At work, we’re expanding our server room by bringing the entrance wall about a meter forward. This will give enough room so that both my boss and I can stand comfortably in there at the same time; it will also allow us to get behind and around servers as necessary. However, while the room is under construction, I can’t use my desk for all the plastic and dust and equipment flying about.

I spent yesterday camped out in a conference room with a laptop. Students tend to go there to take breaks from research (no food in the lab, dontchaknow), so I actually got to talk to them about something other than computers or their data or their pending conference presentation or thesis defense. It was also nice having the refrigerator nearby, and somebody left a bunch of very tasty Rainier cherries on the table for public consumption.

Today the laptop is inadequate for the work I’m doing, so I’ve commandeered a storage room with an Ethernet jack and made it into my temporary office. I’m going barebones here, though, with just one monitor on my beloved Gentoo box. It’s going to take some getting used to.

When the room is not under construction, we’re taking advantage of the summer lull as a chance to upgrade infrastructure. First on the list is a new server to operate the tape backups on a new jukebox. It’ll be using the mobo, CPU, and memory that we removed when we upgraded the offsite file server, a hard drive that has been collecting dust in a drawer, and a new external SCSI adapter. Hopefully I can fold it into the budding distcc cluster without too much trouble.

The quick version of this post:

energy efficiency saves you money, stupidhead.

The long version:

Look. We all know gas prices are ridiculous, and that market forces are going to be scrambling to catch up for a while, and that there are environmental reasons to be energy-efficient, blah blah blah. Much of our collective problem, is that it’s apparently pretty easy to forget about energy efficiency when energy prices are low. So let’s crunch some numbers.

To calculate the per-hour cost of running a particular electrical item — a light, a refrigerator, a TV, whatever —

• Determine its electrical usage in watts. Some items, such as light bulbs, list this outright; those are easy. Other items, such as computers or refrigerators, list voltage and amperage; these use differing amounts of electricity depending on what they’re doing, but you can figure the theoretical maximum wattage by multiplying volts by amperes.
• Divide usage in watts by one thousand to get usage in kilowatts. (Americans: “kilo-” means “one thousand”. It’s that icky metric stuff, I know, but stick with me.)
• Find your local utility’s rate per kilowatt-hour. It should be on their Web site, though you may have to wade through several types of rate. (Right now, I would look at my utility’s summer residential rate, which comes to 7.92 cents per kilowatt-hour [PDF].)
• Multiply the per-kilowatt-hour rate by the usage in kilowatts. Your result is the per-hour cost to operate this item.

As an example, let’s discuss lighting in my kitchen, where there are five bulbs in a ceiling fan. On an average day, we’re in there using those lights for about three hours total; those lights are typically off when they aren’t in use. Throw in a thirty-day average billing cycle and here’s how much it used to cost to light that room, before we swapped incandescent bulbs for CFLs:

• Five bulbs, 60W per bulb = 300W total to use
• Three hours of usage per day, 300W while in use = 0.9kWh per day
• Thirty days in a billing cycle, 0.9kWh per day = 27kWh per cycle
• 27 kWh per cycle at the rates above ~= $2.14 per month in summer

Using 14W CFL bulbs in the same pattern providing the same amount of light:

• Five bulbs, 14W per bulb = 70W total to use
• Three hours of usage per day, 70W while in use = 0.21kWh per day
• Thirty days in a cycle, 0.21kWh per day = 6.3kWh per cycle
• 6.3kWh per cycle at the rates above ~= $0.50 per month in summer

And that’s just one fixture in one room, at rates that are relatively low for U.S. urban centers. The savings are even more pronounced at higher rates: in Juneau, where rates recently hit 56 cents/kWh, that one light fixture would have cost $15.12 per month with incandescents (ouch!), but only $3.53 per month with CFLs (much less ouch).

While it will cost around $10 to put five CFLs in that fixture (vs. $2.50 for five new incandescents, using multi-pack prices from a Home Depot near me), the extra up-front cost will be recaptured after about 4 months of average use at my house. It’s also worth noting that CFLs last about five times longer than incandescents, so you can often come out ahead just on the cost of the bulbs themselves.

(Aside: What’s the heat source on the original Easy-Bake Oven? An incandescent light bulb! “Incandescent” means “glowing hot”, after all. Think about that while your air conditioner runs up your utility bills.)

[And yes, LEDs are considerably more energy-efficient and longer-lasting than CFLs. Unfortunately, their up-front cost is appalling at the moment ($60 for a single bulb?!), so until prices come way, way, way, way, way down I don't see LEDs replacing CFLs.]

It’s even written in the stars.

The new server (still named “rupaul”) is in place. It is quite a bit smaller and quieter than the old server (”pangloss”), and it figures to save us a few bucks on the electric bill. All told, the upgrade project cost around $75.

Both parts I ordered (PCMCIA USB 2.0 card [link] and an external USB 2.0/eSATA hard drive enclosure [link]) arrived Thursday, so I shuffled some local services, brought pangloss down, and extracted the drive with all the /home data. Once the drive was in the enclosure — and yes, it is a snug fit — I took it to work and archived the data to my office box. That particular drive had also hosted /usr and /var, and I wouldn’t need to host either on the new box, so I re-partitioned the drive and put a new XFS on there before putting the data back.

After the “hardened” profile fizzled on me — it is still in beta, after all — I re-built the laptop’s OS from the normal G3 profile over the weekend. Had a couple false starts on the kernel, thanks mostly to some issues with battery modules, but after I got those taken care of on Saturday afternoon the process really got under way. Rebuilt world overnight with a few altered USE flags, and got my basic services covered on Sunday morning.

Sunday afternoon we brought the home network down to clean up the rat’s nest of cables in the utility room. While we were at it, we re-arranged connections to the UPS and found a more efficient layout for all the different components back there. Since that room contains the furnace as well, it is a tad warmer than the rest of the house, but nothing is getting too warm yet. (I’m not concerned about heat in the summer, as that room also has the exchanger for the A/C.)

As of now rupaul is serving files for authorized users (local and remote), managing DHCP and DNS for the home network, and keeping my work box’s portage tree up-to-date. Later on, I may add more services or upgrade the data drive (enclosure supports either IDE or SATA for that reason), but for now I’m quite satisfied with how that little laptop is handling things.

Now I just need to find somebody to exchange encrypted backup space with, and we’ll be all set.

Just as the pain and swelling from the one tooth subsided, another tooth elsewhere in the mouth started making trouble. In a lovely little bit of placement, though, this one is on the jaw itself and has a sharp edge that scrapes up the left side of my tongue. Scraped-up tongues tend to swell, and that has made the sharp edge even more difficult to avoid, which causes further scraping, further swelling, etc. Swollen tongues also make ordinary speech very difficult to understand, so I’ve had to get wildly exaggerative with my facial expressions and the non-lingual bits of consonants.

A friend of ours gave Fred a great suggestion for a temporary fix, though: melt candle wax, let it partially set, and pack it around the sharp bit. It’s an odd taste and an even odder feeling, but it works, as evidenced by my mostly-coherent speech and my renewed ability to chew and swallow without pain. I’m being extra-cautious about the temperatures and textures of my food, though, as I don’t want to melt or mangle my improvised crown.

I see the dentist tomorrow morning and again next Wednesday. Hopefully we can work out something a little more permanent.

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Nigel is still out of service; apparently his tires would have to be ordered from a warehouse, which delays things somewhat. I don’t really mind riding the bus to and from work, but it would be nice to Just Go sometimes without all the extra planning for transfers.

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Speaking of work, it was eerily quiet these past few weeks, but now that the winter break is over it’s picking up again. The quiet was kind of nice — made a bunch of patch cables and got a few other large-ish projects done — but it’s even nicer to stay busy with “real work”.

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Did the bulk of the whole Yule thing with Fred’s family on New Year’s Day. We had had a preview showing a few days earlier when my father came by to have me check out a computer issue (isn’t that how it always is?); he brought a couple presents, including a Roomba, which will be the first member of my robot army once it finishes the living room rug. Fred’s folks outdid them, though, giving us (among other things) a bread machine and electric grill which will need to find a home in our crowded kitchen.

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The Powerbook named rupaul got rebuilt with the Gentoo “hardened” toolchain and a different file system. Unfortunately, hardened is very very shaky on PPC, so I’ll probably go back to the regular toolchain for now and switch again later once the herd stabilizes a bit. Sticking with XFS, though, as it mounts faster and seems to perform better on this hardware than reiserfs.

I have a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card and an external hard drive enclosure en route. Once they arrive, the old server (”pangloss”) will be going down, and all of its data will be backed up off-site (woo-hoo rsync and a fat pipe) before the big drive gets re-partitioned. Since pangloss manages DHCP and DNS for the local network, though, the transition will require a little more reliance on the sometimes-flaky VOIP router (which is going to get replaced soon, just you watch). Since pangloss also hosts a local mirror of the portage tree, the transition is also going to stall some tree updates on my work box until I can get rupaul settled.

Also, I’m very tempted to sing “you bettah WORK!” every time I reboot rupaul to try a newly-modified kernel.

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Chorus rehearsals started Monday for the spring show. We weren’t there for the big chorus, but we will probably be doing the small ensemble again once that starts in a couple weeks.

School also started again Monday. This semester I’m taking a sociology class and a short fiction class. I’d much rather be taking something more major-specific, but there was nothing available that I hadn’t done and for which I had all the prerequisites. (boo.)

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So, caucus and primary season is upon us. I find it fascinating that the turnout so far is a smidge higher on the Republican side and a whole fucking lot higher on the Democratic side, yet all our “liberal” media can talk about is “HILLARY WAS EMOTIONAL THEN SHE WON OMGWTFBBQ”.

That said, it is extremely tempting to look into being a delegate to the DNC this summer, if only to see for myself how it all goes down.

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More later, I think.