If you live in Chicago you have to weather the weather, as it were.  I actually appreciate the variety.  Blizzards, thunderstorms, sweltering days and freezing nights are all par for the course.  Then again, sometimes you go out on your porch and there’s a rainbow.  Take it, Dean!

Months ago I signed up for ComEd’s Residential Real-Time Pricing Program and promptly forgot about it. Then, a few weeks ago I noticed that ComEd somehow managed to install a new digital electric meter in my basement. I have no idea how they got in the building. They must have sent a ninja.

I’m cooler than my neighbors!

A few days later I got an e-mail informing me that I was officially in the real-time pricing program.

Electric companies generally charge people a fixed rate for how much electricity they use. I think it’s currently ¢8.67/kilowatt hour. You get charged that rate at 2 in the morning and at 2 in the afternoon, but the actual cost of electricity changes over the course of a day.

Our power infrastructure must be built to support peak power consumption.  This usually occurs in the middle of the day during the summer when everyone is running air conditioners and office buildings are chugging away.  The more power we consume at this time, the more power plants we need.  During the rest of the day, however, we only use a fraction of our power-generating capacity.

Imagine you share a hot water heater with 100 other people.  If everyone goes to take a shower at the same time, you’d need a huu-u-uge hot water heater to give everyone a warm shower.  If the showers were staggered throughout the day, however, you could get by with one that’s reasonably sized.

The Real-Time Pricing Program uses good old capitalism to encourage people to stagger their showers, figuratively speaking (unless you have an electric hot water heater — then it’s literal.)  Instead of being charged a flat rate for power, the price changes during the day.  It’s cheapest in the early morning and most expensive in the afternoon.  This encourages people to do laundry, wash dishes, and other high-powered tasks at night when electricity is cheaper.  We get lower electric bills and ComEd doesn’t get stressed out that The Grid is overtaxed.  Also, everyone gets popsicles.

The Center For Neighborhood Technology really takes advantage of real-time pricing by freezing ice-balls every night and then using them to cool the building during the day.

How prices fluctuated yesterday

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has an amazing resemblance to Barack “Not The Rock” Obama in both voice and appearance.

Why is it that people who don’t like mayonnaise feel compelled to mention that they don’t like mayonnaise whenever they see someone eating mayonnaise?

I’ve started teaching a programming class to the non-programmers I work with and decided to write up some of the lessons here.  In the last installment, I discussed binary numbers. This time we’ll go a little further and explain how those numbers can be used to describe other things like pictures and words.

Computers are just a bunch of ones and zeros and you now know how those ones and zeros can be used to make numbers. But ones and zeros can be used to represent all sorts of different things, from words to photos to Ricky Martin songs… lots and lots of Ricky Martin songs.

So lets take a look at how binary numbers can be used to represent other data — for example, what you are reading right now.

Text
Perhaps you remember the scene from A Christmas Story where Ralphie finally gets his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, locks himself in the bathroom and begins translating a string of numbers into letters. That is exactly how computers store text as well. Each letter is encoded as a unique number and each number is encoded in binary.

The most obvious way to encode letters as numbers is to set A=1, B=2, and then go through the alphabet until Z=26. This works okay, but what about punctuation, numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters, and this thing: §?

The standard system used to encode characters in computers is called ASCII. Originally it used 7-bits for each character, allowing for 128 unique values. It was then extended to 8 bits, bringing the total to 256. Here is a table showing how letters and other characters are actually encoded in ASCII.

Go ahead and decode this ASCII message:

89-111-117-32-115-109-101-108-108

And just for fun, here’s what it looks like in binary (using 7-bits for each character):

101100111011111110101010000011100111101101110010111011001101100

First one to decode it and post the answer in the comments gets a prize!

Read More »

The soft drink aisle at the supermarket advertises “6 pack NRB soda.”  First of all, why do they call it “soda” instead of “pop?” We’re in Chicago for Pete’s sake! Second of all, what the heck is NRB soda?  The only six packs were these little 8 oz cans.

Shama: It must be “Not Really Big” Soda.

Nancy, one of the engineers on the Guatemala trip, qualified for the “Seniors Ride Free” program offered by the CTA.  Perhaps it’s rude to mention a friend’s age online like this, but I don’t think she’d mind because every time I see her she manages to steer the conversation to free transit, often producing her pass and rubbing it in my face.

One of the nice things about being a student was getting a U-Pass from the CTA that offered me the fun and freedom of being 65 and older, transit-wise.  Unfortunately, that freedom ended in the middle of June and now I’m paying for the train again like a sucker.

If I managed to ride the CTA 1,371 times I could have totally paid my tuition with free fares.  I didn’t.

I work with Arnie, whose blog, “A Year In Pictures of Comedy” is pure genius. I only recently learned that he has a side project as an executive producer on the FOX show “Mystery Cove.” Here’s what he had to say about the third season:

I’d like to remind everyone that the third season of Mystery Cove is currently airing on FOX. We have been told unequivicably by the network that if it doesn’t post better ratings this summer it will be canceled. Steve and I have put a lot of ourselves into this show over the last few years and have fought to use as much Chicago talent as possible at every level of production. I know a great number of you weren’t fans of the second season and have stopped watching the show. But I think as a community, we need to support this show, even those of us who don’t ‘enjoy’ it. As a way of reaching out to our (admittedly smaller) fanbase, Steve and I will be continuing to podcast about the production of the show, answering fan e-mails and teasing upcoming episodes.

I highly recommend the podcast for both fans and non-fans of the show. You can listen to it online or subscribe to it on iTunes. Facebookers can join the show’s Facebook group.

The construction workers constantly jackhammering outside of Jellyvision’s offices finally did it. We heard a particularly loud crash and then all the power in the building went out. This actually happened last year too when a crane knocked down a power line a block away. (Hooray!) I love it when the power goes out. It forces you to change your behavior for a little while and I think that’s nice — especially when your new behavior involves playing Mafia with all your coworkers.

Unlike Celebrity, Mafia has a comprehensive Wikipedia entry written by someone who isn’t me. (Although I was prepared to do it if one didn’t exist. Here’s a fun little experiment: See if you can find something that doesn’t have a Wikipedia page.) If you don’t know how the game works, you can read about it there.

Like last year, Amanda dominated the game. She is the most ruthless murderer I’ve ever met — playing dumb, giggling, spreading rumors — all of it coldly calculated to manipulate us while she quietly kills the entire town.

I had about 3 hours to kill before a 1 AM show at the Horseshoe so Shama and I walked over to the CVS and saw they were selling vegetable plants. Nothing says organic goodness like buying plants in the parking lot of a CVS. But after my bumper crop of asparagus was such a success, it seemed like an expansion of the vegetable garden was in order.

Here’s something I didn’t know: when you buy plants, you don’t just get tomatoes or peppers. They all have names! I picked out a fine looking fellow named “Bradley” as well as another tomato known only as “Beefmaster.” He seems like trouble. I also got something called a “Bush Pickle,” which I hope is a cucumber.

Kelly, who sings Breaking Up with me, sang the national anthem at a White Sox game. She was really nervous about screwing up the words, but as you can see she did just fine:

Oh wait. Not that one. Here she is:

I think she should have gone with “Bunch of bombs in the air.”

My grandma turned 90 this weekend. I never know what to get her. She’s not so big on presents or flowers or even cards. So for her 90th birthday I got her this:

It was by far the most successful present I’ve ever given her. She loved it.

A few weeks ago she let me know just how she felt about my long hair: “You look like that horrible dancing fellow on tv.” She was talking about this guy:

Google Analytics tells me a little bit about the people who come to this site (hello to the two visitors from Vincente Lopez, Argentina, the three people who are using Playstation 3’s browser to get here, and the one dude who got to this site by searching for “good diet for growing a beard”) but I don’t know anything about the rest of you.

So I encourage you to click on the comments link below and say something. Have we ever met? Are you in Chicago? How did you end up at this site? Do you have a website?  Are you over 6 feet tall?  What’s this thing on my foot?

It’s like responding to an Evite except there’s no party and no one cares.

Last night Karen and Gordon invited some folks over to play Celebrity. As their friend Pete was explaining the rules I realized that he was much more succinct and eloquent than I was when I wrote the Wikipedia entry for Celebrity. Yes, that’s right. I’m eFamous.

I went back and looked at it today.  There have been 44 edits since my initial post, but it looks like my description has remained largely intact.  I was especially pleased to see that my example of a fictional character, A.C. Slater, hadn’t been changed.

Some coworkers and I were walking to Subway one day to get lunch when we passed by a horse.

RYAN: Is there anything weird about this?

The horse lives in stables next door to a strip club. Before they changed their name to “VIP’s” (or is it VIPs?) the strip club was called “Crazy Horse Too.”  I wonder if anyone ever got confused and went in the wrong building.