Preliminary walk-through / Hot tub installation.

Last week I had the preliminary walk-through with a tech for the solar installation. My house is a bit non-standard so we had to come up with solutions to some problems. One of them is that there isn't really a good place for the inverter in my house, so it's going outside on the west wall where it will be shaded by the elm tree. Thats fine, I'll be attaching some sort of monitor to it at some point, or just plugging a cat5 cable in there and getting the data directly and publishing it on my web page. Other than that everything looked fine with the install and the tech was a nice easy going person. Installation will start after I get back from my trip to LA/Tucson/Phoenix so that should be tons of fun.

Another project I've got going right now is trying to get a hot tub installed. That one is costing me great wadges of money I didn't expect. I'm putting the hot tub in my shed and so I got a structural engineer to come out and make sure it was strong enough (it's built very strong). Turns out it's not, so he drew up some plans and I got them approved by the city. Problem is now the contractor I had come out to take a look hasn't responded with a quote to do the work. I need the quote so that I can get the permit, and I need the work to get done relatively soon as the hot tub may be here any day now. It was supposed to take 4-6 weeks or 6-8 weeks and we're at week 5 since I bought it.

While all that was going on I was trying to come up with a solution for the floor/walls to keep water from rotting the wood and getting into the basement of the shed. When I say shed, what I really mean is a 20'x20' workshop with a full attic and a 4' tall carpeted basement with shelves and lights in it. More of an artists cottage/workshop/whatever. Anyway...I talked with Adam several times about the thing and finally got a friend who is a contractor to come over and take a look and it turns out he's a flooring guy, so this is his specialty. So he's going to tile the entire corner and put waterproof plastic sheets on the walls for me. I've got that quote and agreed to it so now it's just a matter of him getting the time to do it. That has to be done before the hot tub can be delivered, so hopefully that'll work out. Then if it has to, the hot tub can sit there on the tile until the structural part is done. I can't fill the hot tub until the structural support is in. Then once all that is done, I get Donna to come over and hook up the power, the guy from the hot tub store to come over and give me a quick lesson on how it works, and I'm SET!

I just gotta figure out how I'm going to pay for all the incidental stuff. Ugh. Here's hoping my reclassification at work goes through.

Woohoo!

I just signed and paid for the start of my solar installation. Current projected install start is mid-September, and will take about a week. I'm so looking forward to this and the hot tub. I'm having short powerful panic attacks about the amount of money I've spent in the last month. Good god.

So I'm getting an 8.4kwh system made up of 40 Sanyo 210 panels. It should produce far more power than I use on a daily basis. I'll start researching some storage units and eventually add them assuming it is legal for me to do so with the agreement I'll have to make with Xcel. The total install cost is going to be just short of $24,000. I'll be keeping very close track of all the expenditures so I can do reports on how it's paying off.

Amazing!

http://solardenver.1bog.org/
This site is likely going to allow me to get my solar installed a year sooner than I expected. It's a group of Denver people who are interested in solar and have bargained for better prices.

I am in a webcomic today!

http://www.chrisyates.net/reprographics/index.php?page=863

Zilla and I went up to Boulder today to the Boulder Creek Festival specifically to see Chris Yates who makes really awesome art and has a great webcomic. When we were about 30' from the tent it started to just pour down rain, but we had a great conversation with Chris Yates, Mensa the Menacer, and The Starer. I bought a Baffler which is entirely too cool, and 5 of the awesome Ghosts that Chris makes. And then they took some pictures and put me in the comic! Zilla is in there too, but she's trying to hide. Chris is a really nice guy and his art and webcomic are awesome. You should go see it!

Solar power - 6 months on.

6 Months On is an article up on Slashdot about someone that installed solar power on their house in Northern California and some statistics about how the power generation is working for them at the 6 month point.

I'm back to trying to get the money together to get solar installed...Here's hoping it works.

Vote!

Get out there and vote! It's a very important part of the function of our government and maybe if more people voted regularly we could force some repercussions on politicians who do the wrong things.

64 bit flash plugin for firefox 3

I have had a ton of trouble getting the flash plugin to work for 64 bit firefox 3. I'm using opensuse 10.3.

It turns out the trick is that nspluginwrapper only works on the actual library, not the link to the library. Most instructions I've seen on the net point to running
nspluginwrapper -i /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
but that didn't work. It either gave no output or it said something about it not being a valid NPAPI library or something.

The finally solution for me was this:
# nspluginwrapper --verbose --install /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
Install plugin /usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so
into /usr/lib64/browser-plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so

Restarted firefox and it worked perfectly.