SuperJason’s Personal Blog

We placed an offer on a new house.  Since most of you already know the details, I’ll just attach some photos for those who haven’t seen them.

Nice curb appeal.  Notice the 8ft garage doors.  The garage is over 1000 sq ft! 

The living room, with an amazing fireplace, since it was a showcase home… 

 Built-in desk in one of the bedrooms 

Hickory cabinets and a walk-in pantry.

Built-in desk in the kitchen 

Master bedroom 

Huge “L” shaped walk in closet. 

My electric bill has been skyrocketing.  It’s currently around $90 and I’m dangerously close to passing the $100 mark.  I’ve really started to become conscious about how power my computers are drawing.  I had 3 machines that would run for 24/7.  My desktop machine has a Pentium D processor, which draws 177 watts at idle!  That’s not including the inefficiency of the power supply, or any of the other components.  It’s easily drawing 200-250+ watts when it’s idle.  The same goes for my other 2 servers.

Because of my electric bill, I’ve been disparately trying to figure out how to significantly reduce this bill.  Here is the plan I put into action:

• Set my desktop to sleep if not used for an hour.  This also means I have to shut down the programs that may keep it from going to sleep.  If I need to wake up the machine remotely, I use a wake-on-LAN client.  It sends a “magic packet” to the network card, and wakes the computer up.
• Consolidate the 2 servers into one.  The second server was running cruise control to do continuous builds.  I used the VMware converter to turn the physical machine into a virtual machine.  It now runs on my Ubuntu VMware server.  I can now sell that machine if I want.
• Try not to charge my laptop at home.  I read that charging a laptop can use around 50-80 watts of power.  Obviously if I need to charge it I do, but if I’m somewhere else, I’d prefer to use their power if they’re offering it for free.

I figure just doing this alone will save 66%+ of my power usage from the computers.

I did also look into the following:

• Use laptops - Laptops tend to draw around 15watts at idle.  Unfortunately, no matter how I did the math, it would cost more to purchase the laptops than the money they would save.  If I do need to buy a new computer, I will have to seriously consider this again.
• Get Mac minis or some other low power usage machine - This solution is cheaper than the laptop idea (or maybe about the same), except with more power draw.  The numbers still don’t work.

I never thought I would see an error like this in visual studio:

I’ve been looking for a good way of implementing some “fire and forget it” calls in .NET.  I’ve seen lots of code out there that handles this, but I didn’t like their solutions.  They were prone to breaking when signatures changed.  I want to know at compile time if I have the wrong parameter list.

I want to do insert, update, and delete operations in other threads, so that the user experience is faster for that request.

Ok, here is the code:

private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
     ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem(delegate { SyncDummyMethod(”test”, 4); });
}
private void SyncDummyMethod(string s, int i)
{
     Thread.Sleep(3000);
}

Obviously you’ll want to do some logging if the call fails. You may also want to create your own thread pool depending on what type of work you’re doing.

Lizzy was having some eye issues, so Melissa took her to the vet, and it turned out she had a hair growing into her eye.  Ouch!  Yesterday she went in for eye surgery, and everything went fine (other than the $180 bill).  She’s doing great, and doesn’t have to wear a cone on her head or anything.  We have to give her eye drops twice a day for 10 days, which is pretty easy.

Be sure to pet her when you see her!