Weirdbook.org

A busy season is upon me. Technical coordination of three multimedia presentations within the span of a week to three different legislative committees (sounds impressive, but it really isn't). Planning four events across two states. Setting up a new laptop for Deadpan Alley. Shuttling kids around, which has become a normal course of events, but one which eats away even more time. I almost feel like a grown-up... yet here I sit wearing Chuck Taylors like I did when I was fifteen.

There's a video getting schlepped around lately... a ten-second spot with Matthew Broderick, apparently in his Ferris Bueller character, yet visibly aged. And he utters a version of the phrase which started his infamous day off: "How can I handle work on a day like today?" The clip ends with the date 2.5.12 on the screen and the signature "chicka-chicka" sound from Yello's "Oh Yeah."

First of all: I've had that thought, and I had its predecessor ("How could I possibly be expected to handle school on a day like this?") as a student. It doesn't ever go away, I don't guess, but (usually) you learn to do the right thing and muscle through the day and all its responsibilities instead of blowing it off.

Second: The rumor mill says this is a "pre-ad" for Honda, the real ad coming on Superbowl Sunday. An advertisement for an advertisement? What has this world come to? Granted, the Superbowl ads do have a fairly high entertainment value, but the recursiveness at work here boggles my mind.

Third: If there ever were going to be a sequel to Ferris Bueller's Day Off, this would be the perfect commercial for it. Once upon a time I heard there was going to be a sequel, and the plot was something like this commercial portrays. Ferris Bueller, ad executive (because that's what you do as an adult, become an ad executive, just like on Bewitched), decides he's fed up and takes a day off work. He brings his friends along. Mayhem and hilarity ensue, not to mention bittersweet nostalgia among the Echo and the Bunnymen crowd. It sounds, however, more like a vehicle for Will Ferrell than a true Ferris Bueller movie (or a vehicle for Matthew Broderick, even).

Fourth: There needs to be a real sequel to Ferris Bueller. The audience would consist of folks in their prime earning years, and they would most likely come out in droves. Everyone loves Ferris. He is, after all, a righteous dude. I can't speculate on whether today's youth would appreciate a sequel — I've become too far out of touch with what is hip and what isn't. Most likely, though, the word hip is not.

Honda, if you're reading this, I have one of your cars. It's ten years old and I love it. I'm going to drive it until the wheels fall off. Please don't ruin one of my cultural icons merely to peddle your wares. For the love of all that is holy... save Ferris.

This morning I came across a fairly long yet interesting article about Apple and its manufacturing process. I've heard several people wonder why, if Apple is such a great company, the iPhone is manufactured in China instead of in the United States. It's a perfectly legitimate question — with an unemployment rate over 8 percent for three straight years, we could certainly afford to put a few people to work. But that's where the problems come in. Apparently Chinese labor is dirt cheap, to the tune of $17 per day. And in the cutthroat world of shipping as much product as possible (Apple sold 72.3 million iPhones in fiscal 2011 [1, 2, 3, 4]), if labor costs can be cut to manufacture the devices, so be it. Let's not forget that despite all the magic, Apple is still a corporation with a worldwide reach and stockholders to satisfy — and in that part of the universe, the dollar is (and will always be) king.

The workers at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where iPhones are made, work six days a week and at least twelve hours per day. That's almost double the typical American workweek, and under the grueling conditions of assembling electronic products by hand. I'd be curious to see how many unemployed American workers would accept those conditions. For $17 per day, while living on-site in cramped dormitories. I bet not many. It's thus less expensive for Apple to have Chinese laborers do the work and then ship the products out from there. And I'm only singling out Apple because the source article did. Other companies are just as guilty of the process — including Acer, Cisco, Dell, HP, Intel, Motorola, Nintendo, Panasonic, Sony, and Toshiba, among others. In fact, Foxconn reportedly manufactures 40% of the world's products.

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone's screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

"The speed and flexibility is breathtaking," the executive said. "There's no American plant that can match that."

The New York Times

It's a business decision, plain and simple. That doesn't mean it's the right thing to do, but it's happening nonetheless.

West Virginia natives may think this sounds familiar, and they're right. Once upon a time, across the coalfields of West Virginia, workers lived in company housing and shopped at the company store — all the while digging coal by hand in unsafe conditions and loading it onto railroad cars to ship all over the country. The UMWA was formed, revolutionizing labor laws. I wonder how long it will be until an equivalent of John L. Lewis emerges in China.

And after that, I wonder who will become the world's cheap manufacturer to repeat the cycle anew.

A little more about saving energy. It's one of my favorite ongoing pet projects because the benefits are easily measured, and though it's not as financially rewarding as it used to be since energy costs are rising, it's still good to avoid paying those higher costs (kudos to Elizabeth Gaucher for that thought).

A handy tool for measuring electrical usage is the Kill-A-Watt. This thing is awesome. It measures energy consumption, time elapsed, voltage, current, and all sorts of things — and at twenty bucks, it should pay for itself in no time. It's very simple to operate: plug it into the wall, plug whatever you're measuring into the other side, then walk away for a day or two. When you come back, push the button corresponding to the information you want to see and it appears on the screen. Write it down or record it in a spreadsheet. If you're wanting to see how much it costs to run the thing you're measuring, you'll want two pieces of information: kilowatt-hours (kWh) and time. You'll also need to know how much you pay per killowatt-hour.

Here I've got two readings: 2.76 kWh over a period of 48 hours 21 minutes. These are the actual measurements of a Whirlpool upright freezer, model number EEV163FG0, from late 1979 — and please excuse the picture quality, the freezer is in my poorly-lit garage. This freezer is so old Whirlpool doesn't even have a manual for it online. I'm surprised the thing runs at all. Lately I've been thinking of this old dinosaur sitting in the garage, slurping up electricity, and I've been pretty sure it would be the next victim in my quest to push household electrical usage down.

Conventional wisdom says freezers and refrigerators made before 1992 should be replaced with energy-efficient models. I'll buy that theory, in theory. The US EPA even provides a handy refrigerator retirement calculator where you can plug in the numbers to see how much you'll save each year. According to the calculator, "Freezersaurus" out in the garage should cost $167 to run each year.

But not so fast. According to my measurements, the freezer uses 1.37 kWh each day. I know I'm paying 10 cents per kWh based on prior calculations, so this old freezer from 1979 is only costing me 13.7 cents per day to operate. That comes to around $50 per year — and while that's about 7% of the total electric bill, it's nowhere near the $167 the EPA claims.

The EPA calculator goes on to say a new Energy Star model would cost $37 to run each year. I'm just about at that point now with the old 1979 clunker, so clearly something isn't right. One thing that comes to mind is taking these measurements in January. Though it's been a very mild winter so far (huzzah!), the days when I gathered the data were fairly typical for January in Charleston, meaning: the freezer may not have needed to work as hard to keep everything cold. So I'm going to take another look in July and August (provided it's still running) and see if I get different measurements.

Beyond that, though, I have no idea. A freezer from 1979 almost as efficient as modern ones, and still running after 32 years of service? As tempting as it is to say they don't make them like they used to, I think even this is an oddity... which means it fits in just fine around here.

I've got a spreadsheet where I've been tracking our household energy usage and cost since 1995. There are a few time periods missing, but it's still a good "long view" of how much electricity we've used over the last decade plus. I know, I know... this falls deeply in the realm of OCD and geekiness. Hi, I'm Brad — have we met?

A few years ago, the Kyoto Protocol was making news. In a nutshell, the Kyoto Protocol is a treaty, and the nations which signed the treaty agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions until they were 5.2% below 1990 levels. The United States, (in)famously, did not sign the agreement. Dubya felt it would damage the country economically, and since he was already working hard on that with the war in Iraq and ignoring the shifting of wealth to the banking cartel, why fuck it up by trying to be a true leader in this bold new twenty-first century?

So since the Bush Administration wanted no part of this, I sort of tried it myself. Just a theoretical thing, from which — in Bradworld — it could be scaled up to the national level. At some point the Kyoto Protocol changed so that some nations were allowed to increase their emissions (basically those nations which didn't have many, or any, emissions to begin with), while others (those which essentially stood outside and sprayed Krylon directly into the air without abandon) had to reduce theirs by a larger amount. The United States would have ended up with a magic number of seven percent. When they started talking about buying and selling carbon offsets and trading them on the open market, my eyes glazed over. So after fiddling with the math for a bit and deciding there was no way in hell we could measure the true emissions of our household, I declared we should just aim to reduce our energy usage by seven percent each year.

It started in 2006 (we started recycling the same year for good measure). And as of the end of 2011, our electricity usage was down 44% versus 2006. At first, as the usage dropped, so did the price. But then despite usage continuing to drop, the price started rising. At the end of the five-year period in 2011, I paid slightly more for nearly half the electricity I used in 2006.

Here's a chart I made with the Google Chart API. If you look at the the blue line you can see where the amount of electricity I used dropped from 14000 kWh down to a little over 7000 kWh. The red line follows it down until 2009, and then, as Robert Frost might say, the two paths diverged. Going back to the OCD spreadsheet thing — not only is our household energy usage down 44% over a five-year period, it's at its lowest level ever (back to 1995 at least, before which there wasn't really a household to speak of). The most notable change has been in the last five years, though... not only in usage, but in price.

If you take the annual cost and divide by the annual usage, you'll see that AEP's rates for electricity have — in that same five-year period — gone up 77%. And hey, I was curious, so I did that... and here's another chart showing it:

I know times are tough and everything, and I know companies are still struggling and the economy is just barely limping along. But 77% is a pretty hefty increase. To put things in perspective, imagine gas at $6.19 per gallon, or ground beef at $3.89 a pound, or a gallon of milk costing $5.82. I'm not sure what AEP is doing to justify an increase that big — it's not like I'm now getting name-brand electricity instead of the generic stuff. It's a fundamental force of the universe... about which Michael Faraday once reportedly quipped, "One day, sir, you may tax it."

Yes indeed.

My morning started with a Forbes article about how Best Buy has likely entered the early stages of its death. If true, the biggest electronics retailer in Charleston will become... probably Wal-Mart. Ugh.

I have nothing against Best Buy (Wal-Mart is another story). I've been in the Charleston store exactly once — last February. It was a nonevent, to say the least, and I've not really had a good reason to return. Most of the aisles were devoid of personnel and there weren't many customers. I was kind of sniffing around for a new laptop at the time, and even though I knew I'd probably end up buying from Amazon or TigerDirect, I felt obligated to kick some tires.

According to the Forbes article, that's part of the problem. Best Buy is turning into a showroom for Amazon. If I were to guess at it, I'd say lots of the so-called "bricks and mortar" stores are in that same boat... hence the demise of Circuit City, Borders, and numerous others. Even the strange Sears / KMart amalgamation is on life support (as if the merger itself weren't enough of a clue).

I'm tempted to say Wal-Mart is untouchable, but I once would have said the same about GM, which needed a healthy shot in the arm from Uncle Sam to stay afloat. And Sears, which has been around for well over a hundred years and was once the biggest retailer in America, now having to team up with KMart, is a pretty good sign that retail fundamentals are changing on a fairly large scale. The Sears Roebuck catalog can once again be used as toilet paper, it seems.

Another part of the problem in Best Buy's case? My experience again matched what was highlighted in the article; specifically, despite me being a customer with cash to spend and who could have been persuaded to do so, no one even gave it a shot. The laptop section had one other customer besides myself, while the desktop section had tumbleweeds blowing down the aisle. In the center of the store, people circled around the tablets and poked at them curiously, while the sales staff popped through every once in awhile to see if anyone had any questions. No one did — in fact, everyone seemed annoyed at the entire process (sales staff included). I've got to assume no one was interested in selling laptops at all, because nobody even ventured in my direction. Low commissions, perhaps, or maybe a push from above to move tablets and don't worry about anything else.

I could get better service without leaving my own house, I can research specs and reviews for hours without them being tainted by someone earning a commission, I can dig around and find the absolute lowest possible price, and I can ring up my own order — and, I can have it delivered directly to my front door.

This trend is accelerating, so Wal-Mart may indeed be the biggest electronics retailer with a physical location before long. If things continue like this, they may be the last physical retailer left.

I've been trying to remember what the younger version of myself thought adult life would be like. I think what prompted this was a certain person in this house informing me she would be out on her own in three years, living in her own place, and fairly independent. And I do know for a fact that I had those same thoughts, if not at that age, then slightly younger.

Ha. It took a bit longer than that, and a certain bit of "glamor" I thought might be present typically isn't, but yeah, I got there.

Here's an example of that complete lack of glamor. Right now, I'm sitting in the laundry room monitoring the washing machine, watching for a reported "it's not spinning" problem. I'm doing this because a) we need clean clothes, b) the washer is the best means we have to make that happen, c) the machine is at least ten years old and thus could theoretically go at any time, and d) if there's a problem, it needs to be addressed pretty quickly given a) and b). These are facts, nothing glamorous about them; and no romanticizing about it "being my own place" will change them one iota.

A lot of the time, life is largely logistics and problem management.

I worked half the day today, the latter half, because Charleston's first decent snowstorm of the season blasted through yesterday. It left the hill at the top of the neighborhood impassable in the morning. I ended up working while at home too, SpongeBob blaring away and the kids going wild while I wrote a new module of code and uploaded it. Yes, I enjoyed doing it, but that's beside the point. Ultimately, it just needed to be done and I was the guy to do it.

This evening, after staying late to make sure I did indeed get in that half day (to conserve vacation days for when they're actually going to be used for their namesake), I came home to a round of evening chores — guide the kids in the direction they needed to go (a bit easier than usual with it being a snow day), get some bread started, chase the cat out of the kitchen garbage a few times (which went on most of yesterday evening too), give up and take said garbage to the can outside because the cat is damned persistent, and fiddle with the aforementioned washer.

And tomorrow, unless the snow flares up again, it's back to school for everyone, back to a full day of work, the usual rhythm and grind.

I don't think the younger version of myself saw any of this. I suspect the vision was a little more fantastic. While fantastic this is not, it could be a hell of a lot worse. I've lived that life too, had four dollars to my name and an empty cupboard and rent to pay. Even with that, compared with much of the world, better to be a poor man in America, right? Maybe being a working class hero isn't too bad.

The washer, by the way, appears to be fine.