Reducing Your Electric Bill - A Systemic Non-Solar Approach

Having resided in some of the most expensive electricity regions of the country (New York, Honolulu, San Francisco) I have spent a lot of time researching ways to reduce electricity consumption as a way to reduce our electric bill without having to resort to installing an expensive roof solar panel generation system. A recent move to a 4800 square foot house also prompted me to step up my efforts to develop this electricity reduction plan as we realized that we would have to budget for a huge monthly electric bill.

We discovered that our neighbors in similarly sized homes on our street were averaging about $285.00 to $450.00 per month on PG and E monthly electric bills. I estimated that the baseline monthly electricity cost average to be about $350.00 per month factoring Air Conditioning use. I then set a goal of halving that baseline average of $350.00 per month to $175.00 per month and that any number below $150.00 would be the end goal of my electricity reduction objectives for our new house. After implementing all of the phases listed below, I was able to get my monthly PG&E electricity bill down to $104.00 for 610 kilowatt hours consumed for a 30 day period.

Phase I
Replace all installed interior incandescent 65 and 75 watt light bulbs to Philips, Feit Electric, and GE LED Light Bulbs each consuming 7 watts to a maximum of 11 watts per bulb. Total bulbs changed 55. Total wattage when on 3575 watts with incandescent bulbs. Total wattage when on with LED bulbs 550 watts. That is a huge reduction in watts and the LED bulbs are much cooler than incandescents. 120 degress vs 500 degrees on the incandescents.

Phase II
Installed 2 NEST learning programmable thermostats, one for each level/zone of the house

Phase III
Replace all 27 20 watt halogen landscape/security outdoor lights with 3 watt LED Spotlight bulbs.
Install Dusk to Dawn Timers

Phase IV
Replace old GE Dishwasher with Bosch energy star high efficiency dishwasher

Phase V
Put all battery chargers on power-strips connected to Belkin auto AC timers
Replace Comcast 400 watt old style digital cable box with new high energy efficiency cable box that only consumes 30 watts

Phase V1
Install programmable electric timer for Hot Water Recirculation Pump

Phase VII
Install LG High efficiency Clothes Washers and Dryer.

The Tablet and Smartphone Explosion -The Challenge of Unified Communications

As we move into the second half of 2012, The proliferation of Apple IOS smartphones and iPads, Android smartphones and Tablets has accelerated at a dizzying pace. New product innovation can be found on these new devices with an array of different models to suit most any budget or multimedia and business requirement. Verizon has accelerated the pace of putting new smartphones into the hands of consumers by offering early upgrades and rebates for inducing their longtime customers to upgrade to the latest and greatest smartphones. AT&T and Sprint are following suit. New Android tablet product introductions from Asus, Samsung and Toshiba are also pushing the price-performance envelope as the Android operating system is reaching critical mass with the introduction of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) which is shipping on the newest Samsung Galaxy Tabs and the latest Asus Transformer Tablets. These tablets are shipping with 16 or 32GB of Internal Storage memory and have SD expansion card slots so SD-XC memory cards of up to 128 GB can be easily added for additional storage of files. The new Asus Transformer retails for $399.99 for the 32 GB model and has the Android 4.0 OS installed with a very bright IPS 1268 x 800 10.1" LED Touch Display. The IPS (In Plane Switching) LED panel has an ultra-wide viewing angle of 170 degrees off viewing axis and a brighness of almost 300 NITS. Battery life is rated at an incredible 8 hours. The optional keyboard dock ($150.00) which adds USB slots and extended battery capability converts this tablet to a notebook and adds another 6 hours of extended battery life. It effectively converts this tablet into a fully functional notebook computer. Built in WiFi and Bluetooth make the Asus Transformer a very capable home and business tablet as it has a very powerful  and energy efficient Tegra Dual Core processor and a very fast graphics chip built-in. It offers very snappy performance, instant on capability and a growing library of Android productivity and Entertainment applications. It is also perfectly suited for multimedia applications as it has 2 built in cameras. 1.3 MP for the front camera an 8 MP for the rear. Watching videos or using Skype is easily accomplished with this tablet all at a list price of about $550.00 including the keyboard dock battery accessory.

The price performance available on Android Smart Phones and Tablets allows consumers to buy state of the art hardware with an operating system that costs way lower than Apple's IOS and Microsoft Windows. The software functionality of these operating systems is close to reaching parity with Apple IOS and Microsoft Windows 7 and 8 tablet editions. The Asus Transformer Tablet even ships with a special version of Polaris software Office suite that allows you to create edit and open Microsoft Word documents like Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. The Web Browser capability with support for Adobe Flash ensures that all web based applications will run on their tablet.

What we are seeing is a perfect storm of advanced easy to use computing devices hitting the marketplace with consumers scrambling to buy the latest and greatest smartphones or tablets to supplement their corporate issued or home based notebook or desktop computers. As millions of these devices get sold through to consumer and business users the appetite for mature business enabled applications will increase at an exponential rate. Instant on access to WiFi and 3G and 4G networks make these devices powerful and effective productivity tools right out of the box.

 In many cases the older notebooks and desktops are being supplanted or even replaced as these new smartphones and tablets are more powerful and offer superb battery life and are more suited for mobile computing. All of the major retail channels are discounting this devices including Costco, Walmart, Target, Verizon, BestBuy, Office Max, Staples, Office Depot, Fry's Electronics, J&R Computers, and Radio Shack to name a few. The hardware is out there but the problem of tying all of these devices together remains a huge problem and challenge to companies that want to leverage multimedia services and applications on these devices as employees bring them into work. security, data access charges, connection to WiFi and a host of other associated software feature requirements to unify all of the legacy and new devices remain a herculean challenge. Unified Communications meets the challenge of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). How can companies leverage their existing communications infrastructure by delivering multimedia communications services rapidly while avoiding forklift hardware upgrades?

The answer is quite simple. Thrupoint. Thrupoint is the only company that can deliver on the promise of Unified Communications with their Fusion Software Suite running on their Ubiquity Software platform.

Check out their web-site at www.thrupoint.com

Larry Carlton at The Firehouse Arts Center Pleasanton CA

Mr.335 himself, (nick-named after his signature Gibson ES335 hollow body jazz guitar) Mr Larry Carlton performed at the Pleasanton Firehouse Arts Center on March 22nd. The 4 time Grammy winner performed some of his best known classics and a number of new songs from his most recent album Larry Carlton plays TSOP, The Sound of Philadelphia. One of the highlights was his performance of If You Don't Know Me By Now. The cover of this Harold Melvin and the Blue notes song was soulful and passionate and brought tears to the eyes of the audience which was definitely an older crowd. We had third row seats near the center of this ultra small venue (207 seats) and this concert was simply amazing. If you ever have an opportunity to see Larry Carlton you will not be disappointed. He is a living legend of popular jazz guitar and put so many popular performers on the map as you can hear his lead guitar work on over 100 gold albums.

American Pie by Don McLean - The Perfect Seque into 2012

As the 2011 year winds down the song American Pie gets a lot of airplay between Christmas and the New Year. I guess a lot of DJs feel that the reflective nature of this song is most appropriate to play at the end of the year. I would have to agree with them. American Pie is Don McLean's Magnum Opus of a song which skyrocketed when it was first released way back in 1971. It is a song that resonates in everyone and carries so many personal meanings and interpretations and like carbon dating, links all of us to prior experiences when we all grew up in the seventies and eighties. The lyrics were amazingly simple, direct and heartfelt, and wove a story that even to this day sounds fresh and interesting as it did in the seventies. I remember saving my allowance and newspaper route money and buying the American Pie album from EJ Korvettes in Nanuet, New York. I played it so many times and now as I am much older, I have even more respect for Don as he was able to incorporate so many themes and touch on so many topics that related to the time when I was growing up during my adolescent years in a suburb of New York City..

The song was an instant classic even though it ran way longer time-wise than most other charting hit songs played on the radio. The recording was very clean and the choice of backing studio musicians made a big difference in the overall production quality of the song. Warren Bernhardt played the piano on American Pie and his contributions elevated the performance and made lasting impressions with each listener. Warren is a very famous and talented Jazz pianist whose mentor was Bill Evans. He also played on Paul SImon albums and was the musical director and piano player for the 1993-94 Steely Dan concert Tour. There were few popular top forty hits that showcased the piano front and center except for Billy Joel, Elton John and Paul Simon. It really raised the bar for songwriters to come up with songs that really delivered on both harmony and lyrical content.

Don really came into his own as a popular singer songwriter in the seventies and really carved his own musical career path and led a very independent life as he eschewed commercialism, performed at a lot of Hudson River benefit concerts, and aligned his music and philanthropic work with Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. Moreover, Don was a local musician, born in New Rochelle, NY.

A few years ago, when I was selling for Voyage-Air guitars, I had met with Stan Jay, the iconic owner of the famed Mandolin Brothers vintage guitar shop in Staten Island. He counts amongst his clients, Bruce Springsteen, Don McLean, Conan O'Brien, George Benson, and most every famous rock and jazz guitarist in the NY metro area. He said that Don lives in Vermont with his family and visits his guitar shop about once a year and picks out some nice Martin Acoustic Guitars for his sons to buy. He told Jay that the royalty checks from American Pie allows him to do this and for that he is very grateful.

I don't think there is anyone, child, baby boomer or in between who does not know all of the lyrics of American Pie. Most people will also sing along when American Pie is played on the radio. Don wrote a song that is permanently embedded in the psyche of our country and I for one am very grateful for American Pie. It's been a helluva year. Any music that makes it a little easier for me to reflect and to count my blessings is a welcome gift so to Don McLean a big thank you is in order.

"So bye bye Miss American Pie drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye singin' this'll be the day that I die
this'll be the day that I die, they were singin' bye bye Miss American Pie drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee but the levee was dry, them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye singin' this'll be the day that I die."

Reflections on 2011 - Happy Holidays to All

Holiday greetings to all of my Blog readers and followers. After accumulating some 43,000 cumulative hits, I would like to personally thank everyone for taking the time to read my Blog and also for making valuable comments, technical advice and providing excellent insightful feedback on my articles and posts.

To my international Blog readers a heart felt thank you for reading my Blog. I am amazed at how many readers I have in countries around the world. I feel like an author who has a following outside of the United States and am grateful for all of the attention it has attracted to date.

Here are my reflections on 2011:
I think it's pretty obvious that 2011 was the year of the Tablet computer as Apple's iPad 2 along with the Android gang of Tablets from (Samsung, Acer, Asus, Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo, to name a few) found their way into consumers hands at an ever increasing pace. Coinciding with the Tablet's meteoric rise in sales and overall acceptance by the buying public is the rapid decline of Netbooks which were rapidly removed from store shelves and warehouses to make room for all of the new Tablets.

Steve Jobs passed away and one of the truly great leaders of the PC computing community left his indelible mark on personal and business computing by way of all of the great Apple products brought to market under his guidance and stewardship. The one take-away that resonated with me the most was Steve's regret that he did not have enough time to spend with his family as he was battling cancer to the very end. We can all learn from Steve's work ethic, his vision, the zen-like focus he had on changing the way we make and use computers and demonstrating consistently great leadership in all of the companies he was involved with. He will be missed and his legacy lives on through the continued success and acceptance of all products with the Apple logo.

It was a very tough year economy wise and a lot of small businesses struggled to keep their businesses solvent. I want to take a moment to recognize these unsung heroes of US Business who have been the backbone of our economy year after year without getting much if any help from our government. If you are a small business owner you have my greatest respect in adapting to a down economy and having the fortitude and stamina to tough it out during this extraordinarily tough business climate.

I think the country is doing a better job in reducing our overall energy consumption by purchasing cars that get better mileage and hybrid/electric/diesel cars, installing solar panels, replacing older appliances with Energy Star efficient ones and changing their incandescent bulbs to fluorescent and LED light bulbs. We still have a long way to go in reducing our dependence on foreign oil but I believe the tide is turning in favor of those who want to see us become totally energy self-sufficient. Research continues on safe alternate ways of generating electricity and we need to keep the pressure up on our law makers to continue to spend money on alternate methods of energy production.

Reality TV shows dominated the airwaves this past year and the dumbing down of TV content has reached new lows. I think that the networks have really given up on creating decent programs and content for network television and have also gotten extremely lazy by resorting to Reality TV drivel that is cheap to produce but gets astronomical ratings and sells tons of Ad time. It really insults our intelligence to have this drivel on network television as it continues to dumb down the TV audience. Do we really need more Reality TV shows? I don't think so.

Consumers figured out how to use coupons to their advantage and value shopping became popular as Black Friday approached. Consumers are much more savvy shoppers now and are looking for the best possible deals they can find. They are educating them-selves by researching products on the internet and by reading Consumer's Reports. Money is being spent on high quality items that out-perform their competition and mor folks are fixing rather than replacing higher cost items, such as appliances, electronics and automobiles.

All of us are adapting to the changing times. Most of us can remember the good and the bad economic times we have gone through. We are all wary of scammers and criminals like Bernard Madoff and I think 2011 sobered up a lot of folks with lessons learned from Computer Security Breaches, Hacker Attacks and Identity Thefts.

Here are my predictions for 2012:
The economy will improve somewhat and I think real estate will show some signs of life on both the buying and selling side.

A fire-sale on Netbooks will occur shortly after the 1st of the year. They have to write those suckers down and get them off the books before it impacts the 2nd and third quarter profits.

Amazon will become the dominant eBook and entry level Tablet sales leader by the end of second quarter of 2012. Their cloud computing content delivery model will pick up steam and they will sell a ton of movies through their Amazon Fire Tablet platform.

The Post Office will begin to shut down as half of their service offerings will be shut down to conserve costs and to help stop the hemorrhaging of red ink. Fed-Ex and UPS will step in the fray to provide the services the Post Office was providing but at different price structures. I think letter and junk mail will eventually be phased out. Email and Spam have put the nails in the coffin for the USPS to profitably deliver these items.

I think Fred Smith and the top management at UPS already have a doomsday plan in place that they are ready to implement once the Post Office makes the next round of severe service cutbacks, office closing and lay-offs.

Channels that offer luxury items at a steep discount will continue to prosper and grow. paying full price is something that is reserved for only the richest sheiks these days and even they are looking for ways to save money.

More models of diesel automobiles will be announced and begin their first shipments into the US markets in 2012. Look for the first diesel cars from Mazda and Subaru with more models being announced from Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen.

That's about it for 2012 predictions. Let's see if these predictions were even close in a years time when I will be writing the Reflections on 2012 and predictions for 2013 Blog Entry next year.

Have a happy and safe holiday.

Wes

Samsung Series 3 11.6" Princeton Notebook $349.00 STAPLES Deal

12/18/2012 UPDATE
The Staples Ad for the week of 12/18-12/24/2011 just went live on their web site and sure enough, the Samsung  Series 3 11.6" Princeton Notebook with the Intel Core i3 Processor, 4 GB of memory and the 320GB Hard Drive is on sale for $349.99 WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!!!!!!

HERE'S THE LINK:

http://weeklyad.staples.com/staples/default.aspx?action=entryflash&adref=staples_right_hand_nav%20&icid=HP:HP:WEKLY_AD:WEKLY_:NULL::

This is a super deal and if you don't pick one up, you will miss out on the deal of the year. THis notebook offers much more bang for the buck than the Mac Book Air. At $349.99 it blows the mac Book 11 inch notebook into the weeds!!!!

Looks like Staples is blowing out the Samsung Series 3 11.6" Princeton Core i3 Notebook again and the alert is for next week (week of December 19-23rd). If you trade-in a qualifying used notebook you can get the price down to an incredible $249.00 by way of a $100.00 Visa Gift Card. The normal price at Staples is $599.00.

Thanks to TTRAN88 for posting this tip:

Here is the link to the tip:

http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3712108

Amazon - Cloud Computing Colossus Has Arrived

I have been following Amazon ever since the company was formed some 15 years ago. In their very early years, their initial goal was to build a company that could deliver books to the masses in a very cost effective but profitable way. They took a lot of criticism at first spending millions and millions of dollars building out their computer infrastructure to handle the order fulfillment and advanced supply chain mechanism that has served them so well over the years. They re-invested virtually every dollar they earned into building a data center and network infrastructure that could easily handle their current and future (10 years down the road) computing and network requirements. I remember many Wall Street analysts chastising and publicly criticizing the delay of profitability when Jeff Bezos stuck to his guns and continued to heavily invest in technology and computing infrastructure. Well today, Amazon sits atop the heap of computing companies that has the best cloud computing services and is the go-to leading edge company for outsourcing IT, web hosting, order fulfillment and now platform media services. Amazon counts amongst its current Cloud Computing Services Customers: NASA, Foursquare, PBS, Harvard Medical School, Yelp, Newsweek, Netflix, Virgin Atlantic, and Newsweek. With the impending shipments of the new Amazon Kindle E-Book Readers and the revolutionary new $199.00 Fire Tablets, Amazon is poised to make a ton of money streaming video content and delivering e-books through the cloud faster than any other company that offers those services. They have figured out how to build a tablet that offers users almost 80-90% of the functionality of an Apple iPad with half of the memory required (8 GB vs 16 GB) while offering faster performance as the readers and tablets have been optimized (read perform much faster) to work with Amazon Cloud computing services. Their razor and razor blade model is brilliant and although seems to have lower profit margins, the pricing scheme and volume of users that will buy the Kindle and Fire will more than make up for it. This is a huge wager Bezos is making and believe me, he has pulled out all the stops in stacking the cards in Amazon's favor to win this bet. Apple is taking the totally opposite approach where 90% of their profits come from selling expensive Mac hardware platrforms, both mobile and desktops. Only 8% of their profits come from iTunes. Amazon will sell millions of their Fire tablets with only 8 GB of memory on board and the user will experience faster streaming and performance as each Amazon Fire will be hardware and software optimized to take advantage of the super fast Amazon Cloud computing engine. They came up with a hybrid Android based browser where half of the browser code resides on the Amazon Fire Tablet and the other half is embedded in the Amazon Cloud Computing Services. Since movies will be streamed, there is no need to store the movies on your Amazon Fire Tablet. With iTunes, you download the movie to your local hard drive and that requires a much larger storage capacity. Bezos claims that the Amazon Fire Tablet will easily outperform other computing devices with traditional client based browsers found on Mac, Windows and Linux PCs with traditional operating systems. This is no small feat and in some ways represents the holy grail of distributed computing. For a company like Amazon to pull this off with a pricing and business profit model that makes most software companies envious Bezos and his engineering team is to be congratulated for executing this plan in such a short time span. I really think that Amazon has paved the way for media distribution model that works for all economic classes and delivers affordability and computing functionality to the masses.

Amazon is the tech company to watch as it is really focused on doing things differently and changing the way media content can be sold and delivered over the internet. It is also bringing tablet computing to the masses with a full function Tablet that retails for less than $199.00 which is pretty amazing. The overall impact on the consumer and business computer markets will be positive as an entirely new level of price performance will be introduced into the marketplace and will drive down hardware and software costs once people figure out how great Amazon's streaming delivery service works. It will also add additional validation proof and competitive differentiation for Amazons Cloud computing service as they can point to the fact that millions upon millions of users are streaming high definition videos to their tablets

If you want to read the detail on how Bezos achieved what amounts to total domination of streamed and e-book content delivery please read the excellent cover article just published in the January 2012 issue of Wired Magazine written by Steven Levy; Amazon Owns The Internet "Jeff Bezos Started With Books. Now His Company Dominates The Web in More Ways Than You Think".

Anyone who thinks that US companies today lack vision or innovation are dead wrong. Amazon is just one example of thinking out of the box and coming up with a way to deliver innovation and services using a whole new paradigm that is not only insanely efficient and cost-effective, but brings some of the latest and greatest computer technology to the masses who previously could not afford it.