While I was in Bend last week I took a quick shot with my camera up at Lyra, and was surprised that with only a 5 second or so exposure you can see the ring nebula. (the very small bluish ring in the center of this picture). I really need to get a much larger lense, but I’m impressed with the built in star tracking in the camera ( A Pentax K3II).
I am usually posting pictures of cars or electronics.. and sometimes utility bills. Tonight I decided to do a little rifle cleaning.
I don’t generally have favorites, but in this case I think these three rifles are the three I like the best. The Sako TRG-22 in .308, the Accuracy International Arctic Warfare in . 308, and the Sako TRG-42 in .338 Lapua Magnum.
I have always like the feel of the Sako action, and the stock design seems to fit like a glove. Those Finns seem to have figured out a few things. The AIAW is similar in many ways, and is no doubt just as accurate (And British) Nightforce scopes on the first two, and a Viper PST FFP on the third. (Note the Viper PST FFP is an inexpensive scope compared to the NFs, but it performs very well)
All three are pretty easy 1/2MOA or better with off the shelf ammo, no doubt limited by me. (And yes, there are some data elements in those three target pictures)
There is the age old debate about caliber, and certainly some of the modern 6mm based rounds have fantastic ballistics. .308 might be behind the curve on that, although .338LM is something to contend with. Consider that at 2000 yards (over a mile) the .338LM delivers more energy than a .357 Magnum at point blank range.
So… time for the next utility history plots! Water! Since we live in Portland, water isn’t exactly a scarce resource. Most of our power comes from it, and we get an ample supply 9 cloudy months of the year.
However paying for water is an interesting exercise. As with my previous graphs, this data encapsulates all of the water I have paid for since 1996. There is one empty spot in the chart where I lived in the country and had well water.
A couple of interesting things of note: I used 1.511 million gallons of water in this 20 year period. That is a tad over 3 full size olympic swimming pools. In that period I paid almost $15,000 for the privilege.
In looking closely at the bills, the actual amount of water had very little impact on the cost. In most cases the fixed cost of sewer and stormwater management , bike lanes, and political kickbacks was more that the variable cost of the water itself. I had one bill for $218 to cover 374 gallons of water, while at the same time another bill for $238 for 30,000 gallons of water!
Over the entire history water was a tad less than 1 cent per gallon, but in the last 5 years that price has risen to almost 1.5 cents per gallon.
All in all, water is still pretty cheap.
I call this a table of fun and relaxation.
So continuing my cleaning and shredding.. I have compiled all of my natural gas bills since 1996.
A few interesting trends and observations – Total cost over 20 years was just shy of $20,000. If all of that gas was converted to electricity (with no loss) that represents a bit over 500 Megawatt hours… which would be the output of a good size nuclear reactor for an hour.
You can see where in the first two houses I had an electric water heater, but in the third the gas water heater adds a baseline all year long.
Size matters – Not surprising in a simple thermodynamic system like this. When we did the addition on our house and switched from a heat pump to dual gas furnaces it made a huge jump. You can also see how the colder than average winter in Dec 2016 compared to previous years.
The cost per therm is interesting as there is an obvious trend upward in the early years, and a mostly flat if downward trend in the later years. This represents the actual cost of the gas including all the taxes and meter fees, so the high peaks are in months with very little usage where the base meter fee is most of the bill.
1.8 Billion BTUs would boil ~1.6 million gallons of water.
Also interesting that heating the house was only 3 times the cost of garbage collection.
Hmm.. I wonder what my prescription will test at this time… On the plus side the nearsightedness is getting better over time, but that +1.25 Add sucks. I predict the Add will go up.
As I have been cleaning out my closets, I have collected more data.
The graph below shows how much I paid for garbage pickup since 1996. This is surprising for many reasons. (1) It was surprising to see I had nearly every statement all the way back to 1996. (2) For a while, garbage costs were pretty low and flat and (3) moving to the City of Portland is always the expensive move. 😉
The red line is the actual cost per 96 gallon trash can, and the big jump in 2011 is from both moving into Portland as well as Portland deciding that for the same money they were only going to pickup trash once every other week. You can see the rise in inflation over the same time period, but even taking that into account the overall cost now is higher compared to 20 years ago. Cost for 96 gallons of trash in 1996 = $4.03. Cost for 96 gallons of trash in 2017 (in 1996 dollars) = $12.96. That is a 221% increase.
For those in the know… this was bad ass home internet in 1997.
[ Sort of the Laserdisc of Internet and Telephony technology ].
At the time I actually had two ISDN lines, each that supported two B-channels. With a little bit of trickery I could connected into our Lucent PRI digital bank and bond all 4 B channels together for 256K up and down.
As a bonus, you could do cool stuff with forged Q.931 headers, as Tony Jones can attest to.
So 80 F in Portland right now, 80 F in Bend, and 81 F in Indiana. The difference – 17% humidity in Bend, 37% humidity in Portland, and 74% humidity in Indiana. Oh yea.
Over the last few months I have been working in cleaning up my music library. Lots of terrible meta data, mislabels, imperfect quality, etc. I used a combination of iTunes Match, MusicBranz Picard, fresh CD rips, and a few python scripts to help me get everything in order. It isn’t perfect, but it isn’t bad either.
My Top 10 artists, by number of songs in my collection:
Pink Floyd
Rush
Metallica
Dave Matthews Band
Depeche Mode
The Beatles
The Alan Parsons Project
Peter Gabriel
Led Zeppelin
Andrew Lloyd Webber