Marc's Public Blog

Most of the time was spent on the aggressor diving, but we also visited things around Belize a little bit.

Here is the GPS track of our trip including the dives and flights, showing a good visual overview of the trip:

Nice view over Miami

Belize City

Belize is where cars go to die, they're stripped for parts and left where they were

want fruit?

Cave Tubing

nice caves

fruit and insect bats

Lamanai Mayan Ruins

Those were a bit farther and included a 1h boat ride down a river to a place where driving would have likely taken longer. The boat ride was actually pretty fun, including the monkey visit, and the ruins that are only very partially excavated due to lack of funds, were pretty impressive (the guide also did a good job of describing the Mayan culture and history). The mosquitoes in the forest were however very numerous and fierce...

natural glue

Diving off the Belize Aggressor III

keeping track of where we went and our dive sites (used to make the map above)

It was gatesfest where we got to try Gates housings and equipment

Between the dives, we got to visit Half Moon Caye, which was a nice little excursion:

juicy hermit crabs there too

But back to diving: Belize was not the best place we've been to so far, but it was still enjoyable to dive and the water was a nice 29C. They did have very juicy sizeable lobsters and crabs though :)

lionfish are pest with no predators there

juicy crab

nicely sized groupers

very juicy lobsters :)

we got to try DPVs

that turtle was very bright, it went straight into those weeds

the famous blue hole

stalactites in the blue hole

cleaning shrimp

nice eagle rays

did I mention lobster? :)

gates equipment at work

All good things...

offsite location in Soquel was quite nice

Long story short, it was time well spent and it was quite nice to work with coworkers from all over the company and learn about other sides I've never heard of.

13 days without any DUIs, good job guys!

in class

After several hours of ground review and classes, we went into the actual chamber where they lean the air to 25,000ft (that was after 30mn of breathing pure O2 to prevent decompression sickness).

getting ready

I actually felt ok, but didn't look so fresh on some pictures :)

that was after about 5mn at 25,000ft without any oxygen

The time was interesting, but too short. I obviously seemed to be suffering from the lack of air a little bit, but didn't feel I was doing too badly. I'm still curious how far I was from passing out or being able to turn my own O2 back on.

On the way back, we got to see some U2 flying patterns:

and a few shots from the flight back:

Sure enough Schartzy was there as part of a green talk:

He actually didn't say much and skillfully avoided answering any questions, I guess he was just there as a figurehead...

What's wrong with the brand one and its CTs is:

Anyway, despite its flaws and confirmed incorrect measurements that are off by more than 2% and not in a consistent fashion (I tried to derive an error per day or kwh, but it was all over the map, from 2kwh short per day to overcounting during the winter. I think part of the problem is that the CTs are too big and pick up too much noise in the case of the solar panel probe.

Anyway, the PV system had its own counter and reported 8566Kwh for that period of time while the powermeter measured 8260Kwh (a bit over 5% off).

This graph and the graphs below are selected in zoom mode, so you can use the mouse cursor to draw a rectangle on a time region and the graph will refresh on the time slice you selected. Note that you can also zoom out by clicking the graph with the right button:

House Power without AC, you can guess which day was our wedding day :)

House Power

AC doesn't look like much, but it still comes in handy 6 months a year:

Photovoltaic production looks pretty good, even during the better winter days:

Also, the daily production start and end (hour the sun starts hitting the panels and when it sets past the roof while the end hour can be a bit early because of trees on the west of our roof). Note the one hour jump on Nov 1st and March 6th because of the daily savings change:

And the interesting part is the PG&E Meter. 0.25Kwh average is 2170Kwh/year, but due to time of use our bill is actually slightly negative:

Anyway, even if the scientist in me is quite bothered by the inaccuracy of the Brand One Powermeter (the data being over 5% off is just no good), it's still good enough for nice trend graphs and seeing the results one year later.

Conan came to google on his way to some local shows. He talked to us for a while and did quite a good job being entertaining and answering questions.

Here is the video:

After having watched his interview on 60 minutes, it sounds like he just kind of lost out. No one was really after him, but things just didn't work out for him on TV. Best of luck on his new career as a standup comedian for now.