Charter Communications, our local co-axial monopoly and recent bankruptee, sent a technician out to our house today, to hook up our new net connection. As is almost always the case, the tech was friendly, helpful and generally knowledgeable, in stark contrast to just about anybody you can ever get on the phone if you call the company. The customer service people are like robots. Sometimes, like robots with buggy firmware. They are, quite literally, running a program written by someone at Charter, codified in a choose-your-own-adventure style script booklet or web application. They seem to have no intrinsic knowledge of the business they work for, or the systems they are meant to support. Honestly, I wish Charter (and other such companies) would just put these resources on the web directly, so I can page through them on my own without having to be on hold first. They probably won’t do this, at least not in full, because one of the most important jobs this script/program does is to retain as much of their customer’s money as possible, whether or not they’re really supposed to have it, and to direct people into more lucrative service contracts, aggressively if need be.
Continue reading ‘To Charter Communications: transparent bills get paid faster’
Our local NPR station, KPCC 89.3 is doing a story on bicycling, and how it affects home economics in these trying times… These are my responses to their questionnaire.
Tell the story of how your bicycle is changing your financial picture.
Largely because we choose to bike as our primary form of transportation, and do not own a car, my partner and I have disposable income, even as poorly paid graduate students. We can max out our Roth IRAs (and then some) each year, and still have money left over to rent a car once a month or so, to get up into the Sierras or out into the desert, or to visit family in Santa Barbara. We live comfortably, but frugally, and have no consumer debt. The situation would likely be very different if we had even one, let alone two cars.
In what ways has the price of gas changed your relationship with the bicycle?
I’ve always used a bike as my primary vehicle, so the “high” gas prices really don’t have much to do with my bicycle relationship. Except in extraordinary cases (someone with a long commute and lousy fuel efficiency), fuel costs are not the largest portion of the expense of owning a car. Insurance, depreciation, maintenance, financing, registration, parking tickets, etc. are all significant, but they are “fixed” costs, which you will pay largely regardless of how much you drive, and so most people take them as given, because they assume they can’t live without a car. Most of the economic benefits of bicycling only accrue when you get rid of the car completely, and avoid those fixed costs.
Continue reading ‘The Home Economics of Bicycles’
After being asked rhetorically a couple of times if I knew now much I paid for my electricity, and whether I knew how much power my fridge was using ($0.13/kWh, and I don’t know) I bought a “Kill-A-Watt” power meter to see where our $18/month in electricity usage was going… just out of curiosity. It turns out that watching a movie costs abot $0.08 in electricity. The Cold Box (beer) uses about $3/month worth of power. The fridge itself, usually the largest power hog in a household, is close to half our usage at $8/month. Making a batch of coffee in the french press, using the electric kettle is about a penny. The other big electricity users are the stove and oven, and the washer and dryer (though we hardly use the dryer). They can’t be measured with this thing because they use 220V outlets, which are generally hidden away and inaccessible anyway.
After those miniscule numbers, I was amazed to discover that a day’s worth of computation (24 hours, including some research related number crunching by my laptop, my desk light, my backup disk, and my 30″ cinema display) came in at $0.50! So, at least for me personally, at roughly $15/month my computer is by far my largest expenditure of electricity. Interesting!
I’d love to build (and live in) a condo that tracked the water and power usage of each unit, and within each unit each outlet/faucet/etc, in real time, posted to the web, and displayed in the communal entryway. Visibility goes a long way to influencing behavior.
Fall arrived today, not officially, and not to stay, but for sure it’s now begun. And it’s not just the shit-slinging monkeys running for public office that tips you off. We didn’t need the fan last night. We kept the windows closed. The breeze at home is cool even at 3:45pm. I wanted to wear long sleeves. I didn’t want iced coffee. The shadow of the shade cloth is falling on the planters in the courtyard, and the light has that golden hue. The middle of the day is disappearing, and edges are rushing in, changing the feeling of solar time as we tilt away from the sun.
I’m sure it’ll get hot again. The offical weather reports don’t even seem to admit that it’s cooled off now (highs are supposedly still above 30°C… but they sure don’t feel like it). It can be 40°C in October here. But the blinding and oppressive light that summer wields is weakening. The darkness is coming back. The safe and enveloping darkness we can hide in. The sun that grows broccoli and chard and peas and mustard greens, but puts habañeros to sleep. The gray marine morning.
I give up. The tomatoes just aren’t tomatoing. The three cherry tomatoes on the S. side of the back house in 5 gallon pots just won’t stay wet enough with my attention span. They’re crispy. The fruits they have made are leathery and dry, so out they go. The 2 year old Cherokee Purple is likewise fruitless, and turning itself into an arbor crossing the already very narrow walkway. I pruned it back to just the new green growth coming out of the stumps. I think I’ll move the habañros over there now.
There’s definitely a psychological pattern with the garden. So far anyway. Excitement early on, with rapid new green growth, and then confusion. Am I doing this right? Am i overwatering? Is there something wrong? And then less watering. But maybe too much less. And somehow, the plants take it – they put up with it anyway. It seems to take a lot to actually get them to wilt. once they’re a little woody. But maybe it’s enough to keep them from fruiting? And now despair. Something terribly wrong. 40 tomato plants and 10 tomatoes.
