A while ago I went around the house with a Kill-a-Watt electricity meter, trying to figure out what was using up the most power. It's a nice gadget - you just plug it into the wall, and then plug your appliance into it. You can get instantaneous wattage and also average power over time. (One disadvantage is that it's a pain to plug it into tight spots - it helps to use an extension cord to connect it to the wall. Also it's not as nice as the "clamp" type amp meters you can just place around an already-plugged in cord, but it's cheaper.

Anyway, we use around 30 kWh a day. That's kind of high and it's not clear to me where the power hogs are. Here are a few measurements I took.

Dell Dimension E510	All on	180 W
	Monitor off	140 W
	Standby mode	17 W
Mac PowerPC Mini	All on	100 W
	Monitor off	50 W
Older Gateway PC	All on	150 W
	Monitor off	80 W
Older linux box	CPU only	150 W
Low-voltage lighting	Backyard	56 W
	Front stairs	11 W
Microwave oven	Full power	150
Kenmore fridge	1-day avg	50 W
TV, etc	All off	38 W
	TV	100 W
	TiVo	40 W
	VCR	40 W
	CD + stereo	30 W

The things I haven't measured yet are the lights and the hot tub (heat is gas, so it's only the pump and the ionizer). Still, I don't see how it's going to add up to what we're actually using. Needs more research.

BTW, blogger.com needs to improve the way it deals with table formatting. The html for that table has to be all on 1 line, otherwise lots of BR's get inserted and mess things up.

I just got a copy of "The Eternals" by Neil Gaiman and John Romita. The premise is that we humans share the Earth with two other groups - the Eternals, who have names like Ikarus and Thena (i.e. Icarus and Athena) and are the basis for the gods of legend, and the Deviants, who are the basis for our devil myths. They (and humans) were created by giant inscrutable aliens called the Celestials, who may be coming back soon, with unknown consequences.

The original comic book series was written and drawn by Jack Kirby, and he had a very modernistic style - his creatures and machines were all drawn with clean lines, and his stories had drama but not a lot of moral ambiguity. They were like the fiction of Asimov and E. E. "Doc" Smith - they had this post-war optimism about the future and the promise of technology.

Neil Gaiman is much more post-modern and complex, and Romita's art is a bit less comic-booky then that of Kirby. I haven't finished it yet, but so far the story is somewhat different and (I think) harder to follow.

The Eternals would make a great movie... That is, if they don't mess up the screenplay like the first Fantastic Four movie.

Okay, now I really am going to start posting to my blog. Ideally I'd be writing a novel and making a resolution to write a chapter a week, but I think I'll start small. Here's the challenge - think of something every day that other people would actually be interested in reading.

Here's a fun game that I read about somewhere... Go to Wikipedia and hit "Random article". Keep hitting it until you get to an article that you recognize (i.e. not an obscure Welsh train station or Slovenian member of parliament). Then hit "Random article" again. Your challenge: get back to the previous article by clicking on links in each page. Using features like "What links here" or searching within a page isn't allowed, and to make it more of a challenge you can exclude "list" pages too.

For example, you can get from "Taplan, South Australia" to "Balloon swallower" via South Australia -> Convictism in Australia -> Prison -> Crime -> Smuggling.

Hours of excitement.