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The Bad & The Good
Jan. 8th, 2010 05:01 pmThe Bad is PG&E, today's Crappy Company. Many folks in California have heard about their new SmartMeter program which triples your electric bill when it's installed. OK, that's just what a class-action lawsuit in Bakersfield is contending, and I'm going to try not to be a luddite about it. But in case, they're rolling the program out over California.
How do I know this? Because this morning I hear someone banging around in our front yard, and I went out to ask him who he was and what he was doing, and he explained that he was installing a SmartMeter for PG&E. I did demand to see his credentials here, a little unfriendily, since PG&E hadn't bothered to tell us this. They looked ok. And then he said, "Anyway, I was just about to cut the power and swap the meter over."
That's right, the idiot was about to cut my power with no notice at all from PG&E that we should be expecting this sort of thing, and especially no notice today. He was about to purposefully cut my power in a world full of electronic devices, many of which don't deal well with sudden outages. So I told him he had to wait while I shut down all the computers, and he politely did, even though it takes quite a well for my Mac running full-out to get shut down.
But, I mean, really, who thinks that's a good idea? When I used to work for NASA, we could pretty much depend on every power outage knocking 1 of our 100 Sun workstations out. Now maybe electronic devices have gotten better in the 15 years since, but those Suns were top of the line at the time. And if that 1% ratio does still hold, then PG&E is going to be killing 1 computer for every 50-200 SmartMeters they install (depending on running computers per household in this area, but I expect it somewhere above 1, average).
I don't even want to think of people running something really important, like, say, life support at home.
And now we're going to have to watch our bills carefully to see if there appears to be anything to the class-action law suit against PG&E over these SmartMeters.
The Good. Took Cobweb briefly by the vet today to get weighed. She's now at 9.5#, up from 8.2#. We thought she'd been doing better since 3 or 4 months ago when she looked about ready to die, and, sure enough. Wow.
The good news is a lot better than the bad, though I wrote of it less.
How do I know this? Because this morning I hear someone banging around in our front yard, and I went out to ask him who he was and what he was doing, and he explained that he was installing a SmartMeter for PG&E. I did demand to see his credentials here, a little unfriendily, since PG&E hadn't bothered to tell us this. They looked ok. And then he said, "Anyway, I was just about to cut the power and swap the meter over."
That's right, the idiot was about to cut my power with no notice at all from PG&E that we should be expecting this sort of thing, and especially no notice today. He was about to purposefully cut my power in a world full of electronic devices, many of which don't deal well with sudden outages. So I told him he had to wait while I shut down all the computers, and he politely did, even though it takes quite a well for my Mac running full-out to get shut down.
But, I mean, really, who thinks that's a good idea? When I used to work for NASA, we could pretty much depend on every power outage knocking 1 of our 100 Sun workstations out. Now maybe electronic devices have gotten better in the 15 years since, but those Suns were top of the line at the time. And if that 1% ratio does still hold, then PG&E is going to be killing 1 computer for every 50-200 SmartMeters they install (depending on running computers per household in this area, but I expect it somewhere above 1, average).
I don't even want to think of people running something really important, like, say, life support at home.
And now we're going to have to watch our bills carefully to see if there appears to be anything to the class-action law suit against PG&E over these SmartMeters.
The Good. Took Cobweb briefly by the vet today to get weighed. She's now at 9.5#, up from 8.2#. We thought she'd been doing better since 3 or 4 months ago when she looked about ready to die, and, sure enough. Wow.
The good news is a lot better than the bad, though I wrote of it less.