is what it's about.

It turns out that last week, there were 2 such Flex Alert days. Thursday was the worst. There was actually a Stage 1 Emergency which meant that power usage was within 7% of available reserves. Flex Alert folks responded and actually shaved over a gigawatt off of the demand during peak time (note the difference between the grey and red lines around the peak). This gigawatt was enough to prevent the state from escalating the power emergency to Stage 2.

Interestingly, you can actually see a real-time graph of california's power usage plotted against reserves. The graph on the left is a small version of thursday's data. Check it out at the California Power System Status page and consider signing up for Flex Alerts.