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.

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.

The government might be causing more unnecessary interference on planes by asking people to shut their devices down for take-off and landing and then giving them permission to restart all at the same time. According to electrical engineers, when the electronic device starts, electric current passes through every part of the gadget, including GPS, Wi-Fi, cellular radio and microprocessor.

It’s the equivalent of waking someone up with a dozen people yelling into bullhorns.

I’m really excited about this project. As a kid I was fascinated with vehicles that didn’t use internal combustion engines. In particular I remember reading a Boy’s Life magazine that had drawings of what cars of the future might look like, and how they might run on hydrogen, solar power or batteries. I also loved reading about cars like the sunraycer that could drive from one end of Australia to the other without using any gasoline. Dave was going to retrofit his 90′s(?) convertible cavalier at first, but I convinced him if he was going to spend a bunch of time and money on a car, he may as well like the way it looks when he’s done with it. Enter the Z.

The plan is to post car-related items there, instead of here, as the project continues, but I may not be able to resist mentioning progress here too.

–Tim Ferriss

I remember it being pretty cold and windy on Lummi Island, but we had great weather, and were able to see Mount Baker, some of the Cascades, and (presumably) the North Shore mountains in British Columbia. I managed to get a couple good pictures of Lucy, too. This one has to be my favorite:

We ate/drank some delicious syrup, listened to an informative talk on maple sugaring, wandered around Victoria, and saw some awesome seals and eagles the last morning on our way out of town.

This is my first batch of photos using lightroom 3 (thanks mom and dad!) and its newly improved noise reduction. I’m happy with the results, but it almost feels like cheating when you take an iso 800 image and remove all the noise. And if you’re not careful it’ll end up looking like a watercolor. Next up are some pictures from xmas on Lummi Island with the fam.

first time: 3319 points, acuraccy 94.6%. Second time, 10961 points, accuracy 91.3. Carpal tunnel here we come!