Blessed by the Potato

I just had a terrible departmental presentation. I was half asleep and it just didn’t fly over very well. There was also some last-minute room and time changes which threw my rhythm off. I had to pace with my giant laptop for an extra half hour, and this computer is the least portable computer I’ve owned since my Dad’s 1984 portable Tandy XT, which was just a regular desktop XT with a handle. Well, to be fair it had a 4″ monochrome screen (originally designed for an oscilloscope if I didn’t know better) and a fold-out, full-sized keyboard, but you get my drift.

My neck has gotten a bit better over the weekend, but now my shoulders are all achy from holding my head at strange angles for two days. It looks like this is the result of some sort of strange bug, because Wayfare, my mom, and my sister all came down with severely sore necks in the last few days. I didn’t feel feverish, but I am running a slight temperature at the moment. I only checked after my mom mentioned that it might be some sort of illness, but it was a strange one because it didn’t have any other symptoms…

I got my breadmaker up and running last night. It’s a pretty nifty little device and does a decent job of kneading the dough, which is all I used it for in my first batch. I just made up some basic pizza dough. The dough that came out wasn’t very elastic in the end, so I couldn’t shape it by rolling and stretching like I usually would, but instead had to basically pound it into my pizza pan. However, the final pizza was tasty and had a good texture, so I’ll take it. After that, I decided to make some bread, and started with their “basic white” recipe. I was surprised at how much more had to go into this supposedly basic recipe compared to the pizza dough. When I saw that I didn’t have everything it called for, I started to improvise, first with 25% whole wheat flour, and then throwing in some ground flax too. The bread came out pretty good, though the crust is a fair bit heavier and darker than the “medium” I set it to; I think next time I’ll have to try light. Bread from a breadmaker is very strange because the pan is very tall and not very wide, so it’s almost like the aspect ratio adjustment I’m having to make with my monitor…

When I was talking about my bread at work, I was told that ground flax only lasts for a few weeks in the cupboard and was cautioned to keep it in the fridge. I just googled it, and sure enough it does have a fairly limited shelf life (though the somewhat biased flax council of Canada gives it a few months), and that worries me just a little bit since I have no idea how long ago Wayfare bought the flax. Ah, well, the bread still tastes fine, and now I’m going to set about turning the other half of it into sandwiches (fortunately, I’ve got 3 different bread knifes here to get just the right slices, evenly thick all over).

Growing up, my parents have always have a ton of kitchen gadgets, from cappachino machines to juicers, deep fryers to smokers — even stone-bottomed pizza cookers — and my mom always cautioned my dad never to get a breadmaker, since that would clearly be the last straw. She always considered the breadmaker to be the gadget that people bought because they sounded neat, but never really ended up using. So naturally, sometime after Wayfare bought me this one but before I opened it, I told this story to Wayfare. “This is it,” I said “I can’t think of anything to get my mom. I’m going to have to resort to getting her the last kitchen gadget on earth, the breadmaker.”

As long as my mind is on food I also got the first season of Good Eats with Alton Brown. This is perhaps my favourite cooking show because he takes the time to explain why he does what he does. He actively encourages us to come up with our own recipes, and explains what each ingredient is supposed to do, and how it can be modified or substituted. I find I still get something out of the episodes that aren’t really of interest to me for the food (of which there are a lot; almost every one, since I’m such a picky eater). For example, the one on steaks wasn’t hugely useful to me, since I’m not really one to go to my local butcher and select the cut of meat for me, then pan-fry that (if I make steaks for friends, I’d probably BBQ anyway). But that episode did have some handy information on cast iron skillets. Likewise, I really disagree with his opinion on mashed potatoes in a number of aspects (adding red potatoes to purposefully make them lumpy? And I’ve never understood the appeal of putting garlic in mashed potatoes), but I finally learned why the Yukon Gold potatoes I switched to for a time after moving out on my own (which the grocery store display says should be good for mashing) never worked as well as the plain baking potatoes my mom used (the baking potatoes are starchier and less waxy).

Anyhow, I’m home with a sore neck. I have no idea how I hurt it: my shoulder was sore when I woke up, presumably from sleeping on it funny (or reaching up to the breaker board repeatedly last night; possibly from curling, too) but my neck didn’t hurt at first. Then I had a shower and let the hot water work out my shoulder for a while, and when I went to towel off, I couldn’t move my neck. I walked to work all hunched over, and of course my office mates laughed at me. When I went down to the cafeteria, a small child looked at me like I was the boogieman, so it must have been a funny posture indeed. After not very long at all, I gave up at work and came home where I can sort of plop myself down on the couch and slouch enough that I can still see the screen with my chin on my chest.

I’m sure you’re all bored of my ranting and obsessive tracking of my hydro usage, so I’ll put that at the bottom.

First, I’d like to just mention that Netbug lent Snow Crash to me over the holidaze, and I quite enjoyed it. It has me thinking now, though: you know all that crazy spam that’s been avoiding the filters lately? The ones that mostly have crappy gifs with the random gibberish in the clear? I wonder sometimes if those patterns of lines and colours in those gifs aren’t there to tell you that this really is a legitimate stock tip that you must follow up on, but are attempts to fine-tune some sort of visually transmitted virus for our wetware. Or in a similar vein, try to find a combination of colours and lines and pixelated text that is absolutely hypnotic and is vastly more effective at getting the message across. Given how cheap and plentiful spam has been, it provides a brain researcher in this area an easy way to just go about experimenting by trial-and-error rather than trying to come up with any sort of governing theory… I also sometimes wonder if it’s some terrorist or otherwise secret organization attempting to send steganographic (encoded) messages to people who are unreachable other than by general broadcast…

Anyhow, on to power issues.

I flipped the main breakers today, and the wheel in the power meter did indeed stop spinning. That’s mostly good: good, because it means the meter isn’t completely, flabergastingly broken. Of course, it also means that the easiest solution to my problems is no longer a possibility. Rather than doing stuff and recording the power use in several-hour blocks (pretty much the minimum to get any kind of accuracy from a scale with 1 kWh as the smallest unit), I looked up the method of getting power use from the rate the wheel in the meter spins (thanks to Mr. Electricity). Before I shut off the main breaker, I had one computer and a 100 W light in my room running, plus some LED xmas lights on out front and a variety of leak power (TV, clocks, and the small blower fan for the hot water heater was on too). I was using 428 W, which coincidentally, is quite close to the average power use in the apartment. There’s still a bit of unknown power to account for (again, my computers and all that other stuff were in the apartment too, and except for the light, all that was generally on all the time, so my baseline should be lower so that occasional things like cooking and having the fridge cycle could bring the total up to that point), but it’s not huge. Maybe 100-200 W or so.

Then, after I switched the power off and on again, I went upstairs, turned off the light and turned on the other computer (I should have kept it constant, I know, but I was on my way out, and the difference between the two should be pretty small), then went outside to check again. The furnace clicked on (but I don’t know if the fridge did) and my power usage jumped to 1250 W! This is closer to the usage that would rack up the crazy bills we’ve been seeing, and sort of implies that the furnace fan, beyond all expectation, is somehow drawing 800 W (or possibly, the furnace and fridge together. The fridge was off when I walked out the door, but I didn’t go back inside to check that it didn’t click on before I made it to the meter). I’ll try to track this a bit better tonight when I get home.

Calculation: For the first usage, the wheel turned in 60.5 seconds. The power, in kW = ( 3.6 * 7.2 )/time in seconds. The 3.6 is a factor to go from seconds to hours and also from W to kW. The 7.2 is a factor printed on the meter. So, P = (3.6*7.2)/60.5 = 0.428 kW (or 428 W). The second time was 20.7 seconds if you want to do the calculation yourself.

Sorry for the brief outage today. Turns out I broke the little tab on the network cable that holds it in place a while ago, and when I was under the desk installing my new monitor I tugged the cord out enough that it wasn’t making a good contact. Of all the stupid ways to kill a website, eh?