One Armed Bandits

Maybe we should rename faucets like the one in the picture “One Armed Bandits.” Think about it. Every time you turn on the faucet to wash off your hands or rinse out a glass before putting it in the dishwasher, you are drawing hot water from your water heater half way across the house. That hot water travels ten or twenty feet or all the way to your faucet and mixes with the cold water because all such faucets are designed so that the arm normally sits in the center, mixing 50% hot and 50% cold water. People don’t even think about just swinging it to the cold water side when they do something quick like washing their hands off. They just lift it straight up.

I just did a quick unscientific test. I washed my hands in the kitchen and measured how much water I used: 2 quarts. That means everytime you wash your hands you waste the energy to heat 1 quart of water. Multiply that by however many million such faucets there are installed in kitchens or bathrooms all over the world, then by the number of times people turn on the water when they don’t need hot water. I’ll leave it to someone else who has the time to convert that to wasted BTUs but it is a whole trainload of wasted energy every day.

The solution to this does not necessarily mean going back to the old style faucet with a hot and cold valves side by side like you commonly see in bathrooms. A better solution that would be more popular is to design a faucet where the most natural way to turn it on is when it is drawing only cold water. Some newer style single hole faucets have two valves, one for the pressure and one for the temperature. Some of them are very awkward, but some are excellent.

I offer this as a whole new episode of “Living With Ed.”

Reincarnation

As you can tell, writing this blog has not been a priority for quite some time. I started it simply as a new mode of expression. It was not intended for a large audience. In fact, I was surprised that I found an audience at all. I was mainly interested in exercising my few remaining brain cells – writing is good exercise. I was also interested in the process of publishing with no particular concern as to who might read my ramblings. I suppose that is the foundation of blogging, just stepping up on a soapbox.

My previous excuse for not posting was lack of time. I felt guilty about letting the blog go untouched, and kept thinking about things to write about. But in January, my youngest daughter died in a sledding accident and my motivation just evaporated. She was 21, ready to graduate from UCLA with many hopes and dreams. She was independent, self-assured, very goal oriented, straight-A student, such a lovely person. It hurts so much to lose a child right when they are all ready to go out into the world. One second you are feeling this sense of accomplishment and pride, then it’s like you are set adrift,

It’s been six months now and the pain has subsided for the most part. It still comes to the surface in a rush occasionally, usually triggered by music. They say music has the power to soothe the savage beast, but it also has the power to evoke intensely painful memories. It’s amazing really. Just a few bars of a certain song can turn you inside out.

A few weeks ago I pulled Amy’s iPod Nano out of a drawer. We got it for her for Christmas but she hadn’t got around to putting any music in it. So I started exploring how it works, how to load music into it. I figured out how to load CDs into iTunes and then how to sync all that music into the iPod. I find iTunes to be very frustrating; slow and not very intuitive.

Although I’m sure no one is interested, I enjoy Andrei Bocelli, Bill Douglas, Sara McLachlan, Norah Jones, Enya, Loreena McKennitt, Diana Krall, R. Carlos Nakai, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Jimmy Buffett, and various country artists when they sing upbeat songs with a good beat.

That’s about it for now. If you were expecting some wry comment about some new technology that may come later. I’m not apologizing for being away for a while, but it does feel good to be writing again.

As far as the title of this post, there are experiences that change you dramatically. It's fascinating really.

TQSFOSYDN

Fool that I am, I have taken my own advice and stolen some time to write a new post to this blog. The subject today is the latest catalog from “The Quintessential Source For Overpriced Stuff You Don’t Need” store. Some call it The Sharper Image.

Every time I look through one of their catalogs, I’m struck with the amazing array of expensive products that replace simple manual devices. Many claim to do things you could easily accomplish without any gadget at all. Admittedly I love gadgets, but I also value simplicity in my life and I don’t like to get ripped off. Balance, right?

For a gadget to make it past my screening system it must be well designed, it must empower me to accomplish something I couldn’t otherwise do or save me time, and it should be priced reasonably for what it does. Since I am cursed with an engineering background, I automatically estimate in my head what the thing might cost to make. If they’re asking 25 times my estimate of the manufacturing cost, I get a bad feeling and usually move on.

In the case of the above mentioned catalog, they clearly go to extreme lengths to boost the perceived value of their gadgets through hype and hyperbole. I guess that’s just part of the whole business model: Overpriced stuff + artificially inflated perceived value = sales.

So, after perusing the catalog, I felt compelled to make a short list of items that in my opinion are either highly overpriced for what they deliver, or fundamentally unnecessary for the modern man or woman.

Panasonic Rechargeable Shaver and extra blades: $325
Mach III razor and extra blades: $20

Professional Electronic Weather Station: $250
Stick you head outside: $0

Cobalt Turbo Nose Hair Trimmer: $50
Nose Hair Scissors: $11

Sonicare Electric Toothbrush & one Refill: $142
6 pack of Oral-B toothbrushes and some floss picks: $11

Soap Genie Electric Soap Dispenser: $40
Neutrogena Liquid Soap Pump Dispenser: $2

Automatic Eyeglass Cleaner Gizmo & extra Solution: $60
Tap water, soap and a box of Kleenex: $2

Deluxe Leather Electric Watch Winder: $130
Your Own Index Finger and Thumb: $0

Total QSFOSYDN purchase: $997
The Simple Life: $46

For those who also get the catalog, you will note that I breezed right past the $500 electric picture frame and the $4000 massage chair.

My advice: Chop wood, carry water and travel light.

Mea Culpa

For those who come here and are disappointed in not seeing anything recently published, my apologies. I guess it is some combination of writer’s block, lack of time, and just plain laziness. In my defense, I am trying to start up a small manufacturing business that has sucked up pretty much all of my time and creative juices, leaving precious little for blogging. I know, sorry excuse but there it is.

I can’t promise that I will be able to allocate more time for posting, but you never know, it could happen. I do indeed get a degree of satisfaction out of making observations about cultural anomalies or prognosticating about the demise of life as we know it, so I will try to set aside more time. At least it's therapeutic for me if not for my readers.

Product Reviews

What do you do when you’re thinking about buying a new car or appliance or some new gadget? Do you jump in the car and spend hours or days going around to various stores and asking salesmen their “honest” opinion about their products? I can’t remember when I stopped doing that – probably shortly after I was able to get on the internet.

Truth is, a big percentage of people now go online to do their product research. We visit several online retailers like Amazon or Buy.com and see what all the competing products are and read the reviews. The reviews are particularly interesting, especially when they are negative or marginal.

But have you ever wondered who writes these reviews? I get this weekly e-mail from a place called DealUnion that lists all the specials and discounts offered by various online retailers and I noticed a line for a Bissell spotcarpet cleaner, which I have thinking about getting (we have cats and dogs!). So I clicked on it and it took me to Amazon and I read the manufacturer’s info and automatically scrolled down to read the reviews.

Now I’ve seen this thing advertised on TV and I’ve got to say, it doesn’t look like a very good idea to me. It’s a stationary cleaning machine that you just plunk down on the stain and turn it on. Assuming that it works, what you get is a nice clean circle about 6-7” in diameter in your carpet. Now this is fine if the rest of your carpet looks like the day you had it installed – probably not the case huh?

The point here is that all the reviews focused on how well the thing worked, all glowing reviews in this case. But no one suggested that you’d probably be better off buying an upright carpet cleaning machine for a little more money so you can clean a wider area, even a whole room. If you have pets and you need a spot cleaner machine, you’re going to end up with this polka dot carpet in no time, kind of like a big version of Twister built right into your carpet. So you’re going to have to rent or buy a big machine anyway!

So I started thinking about who writes these reviews, wondering if it could possibly be people working for Bissell? Surely these companies don’t recruit employees to scour the internet (from home of course so the company domain doesn’t show up) and submit glowing reviews about their products to improve the product score! My gosh, that would be dishonest and manipulative and, and, totally plausible. Damn.

After I started thinking about that, I got kind of bummed. Here I’ve been thinking that the internet was a place I could go for honest opinions from real people. You know, people who had tried a product and could tell me what it was really like – not the regular marketing hype I get from store salesmen. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t such a skeptic. There is something to be said for the “ignorance is bliss” state of mind.