A month has gone by since my last post, and we’ve been hard at work on the EV: grinding and painting, the installation of new rear brakes and patches on the holes in the floor panels, and sound insulation and battery box progress!

I don’t want to cross-post stuff that’s on my ‘other blog’ but I do want to mention that the 240Z project is progressing nicely. We’re doing a fairly good job of posting updates, even. I remember when we started the project thinking what a momentous event pulling the engine out of the car would be – or more accurately I remember worrying we might never get to that point – well, now that’s done and we have bigger and more exciting things to do! Like figure out the wiring, charging systems, build an adapter plate and hook the motor/transmission back up to the differential!

In other news, I’ve been working on a really neat project at work. It’s an internal Microsoft project, so unfortunately I can’t provide a public URL, but it’s exciting to me for a handfull of reasons. First it’s a really clean design that follows a lot of the Metro style, which I’m partial to. (It’s great to work with talented designers) Second, we’re building it in MVC3, which is Microsoft’s latest web framework. I’m not generally a big Microsoft proponent but so far I’ve been pleasantly suprised. Third, it’s always fun to do almost entirely straight-up web programming – html, css and javascript – and see how much things have changed since, oh, 2003.

Since I was a kid I loved the idea of using things as sparingly as possible. I remember when my mother asked me to draw on fresh sheets of paper rather than the scratch paper that was always lying around – the back sides of manuscripts or rough drafts that we had stacks of – but it was impossible to break the habit.  I always felt more comfortable drawing on the back of a used piece of paper so I wasn’t wasting a fresh sheet.

Fast forward to today and it’s the same drill, but with different things: turning off the heat when leaving a room for awhile, repeatedly washing out plastic zip-lock bags, biking to work, buying timed switches for appliances that take too much power…

Several months ago, I read about CFLs and how they wear out really quickly if they’re turned off and on again within 15 minutes or so. This makes them a really bad choice for using with a motion sensor, for example. It also makes them a bad candidate (at least in my mind) for a dining room bulb that you (I) turn off obsessively when leaving your (my) dining room. It’s hard to not think about once the idea enters your mind: “When was the last time I turned on/off this bulb?  Has it been 15 minutes?”

So I bit the bullet and bought my first LED bulb.

Just buying a new bulb would have been too simple, though, so I bit another bullet and bought a new light fixture for the dining room (IKEA, $13). The previous one had been bothering me for 3 years. It was kind of gothic looking with fake candle flame bulbs, paint that was starting to flake off, and covered in oily dust that would never come off. I wanted to get something slightly fancier, but I’d never replaced a hanging lamp before and I didn’t want to sink much money into a project that might not end up working out. (Teague – I’ve seen yours before somewhere, and it looks great in your picture! If I had to do it all over again I was thinking about trying to make one of these, since they’re so expensive…)

I was really worried about accidentally buying a bulb that was cold and harsh (I already have bought a couple of harsh CFLs from Fred Meyer and am waiting for them to wear out) so I did some wikipediaing on color temperature and figured that my best bet was something in the 2700K range. And I was right. That’s the range I should always buy bulbs in, apparently. The thing that’s crazy to me, still, is that the bulb costs $17, is really heavy, and gives off enough heat (you shouldn’t use it in an enclosed lamp) that it has a heatsink. But for the equivalent light output of a 60 Watt incandescent bulb, it only uses 7 Watts. And you can turn it on and off as many times as you like, as frequently as you want to.