Interests of Interest

Local Harvest February 1, 2010

While it’s quite late in the season – in fact, the season is long over now, we just harvested our last crop of the season – Loofa!  Actually, we harvested it much earlier – back in August when we noticed a few huge cucumber-like vegetables growing along our garden fence.  Since we lost the identification tags, we didn’t know what they were.  In fact, we assumed that because the tags were lost that the seeds didn’t take.  Back to the harvest – when we cut them open, we didn’t know what they were since they were hard on the inside – they didn’t seem edible, nor did they have any strong taste to them.   So, we took them and threw them away into our garden.  Interestingly, just last week we were in the garden looking around and noticed loofa-looking things in there.  check out the pictures (to be added soon).

Also, since learning about the local food movement, we’ve made a lot of progress in creating our own products!  Here’s a list:

• Comb honey from our 5 hives (mostly top-bar style) via 2 Tanzanian TBHs and 3 Langstroth hives.
• Daily egg production from our flock of hens (varies between 6 and 20).  The high variability is due to possums, raccoons, and foxes.
• Organic fruit and vegetable harvests
• Home-brewing dandelion wine in both filtered and unfiltered varieties.

Next year we plan on doing more of the same, expanding the scale and changing a few things.  I want to shift to more traditional frame-based beekeeping to increase our honey yields, make a 5x increase in the dandelion wine production while experimenting with different recipes, grow more loofa, and start growing a few varieties of bamboo both as a privacy fence, but also for construction materials and edible bamboo shoots.

LETS Create the Our Own Weath January 21, 2010

In these days & times we seem to be surrounded by news of company layoffs, stock market tumbles, and continuing economic hardships from a declining economy.   Yet despite all of the bad news surrounding our collective finances, perhaps there can be another way to live our lives in a productive, fulfilling, and satisfying manner which can provide all of the basics that we need, plus some gravy on top of it all…

Consider an alternative, i.e. complementary currencies – a number of systems are presently in existence with members offering a wide range of goods and services that could help you with meeting your daily needs, and making your life easier.  One such system is called the Saint Louis Community Exchange, http://stlcommunityexchange.appspot.com/ founded by David Wechsler.  While talking to various people and hearing about all of the interesting trades that people were doing individually, he pondered the possibility of creating a system where people could trade with each other using an intermediate system that would keep track of credits that people used when bartering with each other.   This would allow more complex trades to take place, i.e. If you want some used sports equipment, and the seller wants a video game system that you do not have, but your friend does – this type of system would help facilitate trades like that, but in a much simpler way than you would expect:

The St. Louis Community Exchange, also called a LETS or Local Energy Trading System, is a world-wide system that encourages members to trade for something generally called ‘Community Credit’, meaning that if you take from the system, you are obligated to give back to the system in some way or form at some point in the future.

If we open our minds to the limitless possibilities of abundance in our lives, then we can see that before our eyes we have options before us that can limit or even remove the discomfort from the ‘economic downturn’ that’s occuring all around us.  By staying positive and offering some of the wonderful skills that you all have to your community, together we can create a vibrant & sustainable complementary economy to keep our lives running with grace and ease.

Smart Grid Re-Education: Part I January 7, 2010

In my search for other employment opportunities, I have decided that I can’t just ride on the heels of my past work experiences at Aclara.  I need to dig my heels in a bit more to get a broader perspective on the industry in general, and step away from the narrow TWACS-based industry viewpoint.  In saying this, I’m not sending a jab to Aclara/DCSI, but rather stating that I am recognizing my need for looking at the bigger picture.  What does smart-grid mean anyway?  In my previous world, it only covered “Field Area Network”, i.e. AMI/AMR in the distribution network.  In the brief amount of time I’ve spent researching the big picture, I see that it’s alot bigger than I expected!

The Smart Grid space can be divided into multiple segments by various domain standards (i.e. protocol standards):

• Enterprise Level – i.e. ebXML, CIM/GID, SOAP/Web Services
• Control Center – CIM, ICCP, DNP3, IEC 61850
• Field Area Network – Proprietary, i.e. TWACS
• Substation -  DNP3, IEC 61850
• Wind Farms – IEC 61400-25
• Consumer – ANSI C12.22, Zigbee, Wifi
• Distributer Resources – IEEE 1547
• Commercial – BACNet, OpenADR

While this is a very technical standards-body based list, for me, it shows all the areas where I need to start looking to learn more.  Presently, my understanding is in the Field Area Network Domain as well as the consumer domain, in my working with ANSI C12.19 and C12.22 in relation to mapping meter data to our transponders and making the data available for use by the master station software.    Here’s an observation:  there are a whole lot of standards at play here!  Wow.  Talk about complex!

Furthermore, I was recently talking to a friend at Cisco who was telling me that there is a big movement going on in their organization to take a leading role in the Smart Grid space.  Now that I see things from a bigger picture with so many different network control systems from the field, to inter-grid control systems, to billing systems, substation automation, not to mention an umbrella of security, I can definitely see how they plan on making inroads into this market space.