Category: Uncategorized

Starting next year, the sun will supply about a third of the power used by my house. I have always liked the idea of installing solar panels on the roof and making my own power. I looked for a while at installing a solar water heater, but the water heater system was going to cost thousands of dollars for the panels, pump, heat exchanger, and a plus-size water tank, which would never allow me to recoup the investment since my hot water bill is only about $10 a month. There is a house in the neighborhood with solar panels for power. I looked into that too and I have a south-facing piece of roof that would be good for soaking up the rays. But again, it’s not just the expensive panels to buy and install, but then you have to have voltage regulators that will turn the power into AC and send excess power back to the grid while letting the grid supply power when the sun isn’t shining or demand exceeds the solar supply. Even if I divide the installation costs over a long period and I include federal grants that cover 30% of installation, I don’t think I could ever make a system economical.
Continue reading “Solar Powered House”

I got a new 500 GB hard drive. Since the 250 GB hard drive on my notebook computer was kind of full, I thought it might be good to take the hard drive out of the portable and put in my notebook, then take the old notebook drive and put it back in the portable case. The basic idea would be I could move all the files over to the new drive, then put the new drive in the computer, boot up and I would have exactly the same thing except with more space (I’ll call this Option 1). But there are some wrinkles. First, I have a lot of junk on the drive and the computer acts up from time to time. Since the notebook is five years old, it might be worthwhile to reformat and start over. The existing drive has a RESTORE partition that can be used to reformat the C: drive and restore the notebook to exactly the same setup as the first day I got it (Option 2). That would still mean installing all of my software, moving over my pictures and other documents, and downloading a ton of windows and other updates. But the advantage is the computer should run a lot better that way. The downside is how do I do a restore from the old drive to the new drive? Or could I move the restore partition over to the new drive as a new RESTORE partition? Option 3 is to just use the Windows Vista disk that came with the computer and start a new Windows installation after putting the blank hard drive into my notebook, and rebuild the system from scratch, which would be even more trouble than the restore option.
Continue reading “Drive Cloning”

I keep track of five internet domain names, one of which is for my personal website, igirder.com. They are all registered at GoDaddy, which is horrible with its salacious ads, and constant attempts to make you upsize for additional services, but it is cheap. I can usually renew the domain registration for $7-8 per year using different discount codes available on the internet. If you get a new domain, they are really cheap, but they are not as likely to give you a good deal once you are there and just need to renew the domain.
Continue reading “Domain Transfer”

I heard about there being coyotes in the neighborhood a couple of years ago and there are reports on the local bulletin board from time to time, along with missing cats, which seems to be the biggest problem they cause. They only come out at night. So tonight I was walking the dogs and I heard something rustling in the leaves. The dogs stopped to look and I saw a loose dog. I shined my flashlight over there and it was obviously a coyote. Not too far away was another one, a little smaller, maybe walking with a limp. Both were smaller than my dogs, plus with me and the flashlight I think we were pretty intimidating. But they didn’t run away, getting as close as maybe 50 feet. I think they were on their way and were kind of in the way. So we turned the corner and they started walking past us on the other side of the street. The smaller one headed into the backyard of a house, but then came back down to the sidewalk to join the other one. Surprisingly, although my dogs were watching them closely, they didn’t bark or even whimper which Austin does when he wants to bark at another dog. I kept the flashlight on the coyotes a lot, but they would still look in my direction, their eyes lighting up yellow. Eventually they moved pretty well beyond us, so I took the dogs over to where they had been so they could sniff around. People get up in arms about coyotes in the neighborhood, but honestly I’m not seeing a problem, and the only thing they do is kill cats which should be inside anyway.

I have had some money building up and didn’t want to invest it in stocks given the upcoming downfall of civilization (and that the stock market had done pretty well already and might be due for some turbulence). With less than $20,000 left to pay on my mortgage, I thought I could maybe pay it off instead of dragging it out until August 2014. I called Bank of America on Tuesday to find out what I needed to do. They said I could do it that day over the phone! I said I couldn’t quite do that because the money wasn’t in my checking account (also Bank of America) yet. They said they could mail me a pay off statement and I could mail in certified funds, but I figured I would just sell some mutual funds and put the money in the checking account and call them back when it cleared.
Continue reading “Debt Free”