Save the planet with tech industry and politics

I first came across this topic because of this story about Apple's Tim Cook vs the group NCPPR back in Feb. Basically the group, which invested in Apple, urged that profits should be the only thing corporations consider and requested Apple to be transparent about the costs related to environmental sustainability. Well, Tim Cook rejected this and told the group not in invest in Apple if they insist. Gotta say that's gutsy even though I'm no tree hugger. The linked article suggested that NCPPR has political agenda behind this anyway. On a somewhat related note: the fact that the yearly cost of charging an iPhone 6 would be ~$0.47 made the news! Apple saves the world again, right? Oh well, found an 2-year-old article for iPhone 5 (and some phones not made by Apple): so tree huggers should really stick with iPhone 5 since it takes less energy to charge! (And btw, the Samsung S3 costs a whopping $0.53, based on 2012 electricity rate. Buyers beware!) Finally, I wanna mention an interesting article about yet another company that I'm not a big fan of: Facebook. It saves electricity consumption by using its Autoscale load balancing technology. Here is the gist: instead of distributing workload to all of its available servers, it would make some servers idle when usage is low enough and achieve overall lower power consumption. Smart move as it saves the planet and more importantly (to the shareholders), the energy cost! Disclaimer: not a shareholder now.

The Van Halen brothers inteviewed

... by none other than Van Halen's vocalist, David Lee Roth! Here is the video:

Very interesting! (Came across this while cleaning up old emails from 2012!) As a rock/metal fan, I certainly have listened to a lot of Van Halen's. However, I have never been a huge fan. So I just found out from the video that Eddie lived in the Netherland until he was 7. Their mom was from Indonesia while their dad was a traveling musician. Mrs. Van Halen was very serious about her sons' education, including Eddie's music training, which started with classical piano. In the video he mentioned he didn't actually read the sheet music but instead memorizing the tune (and fingerings) while his teacher played! Yet he was able to win piano competitions back then. Amazing.

Dishwasher blues

Gotta admit as a guy who deal with technology all the time, I am not "handy" when it comes to fixing "hardware" like home appliances, cars (or even bikes) Two weeks ago my dishwasher started malfunctioning (tablet did not dissolve and dishes were not clean.) So my workaround was NOT to use it. However, it started to get flooded with water even without being used so it's time to call repairing service. Found from Yelp a peninsula-based company called BayTech and gave it a try. When the repairman (probably the boss) arrived, the dishwasher again has water sitting in the bottom. So the first thing he did was closing it and hit 'Cancel' to drain it (learned something new immediately!) Then he made 2 changes: (1) the valve underneath the sink is not opened enough (and not maintaining the right water pressure according to him)

The valve on the right controls water to the dishwasher

 

The repairman turned it this way to allow more water. To close it completely, turn clockwise.

(2) the valve underneath the dishwasher was out of position. It should be "snapped in" so he pushed it back.

Someone posted this pic online. It showed where the valve is.

Problem solved (for the time being :)