One of the harder things in life is to publicly admitting you were wrong.  Often it’s easier to just stay the course on a decision and look for a way out, rather than admit you made a mistake.

I jumped on the Opalco Broadband wagon big time, and as can be seen in this post, I thought the Opalco plan was the best option out there to bring San Juan County better internet service.

While I still think this was a good plan, I don’t think there is any way a majority of the co-op membership is going to support it.  It’s also not clear that the board supports it 100% either.

Opalco is a risk averse organization, and for good reasons.  Tackling the broadband issue is very complex, expensive and risky.

I was very hopeful in the beginning of learning about this plan in January.  I spoke out in favor of it to those I knew, and in places like Facebook.  But the more I learned of the details and the more I talked to other people in the broadband business, the more I came to realize that the solution to our problems would not be solved by scraping what we have already (throwing out all the copper lines already in the ground), and spending $32million creating a hybrid network of fiber and 4G wireless.

The Opalco board wants 5800 people to pre-commit to broadband by putting down $90.  They started taking that money at the end of February.  I committed my $90.  At the annual meeting in early May, they only had 900 signups.  These were the “easy” votes.  These people were paying attention and probably had faith in Opalco to implement the plan.  Getting the other 85% is going to be a long hard slog.  In my opinion it’s going to end up in the same place as the $35million school bond.  Rejected.  People are not ready to take that big of a financial risk.

The question I see is; does Opalco already see the writing on the wall?  Is there a plan B?  Can they admit the direction they were headed was a wrong one, or will they continue to march down a path for the next 4 months, and at the end say “well the membership didn’t want to do this”?

Has Opalco actually asked the existing broadband providers; Century Link, RockIsland, Orcas Online and others, how Opalco could help improve broadband quality and availability in the county?  Are there partnerships that could happen that could quickly fix some of the existing bottlenecks for a reasonable investment?

I have asked for my $90 vote back.  I’m moving on to look for alternative solutions to the broadband issue because in my mind the Opalco Broadband plan is dead.

I have been following Dave Winer’s writing for well over a decade. There is a great post he just made about “Why you should learn to code”.

http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/february/whyYouShouldLearnToCode

Well, that was an interesting week back on Facebook. It did not end well in the end, and as I reflect on it all, there are many similarities to my recent experiences with Fred Kline’s latest community consensus group (which I will refer to below as CCG).

In the CCG there were about 35 of us that took the time to meet over 4 days, to discuss some very complex community/society issues. The group was a pretty broad cross-section of Orcas community members. There was a somewhat long list of things people agreed to which included the following couple of points which are relevant here:

• Become aware of when you are moved to speak and when you are not moved to speak…listen to your inner voice.
• When speaking…speak personally from your own experience and feelings; use “I” statements; avoid generalizations, and avoid trying to win others over to your point of view…be aware of the preciousness of time.

I’m not one to talk a lot and for the first couple of hours, I was fine just listening.  But what ended up happening was that a few people were doing most of the talking.  They were also doing a lot of generalization, and rambling on, and on, and on.  The meeting was turning into a huge waste of time for me and several times I almost got up and left.

The group had no way of dealing with the people who were monopolizing our limited time, and at one point I just lost it, and cut off Don Pencil (who was one of the people talking on, and on), and asked if we could hear from others who had not spoken yet.  He took this as a personal insult, and did not get the fact that he had already insulted me by not valuing the time I was putting into this discussion.

In the end, thanks to Joe Symons, we adopted a 5 hands up and the current speaker needs to stop talking.

Now, on to Facebook and the Opalco Broadband Discussion group which was started by Alex Huppenthal.  Alex is a true piece of work and this quote from him really puts it all in perspective:

I am the best qualified person in San Juan County, perhaps the nation to sort out some of the facts from the fiction, according to more than one person, so I’ve accepted the role.

So for about a week, I tried to offset much of the rambling conversation he was posting on FB. Much like Don Pencil, Alex just would not shut up, and kept posting all sorts of random stuff, and never really proposed anything worthwhile.  Finally Mike Greene of Rockisland joined the conversation and had a lot of good real world information and insight.  He also setup another message board where we can take this conversation and have a more moderated facts based discussion about Opalco’s Broadband plan, away from Alex’s alternate reality world.

I also met Justin Anderson-Pomeroy in the process, who seems like a pretty level headed normal person, just trying to work and raise a family here like me.

So, it wasn’t a total lost week, but I’m done with Facebook again.

So after having quit facebook over a year ago (and not missed it a bit since), I have been sucked back in again, mainly to be part of the Opalco Broadband discussion.

http://www.facebook.com/groups/425195627559375/

Once this is over though I’m out again.

In the past I was logging all my house heating system data into an RRD database, and then creating graphs from that database, and really only looking at the day to see what was happening. I had the RRD database setup to purge out data after a few days.

But, recently, I decided to save all the data into a postgresql database as well, and save all the data points in 1 minute increments.  I have been collecting this data now for a few weeks, and decided to do some analysis.  Most of the data are just boolean values, like heat calls, or hot water calls, or if the wood boiler is firing, or the solar water pump is running.  Some are analog values like tank temperatures, or kilowatt usage.  Anyway, here is my first raw look at some data:


date       | fire  |  hw  | heat  | w_heat | e_heat |   kw   | shw  | shwt
-----------+-------+------+-------+--------+--------+--------+------+-------
2013-01-07 |  1.17 | 0.23 |  1.38 |   1.38 |   0.00 |  74.41 | 0.00 | 53.39
2013-01-08 | 10.85 | 1.45 | 18.08 |  16.42 |   1.67 |  74.58 | 0.03 | 56.30
2013-01-09 |  5.15 | 1.90 | 19.93 |  14.62 |   5.32 |  95.16 | 4.98 | 59.19
2013-01-10 |  4.30 | 2.57 | 21.37 |  16.67 |   4.70 | 102.04 | 2.90 | 60.24
2013-01-11 |  6.13 | 2.00 | 21.22 |  21.22 |   0.00 | 102.52 | 6.65 | 81.65
2013-01-12 | 18.25 | 0.53 | 23.07 |   8.13 |  14.93 | 168.54 | 6.68 | 93.84
2013-01-13 |  4.33 | 4.28 | 17.03 |  14.63 |   2.40 | 170.25 | 4.53 | 91.50
2013-01-14 |  1.17 | 1.60 | 20.18 |   5.42 |  14.77 | 175.53 | 0.30 | 52.36
2013-01-15 |  1.80 | 1.68 | 17.03 |   1.55 |  15.48 | 176.82 | 5.83 | 64.80
2013-01-16 |  3.52 | 2.43 | 13.25 |   8.50 |   4.75 | 174.14 | 6.93 | 89.59
2013-01-17 |  2.58 | 1.60 | 15.75 |  14.42 |   1.33 |  97.25 | 7.13 | 93.20
2013-01-18 |  4.42 | 2.28 | 16.97 |  10.75 |   6.22 | 110.76 | 5.37 | 83.24
2013-01-19 |  4.53 | 3.10 | 12.52 |   8.98 |   3.53 | 110.86 | 7.70 | 74.08
2013-01-20 |  2.65 | 1.35 | 13.70 |  11.15 |   2.55 | 102.05 | 7.20 | 92.97
2013-01-21 |  4.87 | 2.47 | 13.92 |  10.17 |   3.75 |  99.43 | 7.03 | 85.89
2013-01-22 |  4.50 | 2.90 | 15.62 |  15.40 |   0.22 |  99.56 | 6.93 | 70.47
2013-01-23 |  5.28 | 2.38 | 12.98 |   9.40 |   3.58 |  80.66 | 0.40 | 56.06


Some things I found interesting. Fire is the number of hours I’m burning wood. The 10 and 18 hours is not correct, because the boiler never reached temp and burned all it’s wood, and never turned off. But the other values are more realistic. My boiler puts out about 100k BTU/hr, so we should be able to look at that and say 4.50 hours is about 450k BTU generated.

Hw is the number of hours I’m making hot water with electricity.

Heat is the number of hours the house is calling for heat. I made a major change on the 13th and switched the entire public building to run off one thermostat instead of each room doing their own thing. Doing the room by room thing usually meant that at least one zone was always on, usually the hallway, which never gets up to temp. So this was the entire building turns on and off, and actually seems to be more efficient.

w_heat is when the heat load is fulfilled by the hot water generated by the wood boiler. e_heat is when that is not available, so the electric boiler takes over. On days like the 14th and 15th, I was out of town, and so no fire, and electric takes over. Price per hour of electric heat is about $0.70.

shw is the number of hours the solar hot water pump is running to augment the domestic hot water system. When this number is low, it usually means it’s not a sunny day.

shwt is the max temp the lower portion of the hot water tank got to, so you can see that on days when the pump was running a lot, we got some good water temp gain. Can’t wait to see what this looks like in the summer.

Next step with all of this is to get some graphs created and be able to query these things via the website instead of writing queries.

I have had a TED Energy Meter for a long time in our house, and it’s great to see what the current electrical usage is at any given time, and to be able to see how much has been used for the today day.  There is a USB interface to the meter, but the software available (at the time), only ran on Windows.  For the longest time I wanted to figure out how to just read the data from the TED meter, and save and graph the data over time myself.

After having Dylan take a look at doing this, and after doing a little bit of digging around, I found some code from MisterHouse that decoded the TED messages.  After a little bit of work I had a little Perl program running that spit this data out into the rest of my home heating system data page.  Currently this perl program is running on a laptop connected to the TED, but I hope to get it working on a BeagleBone instead.

Working on doing some cleanup of my backup systems.  On my MacBook Pro work machine and some home machines I use TimeMachine to backup to a common Apple Desktop that I put a large HD into.  But, for whatever reason, I can’t get the display to work on it, so it’s totally headless.  Since some cleanup I did a few weeks ago, it has been turned off and my backups have not been happening.

But, I also use Backblaze to backup important stuff on my laptop, so I’m not unprotected.  But if my HD on the laptop crashes (which it has done before), getting back up and running again would mean a total reload, which I would rather avoid.  So, trying to get the TimeMachine stuff working again for this reason.

But, instead of just turning on the Apple Desktop again, I’m going to do some research on setting up my local linux server to just do the backups and take the drive out of the desktop, and put it in the server.

Found http://roussell.net/blog/build-your-own-linux-time-machine-server/  which does a good job of detaling how to get this done.

For the most part, internet access speeds on Orcas suck.  Your options are pretty much DSL, and…DSL.  Yes, you may have some wireless access, but I imagine the speeds and reliability on that are nothing  to write home about.

What would it be like to have blazing fast access to the internet?  Well, I have had that experience before.  Before we moved to Orcas, we moved into an apartment for 6 months after we had sold our house and while we were waiting for our Orcas house to be finished.  The apartment was part of University of Washington housing, and each room had an ethernet jack, that was connected to the UW backbone, at 100mb/s, download AND upload.  And, it was summer time so there were not many students around.  WOW, WOW, WOW.

Something that may have taken 5, 10 or maybe 30 minutes to download, now took 10 seconds!

At my house, I have Century Link DSL.  1mb/s down, 256kb/s up (when I’m lucky).  I pay them about $80/month for internet and phone.  I have no other options.  I would gladly pay twice that for 10mb/s.

So who is going to come to our rescue? OPALCO.  They have a plan, but it’s going to cost a bunch of money to do.  But nobody else is going to make that kind of investment for so few people.  And nobody else will go out of their way to get coverage to people who are in the shadow of Mt. Constitution or other hard to reach areas.

Will it put existing ISP’s out of business?  Maybe.

Can those ISP’s provide the kind of access and make the investment OPALCO can?  Nope.

Will it provide more jobs and economic opportunities? You bet.

I’m on board, are you?

Outside of writing perl and SQL, I have also been tinkering with Arduino’s and controlling my home heating system.  I have 3 arduino’s setup, one that is controlling my solar hot water system, one that runs the heating system in the house, and another that runs the wood boiler.

All of these report to a linux server which creates graphs of what is going on.  http://orcas.smalldognet.com.

One of the temperature sensors (Dallas onewire) that is in a 300 gallon water tank, started frizing out.  I think this happend last year to.  So I changed the tank temp sensor to be outside the tank and just read the temp off the output (hot) side of the system.

The other thing I’m trying to figure out is why the garage circulating pump is not working right.

There are 3 pumps in the system.  One that circulates water between the wood boiler and the storage tank.  One that circulates water (tempered), to the garage when it needs heat, and another that does the same thing to the house when it needs heat.  If the storage tank pump is running, the garage never gets hot water.  The house always works fine.  Thinking maybe the garage pump is weak/bad or something.

Also, I’m working on switching out the arduino in the boiler building with a beagle bone instead.

Taking the leap here and switching over to wordpress for the front end of my website.  Going to try and do some blogging.  Ya, don’t laugh to hard.