JD

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Credits: jgombarcik, MartinB, M Phatik, and Todd Tankersley

Wired Magazine

Ah, the pleasures of having your own site. On Thursday, I downloaded the latest version of wordpress (2.9.2) to install over the weekend. After spending a couple hours on the install this morning, and troubleshooting to get things to work, I finally logged in and was greeted with the cheery message “WordPress 3.0 is available. Please upgrade now.” !!!! After weeping and gnashing my teeth, I did the whole thing over again. So to make all of that effort seem worthwhile, here I am, blogging about…nothing really.

But I do love some of the “upsets” going on in the world cup these days. England settles for a tie with the U.S. AND Algeria. New Zealand holds world champion Italy to one goal and a tie. Switzerland beats Spain, and Serbia beats Germany. If you’re not watching, you should be.

I would like to add this photo to thereifixedit, but as that site usually shows fixes that don’t actually work, I think this one might not qualify. It appears to be both fully functional and fully awesome.

…except that I just got an awesome toy/tool – the kill a watt! It’s pretty simple, just plug it into an outlet and plug something into it and it will read off pretty much any metric you want concerning electricity usage. Volts, Amps, Volt-Amps, Watts, and KWh (measured over however long you leave it there). After opening it and trying it out on a few random items, I realized I couldn’t put it down until I had measured everything in my house that attaches to an outlet. Luckily, I live in a very, very small house. I didn’t find anything too outlandish, but I’ll publish my results anyway, just for fun. An engineer’s version of fun.

Altec Lansing Subwoofer + 2 speakers – While this is sold as a 120W amplifier, I cranked some music (almost) as loud as I could, and never got it to draw more than 12 W. But, it did qualify as a candidate for unplugging when I found out that it draws, while completely off, 5 entire watts. Day and night, for the past few years, it has steadily and needlessly burned precious energy from the world’s supply. At my current electricity cost of 11.87 cents/KWh, it costs me 0.059 cents/hour. That’s $5.20 per year, or maybe $20-$30 total over the years I’ve owned it. Not terrible, I suppose, but definitely unnecessary.

Toaster – While off, this actually draws an unmeasurably low amount, which is good. While in use, it draws 721W, which is evidently the necessary amount to blacken two pieces of toast in just under 2 minutes.

Microwave – This one was a little bit intense. The microwave is rated at 1200W, but when I plugged it into the kill a watt and began nuking a glass of water, the device began beeping and screeching and blinking while reporting a draw of 1,860W. I assume it was warning of some measurement ceiling that was about to be surpassed, but it seemed to be saying something more along the lines of “situation unstable: vacate the premises while microwave is in use!”.

Fridge – While on, it draws 165W, and with the door open at the same time, 199W. While “off”, it still draws 8W, or ~$8/year. If I assume that it spends about half of its time on (cooling), it is costing me about $86/year. Considering that much of my food is courtesy of the Trader Joe’s freezer section, that seems like a pretty fair deal.

Besides a couple lamps, a phone charger, a laptop charger, and an electric heater, none of which gave particularly interesting or unexpected results when subjected to the kill a watt, that is the complete list of my pluggable appliances. I guess now I will have to leave the subwoofer unplugged for 4 years in order to recover the cost of the kill a watt, but at least now I know that my microwave is 50% more powerful, and therefore awesome, than it claims to be.

I do these things for fun. Really.

When I filed my taxes this year, some burning questions hit me. Mainly, I wanted to know two things – where did my tax money go, and how did it get there? Actually, I’m rather painfully aware of the answer to the second one with each passing paycheck, but the first one seems worth pursuing. So I did. It didn’t take that long to figure out in general how tax dollars are spent, and then apply that to my total tax payment to see how much money I personally spent on difference federal and state pursuits. And the results are in:

Federal Taxes

Social Security ($4,248) – I guess this is basic – most of that money goes to help retired people balance their budget, more or less. And, if I’m incredibly optimistic, I can hope that eventually somebody will do the same for me.

Defense ($3,772) – Perhaps I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised to see that this item takes nearly 50% of the federal tax budget. I’m sure that some of those dollars are well-spent, but I’m also sure that most of those dollars are not. Or at least I don’t believe they should be spent the way they are, to be brief. That’s more money than I spent on groceries or a car last year.

Education, Employment, and Social Services ($1,058) – I’m going to have to do some research for part 2 of this post to figure out some specifics of where that money went.

California Taxes

K-12 Education ($1,046) – Seems good, and doing more seems better.

Health & Human Services ($833) – Again, I’ll have to look into this one.

Higher Education ($317) – So I’m contributing as much to California higher education (~$26/month) as I would pay to AT&T for a landline. Interesting.

Line items I’d like to do more research on include Natural Resources/Environment (US, $299), Energy (US, $248), Community & Regional Development (US, $126), and Non-agency departments (CA, $16). For “Environmental Protection” in California, I spent a whopping $2 last year. Considering that CA has some of the most stringent environmental law in the US, that must be an incredibly efficient operation. Or maybe the enforcement just isn’t what it could or should be?