Modern Geekery

I flew to Chicago today and my flight was late enough that I was able to have a nice breakfast with the family before leaving for the airport. As I was sitting at the table, drinking my tea, the doorbell rang. The nice fellow from Progress Energy at the door informed us that he was there to cut off the power. After my initial “do what?” reaction, we dug out the last bill and took a look at it. I’d paid it online and the amount didn’t match what the guy’s disconnection notice said. I pointed out to him that the account numbers did not match and that he must therefore have the wrong house.

When he got around to asking our names, he discovered that they didn’t match the one on the account he was supposed to terminate. We pointed out that the folks next door had just moved in and that we’d gotten a misdirected bill for them a few weeks back. We’d dutifully set it back out for the mail carrier and thought nothing more of it. It is alsoimportant to note that our own power bill, then one we’d just paid, had been for a short pay cycle.

It turns out that the folks next door had applied for a connection using our address by accident, realized it, and then re-applied with the right address. Progress Energy decided to simply cancel our account and transfer the service at our house to the guy next door. I was astounded to discover that they would do this without even the most cursory phone call to make sure that we wanted our service disconnected.

After discussing the situation with the company, we’re confident that we’ve got our side of the situation straightened out. They’ve opened a new account for us and made sure that we’d have uninterrupted service. I feel sorry for the poor guys next door. They had almost assuredly been paying their bill - the one that actually was for their address. But when I left, it looked like their power had been cut and the outstanding bill will almost certainly be applied against their credit report. Mainly though, this appears to be a total failure by Progress Energy to sanity check their billing and account processes.

Between the garden and our CSA share this year, we have been just overflowing with fresh vegetables. One thing that we have been getting in our CSA basket that has been just phenomenal are the mustard greens. Crisp, light, and sinus-clearingly spicy, they have wound up on my sandwiches and in my salads. Today, I built a salad around the mustard. I added sugar snap peas, also from the CSA basket, and some of the foliage from the fresh fennel I bought at the farmers market this morning. (My own fennel isn’t big enough yet.) Add to that some nasturtium leaves and a nasturtium flower from my garden and some shaved daikon radish, from the farmer’s market. The overall effect was deliciously sweet and spicy and with a touch of acid from some apple cider vinegar in an oil/vinegar emulsion, a great salad for dinner tonight. The rest of dinner was also largely local. A pasta dish with Russian kale from the CSA and locally raised pork sausage, with white beans and a carrot-kohlrabi bake, with carrots from the CSA and kohlrabi from our garden.

I’m leaving Monday for Chicago again. We’ve decided to lease an apartment up there for the summer, since sublets are fairly cheap now. One of my teammates will be relocating for 2 months, which will mean a lot more work will get done in the lab in Chicago. It will present a logistical hurdle, one that we’ll certainly overcome. For the amount we’re saving, both in total dollars and in dollars per man-hour, it’s a win-win situation.

HeavyPetal has a quick HOWTO on plugging shiitake logs. Her version includes the cheese wax step, with picture, which I didn’t bother with, so I highly recommend checking her post out. My guide to plugging a shiitake log is, of course, here.

This is way cool: Google Maps API now supports a wide array of geotagged sites. In the example given in the link, a properly geotagged Wikipedia article will display a link on Google Maps at that site. Very nice! I expect to see a lot of organizations tagging projects or sites of interest in this fashion. Think about the Nature Conservancy tagging potential new acquisitions or a local chamber of commerce highlighting attractions in their town this way.

For a long time, I’ve struggled with Habitat for Humanity as a charity. On the face of it, the premise seems pretty worthy: help folks find affordable housing. Over the years, as I’ve thought and researched the subject, I’ve reached the conclusion that on the whole, Habitat for Humanity is likely making life worse for the people it is trying to help.

First and foremost, it appears that Habitat focuses on single family detached dwellings in suburban and exurban subdivisions. While this may not be true of all Habitat affiliates, it appears from my research on local Habitat affiliates and the national website to be generally true. I see this as a cruel prank of sorts on the future homeowner. At a time when it is becoming less and less affordable to live so far outside the city center and less desirable to become more dependent on a car for living, Habitat is offering to folks the false promise of economic independence and middle class lifestyle.

Many writers and publications have taken on this subject, including The Atlantic Monthly and Worldchanging, and the implications are pretty clear. The rising cost of living in suburbia are slowly making these areas unlivable for the people who could just afford to live there. People, like those who are being ‘helped’ by Habitat for Humanity will fare far worse, since they could not have afforded to live there at all.

The opportunity costs that Habitat incurs are high as well. By spending the money and using the land to build low-density housing, they prevent those resources from being used to build more efficient, high-density housing that could have a larger effect on the overall housing market in a region. If Habitat were to make it more affordable to build up the population density in former suburban areas, they could essentially drive the growth of livable, walkable neighborhoods, something that could possibly also make the difference in the cost-effectiveness of public transportation as well.

Further, Habitat focuses on traditionally-built homes. As far as I could tell, no Habitat affiliate makes any particular effort to build highly energy efficient homes. This is a further disservice to the people whom they are trying to help. I would have thought, in particular, that in areas with extremely depressed home prices (e.g. Detroit) Habitat would be working hard to buy and renovate marginal homes to make them more livable and efficient. I saw no such evidence of that on the Detroit affiliate’s web page, at least.

Considering these missed opportunities and disservices, I truly wonder how Habitat continues to attract donors and volunteers. Certainly, there are many opportunities for them in this economic downturn and housing crisis if they can change their model to address them. It may be more difficult for them to make these sorts of changes due to their affiliate structure, but by the same token, that structure might provide a way for particular affiliates to lead the way on their own.

• Mowed yard, composted the clippings.
• Mowed clover in the garden area, mulched in place.
• Planted lettuce, basil, sunflowers, transplanted various seedlings
• Installed the last bits of the new hardwood floor in our craft room with my father-in-law
• Hiked about 2 miles with the family
• Weeded around the pawpaw trees
• Started research on a new idea for a self-directed research project at work.

Not too shabby.

Tonight’s dinner is a salad containing thin strips of red-leaf lettuce mixed with thin strips of fresh sorrel from my garden, topped with a fresh radish from my garden, thinly sliced vidalia onion tops, almonds, and a homemade vinaigrette. Excuse me while I have my foodgasm.

Last year, I had to have a dying hickory in my yard cut down. While I paid to have most of the trunk hauled off, I still have a pile of the limb wood. I had decided a while back that I would plug these logs with shiitake spawn and make shiitake logs. Its best to do the plugging after the last hard frost, so I waited until yesterday to do the work.

I ordered my plug spawn from Fungi Perfecti, a neat company near Olympia, WA. They’ve got spawn for lots of different strains of mushrooms, but I love shiitakes and shiitakes love hardwoods. The spawn arrive in a little bag like the picture on the right. The spawn themselves are small dowels, about 1.5″ long, with a spiral groove cut into the side. You can clearly see the white mycelia from the shiitake in the groove. There is also some grain in the bag as well, which I surmise are how the dowels were inoculated.

I had ordered my spawn about a month ago, so by the time I pulled the bag out, there was plenty of mycelial growth in the bag, which you can see in the picture on the left as the white matting around the dowels. According to the instructions, this is normal and probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d used the spawn more quickly. Fortunately, no mushrooms had begun to bud, so I didn’t have to pull those off.

Continue reading ‘Shiitake logs’ »

After a a couple of months of moving the cold frame around, the structure had gotten a little less than sturdy. When I started putting it together, I figured that this would be the failure mode, since without corner supports, only the thickness of the wood would support the screws holding it together. I’d been looking for some untreated 2×4 or 4×4 scrap for a while to make the reinforcements, in keeping with my theme of “cold frame on the cheap,” but I finally broke down and bought an untreated 2×4. ($2.70 at Lowes.) Cutting the appropriate length pieces from it, I took the frame apart and reattached them properly to the supports.

And just in time too, since its supposed to be right at freezing tonight and tomorrow night.

I just read this piece by Alex Steffen on the WorldChanging blog and highly recommend it. The key quote from the piece, in my opinion, is this one:

[I]f we’re going to avert ecological destruction, we need to to not only do things differently, we need to do different things.

What he’s saying here is something that I’ve pointed out to my colleagues in the innovation community: sustainability is not about making things with less stuff, or that last longer, or that aren’t toxic, or even that can be infinitely cradle-to-cradle recycled. Sustainability requires us to invent things that make it possible to live more sustainably. If the things, the stuff, that we have and use make it easier to live sustainable lives than to not do so, then we will live sustainably.

Its not an easy problem to solve, for the same reason that truly groundbreaking innovation is not easy. It is pretty straightforward to imagine a novel solution for a market that already exists. It is much harder to invent a new market. I think that the kinds of products that will help people live sustainably are products for a market that doesn’t exist yet. Our business strategists don’t know how to value them, so our market analysts can’t compute a return on investment, so no investment is made. And truthfully, our scientists and engineers don’t always have the global perspective necessary to understand what types of solutions are necessary.

The point of Steffen’s article was to underline the importance of community in making these changes in our systems. I think that it is also important to understand the systems themselves. As we grow in our understanding the network of interactions and dependencies in our economy and our society, this understanding will allow us to break out of unsustainable patterns and replace them with ones that are equally understood, but are sustainable to the best of our knowledge. And because we’ll be building from a base of understanding, we’ll be able to look at them in a rational fashion 40 years from now when we understand the ways in which the new patterns are not sustainable.

It may be that at first, these more-sustainable patterns will be obvious. Things that folks like Steffen have been telling us for years, like community gardening, reducing sprawl, and increasing bike transport. But as with everything else, the low-hanging fruits will be quickly exhausted. At that point, progress will only be made by deeper understanding. It will be interesting to see how the tools for gaining that understanding develop.