Marc's Public Blog

we didn't quite make it across i80 before it closed for accidents and cleaning

we almost made it to the chalet, except the snow was too heavy and too wet

digging out didn't work, we could only go down with gravity

We never made it to the chalet, we had to drive back down and abandon the car in a parking lot. Thankfully Karl had a bigger truck with huge tires and was able to drive up there and take us too. Thankfully we found his car in the parking lot the next morning before it got towed:

Next morning wasn't bad. Most resort reported 3ft of fresh snow, or 4ft if you have a "Heavenly ruler".

neighbour clearing the road so that we could get out of the driveway

The next morning, I made the call that Alpine Meadows would likely not be as busy and bad as Squaw. So, we learned one good thing to know: *DO NOT EVER GO TO ALPINE ON A POWDER DAY*. Alpine will close their own access road to the resort for 1.5 to 2H for avalanche control, preventing you from getting to the resort, unless you got in by 07:30.
We eventually got to the lifts by 10:00, but that's pretty pathetic and a lot of good snow had already been tracked by then:

it was St Patrick's day

ridiculous line at Scott Chair

line to hike to the Sherwood back side when it opened.

Arturo hit a branch :)

So, how was Alpine? It wasn't bad obviously, it's difficult for any place to be bad in those conditions, unless they're so low that the snow is rain. The access road closure was pretty pathetic, especially when it's a re-occuring condition, the lifts were actually fairly crowded, and it was hard to find good runs of pristine powder as it got tracked out much quicker than I was hoping for.

That evening, we enjoyed the Chalet that Karl had found for us. It was a nice place.

snow angel

nice dinner

The next morning, I made the better call to go to Northstar. Turns out it actually plenty of untracked snow, more than we had the previous day at Alpine. We went for the backside right away, and then did lookout mountain in the afternoon. They were both quite good.

Northstar was actually a great day, and we ended around 15:00 after Karl had a (hopefully) minor injury that ended the day, but the rest of us were pretty skied out anyway.

This brings us to the drive home, and how Caltrans and CHP seem to handle Tahoe roads. Roads weren't that bad, but it only take a few drivers to screw it up for everyone else:

road wasn't that bad when we left, this was close to the pass.

Before long, traffic was held on i80, and then it got closed, and we got stuck on 80 for over 4 hours until traffic moved again:

so much for leaving early and getting out of the snowline in daylight...

Long story short, I wasn't impressed with Caltrans/CHP for apparently not doing enough to slow traffic down, yielding to a few unavoidable accidents and spinouts, and then closing it down for over 4H with a lot of people trapped on it (quite bad, because people run out of gas, or cars ice up when they get stopped).
Caltrans, can't you just plow the road and block it at the same time by having plows go down at 20mph or so, forcing cars to go on a freshly plowed road at low speed? I'm dismayed that they look like they almost let accidents happen and then deal with the much harder job of cleaning it up and dealing with stranded people on the road, and a road that isn't being self cleaned by warm cars and tires.

Took 7.5h to get there, and about 8H to get back. I'm just not impressed, I think they can do better considering that the snow storm was actually not _that_ bad.

I've also made a spreadsheet showing all the numbers I've gathered so far: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AloDTsnSvSs7dHdwS1NzcHJlRF80cVg1NUxzUlFEOFE

I figured I'd use the opportunity to switch to 64bit userland and start clean (everyone says I'm insane for never re-installing linux and keeping year old installs, like my debian servers that I've been upgrading for the last 10 years with no re-installs).

I made a debian bootable USB key with debian testing, and apart from a small UI bug in package selection, the install was pretty effortless.

In a nutshell:

My impressions so far?
It feels good to be with a system that I know will not randomly force crap I don't want, and that I can upgrade piecemeal. That doesn't make gnome less crappy, or network manager less unreliable, but it's debian, I've had 10 years with it, and I know they're the least likely to screw me in the future like canonical effectively has. Oh, the best part is that some of the package maintainers actually look at and respond to their bugs. How about that! :)

Here's to the next 10 years, debian! :)
(one year later: after the initial setup, debian has as expected worked quite well for me. I've been able to upgrade just what I needed when I needed it, and otherwise breakage was pretty much non existent).

For the first year or two, I was happy with ubuntu, maybe all the way up to Gutsy or Hardy. It delivered on what I signed up for. But then, came a quite unfinished upstart, network manager suckage, non working pulseaudio for many releases, and an ever increasing amount of half baked crap.

Ubuntu switched from a better debian to some experimental distribution where shippping known broken stuff was ok, and even pushing experimental known unfinished stuff in an LTS was apparently ok. It became as bad or worse than Fedora Core, except Fedora Core never made a promise to be stable or make rational and generally 'safe' choices.

First, I started writing about it, and contacted several people at canonical to let them know how bad the non gnone non desktop experience was getting (and actually even the gnome/desktop experience was riddled with bugs), and after a few years, I eventually gave up and decided that enough was enough and switched back to debian, which is also what I'm doing at work (their loss, that's *many* machines):

At this point I drew a line in the sand, and decided to switch back from Ubuntu to Debian. Debian doesn't have an agenda of pushing half baked software or disruptive software to its users, and does its very best not to break compatibility, at least needlessly.

So, it made sense to have them for a sunday night dinner :)
Jennifer seared the foie gras, which was quite good with local Sauternes substitute :) and we had the caviar after that, just because :)
(et la porsche et la blonde dans la piscine :) )

Dear PG&E,

I was good, I upgraded my server hardware to be more power efficient (old dual P4 Xeon to I3 2100T lower power CPU), spin down hard drives, and reprogrammed my mythtv to suspend and use virtually no power most of the time. This saved about 200W of 24/7 baseload. As a result, our true up bill went from -$38 for the year, to -$110.
So remind me, why is power not worth more when we have to pay for it than when you have to pay us back? Why are all my efforts to save power ending up with a further negative bill rewarded by a flat out $0 that we get back?

For the casual reader, the longer answer is in PGE Trueing Up Encourages Electricity Wasting. Eventually if I ever manage to save enough power, I might get a few dollars back, and PG&E will pocket about $150 of spread.

PG&E, you're supposed to encourage us to save electricity. Is it really smart to antigonize your greener customers with this unfair system?

Here's what you owe us so far:

.		Kwh used in the year	Dollars Balance
.	2009-2010	1602	-$39.87
.	2010-2011	1209	-$38.8
.	2011-2012	674	-$110.43
.
.	Total Since Install	3485	-$189.1

And here is the full true up bill for 2011-2012:

.	2011-2012	Total (Kwh)	FEB 2012	JAN 2012	DEC 2011	NOV 2011	OCT 2011	SEP 2011	AUG 2011	JUL 2011	JUN 2011	MAY 2011	APR 2011	MAR 2011
.	Summer Peak	-752				-8	-14	-99	-153	-204	-171	-103
.	Summer Part Peak	-622				-1	-100	-125	-130	-103	-114	-49
.	Summer Off Peak	810				69	195	117	125	164	86	54
.	Winter Peak	304	62	59	68	-2						-22	68	71
.	Winter Off Peak	934	217	132	301	112						24	-80	228
.	Total Kwh	674	279	191	369	170	81	-107	-158	-143	-199	-96	-12	299
.	Total $	-$110.43	$29.49	$20.11	$36.95	$14.85	-$1.75	-$35.68	-$50.11	-$55.62	-$62.67	-$34.76	-$0.28	$29.04

And here is 2010-2011:

. 2010-2011 Total (Kwh) FEB 2011 JAN 2011 DEC 2010 NOV 2010 OCT 2010 SEP 2010 AUG 2010 JUL 2010 JUN 2010 MAY 2010 APR 2010 MAR 2010 . Summer Peak -762 0 -19 -124 -186 -156 -174 -103 . Summer Part Peak -572 11 -78 -100 -151 -108 -107 -39 . Summer Off Peak 1047 95 332 199 188 185 47 1 . Winter Peak 354 68 78 78 18 -16 57 71 . Winter Off Peak 1142 113 331 448 163 0 -28 115 . Total Kwh 1209 181 409 526 287 235 -25 -149 -79 -234 -157 29 186 . Total $ -$38.80 $17.89 $39.60 $51.27 $26.68 $11.61 -$34.95 -$62.18 -$32.44 -$44.34 -$26.49 $2.30 $12.25

And here is 2009-2010:

. 2009-2010 Total (Kwh) FEB 2010 JAN 2010 DEC 2009 NOV 2009 OCT 2009 SEP 2009 AUG 2009 JUL 2009 JUN 2009 MAY 2009 APR 2009 MAR 2009 . Summer Peak -725 20 -60 -90 -151 -172 -173 -99 . Summer Part Peak -531 -1 -60 -106 -112 -119 -113 -20 . Summer Off Peak 1240 110 284 165 230 257 138 56 . Winter Peak 301 76 72 77 -1 -9 63 23 . Winter Off Peak 1317 411 442 422 164 25 -163 16 . Total Kwh 1602 487 514 499 292 164 -31 -33 -34 -148 -47 -100 39 . Total $ -$39.87 $32.54 $34.04 $33.45 $20.87 -$1.63 -$19.71 -$8.08 -$45.81 -$55.31 -$25.83 -$8.13 $3.73