Saving the World, One Light Bulb at a Time

A few weeks back, I read an excellent article about compact fluorescent lightbulbs, or CFLs. Although they have been around for a while, they have improved drastically in recent years. They come on nearly instantly, do not make any noise, provide constant and consistent light, consume much less electricity than traditional incandescent light bulbs and last MUCH longer. According to the article, they are so energy efficient that if every household in the U.S. (110 million) replaced just one single incandescent with a CFL, it would be equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off of the road!

The article describes a campaign Wal-Mart is launching to promote General Electric's CFL products. Wal-Mart is aiming to sell 100 million CFL bulbs over a 12-month period. If successful, it could actually help everyone at the pump. Sheila and I have started doing our part, and have replaced at least a dozen incandescents with CFLs. I bought some of the GE bulbs at Sam's club, for less than $11 for 8 of them.

Unfortunately, they are slightly taller than traditional bulbs, so there were a few light fixtures where they wouldn't fit. However, today we went to the Home Depot, and I found some bulbs that were slightly smaller. We brought them home, and sure enough they fit just right. As it turns out, the bulbs we bought at the Home Depot (n:vision brand) actually work even better than the GE bulbs. The GE bulbs take about a half-second to come on, but the n:vision bulbs come on instantly. The n:vision bulbs are also rated for 10,000 hours, whereas the GE bulbs are "only" rated for 8,000 hours. The n:vision bulbs were slightly more expensive. I think it was about $7 for a pack of 4. I think due to the longer life and more responsive turn-on time, the n:vision bulbs are probably worth paying a little bit more for. So do your part, save the environment, help lower the price of gas, and buy CFLs!

jsierra.net Federates with Google Talk

I recently set up Google Apps for Your Domain for my domain. At first, it seemed it wasn't possible to set up the required SRV DNS entries with GoDaddy. However, after looking around the Total DNS Control Manager, I saw it was possible to create custom DNS entries by adding TXT entries. I just set the value with the information as required by Google, and it worked like a charm. I was even able to set up Gaim to work with my jsierra.net chat account:

• Screen Name:
• Server: jsierra.net
• Resource: Gaim
• Password:
• Use TLS if available (enabled)
• Connect port: 5222
• Connect server: talk.google.com

Gaim didn't work right away. Eventually it worked. I don't know if it was something I did in fooling around with the settings, or perhaps the new DNS entries hadn't yet propagated.