Earth Hour 2010 Fail

Ontario failed for the second time during our 3rd installment of the global energy-saving initative, yet you will never read about it in your newspaper, or hear about it on the news.

Starting with Ontario's Earth Hour blunder last year I started to grow suspicious, and conflicted. As an avid energy conservationist I wanted Earth Hour to be successful. But as a decent human being, I wanted the truth to be known. And the information I downloaded from IESO.ca was finally finding some ears willing to listen.

This year, I was contacted by a local newspaper columnist wanting my thoughts and opinions on Earth Hour, specifically regarding the energy spike of 2009 conflicting with the "official" response from IESO.

I’m working on a story for the event this weekend and would love to get your comment on it. (You) had some pretty interesting points and it’d be great to chat over the phone if you have a moment today.

I showed her the graphs I downloaded from IESO.ca; the first showing 2008's energy-saving dip, the second showing 2009's energy consumption spike. She, in turn, contacted a spokesperson for IESO and, unfortunately, decided not to interview me for her article.

I can't blame her. I'm nuts.

Last year's strange 400 megawatt energy consumption spike, I hoped, was an anomaly. I truly hoped I'd see another 2008-style dip. As the LED clocks in my house all struck 8:30 p.m., thus launching Earth Hour 2010, Suz and I shut everything off and went for a walk. A very disappointing walk.

As we walked around our neighbourhood, we counted. We compared dark houses to those with lights or TV's on. What we found was shocking. Of the 130 houses we counted, 82 had either lights or TVs on, or both. The remaining 48 homes were dark, resulting in a dismal 36.9% of homes participating.

According to the real-time energy demand at IESO.ca, there was an enormous spike of energy useage between 8:30 and 9:00 p.m. View the graph here.

The graph, of which I took a screenshot immediately after Earth Hour, clearly shows an 800 megawatt spike over what IESO had anticpated. Not only that, but the amount of energy consumed during Earth Hour was approximately 100 mw higher than the projected peak energy usage of the entire day (16,404 mw).

What does that mean? Earth Hour was the biggest bust since the Hindenburg. But guess what - you won't read that anywhere, because the IESO reported an Ontario-wide drop of 560 megawatts compared to a "normal" Saturday in "late March".

Let's compare.

2008's daily Peak useage on Earth Hour Day was 17,800 mw. 2009's daily Peak useage was about 15,500 mw. And 2010's daily Peak useage was about 16,500 mw, which was during Earth Hour. So, is 16,500 mw less than a "normal" Saturday? It is. But only if you compare to 2008.

Sorry IESO, you fail at math, and at reporting the truth. I've decided Earth Hour is really only for people who don't conserve every day.

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2008 Ontario Earth Hour energy usage.
2009 Ontario Earth Hour energy usage.
2010 Ontario Earth Hour energy usage.

Roomba 2: The Sequel

I am surrounded by failure. Firstly, neither of our cats can speak English despite 8 years of personal, one-on-one lessons. Secondly, their arch-nemesis, the Roomba, broke down numerous times over the last week. And when I look at my computer I see nothing but failure. (It was a one in a trillion chance, but both my regular hard drive AND my backup hard drive failed at the exact same time. I lost everything.)

Yes, everywhere I look there is failure. Even the Useless Men, with two new posts in the last 30 some-odd days, are performing particularly uselessly.

But let's get back to Roomba, its failure and iRobot's silly customer support. It all started when Roomba stopped beeping.

The Roomba beeps to tell you various things. The cute & cuddly beeps are charming like a Speak 'n Spell, or sad and scary like a pissed off R2-D2. Roomba says "DO-DO! LA-LA-LAAA!" when it is happy, and "Uh-oh!" when there is trouble. The beeps are the window to Roomba's feelings and innermost thoughts. When something bad has happened to Roomba, he tells you. With beeps!

But how can Roomba tell you his speaker is broken when he can't beep at you? On top of that, Roomba wasn't working - and because of the failed speaker, couldn't tell me why.

Enter iRobot Customer Support. After explaining via email that my Roomba no longer beeps, and I therefore couldn't figure out what made him sick, I received a reply. A ridiculous reply that went something like this:

"If Roomba beeps 'uh-oh' 2 times, it means...
If Roomba beeps 'uh-oh' 3 times, it means...
If Roomba beeps 'uh-oh' 4 times, it means..."
etc.

You get the idea. Customer Support was useless, and in my curt reply I let them know it. But upon receiving a nice package at my door today, I wish I had been a little nicer in my email.

After the inital email, I received a second one from iRobot. The Customer Support agent apologized for the previous email, then told me that with a failed speaker, Roomba was in need of being replaced. That's right, a full replacement because of the failure of a part worth a little less than a gallon of gasoline. (And don't even get me started on the amount of fuel it took for them to ship it to me from Pennsylvania!)

While I waited for my new Roomba to arrive, I disassembled my Roomba to try and find the problem. Inside there were bundles of tiny wires. The wires lead to various sensors and motors. I found the speaker and it was intact. The speaker wire was also intact. I took apart the motor to the side-spinning brush. I re-greased the gears with nuts and gum and put everything back together.

After all my toiling, Roomba still didn't work. It would start, but jerk to a halt a few seconds later. Frustrated, and knowing a logo-less replacement was on its way, I vented my anger in the form of a powerful punch. Roomba came back to life instantly.

It seems a good flogging now and then is good for delicate electronics, and helps the Chinese workforce stay motivated to churn out the cheap Roombas destined for jerks like me who can't afford the Trilobite.

And if anybody's looking for me, I'll be hiding in Florida till Sept. 2nd. Au revoir!

Failure

moar funny pictures

So much failure. No Olympic medals for Canada thus far and the worst part of all - I haven't been able to post anything new lately because of a hard drive failure. Yes, that is so much worse than Canada's showing at the Olympics. Why? Because Canada never does well at the Olympics so there are no surprises.

Anyhoo, my hard drive has unexpectedly and catastrophically crashed leaving me unable to boot up Windows. I have pictures but have been unable to transfer my photos to my computer or write anything.

So while you wait for me to get up and running again, enjoy this ad I found online, and many more failures at Failblog and I Can Has Cheezburger?.

And yes, this was a real ad I found. Yes, some 'business' full of incompetent employees who can't understand why the terrorist who masterminded the destruction of the World Trade towers is running for President actually thinks they have the ability to correctly test how intelligent you are. If you take the I.Q. test and believe the results, shame. You are certainly NOT "smarter than a eight year old."