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Hey! Look! It's somebody complaining on the Internet!

Dear People that Love The Environment:

I am tired of seeing your hemp or canvas bags with the "recycle logo" printed on the side sitting at your desks next to your half empty cup of Starbuck's Coffee, your half empty and abandoned plastic bottle of water, and your space heater cranking out the BTUs while you sit in your T-Shirt and complaining about how cold the office is.

That is all.

I live approximately an hour outside of Fairfield, California. I have just taken a position located in Redwood Shores. I accept that I am likely going to have to rent a room, or a motel, or some other closet-away-from-home arrangement, but I wanted to make certain that the commute was intolerable first. My results with notes:

I live off the electric grid. I get the bulk of my electricity from solar and store it in batteries. I also rely on a diesel generator to fill in the gaps when the solar can't fill the load or the batteries are being finicky. What I have learned about diesel generators in the six years I've been here is that they're loud, they need maintenance, they're heavy, and they're hard to move.

The great thing about being unemployed is the time off. Time to do projects. Time to get outside. Time to just enjoy ... well ... time. Of course the flip side of that is that you're also broke, or at least on a budget. So you can't afford to take that trip to Europe, or that fancy new iGadget, etc. So of course that makes it so much more galling when things break.

Off the top of my head these are the unexpected problems that have come up this year:

Radiator ($800+)
Grundfos well pump ($850)
1500 AmpHour deep-cycle batteries at 24v (~$7000+)
Generator controller (~$100-500)

I'm here. What the hell. I might as well "live blog."

• Intro stuff - no amount of trance music will make a slideshow seem more interesting.
• Animated intro - A 3D rendering of a guy running through stacks of organized data and hardware. Eventually everything explodes. I'm not positive this is the message they mean to convey.
• Mark Hurd takes the stage. How is it possible he resigned in disgrace from HP and, three weeks later, is opening the Oracle keynote? It's against all that's right in the world.