4 posts tagged “water”
But that's a good thing :) It was only down to about 58 in the house, not that bad. I couldn't even tell while I was still under the covers.
Every April, I begin turning my oil burner off at night and then back on in the morning. It would work the same with a water heater, but the savings wouldn't be as great. As a matter of fact, you can get a timer for your hot water heater to turn it on at a certain time in the morning and back off again, and then back on at a certain time in the evening, like when you get home from work.
From April to September, I use less than 50 gallons of oil. So this year, with prices the way they are, I should save around $700. It saves a lot in electricity too, and the savings would be a lot greater for those with electric hot water heaters.
My oil burner heats the house and heats our water, which means it cycles on and off while it's on. I turn it off after doing the dishes at night or after the last shower. In the morning, I turn the oil burner on and turn up the thermostat to 65 to take the chill off the house. It was a bit of a shock this morning when I washed my hands in ice cold water, but it was only about 10 minutes before the water heated up. Once the weather hits 80 degrees and higher, I don't bother to turn it on at all.
It's a little thing to do with a big payoff.
Free speech is okay, as long as it isn't against Bush.
"Joshua Kinberg's internet-connected, sidewalk-printing graffiti bike got him a lot of attention ahead of the 2004 Republican National Convention; he was Boing Boinged, Slashdotted and featured on CNN and in Popular Science.
Though he didn't know it at the time, his gadget also landed him a spot in secret files being compiled by the New York Police Department's intelligence arm against protest groups across the country.
"The existence of these files show that there was a premeditated desire to prevent my project and arrest me to avoid having embarrassing messages on the streets during the convention," Kinberg said.
Kinberg's invention was a bicycle equipped with a line of spray cans pointed at the ground, and activated by individual computer-controlled solenoids. If all had gone according to plan, Kinberg would have ridden the bicycle around the streets of New York during the RNC, while users submitted messages through his Bikes Against Bush website. The messages would have been relayed to his laptop through a cell phone, then sprayed on the sidewalk behind him in a dot-matrix of water-soluble chalk.
But the New York Police Department had a different idea.
Though they'd never seen him use the bike, the police arrested Kinberg on criminal mischief charges prior to the convention start, during an interview on Broadway Avenue with MSNBC's Ron Reagan. The arrest took place on a spot where, two days earlier, Kinberg had printed out the water-soluble message, "America is a free speech zone" during an interview with MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann.
Kinberg shows off his invention, a chalk-writing bicycle.
During his 24 hours in lockup, his bike was inspected and praised by bomb-squad technicians, while detectives traded Polaroids of his creation and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force questioned whether he knew violent protesters. Kinberg's charges were later dropped, on the condition he not get arrested again for six months.
It wasn't until December of last year that Kinberg learned his arrest was less spontaneous than it appeared.
He received a phone call from Gideon Oliver, an attorney enmeshed in a series of suits against the NYPD challenging the department's mass arrests, fingerprinting policies and detention conditions. Oliver revealed that Kinberg had been one of many targets of the NYPD's "RNC Intelligence Squad," which had been traveling around the country infiltrating progressive groups and building secret files on potential rabble-rousers ahead of the convention."
