Paul Kimbrel's Musing

It’s been a crazy few days, but we final got home with our new little guy, Benjamin. Once I have a chance, I’ll get a picture up here…

I’ve been considering replacing our incandescent light bulbs with CFL’s (compact fluorescent light bulbs) for quite a while, now. After looking at the whole CFL vs. Incandescent light bulb debate on the internet, I’ve noticed there’s a lot of neigh-sayers against CFL’s.

Here’s the problems some people have noted about CFL’s:

1) CFL’s aren’t as bright.

Not true.

Yes, there are probably some brands that are not as bright, but in general, I’ve found CFL’s to be brighter. The manufacturers mark the CFL’s with their incandescent equivalent. In most cases, the CFL’s I’ve purchased have been much brighter than I expected (based on their incandescent rating). In fact, some have been too bright. One case, however, (the 20w equivalents) I noticed the bulbs were not as bright.

I’ve been using bulbs made by “Feit Electronics” (from Menard’s) and “n:Vision” (from Home Depot) mostly, as well as a few from “Sylvania” (also from Menard’s). They have all been much brighter than I expected (except for the candelabra bulbs).

Also, take note of what category of bulb you’re looking at.

- Soft White: This is the closest thing to a warm incandescent that I’ve found. I like these and they represent 95% of my bulbs.

- Bright White: The Sylvania bulbs are the only bright white bulbs I bought (since they were on sale). VERY bright. MUCH brighter than the incandescent equivalent. I actually don’t like these much. They remind me of traditional fluorescent bulbs.

- Daylight: These are supposed to mimic sunlight. They’re more expensive. I have one, and it’s nothing to write home about.

2) CFL’s can’t be dimmed.

Actually, there are some that can. However, they’re more expensive.

Look, if this is the only reason you don’t change to CFL’s, then you don’t get the point behind the switch. Really. Have a dimmer? Fine. Put CFL’s everywhere else if you can and keep the incandescent on the dimmer circuit. You can still save money.

3) CFL’s have mercury in them.

If you don’t have a recycling center that will take CFL’s in your town, don’t change. You do not want to throw these things away in the regular trash. I’m not a big environmentalist, but even I don’t want to put this kind of stuff in the landfills. But if you do, you can’t really use that as a reason not to switch. An extra trip to the recycling center is worth the savings on your electric bill.

4) CFL’s don’t come on right away and they take a while to warm up.

Yea, so? Again, it depends on the manufacturer. Mine come on in about 1/4 seconds. Whoopie. I can live with that. If that’s too long for you, you might need to lay off the caffeine.

These are not like those old circular fluorescent bulbs. Those things took, like, 3 seconds to come on. And they flickered something fierce. CFL’s do take a while to come to full brightness when they’ve been off for a while, but you can still see from the initial light.

And frankly, lights don’t get turned off nearly enough around my house to count warm-up time. That’s why I went with CFL’s in the first place. I figure if I can’t get people to turn the lights off, I can at least cut down on their power consumption.

And as an added bonus, the CFL’s in my bathroom don’t shock my system in the middle of the night. Consequently, the 60W equivalent CFL’s in my bathroom are waaaay brighter than the 60W incandescents I had in there.

5) CFL’s don’t last as long as advertised.

The jury’s out on that one for me. I just got started. If they only last a year, I won’t be happy (when they advertise a 5-7 year lifespan). But even if they last 2-3 years, I’m still ahead of the game - assuming that I pay less for power. Shoot, I was changing my incandescents (especially the candelabra bulbs) every month! Granted - not all at the same time, but bulbs were only lasting about 8 months.

6) CFL’s cause seizures.

If this is an issue for you… then don’t buy them. And avoid malls and business offices, too. I’m pretty sure they use fluorescent bulbs, too, and they’re flashing is much worse than any of the CFL’s I’ve seen.

7) CFL’s give me headaches.

When was the last time you used one? The CFL’s you can buy today are not like the ones coming out even a few years ago. And they are certainly not like the old standard fluorescent bulbs with standard light sockets from the last couple of decades. You know… those circular deals. Those even gave me headaches.

8) CFL’s don’t work well in cold weather.

Very true.

That’s why I don’t have any CFL’s outside. CFL’s are great, but not the perfect choice for every light socket. Outside - CFL’s just don’t cut the mustard (unless you live in the South).

9) CFL’s interfere with radio and hi-fi equipment.

If you listen to short wave radios, sure. But I’m guessing you listen to FM radio or watch TV. They don’t mess with signals that high in the spectrum. They might mess with AM radio, but Rush is on in the daytime, so I’m guessing it won’t matter much (no, I don’t listen to Rush).

As an amateur radio operator and a studio engineer, I can say that I’ve not experienced interference on my radio or studio equipment. But I’ve also left my radio station and my recording studio with incandescents.

Again… CFL’s are great, but not the perfect choice for every light socket.

Summary
CFL’s are not going to replace every incandescent light bulb. They’re not perfect. But with electric rates going sky-high, it’s making more financial sense to switch.

My electric bill runs about $200 a month on the budget plan (where they average out the last 12 months) and Illinois’ electric rates are practically doubling, so I had to do something. I just wish I didn’t have to wait another 12 months to see a difference, but I should get a pretty healthy credit balance on my bill if this pans out.

I’m also vehemently opposed to the government actually banning incandescents. I have enough places in my house where I don’t want any CFL’s (studio, radio shack, outdoors), that it doesn’t make practical sense to ban them out right.

But it also doesn’t make sense to write off CFL’s based on their short-comings. They certainly have their place in our homes. If we all changed the light bulbs in the fixtures we overuse, we could not only reduce our electric rates, but reduce the demand we’re placing the electric grid. I’m not exactly “Mr. Green,” but consuming less certainly won’t hurt anyone.

I finished wiring the last bedroom last night. And it was a pain ’till the end. I was on my belly in the corner of the attic in black soot, drilling through two petrified 2×4’s with a right-angle drill and a dull drill bit with sweat running into my eyes. It’s hard not to cuss under such circumstances.

But we got the hole drilled and wire ran, and now the entire house is on modern wiring.

Hallelujah!

Well, I just played a video game for half an hour and found out something interesting… I didn’t like it! I spent bunch of time trying to build a character only to be killed in an instant. Wow. What a complete waste of time. Of course, I always knew video games were a complete waste of time, but now that time is especially precious to me… it’s a real waste of time. I’m finding that I really have no more desire to play any sort of video game. I used to be a hardcore gamer. What happened? I guess I just grew up or something.

And I’m listening to more classical music.

Man, when you hit 30… it’s all over (ha ha - I know, it’s just beginning).

By day, I’m a middleware developer (software that connects software), and I have an RSS news subscription to IBM’s Websphere MQ update news site.  Basically, it’s a news feed that announces fixes and updates to their messaging queuing software (formally called MQSeries).  Here’s the title to one of the updates today:

SE10763: MQM400-MSGAMQ5615 STRMQM FAILS WITH AMQ5615 AFTER AMQZXMA0 FAILS MCH0601 IN FUNCTION RFXADDCLQMGR

Um, yea… did you get that?  It’s pretty much like that every day.  Several times a day.

That just cracks me up.  Of course, it worries me a bit that I actually understand most of what that’s saying.  However, I’m finding that I have to gloss over the 20+ announcements I get each day from this that site since I can hardly read the headlines.  Didn’t IBM get the memo on typing in all caps??

I guess this is IBM, the “Lord of the Acronyms.”

I’m starting a project to build a rotor system to track amateur satellites. Just have to prove my geekhood I guess. I’ve created a sub-blog to chronicle my adventures in engineering that, frankly, I’ve never done before.

I’ve already taken a bunch of pictures and am ready for my first post, but it’s late and I hear a little boy screaming upstairs (Me? Sleep? Yea, right…). So it’ll have to wait till tomorrow…

Here’s the link:

http://www.paulkimbrel.com/rotor

Yep. I’m crazy.

Certifiable. My antenna came down during the ice storm earlier this month and I haven’t been able to get on the air. Well, the weather was nice today and I had talked about putting the antenna back up. My wife suggested that today would be perfect before it got cold and nasty again.

Yep. Me. On a ladder. Working above my head. Outside.

Yep. Crazy!

But, I did it! I’m darn proud of it, too. See, I don’t really care for heights, let alone ladders. Gravity and I don’t get along too well. Tonya gave me moral support and held the ladder while I was up there.

There were only two moments when I really wanted to click my fingers and be off the ladder, inside, and sitting down. Once when I was soldering the dipole leads (the main wires going from the house to the trees) onto the ladder line (the wire that goes down and into the house). I decided to try out my new butane soldering torch. Here I am, 5,000 feet (okay, 15 feet) off the ground, soldering with FIRE in such a way that the any extra solder would come down on my coat.

Kids, don’t try that at home.

The second moment was when I went up the tree in the back yard to make the final attachment. The ladder wasn’t as secure as I’d like it (though, I’m sure it was just fine) and I had to basically hug the tree to get the cord around it. Egads. Then I had to tie it off above my head which, unfortunately, requires two hands.

Well, it’s up. And thank goodness - it works!

I talked to a guy (ever so briefly) on 80 meters tonight in Paris, TN. It was an odd-ball mode that I had never used called Hellschreiber (or Feld-Hell for short). It’s an old teletype mode the German’s invented back during WWI. People decided to try it with modern day computers and have breathed new life into the mode. My understanding is that it was the first mechanized form of radio communication.

Well, hope everyone has a happy new year - and I’ll try to stay off the ladders for a while.

I think I speak for all consumers when I say… we hate your menus.

You know what? When I plop down $10, $15, even $20 for a movie… you know what I’m interested in?

THE MOVIE!

Not the 15 minutes of menu introduction with swooshes and bangs and clips from the movies and pretty music. Nor the lousy video game graphics. If I wanted a video game, I would not have bought…

A MOVIE!

Now, it’s forgivable if I can hit the skip-forward button and get to the guts of the menu. To Disney… kudos to you for making sure we can skip previews and the lengthy menus. To the rest… shame on you!

My kids just acquired an old movie about a certain rangifer with a nasal disorder. Just like many of their other movies… there were several previews that could not be skipped, and a lengthy (though not the longest I’ve seen) menu which could not be skipped either!

I dare say if we could find the people who produce these things, put them in a room with a whiny child eager to watch a movie, and give them their own DVD to start - things would change.

Please, please! If you produce DVD’s and are responsible for these menus, read the DVD spec. Become familiar with the skip feature. Use it. Disney figured it out. You can, too!

The consumers of America would appreciate it.

When we bought this house, I found it astonishing that it was recommended we get a smoke detector not just on every floor… but in every sleeping space. I really felt the pinch when I started remodeling and found out that, per the build code, all my smoke detectors had to be wired into the house’s wiring and interconnected. Well, I finally got them all wired up and I truly feel that it was worth the effort. We feel much more secure now that we have a smoke detector in almost every room.

But I always felt that installing carbon monoxide detectors were overkill. I mean - how many people have really died from CO poising?

Well, yesterday, it was almost my family.

Tonya called me at work and towards the end of our conversation, she mentioned she had a headache. She thought it was the front moving through ahead of the rain. I didn’t give it much thought. But then she said that Eli woke up and was acting like he had a headache. She thought it was the weather for him, too. But for some reason a vision of my hot water heater popped in my head. Then she said Clayton woke up nauseous and pale. That’s when I started to panic.

See, when the previous owner of our house had the hot water heater put in, whoever did it cut a corner and left the old vent hood in place. Newer water heaters already have a hood in place and don’t need an extra one. They just left it because it meant one less pipe to cut. I recall a contractor mentioning to me that I should ditch the extra hood to prevent exhaust from escaping into the basement. I put it on my “to do - sometime” list and forgot it.

Well, that hood would not leave my mind and I had Tonya dig up the carbon monoxide detector. Yep, we had one. It was one that plugged into the wall and kids never left it alone. So we put it on the shelf. She plugged it in and a few minutes later - it went off.

So they went shopping for a bit in the clean fresh air while I came home to figure out what was going on. I cranked up the hot water heater to get it going and held a mirror up to the exhaust hood. Sure enough - it got foggy immediately. My “to do” list got a quick shift.

My father-in-law, Jim, came over and helped me pull and replace the extra hood with a piece of pipe. It was a quick job and we saw an immediate result. The mirror didn’t fog up and we got good suction up the hood.

And we now have four carbon monoxide detectors throughout the house.

The moral of this story…

If you don’t have a carbon monoxide detector - get one! If you have one carbon monoxide detector - get another one! Don’t mess around with this. When I think about what I could have lost, it scares me to death.

Well, I just took the plunge on IE7.  I just wanted to get rid of the yellow shield on my system tray, really.  Well, it’s all slick looking I guess and I’m sure those tabs a gas for people who like tabs (not I).  But the address bar really bugged me.

Why, oh why?

Every application with a menu bar since the cave man first clicked “start” has been at the top of the window.  EVERY ONE!  Why, all of the sudden, is the address bar at the top?  What sort of innovation is that??  Well, poop on it.  I want my menu on top.

Well, I did a bit of Googling  (as I’m sure you did if you’re reading this) and I found how to move the menu up.  Well, actually, move the address bar down.  6 of one…

If you’ve never used “regedit” or you don’t know anything about your registry, get used the menu bar where its.  Don’t do this.  Please.  And don’t blame me if you screw it up…

First - close all your IE sessions.

Then go into your registry editor (”Start->Run” and type “regedit” and hit enter - but I’m sure you know that).  Dive down into the HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ InternetExplorer \ Toolbar \ WebBrowser key.  Right click on the right hand side (where the keys are) and add a new “DWORD” key.  Call it “ITBar7Position” and give it a value of “1″.

That’s it!  Now, this isn’t perfect.  I also had the Google toolbar for IE and the address bar wound up ABOVE it (rather than below it).  Sheesh.  Why they couldn’t just make the address bar a toolbar like it was in IE6, I’ll never know.