My Grandfather, the…

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When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time with my cousins and grandparents on my dad’s side.   My cousins and I would go on trips in my grandparents 5th wheel (a 1980’s Hitchhiker II) to Ocean Shores and other places where we’d go fishing or clamming, and generally run around.   Some mornings my grandfather would wake us kids up by threatening to kiss us while his face was covered with shaving cream.  Then us kids would squeeze the little tubes (apparently it’s called the “crystalline style“) out of the razor clams–giggling as we did it because we thought that little thing was part of the clams naughty bits–and then grandma would cook up the clams.

Many weekends growing up my grandpa, dad, my Cousin Mark, and I would go trout fishing at Spada Lake or another small lake, or take my grandpa’s 19ft boat out on Puget Sound for some Salmon fishing which almost always turned in to dogfish fishing.  One time we were trout fishing and I hooked a nice little rainbow trout and grandpa jokingly said “that’s too small, let it go” and I did, not realizing he was joking.  I caught zero additional fish that day but somehow it was still funny.   At the end of the day the driveshaft U-bolt broke as we pulled the 12ft Duroboat out of the water.  Grandpa spent the next hour or so removing the drive shaft entirely and we drove the F-250 home in 4-wheel drive (now front-wheel-drive).   I remember the driveshaft U-bolts being a consistent theme.   Inside that F-250 there were hundreds of tools stashed in various places.  If it came to it, I believe that he could have rebuilt the entire truck using just the tools he had inside.

When us grandkids were a little older, my grandpa bought a go-kart.  He also somehow had a Caterpillar D9 on his 5-acre property in Woodinville.    He spent weeks grading a go-kart track that went all around the back yard and front yard.  And us kids spent years driving that thing, full throttle (there was no other reasonable way to drive it) on that track.   I have a ½” burn scar on my finger from accidentally touching the exhaust while pushing the go-kart to get it going for my cousin one time.

For a while he had a pet donkey…  Might have been a mule, I can’t remember for sure.  All I remember is that his name was Griesel Diesel Number 9.   I can’t begin to tell you where that name came from.

Sometime around 1999-2000 (I can’t remember these dates as well as I’d like) my grandpa (among others) was helping me move from one apartment to another in Kirkland.  He used to drive trucks, delivering cabinets for Western Cabinet, so he was used to carrying things, though his back was being slowly and permanently damaged from it.  I was single at the time and every time he saw a young woman walking by he’d call out to them asking them if they were single and letting them know his grandson was moving in.   He had a mug that he’d brought with him filled with coffee.  He asked me if it was okay to add some of my vodka to his coffee.   I was confused because I didn’t think I had any vodka but said sure.   An hour or so later he’d drank most of the coffee and he told me that the vodka had a funny taste.  I wracked my brain trying to remember what vodka I had and then I asked him where he found it.  “Under your kitchen sink”.   Ahah!!  “That’s not vodka grandpa, that’s vinegar my mom gave me”.  He’d been drinking coffee with added vinegar in it for an hour.  He then explained to me that he used to drink vinegar as a kid…and he proceeded to finish the coffee over the next hour, vinegar and all.

After developing dementia over the course of a few years my grandmother fell down some stairs and eventually passed away at Harborview on July 25th, 2014.  My grandfather was clearly upset and clung to Sophie (his little dog) determined to stay in his house in Twisp, WA till the end.  My biological dad, my grandfathers son, died suddenly in his home 6 months later in January, 2015.   For the last two years, my grandpa has been living alone (with a few regular visitors) in his home while his spine and short-term memory continued to deteriorate.  Conversations were hard due to his memory but he was always happy and generally healthy.

On December 19th, he fell in his bedroom and shattered his L4 vertebrae.  Doctors at the hospital explained there was nothing they could do because his spine was so deteriorated from osteoporosis that there was no structure to attach anything to.  He was left bedridden but he was happier than ever because he wasn’t alone, he had doctors and nurses around all the time.  I flew to Spokane mere hours after I found out and was both surprised and relieved to see his demeanor.  Even joking with the nurses who were “playing with his ding-a-ling” (adjusting his catheter).  They moved him to a nursing facility on the 28th and got settled in.  Unfortunately, he was experiencing pain every time they had to shift his body and it seems they couldn’t get the pain meds right.  Yesterday he was found non-responsive and taken to the emergency room.  He passed away last night.

He was 89.  Stubborn, Funny, Hard-working, Resourceful, Smart, Caring, and Strong–possibly one of the greatest humans I’ve ever known.  Likely making jokes with Saint Peter about how The Gates aren’t pearly enough to keep, whilst relaxing in an easy chair with my grandmother and my dad.

Left to Right – Me, My Wife Devon, My Dad, Grandmother, Grandfather, my Mother, and my Step-Dad Tim

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Has Auto-Correct Gotten So Smart That It’s Now Stupid?

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At first I thought it was just me, but it seems many others are struggling with the same issue.   Several years ago when phones finally had pretty good auto-correct and spell check I felt like it was actually a pretty nice thing to have.   As I typed on my phone with fumbly fingers most of my errors would be fixed leaving just a few to fix manually before clicking send.   And the auto-correct would replace words based on the context as well which made things altogether pretty intelligent.  My thought had been that as the developers (Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc) of these predictive text dictionaries got more and more data from user devices the auto-correct function would get so good that you’d have little to fix after typing an entire message.

img_3010However, what seems to have happened in the past year or two is that the algorithms have gotten marginally better, but the aggressiveness of auto-correct has increased by an order of magnitude.  What I find now is that I have to retype words 2-3 times before auto-correct will let me keep it the way I’ve spelled it.  And if I mistype a word and try to correct it myself, sometimes auto-correct will then suggest the very misspelling I was trying to fix.   Even with a new phone and new computer, which haven’t had time to learn my own vocabulary, the auto-correct functionality suggests words that don’t even make sense, trying to replace perfectly valid words I’ve typed.   This affects both my phone and my computer, albeit both are Apple products, and my wife has the same issue with hers.

So I’ve given up on Auto-Correct, and gone back to the old way, with underlined words that I can selectively fix or leave as-is before I click send.   Frankly it takes me less time to manually correct a couple of words than it did to fight auto-correct to allow me to type the words correctly in the first place.

The good news is you can disable Auto Correct and get back to the good old days of being informed without being intruded on.

  • On a Mac, go to System Preferences -> Keyboard -> “Text” tab, and un-checking “correct spelling automatically”.
  • On an iPhone, go to Settings -> General -> Keyboard, and disable “Auto-Correction”.

 

In both cases incorrect spellings and such will be underlined and suggested words will still be shown, but it won’t automatically replace what you have actually typed.  You can still chose one of the suggestions and/or click the underlined word for a correction, basically the same thing that you could do before Auto-Correct became so smart it turned stupid.

P.S. Please forgive any typos as this was typed on a Mac with Auto-Correct disabled.   😉

Quote of the Week

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“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea… “cruising” it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

“I’ve always wanted to sail to the south seas, but I can’t afford it.” What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of “security.” And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine – and before we know it our lives are gone.

What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all – in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade.

The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life? ”

― Sterling HaydenWanderer

Sterling Haydon and kids on Wanderer

Sterling Haydon and his children on Wanderer

Time for a new website!

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Well, I finally got around to building a new personal website.  It’s been a while since I updated the old one, mostly because it was made in Apple iWeb which I no longer have.   One set of content on my old site is quite active (the documents I’ve collected for Cal sailboats) so I wanted to make sure that any new website maintains the old URLs to those documents so Google search results would still link to them.

So I installed an instance of WordPress in the same folder as the old website, imported or recreated the content (depending on what it was) and specifically rebuilt the pages for the Cal documents so that they linked to the same files in the same locations as the old site.   Then I set about updating the old pages with automatic redirects to the new site.  Each section on the old site now redirects to its matching section on the new site.

Hopefully now that the website is running on WordPress I can update it more frequently and slowly tune it to be something I will be proud of.  In the mean time it’s pretty nice so far, and it meets my objective of keeping old content available.

I’ve actually consolidated blog posts from various blogs I had around the web into three final locations:

  1. Sailing related posts have been imported into our cruising blog at AndersonsAbroad.com as well as some other travel blogs we had written about French Polynesia and Italy.
  2. Work/Technology related posts were already on StorageSavvy.com which is now at Storagesavvy.richardanderson.net.  I’m winding down this site and no longer want to pay for the domain.
  3. All other personal posts have been imported into this site under the Personal Blog section.  This includes posts originally on the old richardanderson.net site, in addition to non-sailing posts that were on sailingsleipnir.wordpress.com and kirklandnano.blogspot.com.

Take a little tour through the menu to see what’s here..

Category: stuff

Coin Operated Spending Unleashed

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Back on December 20th, 2013, I came across an ad in Facebook (yes I do click some of them) selling the concept of carrying a single payment card for every purpose (key to a slimmer wallet).  It was early in the campaign so the price was $50 instead of the full $100 that it was expected to cost later so I bought in to Coin’s crowd funding campaign. I paid the $50 for my Coin thinking I’d receive the card in Spring 2014.

Then in 2014 there was a huge kerfuffle over the news to backers that Coin wouldn’t be able to make their original shipping dates. They instituted a beta program for the earliest backers (only about 50 if I recall correctly) and later it was pretty clear they were struggling to ensure the product actually worked as advertised.

In the meantime Apple announced Apple Pay in September 2014 with the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch, which promised to provide a potentially even better experience than a multi-network card (ie: Coin) because it was technology embedded in something you carry anyway (your phone or watch). A friend of mine who also pre-ordered a Coin took advantage of the return option, getting his $50 back and used that to help cover the cost of his new Apple Watch which he uses to buy things at retail locations.

I’ll admit that I’m pretty fond of most of the Apple products. I grew up with PC’s and after spending most of my career managing PC-based computer networks I switched to Mac at home.  Today, our household consists of several iPad’s, a couple of MacBook Pros, an iMac or two, multiple iPhones, two AppleTV’s, and no less than four Airport Extreme routers. But I could not really justify purchasing an Apple Watch right away; it’s just a bit too expensive for a watch when I normally don’t wear a watch. And I couldn’t upgrade to an iPhone 6 any time soon because my mobile phone is actually provided by my employer. So Apple Pay was not available for me any time soon.   With no Apple Pay option, I let my Coin pre-order ride on.

Fast forward to Monday Sept 14, 2015. I opened the mailbox and I found my long overdue Coin. After all the delays they actually finished production and beta testing, and shipped the darn thing. In addition, they revamped the hardware in the process, specifically (and significantly I might add) adding NFC wireless. This means the Coin 2.0 card functions a lot more like Apple Pay because you can just hold it up to the reader rather than swipe it.

IMG_6886

Unboxing the device is sort of Apple-esce. The box is white and far more upscale than it needs to be for a glorified credit card. A credit card mag stripe reader for your mobile phone is included with the card so you can swipe your credit cards to the Coin app which then sync’s the data to the Coin.

IMG_6916Setting it up is very simple – in fact a bit too simple really because at first I sort of stared at the app looking for a way to pair my phone with the Coin and I couldn’t find it.   All the app wanted me to do was add my credit cards. Turns out it’s pretty much that simple, you swipe each card, giving each one a nickname, and then click Sync. Sync pairs up the Coin with your phone and loads your cards into it and it’s all set.

Another new feature in Coin 2.0 that was not originally expected was support for gift cards and membership cards.

After that I was all set to go out and spend Coin.  I’ve added two VISA cards, two AMEX cards (a personal and a corporate card), a debit card, and my Starbucks Gold Card. Time to test them out in the real world.

IMG_6887I spent the last two days with my Coin and my experience so far is, well, seamless.. and ultimately that’s a good thing.

Yesterday I headed out for lunch and used Coin to pay for parking with a kiosk, then to pay for the meal. The waitress didn’t even seem to notice, and it worked fine.   We then walked over for gelato and again, no notice from the girl who rang us up using my Coin as a VISA.

Today I went to lunch again, but this time it didn’t work. The waitress said it was the second one she’d seen and thought it was pretty cool, but alas I had to pull out my real VISA card. Then I decided to try using it at Starbucks as my Starbucks Gold Card (effectively a gift card).   I had to make sure the barista knew to treat it as the gift card but it worked just fine. And right after that I headed to the DOL to renew car tabs and no issues. The woman at the DOL was super-curious and wanted to know how to find one. So we’re 5 for 6 so far.

IMG_6915One nice thing is the map in the Coin app let’s you check to see if someone’s Coin was successful at a particular establishment, and you can tap on a place or search for one and report your own experience for others.

So far I like it, I also got my Wally Bifold slim wallet today so I look forward to a slightly more sleek cash and Coin carrying experience.

One Month With a Solar Home – 1.82MEGAWatt(hours)!

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Version 2

Well, it’s been just over a month since the solar system came online..

In the 33 days that the solar system has been online, we’ve generated a total of 1817kWh from the panels.. Due to line losses and differences in measurement intervals and such the PSE Production meter has registered 1724kWh.

  • For the Washington State REAP program that we are participating in, that 1724kWh translates to ~$930 in state incentives generated so far.

The PSE Net meter which is what our monthly power bill is based on has two useful values..

  • First, we’ve pushed a total of 1205kWh of excess solar power to the grid. This means that from the solar power itself, during the day, we’ve consumed 519kWh that came straight from the solar panels and didn’t have to be pulled from the grid.
    • On a more grand scale, the full 1205kWh is power that didn’t have to be generated somewhere by a Nuclear, Gas, Coal, etc power plant.  What happens if you scale that up to more homes?
  • Second, we pulled a total of 602kWh during the same period, primarily at night when the solar panels are not generating any power.
    • Now, what if the excess we pushed into the grid above was stored at the power company’s neighborhood substation in a bank of batteries (Tesla Energy?) and then this power that we pulled at night came from those batteries.  Suddenly the power generation get’s much simpler and demand spikes are smoothed out…  But I digress.

So our total consumption of power during the 33 days was about 1121kWh, and we generated 1724kWh.   Due to how net metering works, our electric bill will now have a credit equal to 602kWh. Unfortunately, because the power company fiscal year is July through June, this credit is more or less a throw-away.. It get’s zeroed out at the end of June. But going forward from July until June 2016, as we generate more credit we will be able to consume that credit during the winter months as needed to cover the difference between what we generate and what we consume.

Oh, it’s freakin’ HOT here right now compared to normal, and we have no AC, so the furnace fan and about four other fans are all running pretty much non-stop. This combined with charging our electric car (actually a very small amount of power) is pushing our power consumption up a bit higher than normal. Typically we consume about 100kWh more in August than in other months due to running the fans, but we’ve had a very warm spring, today (July 1st) it’s 92F here and the average is only 73F. The record for this day, prior to today was only 84F.

At $0.10/kWh, we would have paid about $100 for electricity. But instead the power we pushed to the grid has more than offset that and our bill will essentially be ~$7 for the base connectivity charge.

You can browse around my online solar reports if you want – StorageSavvy’s Solar Dashboard

StorageSavvy is going green! I see the light!

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Through a series of discussions with a friend who was evaluating solar for his home, doing some calculations, and discussing with the local contractor, I bit the bullet last month and got a 9800 watt solar array installed on our house here in the Pacific Northwest.  While pricey up front there are a number of incentives available from the Federal government as well as Washington State that effectively pay for the entire system.  I’ll write-up the cost analysis later but for now let’s take a look at the performance of the system..

Version 2The roof of our house has 4 sides with trees lining the entire East side of the property, causing some shading in the morning.  The majority of the North and South sides are clear and the West side is completely open.  Due to this, the 35 x 280 watt panels cover pretty much the entire West roof and a large portion of the South roof.  Our system uses the more expensive micro-inverters in order to handle shading of a single panel without affecting the rest of the system.  Aside from more efficiency in shading situations, the micro-inverters have about double the life of the less-expensive in-line inverters.  Our system is also grid-tied and we do not have any batteries involved.  Since the micro-inverters push 240VAC power down from the roof, the interconnection with our panel is very simple.  In order to take advantage of Washington State’s solar incentive the local power utility (Puget Sound Energy) installed a “Production Meter” that measures how many kWh’s the system generates irrespective of how it gets used.  And in order to take advantage of the grid-tied solar system to reduce my power bill they installed a new digital “Net Meter” that tracks both how much power I consume from the grid and how much our system pushes TO the grid.  The difference between those numbers determines the actual billed amount each month.

For example, if we push 1000 kWh into the grid during the month, and pull 900 kWh, then our bill that month will show a credit equal to 100 kWh.  That credit can be used in a later month (ie: the winter months) when we might be consuming more than we generate each day.

At about 7pm PT today pulled statistics from the micro-inverters as well as the current readings on the ‘net’ and ‘production’ meters.  The system came online during the morning of May 29th.  The cumulative numbers for the past ~12 days are as follows..

  • Production Meter
    • 580 kWh‘s generated by the solar array
  • Net Meter
    • 378 kWh‘s pushed to the grid
    • 205 kWh‘s consumed from the grid

Doing the math, this means we’ve consumed approximately 387 kWh in that time from all sources (grid + solar).  The summer has pretty much started here so at least for this time of year we are clearly generating significantly more that we consume.  The winter months will be different of course.  This also translates to a 173 kWh credit on our electric bill so far.

Let’s take a look at how the system performs on different days and at different times of day..

First, here is a look at how many kWh’s we are generating per-day.  You will see that there are some stormy, rainy, cloudy, dark days mixed in with the other more sunny days..

kwh-per-day-solar

Now here are two charts, the first showing the amount of power being generated in watts through a 24 hour period on a nice sunny day and the second showing the number of kWh’s generated in each particular hour.

watts-24hours-sunny

You may notice the dips around 9am and 11am.  These are caused by the south side panels being partially shaded at those times as the sun moves across the sky.
kwh-per-hour-sunnyHere are the same two charts for the darkest, cloudiest, rainiest day we had a quite a while.

watts-24hours-rainy

As the clouds and rain change through the day, you can see that the power generated is all over the place.  I was impressed that we still achieve over 7000 watts mid-afternoon on that day, if even for a short time.

kwh-per-hour-rainyWhen you consider that there are comparably few days this bad in a given year, and we still generated about 75% of our average daily consumption rate, things are looking pretty good for an overall annual low electric bill.

All in all pretty promising — and we recently leased a new all-electric BMW i3 which we charge about once every 3 days.  That charging activity is included in all the above numbers so we are essentially powering the i3 entirely from the sun.  On the flip side, our house contains probably 50 x 65w can lights of which only a few have been converted to LED so far.  We could certainly reduce our power consumption a bit more if we converted more of our lighting to LED.  But there is a cost to that of course and it’s a long-term project.  Assuming our annual out-of-pocket electric cost ends up being zero, there’s really no ROI on replacing our bulbs with LED before the existing bulbs fail on their own.

More on this project later.

 

What your Nest could have told you but didn’t

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So you picked up a Nest at the store, or online, because you realized (or thought maybe) that you could save some money on your heating or cooling bills, and/or the possibility of remote controlling your home HVAC from your phone was pretty slick.

Now I won’t really spend much time on the energy/cost savings (or possibly lack thereof) related to using a Nest vs. any other programmable thermostat but suffice it to say I’m dubious as to whether Nest will actually save me any money in its lifetime. But that’s not why I got it.. Being able to remotely set the furnace to away and bring it back to life as needed from my mobile phone is interesting enough to me. Combined that with energy consumption statistics and I can see at least enough benefit to warrant trying it out.

Further, I am supporting a startup project called Ecovent which integrates with Nest and will allow individual control of the temperature in each room of our house. No more cold office with an overheated living room…

Anyway, I picked up the Nest while upgrading my wife’s mobile phone because I was able to bundle my items together for a little discount. At home I spent just under 10 minutes installing it, it really IS easy! Perfect, looks great, and seems to work just fine. It was evening so I set the temp to 60˚F and left it alone for the night.nest-online

The next morning I set the furnace to 69˚F from my phone before I got out of bed and started getting ready for the day. From 7am until about 10am the furnace turned on and off, on and off, repeatedly, but the house never got any warmer.   The Nest itself seemed fine with no errors on screen. I turned the knob up a bit and it said it was heating but still same result. I gave up on it for most of the day thinking maybe it was learning how quickly or slowly the furnace raises the temperature. WRONG!

Later in the evening it was still not working so I Google’d around a bit (yes I use Google so I can use the big G) for this issue and found a few notes in discussion forums. I didn’t find anything useful on Nest’s website (although I searched today, and found this KB article) itself regarding this issue, and calling customer support is always my last resort because I’ve found that most of the time customer support organizations don’t know their own product much better than I can figure out on my own with the Internet at my disposal.

What I did find on the discussion forums indicated that the problem was that there wasn’t enough power available in the control circuit and/or board to fire up the gas burners. And the furnace is designed to shut down the fan and heat cycle after two minutes if the burners haven’t ignited. I also saw several Nest owners comment that they had to call out HVAC repair technicians to figure out what the problem was, presumably at a fairly hefty cost. The good news is that I was able to determine the cause and fix the problem myself, and I’ll describe that here. It’s quite simple, however the caveat is that your house may not have the thermostat wiring in the walls that you need in order to fix it, which means running a new wire, decidedly more involved than if you already have the wiring in place.

First, the ultimate issue is that the Nest consumes more power than a typical thermostat. It has a color screen with backlighting, an actual CPU running an operating system, and a WiFi radio. It also has a rechargeable battery embedded to keep it running when you remove it from its wall base, or when the power is out.   The power to run the Nest AND charge the battery comes from the 24VAC Control board in the furnace. Since the Nest uses more current (amperage) than normal and that current comes from the same power source as the current required to turn on relays for the fan and ignite the burners, open gas valves, this is where we get into problems.

The Sequence goes like this…

  1. The Nest is using power all the time
  2. If the battery is still charging for some reason it’s using even more power
  3. At some point Nest decides it’s too cold and sends the Heat signal to the furnace, sending this signal takes some more power
  4. After the furnace fan has been running for a few seconds it’s time to ignite the burner.  This takes a bit more power (close relay to heat up igniter, close relay to open gas valves)
  5. But now the power in the circuits going through the Nest doesn’t have enough current left to do this, and the voltage has dropped as a result so the relays don’t actually close… and the burners never get gas and/or the igniter doesn’t heat up.
  6. Two minutes pass and the furnace senses that the burners still aren’t lit and shuts down.
  7. Lather, Rinse, Repeat

You can determine very quickly with Nest if this is going on by looking at the technical data screen..

nest-power-bad

Notice the Voc and Vin are wildly different.. this means that the AC sine-wave is fluctuating, ie: voltage is dropping. And the Lin is a current measurement showing 20mA.. According to online discussions this should be around 100ma.

The fix for this is to add power. The most common method of doing that is to connect the blue “C” common wire between the furnace and the Nest. This makes it so that the Nest doesn’t steal/rob it’s power from the same lines that are used to control the heat and fan.

furnace-wiring-fixed-blue

nest-wiring-fixed-blue

You will notice I already had an extra blue wire in the wall, but it wasn’t in use, so I connected it at both ends.

Now look at the Voc and Vin and Lin values..

nest-power-fixedThe Voc and Vin are very close, so the AC sine-wave is stable and Lin is 100mA.. This is how it should be and now the furnace works perfectly.

So hopefully if you run into this, now you know how to resolve it. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a spare wire you are going to have to run a new wire through the wall, which will be somewhat, or very, difficult depending on your home.

Being very new, my Nest is a Gen 2 device, and some of the discussions indicated that the Gen 1 devices did not originally have this problem, and then following a software upgrade sometime in the recent past the problem started occurring.  The fix was the same.

After this experience I sent some feedback to Nest about this.

  • It seems common enough of a problem that it should be mentioned in the install guide. Common issues and their solutions should be readily available to self-install homeowners.
  • It also seems like the Nest software could very easily detect this issue. It already monitors the Voc, Vin, and Lin values obviously, and it knows how often the furnace is cycling. It would take very little code to detect the combination of factors and display an alert on the screen and an iPhone notification that there is a power issue, with a knowledge-base article # referenced to read about it. The Nest doesn’t do this so unless you are observant or it’s really cold outside it could linger for days or weeks without you realizing it. And you will find out when it’s really cold, the furnace won’t heat, and you won’t know why.

Otherwise, I think the Nest is pretty slick and I’ll be monitoring to see how it affects my energy bill, if at all.

 

Footnote: You can type a ˚ on Mac OS X with Option-K or a ° with Option-Shift-8 

For Sale (Sold)

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1974 MGB Chrome Bumper Roadster – Dark British Racing Green

$16,999

https://www.flickr.com/photos/techsavvy/sets/72157644485247145/

Hoyle coilover double-wishbone front suspension / GAZ Adjustable Shocks
British Automotive composite spring rear suspension
Traction (anti-tramp) control bars / Mantell Motorsports Panhard Rod

1924cc Big Bore engine (83mm) JE Forged 83mm Pistons
Kent 717SP Fast Road Scatter Pattern cam / Pertronix Coil and Ignition
Harland Sharp 1.55:1 Roller Rockers
RIMFLO stainless valves, 3-angle, ported, polished, cc’d head
Weber Outlaw 38DGES 2-barrel synchronous downdraft carb
Falcon stainless LCB header / Monza exhaust
16 row oil cooler with bypass valve and spin on oil filter
Lightened flywheel

Matching Chassis, Engine, Transmission, and Differential numbers

Time flies when you’re having fun!

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I can’t believe it’s already been a year and a half since my last post…  I’m sorry for the lack of content here.  Things have been so busy at EMC as well as at home and so much of what I’ve been working on is customer proprietary that I’ve had trouble thinking of ways to write about it.  In the meantime I’ve taken on a new role at EMC in the last month which will likely change what I’m thinking about as well as how I look at the storage industry and customer challenges.

In the past couple of years I’ve been involved in projects ranging from data lifecycle and business process optimization, storage array performance analysis, and scale out image and video repositories, to Enterprise deployments of OpenStack on EMC storage, Hadoop storage rationalization, and tools rationalization for capacity planning.  It is these last three items that have, in part, driven me into taking on a new role.

For the first three and half years I’ve spent at EMC I’ve been an Enterprise Account Systems Engineer in the Pacific Northwest.  Technically, I was first hired into the TME (Telco/Media/Entertainment) division focused on a small set (12 at first) of accounts near Seattle.  After about a year of that, the TME division was merged into the Enterprise West division covering pretty much all large accounts in the area, but the specific customers I focused on stayed the same.  For the past year or so I’ve spent pretty much 80% of my time working with a very large and old (compared to other original DotCom’s) online travel company.  The rest of my time was spent with a handful of media companies.  I’ve learned A TON from my coworkers at EMC as well as my customers.  It’s amazing how much talent is lurking in the hallways of anonymous black glass buildings around Seattle, and EMC stands out as having the highest percentage of type-A geniuses (does that exist) of any place I’ve worked.

One of the projects I’ve been working on for a customer of mine is related to capacity planning.  As you may know, EMC has several software products (some old, some new, some mired in history) dedicated to the task of reporting on a customer’s storage environment.  These software products all now fall under the management of a dedicated division within EMC called ASD (Advanced Software Division).  Over the past 13 years, EMC has acquired and integrated dozens of software companies and for a long time these software products were all point solutions that, when viewed as a set, covered pretty much every infrastructure management need imaginable.  But they were separate products.  In the past couple years alone massive progress has been made towards integrating them into a cohesive package that is much better aligned and easier to consume and use.

In just the past 12 months, one acquisition specifically, has greatly contributed to EMC’s recent, and I’ll say future, success in the management tools sector, and that is Watch4Net.  More accurately the product was APG (Advanced Performance Grapher) from a company called Watch4Net, but now it is the flagship component of EMC’s Storage Resource Management (SRM) Suite.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with SRM Suite lately at several customer sites and I’m really quite impressed.  SRM Suite is NOT ECC (for those of you who know and love AND hate ECC), and it’s not ProSphere, or even what ProSphere promised; it’s better, it’s easier to deploy, it’s easier to navigate, it’s MUCH faster to navigate, it’s easier to customize (even without Professional Services), it’s massively extensible, and it works today!  The Watch4Net software component is really a framework for collection, data storage, and presentation of data, and it includes dozens of Solution Packs (combinations of collector plug-ins and canned reports for specific products).  And more Solution Packs are coming out all the time, and you can even make your own if you want to.

What I really like about SRM Suite is the UI that came from Watch4Net.  It’s browser based (yes it supports IE, Chrome, Firefox, Mac, PC, etc) and you can easily create your own custom views from the canned reports.  You can even combine individual components (ie: graphs or tables) from within different canned reports into a single custom view.  And any view you can create, you can schedule as an emailed, FTP’d, or stored report with 2 clicks.  Have an extremely complex report that takes a while to generate?  Schedule it to be pre-generated at specific times during the day for use within the GUI, again with 2 clicks.

As slick as the GUI is, the magic of SRM Suite comes from the collectors and reports that are included for the various parts of your infrastructure.  There are SolutionPacks for EMC and non-EMC storage arrays, multiple vendor FibreChannel switches, Cisco, HP, IBM servers, IP network switches and routers, VMware, Hyper-V, Oracle, SQL, MySQL, Frame-Relay, MPLS, Cisco WiFi networks, and many more.  This single tool provides drill down metrics on individual ports of a SAN switch for a Storage Engineer, Capacity forecasting for management, as well as rollup health dashboards for your company’s executives all within the same tool.  And those same Exec’s can get their reports on their iPhones and iPads with the Watch4Net APG iOS app anywhere they happen to be.

(From vTexan’s post about SRM)

It’s hard to paint the picture in words or even a few screenshots, so you should ask your local EMC SE for a demo!

The second Big Deal coming from EMC’s ASD division is EMC ViPR.  ViPR is EMC’s Software Defined Storage solution.  ViPR abstracts and virtualizes your SAN, NAS, Object, and Commodity storage into Virtual Pools and automates the provisioning process from LUN/FileSystem creation to masking, zoning, and host attach, all with Service Level definitions, Business Unit and Project role-based access, and built in chargeback/showback reporting.  A full web portal for self-service is included as well as a CLI but the real power is the fully capable REST API which allows your existing automation tools to issue requests to ViPR, to handle end-to-end provisioning of your entire environment.  Best of all ViPR has open APIs and supports heterogenous (ie: EMC and non-EMC storage) allowing you to extend the single ViPR REST API to all of your disparate storage solutions.

Looking at the future of the storage industry, as well as EMC as a company, I see ViPR, in combination with SRM Suite, as the place to be for the next few years at least.  And so that’s what I’m doing.  Right now I’m in the process of transitioning from my Account SE role into being one of just a handful of ASD Software Specialist SE’s (sometimes also referred to as SDSpecialists).  In my new roll I’ll be the local Specialist for SRM Suite, ViPR, Service Assurance Suite (aka EMC Smarts), and several other EMC products you probably never thought of as software, or probably never heard of.  There are many enhancements to all of the products on the near term roadmap which will further solidify the ASD software portfolio as market leading but I can’t talk to much about that here..  So ask your local EMC SE to set up a roadmap discussion at the same time as the demo you already asked for.

I do plan to get to writing more often again, and I believe that my new role in the ASD organization will provide good content for that.

More soon!