Furrer Farms Open House Was A Hit!

The house is complete, the old barn is fully restored and has a new floor. It’s time to party!

Last Saturday night, we held the Furrer Farms open house. Heidi did all of the massive preparations and made all of the food, and she did an awesome job! All of the guests loved the food, beer, and music.

Other than a little snafu with a blue grass band that thought they were Fleetwood Mac and made a bunch of undeliverable demands, everything went off smoothly. Of course, if there is a stage and an audience, the Procrastinators have to play. We had a great time and people enjoyed our set.

Compared to the drudgery of packing boxes and moving, which is what I am doing as I write this, the memories of this event are sweet.

Here are some pictures of the event:

Furrer Farms Is Coming Along

It always seems like it is the proverbial “two weeks” away, but the house on the farm is finally seeing the end of construction. Cabinets and counter tops are installed, the Tulikivi mass fireplace is in, most interior painting is done, carpet goes in next week, etc. My new target date for move in is now the end of July, mainly due to us being gone for vacation the middle two weeks of that month.

Farm wise, the old barn has been restored, the big “fun” barn has been enclosed and the recoding studio is nearly finished. We have a huge learning garden planted and our hay has been cut. I have been doing a lot of research about what kinds of crops, animals or services we can grow and provide, but have not made any real decisions about what the business model will be.

We are going to have an open house 8/2/2008 with a live bluegrass band, Heidi’s Darn Good Burgers, Ninkasi beer, and a short Procrastinators set.

Yahoo Sucks More Everyday

I rarely use any Yahoo services anymore. With the exception of delicious and Flickr, which I barely classify as Yahoo services, I simply do not use their “free” apps or services any more. Back in the day I used MyYahoo everyday, mainly for access to their (still) pretty good financial portfolios and research as well as their web based email, which I considered the first really usable on-line email. I also used Yahoo Maps, and experimented with anything they would come out with. For years, I touted Yahoo’s IM instead of ICQ, but as time progressed it became a bloated mess that wanted to own everything I did. As the family’s defacto IT guy, Yahoo IM became more and more of an issue, so I was happy to finally be able to recommend Meebo as soon as that came out.

Google Mail came out and I never looked back. It became the default for my mail, my family’s mail, and my company’s mail. It was a revolution and it made me trust Google even more. I look forward to new Google services and have found them all to be delightfully functional, but that is not the only reason Google kicked Yahoo out of my life.

Today, I tried to use my Yahoo mail as a throwaway to sign up for a service I was unsure of. When I went to the account that I had not visited for several months, my box was filled with Yahoo spam from all kinds of sources. Of course, at the bottom of every one of the emails they sent me, the little disclaimer is right there:

You received this advertisement from Yahoo! because the information for the account jeff.tunnell indicates that Yahoo! may contact you. If you do not want to receive further commercial mailings from Yahoo!, unsubscribe by clicking here. To learn more about Yahoo!’s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.

So I click unsubscribe, and after an interminable amount of time (Yahoo is incredibly slow), my log-in page comes up (I had just logged in five minutes earlier), and up pops this screen:

I never, ever gave Yahoo permission to spam with this crap. I find it incredibly lame that they feel the need to “opt” me in to this kind of desperate attempt to make money. If this their new direction that Jerry Yang has been touting as the way to head off Microsoft, they are in deep crap.

Can Voluntary Sustainability Ever Work?

I’m sitting in the Phoenix airport after three days in Las Vegas. Never mind that I flew in a jet to watch Supercross races, that is fodder for a different post regarding my ecological sins.

The amazing thing is that over four million people flew into Vegas last month alone to join the rapidly growing 1.1 million people living in the valley. There is no reason a city should even exist in a desert that barely grows sage brush.

• I guess it could be argued that they can get all of the electricity from Hoover Dam, but the dam’s output is off 15% from low water levels, and Nevada only gets 4% of its power from the dam. So, what is powering all of those air conditioners?
• Same with the water. Get it from Lake Mead, but the lake’s level is falling fast. Predictions are that the lake has a 50% chance of going dry by 2021. That seems likely when looking at the lake from the sky.
• Food is only five hours away in California, but nothing will grow next to LV without massive amounts of water, and even then, the temperature is too high. There is a reason it is called a desert.

I could not help but ponder this the entire time I was visiting, but I was watching people completely oblivious to the problems. Millions of people worried about their tans, fake boobs, tattoos, and winnings. I cannot imagine many of them changing their ways voluntarily.

What does it take to get people to change? Maybe the shock of high energy prices will be enough. As Peak Oil approaches (or is here) prices will rise so much that this propped up fantasy land cannot be maintained, and it will simply collapse under its own weight. Or on a brighter note, maybe everybody will get a clue, conserve, put up massive thermal solar arrays, figure out how to catch every drop of the 3.5″ of annual rainfall, and the world can keep its fantasy land. Or not.

Could Replacing One CFL Really Save $800MM ?

I have always thought the claim of replacing one bulb with a CFL in every home would save $800MM per year was overstated. So, I did a little research, and it is not overstated. There are over 112MM households according to census.gov, and each 60W bulb running 8 hours per day replaced with a 60% more efficient CFL will save over $800MM per year. Here is the spreadsheet:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pkSD9nN5FvlTg5Yu3H9j2Ug&output=html&gid=0&single=true&range=a1:c14

Hmm. iframes do not work on WordPress.com due to security issue, but the sheet is available on the link. Looks like the savings really are there. It is amazing how big 112,000,000 households really is. We have over 130 bulbs in our house. Some are rarely used, so CFL’s would not make sense, but if 1/3 were replaced all across the US, the saving would amount to billions. Wow.

Testing Remote Posting From ScribeFire

This is a test to see if the ScribeFire Firefox plugin works.

Procrastinators Eugene Debut!

Oh man, was this fun or what? Playing rock and roll in the bars again. Lots of friends turned out to watch us open for Aaron’s band, The Athiarchists. Most of the people in the bar were not even born the last time I played in a Eugene bar, but they gave us an awesome reception anyway.

Fun stuff!!

Kindle

Don’t kill trees. The Kindle is the future of books! Some people think it looks strange, and I do too, but the design is actually quite functional. This thing will hold 400 books, and saves a lot of trees (not sure if it saves carbon output though since it is made of plastic).

Eagles

Coyotes killed a few sheep in one of our Furrer Farms fields. The remains attracted Eagles for a couple of days. Quite a treat.

Water Calculations For Furrer Farms

Our irrigation well produces 40-50 gallons per minute. It has too much arsenic to drink, but has been able to irrigate about 10 acres of pasture for cattle grazing throughout the summer. Here is a quick calculation of how much water this well actually produces:

So, how much water could be in a pond that would hold rainwater runoff, take in some seasonal creek runoff, and maybe be augmented by the well? Below is the calculation of how much water is in a certain size pond:

Length (ft.) x Width (ft.) x Average Depth (ft.) x 7.5 = volume of water. For example, a if your pond is 4 ft. Long x 8 ft. Wide x 2 ft. avg. depth x 7.5 = 480 gallons. I’ll put this in an Instacalc embed soon, but for now, I’ll see what a 200′ by 200′ pond that is 5′ average depth has for volume.

200 X 200 X 5 X 7.5 = 1,500,000 gallons. So, it would take about a month to fill with all of the output from the well.

Rainwater catchment from the barn would be about:

80 X 144 = 11,520 ft sq roof area.
.9 efficiency coefficient for metal roofing
3.7″ average monthly rainfall in Eugene, OR, USA area.
.6 conversion factor to get gallons
11,520 * .9 * 3.7 * .6 = 23,016 gallons per month.
23,016 * 12 = 276,192 gallons per year.

Wow, not much of a dent in filling the pond.

But, much, much more could be gotten from the seasonal creek. I will have to do some flow analysis to determine just how much water id flowing by the pond site from October to May of each year. I know it is a LOT.