Marc's Public Blog - All Items

π 2012-07-30 01:01 in Solar

I had been doing a better job in the past on cleaning our solar panels last years and I got a bit lazy this year. That was stupid, they had a layer for dust pigeon poop, and other crap.
It took an hour with water hoses, a broom, and dishwasher liquid, but the effort was worth it.

I only have a week's worth of data and it's weather dependent, but the peak production number averaged over a week went from 4542 Watts to 4964 Watts, and the daily production went from 30.3Kwh/day to 34.9Kwh/day.
That may have been 300Kwh to 500Kwh that have been lost due to dirty panels.

Moral of the story: don't be lazy :)

π 2012-07-21 01:01 in Public

Jennifer's company had a picnic in San Jose History Park, and we had never gone there before. Turns out it's a nice little park with buildings left from how they were 100 years ago or so.

It was a nice little afternoon, worth the trip.

Yum, death by sugar :)

Nice picture of the south bay before and after the silicon age

π 2012-07-14 01:01 in Outings

Jennifer and I enjoy art festivals, it's a good place to get fancy sented soap, and even if we're not the kind of folks to buy a lot of random art, it's still nice to look at.
This time we went to the nearby Los Altos one:

See more images for Los Altos Art Festival

π 2012-07-07 01:01 in Exercising

Jennifer is getting ankle surgery soon, so we went for a nice bike ride around the bay. We went towards baylands through different trails, and I used a new trail I found that went around the Moffett runway, linking back to the Steven's Creek Trail we took home.

We saw many ducks and birds, a nice sunset, and got home a bit later than sunset :)

everything was great, except having the trail end at a fence, and supposedly being forced to backtrack a long distance to get to the other side of said fence...

we were running a bit late, but got a nice sunset over shoreline

π 2012-07-05 01:01 in Cars, Ncars

Since we had July 5th off, we went out for a nice drive.

We eventually arrived in Pescadero for a late lunch:

I went by the ocean before going home since we were so close

It was a good time, thanks to all who joined.

π 2012-07-01 01:01 in Flying, Nflying

Since I was in Vegas one night on the way back from a Fly Out Group Trip to Colorado, so I signed up for a dogfighting flight in Extras 330 followed by acro at Sky Combat Ace in Henderson.

It was not cheap, but fun :)

my opponent and our respective acro CFIs to keep us safe

yeah, my gopro looks silly, but it got better video than their onboard camera

The dogfighting was definitely hard and fun, and the acro done by the master instructor behind me was a workout to say the least. I was able to withstand it, but only barely at the end :)

Their edited video:

And mine from my gopro:

Clearly, it seems that we didn't fly very straight, imagine that :)

Good times.