My house is green

Starting this year, 100% of the electricity consumed by my house is coming from renewable sources, via Puget Sound Energy’s Green Power program. I truly believe in renewable energy sources, so I figure I’d be a bit hypocritical if I didn’t use green power myself when PSE makes it so easy. Of course, it does come at a slight premium over that ugly black power that most people settle for: I expect my electricity bill to be around 14% more. That’s reasonable for now, though it might not be too long before fossil fuels surpass that cost anyway. (And I do trust that I’m actually getting what I pay for.)

Curiously, hydro is not included in the list of green power sources. In case you didn’t know, nearly half of everyone’s electricity in this area already comes from hydro. While I would consider hydro to be renewable as long as it keeps raining here, I guess there has been a lot of backlash in recent decades about the environmental impact of damming up rivers.

The only thing in my house not powered by electricity is the central heating, so in the winter months I’m still burning dead dinos. While efficient electric heat pumps are pretty suitable for the mild climate here, it isn’t practical to replace my furnace now since it’s only a few years old.

Oh, and while my car still runs on gas too, there’s not much I can do about that until my Tesla arrives.

Lindy Hop Musicality and the Seattle Swing Scene

I last blogged about my swing dancing passion about four months ago. Since then, I’ve gotten into it more than ever. Especially this month, I think my dancing prowess has improved phenomenally. While I have been taking more lessons and workshops, it’s mostly because I’ve been going out dancing two or three times a week recently. After dancing enough to become comfortable leading all the different moves that I’ve learned in classes for the past year, I’m gradually discovering an ability to go far beyond the simplicity of just stringing together the class moves in random order.

Apparently, dancing is better when done to the music — who knew? Okay, everyone knows that, but to a beginning dancer it’s really hard to actually listen to the music while at the same time thinking about all the other things you need to do to make the dance work. More than anything else, the ability to listen to and interpret the music in my dancing has made me feel like I’ve moved beyond being a beginner. While it helps that I’ve heard the more popular songs in the genre a few times now, some predictable patterns can even be pulled out of an unfamiliar song by an attentive listener. (My musical experience and music theory education from high school helps a little too.) It can be as simple as doing some slower slinky moves during the more mellow parts of a song, and throwing out big flashy moves for the crescendo. And while I can’t get it right every time, it feels really great to hit a big accent or "break" in the song with a corresponding dance move — and to lead my partner to do it with me!

Recently, I’m also starting to experiment with interesting footwork and other variations that fit in between or in the middle of other moves. Lindy hop as a dance style is very influenced by the improvisational spirit of the jazz music it is danced to. (Swing music is related to or a sub-genre of jazz.) So playful variations and improvisations around the basic structure and style are highly valued. Maybe this is somewhat true for other dance styles, but I think even more so for lindy hop. Anyway, some of my experimental moves work and I remember them for later, and some of them don’t and I just keep on dancing. I think certain patterns and preferences I use now are starting to give me my own distinctive style which, I hope, will help me stand out in small ways from the other leads. I know there are still a lot of things I can improve on though.

I’ve never been a socially precocious individual, so you may find it a bit strange that I would choose to go hang out with a bunch of strangers all the time. Maybe that aspect was a bit uncomfortable to me at first, but it mostly doesn’t feel like that anymore. Because when you see, and dance with, the same strangers every week, they’re no longer strangers. While I can’t say I’ve made any close friends yet, I have gotten to know several people reasonably well (mostly women, for obvious reasons). When I walk into, for instance, the Century Ballroom on a social dance night, I feel right at home and it’s great to see and be greeted by all the familiar faces of the other regulars. The whole swing dance community is very friendly and welcoming. I didn’t have that experience at all when I used to go salsa dancing in previous years.

It’s very nice that a there are a lot of swing dancers around my age. This is true not only in the Seattle scene but across the country, and it’s partially due to the great swing revival of the late 90′s, which was right around our college years. (If nothing else, you may remember the famous Gap ‘Khakis swing’ commercials, or the movie Swingers, from that era.) Back then, neo-swing bands like Big Bad Voodoo Daddy and The Brian Setzer Orchestra became phenomenally popular, and lots of college kids took up swing dancing. I remember when Rich, a college friend/roommate, got into swing dancing in Saint Louis during that time, and he’s still at it. Sadly, I wasn’t convinced to join him at the time, but now I know what I was missing. Anyway, while swing today is not nearly as big as it was a decade ago, there is a good-sized community of dedicated people who mostly started in college back then and have continued to bring in others around their age, as well as introduce the dance to a slightly younger crowd.

So there are a lot of college-age dancers too, at least at the weekly Century all-ages dances on Sunday nights. Some of them can dance pretty well, though it seems like there’s a constant cycle of young newbies who try it briefly and don’t stick with it. Once I got beyond the point where I felt like a newbie myself, I used to not enjoy dancing with follows who didn’t really know what they were doing. However, as my skills and experience improved further, my attitude on that has changed. I’ve found that as long as my partner knows the absolute basics, I can lead a variety of simpler moves well enough to really show her a good time. On the slower songs, I might even be able to throw in enough slinky musicality in there to make her nearly swoon! :) Yeah it’s a bit of an ego boost, but also if that helps to convince more follows to stick with swing dancing, I am doing my part to bolster the community — and I’m tipping the lead/follow ratio just a little bit in my favor. Sure it still feels great to dance with the good dancers (although it can be intimidating if she’s a local superstar), but variety is also good so there’s no reason for dance snobbery.

I’m afraid I have to admit that if I was talking about dating, college girls might be getting a bit too young for me. With the reality of me being in my late-late twenties now, they might be a full decade younger than me! Wow, I don’t feel that old. And actually, they probably don’t think I am either. I’ve been told before that I look a few years younger than I am, and several times this year I’ve been asked if I go to college around here. What do you think — am I that young-looking? While it might have been annoying when I was 21 and looked 17, I don’t think I’ll mind any more.

Dancing is not dating though — I can have fun with a broad age-range of partners. While the prospect of finding a date with someone who shares a common interest is a nice side-benefit of the activity, it’s not at all what keeps me coming back for more. There have just been so many nights when after several hours of dancing (and a bit of socializing mixed in), the music stops and the lights come up, and I think, wow, I had such an awesome time tonight, and it ended too soon, and when can I come back and do it again?!

Banishing the garage door poltergeist

Those of you who visited my house during the first year I lived here may recall that my garage door would occasionally open and close for no reason at all. Sometimes I would even come home to see my garage door wide open, inviting anyone to freely walk into my house. I wasn’t too worried given that I’m in a very quiet cul-de-sac with only my one neighbor ever driving by, but still it was a little disconcerting. Finally that stopped happening about a year ago, around the same time the button on the wall in my garage stopped working. I didn’t really need that button though as I usually use the remote in my car, so I didn’t worry about fixing it at the time.

Then about a week ago my garage door stopped responding to any commands to open or close. Finally this weekend I got out my handy multimeter to investigate. I found one of the safety sensors at the bottom of the door wasn’t getting any power, causing the garage door opener to think there was constantly something in the way, so it would refuse to move the door. The switch on the wall wasn’t getting any power either, though the voltages all looked good at the connections to the opener unit. Most likely a loose connection in the switch wiring had been the cause of those random door movements, then that loose connection eventually disconnected altogether.

I actually know how things got into this state. When selling the house, the previous owner had new drywall installed in the garage — one of the cheapest, sloppiest drywall jobs I’ve ever seen. I guess the quality normally wouldn’t matter much in a garage, except that here they hid the garage door opener wiring behind the drywall, then managed to drive a screw through the wiring or something else to nearly break it, in two places no less.

Fortunately, rewiring things is something of a hobby of mine! This morning I ran new wire to the switch and safety sensors, and now it’s all working fine. It’s very satisfying that a little bit of effort, along with some tools and and trivial applied knowledge of electronics, allowed me to cheaply fix a problem that has been annoying me for two and a half years.

Joss Whedon to do a new TV series

And it will be on FOX!? Has he forgotten what they did to Firefly?? Admittedly, Joss does sound in interviews like he is not getting his hopes up too high just yet.

The new show will star Eliza Dushku (the scene-stealing other slayer from Buffy), and will also involve Tim Minear (writer/director/producer from Angel and Firefly). So I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least a few guest appearances of other past Whedonverse denizens, since you know, they’re like one big family.

The project is (tentatively?) titled Dollhouse "because that’s the nickname of the high-tech lab where a group of human chalkboards are kept between assignments. Human chalkboards?! Yes! What else would you call characters like Dushku’s Echo who can be given new memories, skills and even personalities, then stripped of them just as quickly, leaving them virtual children?"

If all goes well, Dollhouse is set to premier on FOX in the fall of 2008.

Read more at TVGuide.com, or the show’s premature fan site which seems to have coalesced overnight out of the hopes and dreams of browncoats and Whedon worshippers everywhere.

$1 US == $1 Canadian

The exchange rate for the two currencies hit 1:1 today.

Wow. Last time I was paying attention, a Canadian dollar was worth something like 80-85 cents in US currency. But in the past few years, the US dollar has been steadily weakening, while the Canadian dollar has been getting stronger.

Contactless payment security

In yesterday’s blog entry, I wrote about contactless payments. I promised to follow it up by addressing security and privacy concerns you might have about the system. I’ll start with security.

There are basically two results a malicious attacker might want to achieve by exploiting the contactless nature of this kind of payment system:

1. To make charges to your account at the attacker’s "store" without your knowledge or consent.
2. To surreptitiously steal your credit card number for later use to make purchases with your account or otherwise impersonate you.

Unfortunately for the would-be criminal, and fortunately for you, the first attack is ineffective, and the second attack is impossible! Why?

It might not be what you’re thinking. We should ignore the helpful restriction that the super-low-power communication requires the RFID chip to be within a couple centimeters of the reader, so it would be difficult for someone to activate it without you noticing — maybe you’re on a Tokyo subway car at rush hour and it’s perfectly expected to have strange people and things pressed up against you on all sides. Also, let’s even put aside the fact that all the RF communications are strongly encrypted — maybe the attacker has a device that can trick the payment token into thinking it’s a valid merchant, allowing it to participate in the encryption.

Credit card companies provide two very simple mitigations for attack #1 above. First, any reputable card-issuer does not hold consumers liable for fraudulent charges (often this is enforced by law). And second, any merchant with many reports of fraudulent charges is very quickly going to have their credit card acceptance privileges revoked, probably before they even receive the funds. Although this does not absolutely prevent a very determined troublemaker from briefly hassling somebody, there will probably be plenty of information for the police to easily track down and arrest that troublemaker. So in practice, this is never a problem as far as I’ve heard. (Things get more difficult for a consumer who intentionally makes a purchase from a merchant who then doesn’t deliver on the promised goods/services — but that is a different kind of attack, and not really credit card fraud because the account-holder approved the transaction at the time it was charged.)

As for attack #2, it is foiled by a design that ensures the RF communications never even include an account number, nor any number that is ever usable outside the current transaction. The full explanation requires an understanding of public key cryptography, but conceptually you can imagine the tiny computer chip in the payment token is generating and transmitting a single-use credit card number for each transaction. Credit card companies have issued single-use credit card numbers upon request for about a decade, primarily for users who are concerned (paranoid?) about making purchases online. Only the credit card company can link a single-use number back to the real account number that it was generated for. Contactless transactions are actually a bit more complex, but this should give you an idea of how the payments can be made without ever exposing your account information. So even if an attacker is able to eavesdrop on the transaction data, they won’t see any useful information.

Most credit card fraud today occurs when a (soon-to-be) criminal somehow obtains your credit card or credit card information (name, number, exp date), then goes on a shopping spree. This can easily happen when a waiter takes your card away out of your sight, when a cashier "forgets" to hand the card back to you after swiping it, or maybe even if the person behind you in line at the checkout manages to snap a photo of your card. But contactless payment systems are not vulnerable to this form of fraud at all! Because you don’t ever have to give up possession of the payment token, and it’s not readable by a human, in this way you can consider contactless payments more secure than an ordinary credit card.

Of course, if you manage to lose your payment token, it is possible for the finder to go on a shopping spree just like with a normal plastic card. So you still need to report it to your bank so they can block it.

If I sound like I know what I’m talking about here, it’s probably because I do similar (but much more formal) security analyses for software all the time, after having had lots of training for that task. Now, I must admit I’m far from an expert on RFID payment systems, but at least I can still manage to sound like I know what I’m talking about.

Coming soon, I’ll take a look at the privacy issues.

My phone is also a credit card

Why must I carry a wallet? Paper money is a cumbersome. Physical identification is easily forged. Supermarket club cards are the most annoying thing — if they must track my shopping habits, can’t they recognize me by the credit card I use? And then there’s the unnecessary key ring with metal keys?? Those archaic mechanical locks are so weak they’re just begging for a more secure, convenient, and modern alternative.

There is only one thing that I can accept that is worth carrying with me everywhere: a smart compact digital device that identifies me and connects me to the rest of the world. It is my mobile phone, and it should be so much more. (Until I upgrade my neural implant to support wireless networking.)

At the very least, I should be able to buy things with my phone instead of a credit card. People in Europe and Asia have been swiping their phone at the retail counter for years, so why are we so far behind here in the USA? Well, contactless (RFID) payment systems are finally being rolled out here by Visa, MasterCard, and AmEx, though they’re slow to catch on due to a chicken-and-egg problem: hardly any consumers carry contactless payment devices because very few merchants can accept them, while merchants aren’t interested in setting up the contactless readers when nobody will use them. We need more cool applications like the NYC subway trial to get contactless payments into the mainstream.

Several American credit card issuers will now give out contactless payment devices on request. Some provide an otherwise normal credit card with an integrated RFID chip, while others issue a separate token of some kind. My primary credit card is a Citi MasterCard, and for it I was able to request a "PayPass" device.

Citi sent me a big blue plastic fob meant to go on a key ring. I hate having a big jangly key ring, but that’s okay because I never intended to keep the fob there. Instead I very carefully destroyed it. The plastic case of the fob was pretty thick and strongly welded together, but some tough Cutco utility scissors made short work of it. The functional part is actually just a small sliver.

The actual RFID chip isn’t visible in this photo, but it’s only about 5mm square and 1mm thick. Most of the blue area is a thinner plastic piece that just holds the surrounding RF antenna wires.

Now, I could just stick this sliver in my wallet, so that I can swipe my wallet in front of a contactless reader to make a payment. But as I explained above, my phone is really the proper place for it. Besides, my phone is more easily accessible than my wallet. And there’s a good chance I already had it in my hand because I was checking email while waiting in line at the checkout counter!

 

I was just barely able to fit the RFID sliver underneath the battery cover on the back of my T-Mobile Dash. Now I can swipe my phone in front of a MasterCard PayPass reader to pay for things! I wonder how many funny looks I’ll get from cashiers…

If only the places I shop had PayPass readers. Around here only a few chain stores have them, most prominently Tully’s, McDonald’s, and 7-11. I don’t drink coffee or eat fast food burgers, nor am I a fan of slurpees or any other junk food at 7-11. Maybe if 7-11 sold something really cool, I might stop in… Oh. Awesome.

Anyway, I’m sure there will be more PayPass locations soon enough. How about some gas stations? They pioneered contactless payments in the U.S., but now that regular credit cards are doing it I’d rather not have to maintain a separate account.

Now, some paranoid readers may be eager to bring up concerns about the security and privacy of electronic contactless payments, compared to regular magnetic-swipe cards or paper money. In a future blog entry, I’ll explain why security is basically not a problem for consumers today, while privacy/anonymity is a problem that could easily be solved if only the industry was motivated.

Hacking light fixtures for fun and carbon reduction

When I first moved into this house just over two years ago, the great room in the basement had some really dim and dingy light fixtures. So I replaced them with some simple round incandescent fixtures. But I was never really satisfied with those, for several reasons:

1. They stuck out too much from a ceiling which is already slightly lower than normal.
2. They directed too much light to the sides, impacting the projection picture too much.
3. They were not individually controllable — all six were on the same dimmer switch. I often want to leave the front two lights off to avoid washing out the projection screen, while still lighting the rest of the room.
4. They used too much energy. 6 x 100 = 600 watts just to light that room. Ouch!

With the latest upgrade, I’ve managed to solve all of these problems!

• I had to go with fully recessed fixtures to solve problems 1 and 2. The challenge there is that the original holes were in an odd size (10" square) that nobody uses anymore. (The house was built in 1952, and I’m pretty sure the fixtures I removed two years ago dated from that era.) Recessed florescent fixtures come in certain standard sizes, from which I chose 1′ x 4′.
• The original fixtures were all wired to the same switch, but I wanted to control them separately. Insteon let me do that, by directly hooking up hidden Insteon switches to each new light fixture, and hard-wiring the original switched wires to ON.
• For efficiency I considered both florescent and LED lighting. LED is much more efficient even than florescent, but the problem is household LED lighting costs a lot if you want something bright (though it is slowly getting cheaper). Florescent is cheap and moderately efficient, but it’s not dimmable which makes it unsuitable for a theater room. I ended up going with a hybrid solution.

Of course, you can’t just buy a hybrid florescent-LED recessed fixture with integrated Insteon switches off the shelf. So I built my own by cutting up, drilling, rewiring, and generally hacking a standard recessed florescent fixture. I’m very pleased with the result, which is why I’m showing it off. Here’s a photo of one in my basement ceiling, with the cover open and hanging down.

(No, it’s not actually warped, that’s just distortion from the camera.)

On the two ends, you can see the two integrated Insteon switches which are easily accessible with the cover open, but invisible with it closed. The one on the right controls the two small dimmable LED floodlights (currently on), and the one on the left controls the florescent tubes. The custom wiring, extra bulb sockets, and florescent ballast are hidden underneath the raised bulge that goes down the middle.

The two LED floodlights use only 3W each, but together they put out about as much light as a 45W incandescent bulb! That’s certainly not enough to brightly light the room – the florescent bulbs serve that purpose — but it’s some nice moonlight for when the projector is on. Actually I’ll leave at least a pair of the LED lights on all the time to prevent the basement from being a dark cave. I used to leave a 45W bulb on down there all the time, but now this will save me a continuous 39W. At that rate, the LEDs will pay for themselves in… about 2 1/2 years. Since LEDs last halfway to forever, in this case they’re easily worth it without even counting the green factor.

The biggest problem with this whole design is the amount of time it takes to do the custom modifications. Did I mention I’ve only done one out of six so far? Now that I know exactly what I’m doing it should go a little faster, but still, it will probably be a while before I get all six of them done.

For the one, the scary part was cutting the big hole in my basement ceiling. I used a powered reciprocating saw, and got the hole pretty close to correct. There are some very small gaps and chips in the plaster on one side which aren’t very noticeable and can be touched up with spackle.

The really hard part was getting the thing mounted up into the ceiling… by myself! Saeed wasn’t around, and I was impatient to get the job done. It’s not terribly heavy, but I just didn’t have enough hands to hold and screw at the same time. But I somehow managed it, without doing anything stupid or dangerous.

Lindy Hop!

I originally learned a bit of swing & lindy hop dancing about 5 years ago. That was, I guess, right on the tail end of the great American swing craze of the late nineties. I remember that it was starting to be fun, but I never really learned enough to feel comfortable social-dancing. More recently, last year I took a lot of salsa lessons. Salsa is really popular these days, at least around here, and several of my friends are decent salsa dancers. Now and then I would go to social salsa dances either with friends or on my own. I was reasonably good at it, but I was never really passionate about it.

Starting last fall, I decided to give swing another chance. I took several lindy hop lessons with Julie, starting over at the beginning. While she suspended lessons this spring – and moved away :( — I have kept at it. Allow me to boast, now, that I’m getting pretty good at it. I know all the basics and a good variety of moves and variations, so that I can spend a lot of time on the dance floor without too much boring repetition. Now and then I get compliments for giving a solid lead. While I might know enough to seem impressive to a swing newbie, I’m very far from some of the outstanding dancers. I’m having tons of fun, I’m hooked, and I want more!

I’ve been going to social swing dances at the Century Ballroom nearly every week recently. While I have fun going on my own and find plenty of nice people to dance with, it would be cool if I had some friends to go out with sometimes. There are a few people I sort of know because I’ve danced with them a lot and talked a bit, but I haven’t found a group to really hang out and go out with. So if you’re reading this and you’re looking for a fun, active, social activity, give swing a try! I assure you that anyone can do it! (And it’s more fun than salsa, trust me.) I’ll even offer free lessons; I’m sure I could do a decent job of teaching the basics now.

Last night at the Century was a blast. There was a great live swing band, so there was a good crowd of skilled dancers. Besides my own modest dancing, I witnessed an impromptu performance of the Big Apple by about three dozen people. The Big Apple is a famous choreographed group routine done to a certain song, with movements that are mostly not quite swing but derived from it. I’d seen it on videos before but was very surprised to see that apparently all the good swing dancers know it well. Then afterward some of the best dancers showed off with some crazy moves and arials, all unchoreographed but no less impressive than this video, which starts out similar to the Big Apple but will quickly have you saying "wow". Yeah… I’m not quite there. Yet.

Portrait of… me?

The Jargon File is a well-known concise description of hacker language and culture. It’s been around a while and I’ve browsed it before, but I happened to stumble across it again today. Some of the content is a bit obscure since it dates back a couple decades or more. But perhaps the most fascinating and continually relevant section is the Portrait of J. Random Hacker. (You do know what a hacker is, right?) Many of the descriptions are eerily accurate when applied to myself — much more than any horoscope could ever be. Until I read the Jargon File a few years ago, I didn’t quite realize how much I conform to the nonconformist hacker nature.

Of course not everything can be completely on the mark. But there are a surprising number of striking examples, including…

Dress: "A substantial minority prefers ‘outdoorsy’ clothing"

I think around 90% of the clothing I wear comes from REI.

Sports: "Interest in spectator sports is low to non-existent; sports are something one does, not something one watches on TV."

Absolutely.

… "Ultimate Frisbee has become quite popular."

My favorite sport!

… "Martial arts in the hacker culture deserves special mention."

I’ve dabbled in a few martial arts and always wanted to do more. I’ve been planning for a couple years now to take up aikido more seriously, but I just don’t have the time to add another frequent activity to my schedule.

Food: "Ethnic. Spicy. Oriental, esp. Chinese and most esp. Szechuan, Hunan, and Mandarin (hackers consider Cantonese vaguely déclassé). A visible minority of Southwestern and Pacific Coast hackers prefers Mexican."

Mmm… Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese food are indeed my favorites. But as it says, I never much cared for Cantonese (once I figured out the difference).

Communication: "Though hackers often have poor person-to-person communication skills, they are as a rule quite sensitive to nuances of language and very precise in their use of it."

I constantly find myself cringing when my co-workers (mostly the non-hacker ones of course) repeatedly miss-apply or miss-speak colloquial phrases. Some of them even grew up in this country so they should know better. And in some cases those misuses seem to catch on and grow into a widespread meme, annoying me to no end. Personally I almost always avoid silly colloquialisms and just say what I mean.

… "They are often better at writing than at speaking."

Well, I try. If my writing is bad, my speech must be horrid.

Personality: "Also, most hackers are ‘neophiles’, stimulated by and appreciative of novelty (especially intellectual novelty)."

Old stuff is obsolete. People who resist good changes for the sake of familiarity or pointless tradition annoy me.

… "Hackers are ‘control freaks’ in a way that has nothing to do with the usual coercive or authoritarian connotations of the term."

I insist on driving a stick-shift. I wired my house with programmable light switches.

Misc: "Hackers are more likely to have cats than dogs."

Check.

"Richer hackers drive spiffy RX-7s…"

Oops, an off-by-one error! Obviously the Jargon File needs to be updated for the current decade.

"… and then forget to have them washed."

Guilty.

—

Lots of other things there are not far off, but I may not be prepared to admit everything. So, for fellow hackers, does much of this ring true for you? As for everyone else… just know that we do not envy your normalcy. :)