On Borrowed Power (Day 8)
Last Monday when the electric bill came in with a thousand bucks markup, I decided to stop using my home computer. Partly to save on electricity. Partly to shut my mom up about how much electricity it actually consumes. Mostly as a challenge to myself. Can I actually get through a month without opening my home computer?
This may not sound like such a big deal to some of you but it is to me as I watch everything on my computer. Of course, as luck would have it, I have plenty of other gadgets to tide me over. Without meaning to, my two new acquisitions in this area would actually make this abstinence quite tolerable. My new phone has a pretty big amoled 3 inch screen and can play divx .avi files out of the box. I got my new tablet netbook mostly as a glorified manga/ebook reader but the screen real estate at 10 inches looks rather excellent for watching stuff too. Though without it, my fallback would have been my 7 inch portable dvd player. So with all these alternatives, this wouldn't be as hard to do as I thought it would be.
To make things more interesting however, I decided to extend my plan to my other gadgets, whereby I would refrain from charging anything to a power outlet at home, so no further electricity would be consumed that would have offset not opening my computer and made the whole thing moot.
The challenge is, in this day and age and with my predisposed attachment to all things electronic, this isn't exactly feasible. I need my mp3 player for the daily commute. The cellphone is a necessary mode of communication. All these things require constant charging. So how does one make such a plan work?
Luckily, my workplace doesn't restrict things we can bring to work so the answer is to charge everything at the office. I realize this is another form of cheating but one can't exactly live without a cellphone. One might say this would just be using one source of power to substitute for another. It's also not exactly ethical to pass on my power consumption to the office expenses, even if they can hardly feel the difference. As you can see, the primary purpose of this experiment is to lower my electric bill at home, and not really lowering my carbon footprint. Ethical or not, it just doesn't sit right with me. I can however justify this move by charging everything through my laptop's usb. My laptop is always plugged in and technically its not added consumption (I could be wrong here, I never really looked into it) to plug stuff onto it's usb ports.
The netbook and portable dvd player are another matter as both have chargeable batteries that only charge through a power adapter. Depending on how I fare over the next few days, I'll try to refrain from using them much. I'm trying to make a concerted effort to do other things besides watch on the computer. I've already decided not to watch any of the shows I follow save for one. Parenthood is the only new tv show I'll be watching throughout all this. I have so many other old tv shows I could be catching up on and watching. And I'll probably just catch up to all my current ones when their seasons end. This ties into my internet abstinence plan, which I will go into more detail in another post.
So far I have managed to refrain from opening my home computer. This is the one area you won't see me cheating at.
The weekend was the perfect test. And I would have made some concessions had my cellphone lost power, but it made it through the weekend and was on its last breath as I got to work. I hardly used my mp3 player so that was still ok and it has a pretty long battery life. Go Sansa Fuze! Had it ran out of battery, I was gonna charge it on the docker as I used it as my sound system. But I was reluctant to consume additional power via the speakers. So all in all, it was a pretty successful weekend.
Cors I pretty much slept through most of it and read books in the other half. Now if only I could refrain from reading into the wee hours of the night and well into day break. Or actually do something a little more productive over the weekend. I'm trying not too be too hard on myself since this was the first weekend after all.
Here's what I ended up watching:
1. 9 (on the portable dvd player)
2. 30 minutes into Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard (on the portable dvd player before the battery went out)
3. Parenthood 1x08 (on my cellphone)
Not great, but I'm making it work somehow. Let's see if I can make it through all this without going over the deep end.
This may not sound like such a big deal to some of you but it is to me as I watch everything on my computer. Of course, as luck would have it, I have plenty of other gadgets to tide me over. Without meaning to, my two new acquisitions in this area would actually make this abstinence quite tolerable. My new phone has a pretty big amoled 3 inch screen and can play divx .avi files out of the box. I got my new tablet netbook mostly as a glorified manga/ebook reader but the screen real estate at 10 inches looks rather excellent for watching stuff too. Though without it, my fallback would have been my 7 inch portable dvd player. So with all these alternatives, this wouldn't be as hard to do as I thought it would be.
To make things more interesting however, I decided to extend my plan to my other gadgets, whereby I would refrain from charging anything to a power outlet at home, so no further electricity would be consumed that would have offset not opening my computer and made the whole thing moot.
The challenge is, in this day and age and with my predisposed attachment to all things electronic, this isn't exactly feasible. I need my mp3 player for the daily commute. The cellphone is a necessary mode of communication. All these things require constant charging. So how does one make such a plan work?
Luckily, my workplace doesn't restrict things we can bring to work so the answer is to charge everything at the office. I realize this is another form of cheating but one can't exactly live without a cellphone. One might say this would just be using one source of power to substitute for another. It's also not exactly ethical to pass on my power consumption to the office expenses, even if they can hardly feel the difference. As you can see, the primary purpose of this experiment is to lower my electric bill at home, and not really lowering my carbon footprint. Ethical or not, it just doesn't sit right with me. I can however justify this move by charging everything through my laptop's usb. My laptop is always plugged in and technically its not added consumption (I could be wrong here, I never really looked into it) to plug stuff onto it's usb ports.
The netbook and portable dvd player are another matter as both have chargeable batteries that only charge through a power adapter. Depending on how I fare over the next few days, I'll try to refrain from using them much. I'm trying to make a concerted effort to do other things besides watch on the computer. I've already decided not to watch any of the shows I follow save for one. Parenthood is the only new tv show I'll be watching throughout all this. I have so many other old tv shows I could be catching up on and watching. And I'll probably just catch up to all my current ones when their seasons end. This ties into my internet abstinence plan, which I will go into more detail in another post.
So far I have managed to refrain from opening my home computer. This is the one area you won't see me cheating at.
The weekend was the perfect test. And I would have made some concessions had my cellphone lost power, but it made it through the weekend and was on its last breath as I got to work. I hardly used my mp3 player so that was still ok and it has a pretty long battery life. Go Sansa Fuze! Had it ran out of battery, I was gonna charge it on the docker as I used it as my sound system. But I was reluctant to consume additional power via the speakers. So all in all, it was a pretty successful weekend.
Cors I pretty much slept through most of it and read books in the other half. Now if only I could refrain from reading into the wee hours of the night and well into day break. Or actually do something a little more productive over the weekend. I'm trying not too be too hard on myself since this was the first weekend after all.
Here's what I ended up watching:
1. 9 (on the portable dvd player)
2. 30 minutes into Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard (on the portable dvd player before the battery went out)
3. Parenthood 1x08 (on my cellphone)
Not great, but I'm making it work somehow. Let's see if I can make it through all this without going over the deep end.