Snicker:
Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.
The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket.
But since when have the masses listened to critics?
On March 10th, I completed moving Weather Now to Windows Azure, and shut down the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center. I had already received my lowest electric bill ever for this location, thanks to a 25% rate reduction negotiated by the City.
Earlier this week I got my March electric bill, for my electricity use between March 8th and April 7th. Take a look:
My electricity use in March 2013 was just 26% of my March 2012 use (243 kw/h in 2013 against 933 kw/h in 2012). The bill was 80% lower, too.
My telecommunications bill also went down considerably. After I have complete data of these cost differences mid-May, I'll post a full rundown of how much moving to Azure saves me every month.
In my profession, I get to sit at Peet's Coffee at 6:30am and watch action-packed videos like this:
I know what you're thinking: "slow down, tigerblood. Slow down."
I'm also pushing a new build of customer software up to production, and waiting for my coffee to kick in.
At least I'm not blowing three runs in the 10th with a damned balk, like other people I could name.
Back in November, Chicagoans voted to buy electricity in the aggregate from Integrys rather than the quasi-public utility Exelon. As predicted, the big savings only lasted a few months:
And Chicago, where residents saw their first electric-bill savings this month under a 5.42-cent-per-kilowatt-hour deal completed in December with Integrys, will see its energy savings shaved to just 2 percent.
ComEd's new price is not yet official. But utility representatives have filed their new energy price of 4.6 cents per kilowatt-hour with the ICC and have told the commission they expect forthcoming transmission charges to be about another 0.95 cents per kilowatt-hour. That will make the ComEd "price to compare" cited by competing suppliers when marketing their offerings about 5.55 cents.
That said, between the new Integrys rate that hit me on my last electricity bill, and moving to the cloud, my March bill was only 54% of my average bill from 2009 to 2012. So ComEd is lowering rates too? Good. It'll still be higher than Integrys.
Not only does my time evaporate into multiple projects these days, but the number of context switches I've experienced over the past few days hurts. Here's today's timesheet:
Yeah, but I shoot with this hand. I worked from home Wednesday so that I could jam on some documentation. How'd that work out?
Blogging, by the way, helps me switch contexts. I think.
Too much going on:
Now, I will go back to drafting documentation while I wait for AT&T to reconfigure my DSL and kill my landline. I've had a POTS ("plain old telephone service") twisted-pair line longer than most people on earth have been alive. After today, no longer. I don't think I'll miss it, either. I only have it because I have a business-class DSL, which I don't need anymore, and the only people who call it want money from me.
Odd that I'm finding this out through the Chicago Tribune:
Amazon.com has introduced a way for users to quickly save and send news articles as well as other items to their Kindle devices for later, off-line reading.
The new feature can be added by users in a variety of ways. Amazon has made it possible for users to send items to their Kindles through Web browser extensions for Google Chrome and Firefox, as a feature that can be installed on Macs or PCs, from Google Android mobile devices, or from users' emails.
Cool. Look for the button to appear on The Daily Parker very soon.
Now that I can send directly to Kindle, and after having Instapaper crash frequently on my Android device, I might switch. Though this does underscore the risks start-ups take when they develop relatively simple ideas into software. Other, larger companies can kill you.
Regular blog readers know that since moving to my current apartment in February 2008, the Inner Drive Technology International Data Center has occupied a couple square meters of my home office. I've also mentioned lower energy use since I started to move everything out of the IDTIDC and into Microsoft Azure.
Something else has happened to my electricity bill. In November, we citizens of Chicago voted to pool our electricity buying to get the lowest electricity cost possible. Well, the new regime kicked in last month, and the 660 kw/h I used in February cost 25% less than the 610 kw/h I used in January—which was the lowest use ever for this place.
It helps, also, that since moving my email to the cloud in June, I've used an average of 224 kw/h less electricity each month year-over-year.
I can't wait to see my bill for March. They read my meter on the 7th or 8th to prepare the bill I just got; the IDTIDC shut down on the 10th.
Years ago, I had two blogs: one for work, and one for everything else. Eventually I stopped having two blogs because...well, laziness?
The old blog is back. I discovered I had dead links, and it was simple enough to drag the old blog out of archives and throw it onto my general-purpose VM.
Actually, I cheated. I only threw the content up there. I used The Daily Parker's blog engine with all its customization and just copied the old content up to the VM.
It's kind of interesting, looking back on the things I was working on seven years ago. I am particularly happy, given everything I did this past weekend, to link back to November 2006, when I built my last data center.
The Inner Drive Technology International Data Center is no more.
This morning around 8:15 CDT I updated the master DNS records for Weather Now, and shut down the World Wide Web service on my Web server an hour later. All the databases are backed up and copied; all the logs are archived.
More to the point, all the servers (except my domain controller, which also acts as a storage device) are off. Not just off, but unplugged. The little vampires continue to draw tens of Watts of power even when they're off.
The timing works out, too. My electric meter got read Thursday or Friday, and my Azure billing month starts today. That means I have a clean break between running the IDTIDC and not running it,* and by the beginning of May I'll have more or less the exact figures on how much I saved by moving everything to the Cloud.
Meanwhile, my apartment is the quietest it's ever been.** The domain controller is a small, 1U server with only one cooling fan. Without the two monster 2U units and their four cooling fans (plus their 12 hard drives), I can suddenly hear the PDC...and now I want to shut it down as well.
* Except for the DSL and land-line, which should be down in a couple of weeks. I'll still have all the expense data by May.
** Except for the two blackouts. Now, of course, I never need worry about a blackout again—unless it hits the entire country at once, which would create new problems for me.