I, like many recently, have been looking at alternative fuel sources. Looking for ways to cutback my dependance on expensive electricity and gas. I’ve come up with some ideas but one that doesn’t seem to be worth a damn is Solar Panels. I found this solar panel kit that only costs $600 and yields about 1 kWh a week.

Wow a whole kilowatt every week!

That sounds like a pretty good dead right! I mean, 600 bucks gets you 52 kWhs a year assuming you have perfect weather and the sun is always directly on your solar panel…oh and it also has to be summer all year long.

There’s only one problem, after a year you will have paid ($600/52)=$11 a kilowatt. That doesn’t sound like a bad deal. A kilowatt is like…1000 watts right? That must be a large sum of watts! Like…a whole barrel of watts!

Back in the real world

Unfortunately last month my house used 981 kilowatts for a bill of $78.56. Which means I paid $0.0698 per watt. That makes solar power a whopping $10.30 more expensive per watt. In order to power my entire house I would need roughly 981 solar panels of this size 4.5 ft x 1.5 ft which means I would need an area roughly 4414.5 ft x 1471.5 ft. I’m pretty sure thats more area than the plot that my house sits on. Oh yeah, plus it would cost $588,600 dollars to make…

Sorry solar power, until you cost less than 11 times as much as normal electricity it looks like it’s a no go.

This morning I woke up and was getting ready to go when I realized that I didn’t have a single dry pair of pants. They were all in the wash. What was a man to do?

I popped a mentos in my mouth and danced around like an idiot grinning cheesily until I was at my closet. I had suit pants! So I’m rocking a tie today to go with my suit pants.

MENTOS! THE FRESHMAKER!

The Setup

I share an office with eight other people (nine including myself) and seven of the people in this room prefer to work with the lights off. We have big windows and it’s nice to just work in natural light. A lot of us find it easier to focus but there are two people that are very adamant that the light be turned on.

Today one of them was gone and seven of us where sitting in here working with the lights off happily when our co-worker who wants the lights on, we’ll call her “Sarah”, walked in the room and immediately turned the lights on.

I stealthily remarked via IM to another colleague that it was pretty rude to walk into a room and change it without any regard to the people already in there.

Trying to teach a lesson

To try to demonstrate to Sarah why this might be rude I left the room and when I came back in I turned off the lights. Sarah looked back at me and I stopped and said “Oh, I’m sorry, whenever I walk into a room I automatically adjust it to my personal preference regardless of what the people in the room might want.”

I was afraid that my sarcasm might come off as way too mean when I don’t bare any animosity for Sarah (I quite like her actually). Fortunately for me Sarah lacks a sense of irony and responded thusly: “Oh I see, you’re saying you’re really self-centered and you don’t think of others. Hows that working in your marriage?”

All I could do was laugh, it would be funnier though if she understood the joke was on her. Irony, it seems is lost on this one.