Stewart Schatz

Those that know me know that I am not green, as they say.  However, they also know that I would love to own 40 acres and have my house right in the middle, surrounded by trees. 

A little anti-social?  Probably.

Anyway, what some may not know is that I think it would be very cool to live independent of the local electric utility company.  Not "off-grid", but have a way to create the amount of electricity to support my needs (believe me this would be no small task) and once in a while sell the utility company the excess.

Wouldn’t that be awesome!  Send someone else an electric bill.

Anyway, SUNGRI has developed a technology that uses a magnifying glass, high-efficiency photovoltaic cells and a proprietary heat transport technology to produce electricity from the sun at $0.05/kWh.  That’s definitely less than my last electric bill ($0.06977/kWh + $0.02270/kWh for "energy adjustment").  We average about 28 kWh/day (told you I wasn’t green).

Mr. Electricity has a good explanation about what a kilowatt-hour is and  other interesting facts about electricity.  Just a word of warning: he can be a little… blunt, but the information is great.

No, not that kind of sprite.  I’m talking about loading an image onto a page and only using part of it at a time.  There have been a ton of people that talk about this technique.

Chris Coyier, the author of a blog that I follow, really seems to like the technique.  Today, I happened upon a site that uses it pretty well.

It’s a small startup company called… GOOGLE!

Anyway, I thought it was kind of cool.  Below is the image that they use on iGoogle.

I found some handy financial calculators at DollarTimes.com.  It provides all the common calculators like loan payments, mortgage comparisons, etc.  However, it also has things like "Fuel savings with a fuel-efficient vehicle", "Pack your lunch vs. going out" and "How much will you save if you stop buying expensive coffee?"

I am trying a new advertisement widget called BlogUpp on my other blog: E1Tips.com.  It was really easy to get started, but there isn’t any feedback.  I can’t tell where my ads are showing or when.

Anyway, it was painless to set up so, I’ll see how it goes.

In researching that last post, I noticed something kind of  crazy.  Everything really is all connected like a web on this Internet/World Wide Web thing.

Yeah, yeah, stop with the "no kidding!"  I’ve been on the www for quite a while.  I remember using the North Dakota University Systems network to talk to some guys from Boston College in 1993.  Yeah, I’m getting old.

Anyway, the reason I realized the Internet’s "connectedness" is because in my last post I wrote about an article I saw on Geeks Are Sexy.  Well, they happened to cite TechEBlog at the bottom of the article.  So, I followed the link.  Then, TechEBlog cited both Dvice and Retro Thing.  So, I followed the link to Dvice and found that they cited Retro Thing too.  Then, on Retro Thing, they cited a blog entry on Kodak’s corporate blog site PluggedIn by the inventor himself, Steve Sasson.

Pretty cool, but strange how this one little article published on October 16, 2007, is sparking content for so many people today.

Oh, by the way, I wrote this on Friday, May 9th, 2008.