This morning, I got out of bed, wandered in the dark to the bathroom, and dragged myself through shaving. As I got in the shower I couldn’t believe how tired I was and wasn’t looking forward to the day. I got out of the shower and headed toward the dresser for some clothes, but something didn’t seem right. When I moved my water glass out of the way of the alarm clock…
What… the… heck…
It was 1:21am.
I normally finish my shower around 6:30, so the fact that I only got two hours of sleep explained the discord. My wife woke up as I expressed my dissatisfaction, and before long the mystery was solved. Apparently, my wife said “Please shut off the TV. You forgot to set the sleep timer.” What I heard was “Get your butt out of bed and get to work.”
Going back to bed was never so refreshing.
If my research is correct, the island in the map below is called “Treasure Island.”
View Larger Map
Treasure Island is an island in Mindemoya Lake. Mindemoya Lake lies on Manitoulin Island. Manitoulin Island is in Lake Huron (one of the Great Lakes). Therefore, Treasure Island is an island in a lake on an island in a lake. It’s not the only one, but it’s one of the largest.
To take things a step further, Vulcan Point is a small island in Crater Lake, which lies on Volcano Island, which is in Lake Taal, which is on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Therefore, Vulcan Point is an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.
View Larger Map
I don’t know why I find this stuff so interesting…
Since it’s much cheaper to write about a previous project than to undertake a new one, I finally got around to posting details about the playhouse I built last summer. Take a look at the Playhouse page.
A couple of weeks ago, my parents were kind enough to give me a new “netbook.” It’s an Asus EEE PC 1000HE, which is a 10 inch laptop. Here it is next to my regular laptop:
It runs Windows XP and has a 160GB hard drive and 1GB of memory. The keyboard is smaller than a regular laptop, but it didn’t take long to adapt. I’ve run some benchmarks, and it’s definitely “slower” than my full-size laptop, but in practice, I haven’t noticed any difference for general web browsing, etc. Even though portability wasn’t a major goal, I’m quite happy with my choice due to one particular feature: the 8-9 hour battery life.
There are tons of reviews out there, so there’s not a lot of point in repeating what they all say. One thing I can add is my electricity usage measurements. Using my trusty kill-a-watt, I took the following readings:
- idle, power save mode: 10 watts
- idle, super performance mode: 11 watts
- idle, screen off: 9 watts
- playing DVD video: 14 watts
- standby: 1 watt
For comparison, my full-size laptop, a Dell Inspiron 6000, uses 22 watts when idle. My netbook uses less than half of that. I imagine that might just contribute to the excellent battery life!
For all more power measurements, see my Electricity Usage Measurements page.
False start
RSS feeds available for 