Reboot

Wow, it's been what two years since I've posted? Well let's start with the fact that I've bought Artisan Bread in five minutes a day, and it's working pretty well for me. The bread so far it's a little chewey in the center, but the ability to break up a bit of dough and just bake some fresh bread is amazing. Just yesterday I did some homemade naan on the stovetop. Took maybe 10 minutes. Can't go wrong with homemade naan.

Going dryerless

After getting nagged by some friends in Europe about using a dryer to dry clothes, noticing the wonderful California sun, I decided, why not try going without a dryer?

I went to Ikea bought a Frost drying rack, a Jall clothing rack, and tried it on my next load of laundry. It actually worked out pretty well. In the garage, not even in direct sunlight, the clothes dried overnight. Jeans and really thick clothing take a bit longer. If I put them out in the sun, they dry even faster.

Pros:

• Less energy: not using a dryer means less electricity
• Quite: our dryer is right under my roommates room, this means I can do a load of laundry late at night and leave it to dry without disturbing their sleep.
• better for your clothes: you know all that lint in the lint trap? Guess where it comes from

Cons:

• Takes some more time: the dryer you just throw it in and run the dryer, hanging you have to take a little time to hang it properly
• Not soft and snuggly: Nowhere as nice as soft as a dryer and dryer sheet, but use of a liquid softner in the wash will help alleviate this problem
• More ironing: While nice shirts have to be ironed anyways, hang drying has more wrinkles than electric dryer. Some attention and stretching when drying will help, but especially thin shirts will have to be ironed.

The only caveat I have is how well this works in the winter. Right now in the summer, things dry really fast. In the winter with higher humidity, it may take longer. But then is that really a problem? If you don't wash every singles piece of clothing you need, you can hold out for a day or two. As usual with these things, it takes a little foresight some planning.

So would I recommend it for others? Yes, very much so. The above two items cost me about $25 dollars, which my mom promptly laughed at me for because she thinks you can just hang clothes anywhere you find the space. But lets say you spend $25, you don't even need a garage or backyard, you can do it inside just fine. Spend a extra say 5-10 minutes to hang them up, save yourself a lot of electricity. (I've seen numbers that a dryer is about 5.8% of household electricity use) So really, go ahead and try it. It's not like you're going cold turkey, your dryer is still there. If you're in hurry go ahead and use it. Otherwise if you're not, take the extra time to hang dry them.

What's much harder is going without the washing machine. My mom does that, but somehow I don't think I'll be able to do that.

Fixing bikes

I've been doing OneBrick events, they're a volunteering group. You sign up for an event online and show up. There's no training or commitment. The concept is you do as much or as little as you want, pick the events you want. You do some volunteering, meet people and have fun.

This time, it was fixing bikes for a group that took bike donations fixed them up and gave them to people who could use them. I got to learn a little about bike repair while helping out which was pretty cool.

The bad side is that what I learned probably isn't too practical. I spent a lot of time doing the brakes on a center pull bike. It's an older type of brakes and a real pain the rear end to adjust. Oh well.

I think I'm liking how this OneBrick organization. I have to go to more to get a good feel for it but so far so good. The one issue is that they don't have as many events in the East Bay. If you're in the South Bay or S.F. area though, they'res plenty to do.

Traffice Cameras

A recent story at msnbc gets into some of the issues with red light cameras, and I also think that some of the same things will apply to automatic speed cameras. While I dislike these kind of surveillance at a instinctual level, my biggest objection is very simple: conflict of interest. Most often the deals that set up the camera is often a revenue share between the company and city. The more citations there are, the more money both get.

Let me take a quick detour about metrics. I don't remeber offhand, but I heard one thing about software testing. In an attempt to create some metrics for the testing department, they set up metrics based on the number of bugs filed. So what happens? The testers start putting in as many bugs as they can, even splitting up simple problems into many "bugs"

So what might cities do once they have these traffice cameras in place? Well they might say, shorten the yellow light times to get more citations.

Now I'm not saying all cities do this, but the problem is that the incentives are in the wrong place. If it's truly a matter of public safetly like they talk about, then the fact they do not pay for themselves shouldn't matter. Do traffice lights pay for themselves? Do police officers generate enough revenue to pay for themselves? No, we pay for these things out of our taxes for the public good. If traffice cameras are really about safety, lets talk about it on that basis, how much money are we willing to pay for for how much improvement in safety. So do the red light cameras have enough improvement in safety vs. how much they cost?

The fact that some cities are considering taking them down tells me I might know the answer to the above question. There are other measures we can take to improve safety besides wholesale surveilence that lines the pockets of the city and private companies.

Bookmark fun: Gotta love the Japanese

Smoke on the water - Ancient Japanese Style
We Will Rock You - Ancient Japanese Style

The above youtube links speak for themselves.

SCOTUS: Oyez, Oyez

A while back I discovered the Oyez site where they had audio recordings of Supreme Court arguments. Now every once in a while I'll listen to some of the oral arguments on my portable mp3 player.

At the supreme court level, the arguments are often about ideas instead of the minute details of the law. Freedom of speech, right to bear arms, right to privacy, federal vs state power etc. Many of the cases deal with grey areas of the constitution and often they pull in things like English common law, international conventions, even ancient philosophers to aid their arguments and reasoning.

Basic ideas that have so much affect on our lives such as the miranda warnings, time place and manner, judicial review, all these came out of our supreme court.

Every once in a while I'll post little summaries of cases I find interesting.

Fresh Start

Allright, let's start over, again. After getting tired with hosting my own blog, I've decided to move to blogger and let them take care of the backend details. So, let the postings begin!

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