Marc's Public Blog

I got a few laps with Ralf and drove a few of my own laps, and wasted about 8 hours for the privilege. Oh, and someone drove over my air compressor and damaged it :(

Ralf, hard at work

Grr...

Thankfully I was able to get a tire plug at wallmart and it was enough to drive home without needing a tow truck.

First, we got a visit to see what cars they had. They do have an impressive collection which is basically owned by their members who "cash in" points for their cars being used by others, which in turn allows them to use other exotic cars too. It's actually a good idea for those who like to just go out for drives planned in advance (not as useful if you just want to drive out of your house and drive somewhere).
Of course, they do not allow going to the track, which is a big bummer for me, since this would likely have been the main interest for me. Oh well..

cars being worked on

they had just received a Ferrari 458

They had a very nice De Lorean:

Then, we got to meet the cars we were going to drive:

Ferrari F430 Coupe was first:

First stop and car swap

The Lotus was next:

Second stop and car swap

Lunch at Alice's Restaurant

A huge bunch of motorcycle cops out for a ride too, also came there for lunch

Next Car was the Aston Martin DB9:

of course I was driving the speed limit :)

Then, was the the time for the Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder:

It even shows you which door is opened in case you forgot

Next car was the Maserati GT Spyder:

And last, but certainly not least, was the Audi R8:

still driving the speed limit :)

All in all, it was a great day.
The lotus was planted to the ground, and reminded me of my miata without shocks :)
The Aston Martin was an overpowered boat with scary steering and brakes as far as I was concerned :)
The Gallardo was probably my favourite (not counting the F430 I already knew).
The maserati wasn't bad, but just not my cup of tea as it may be :)
And last but not least, I actually liked the R8. It was lacking a read row of seats that my M5 had, but it was otherwise a fairly enjoyable car that was well built inside.

Original message:

Dear PG&E,

We got a solar system on our house based on our use up to the solar system setup. We then managed to save eletricity by making a lot of improvements in our house and we are now in a situation where we do not produce more Kwh than we use after one year, but once you add time of use weight to Kwh (which is what E6B time of use pricing does), we end up with a negative bill, which we get no credit for.

I've been told that California now does allow people who produce more than they use to get 8c per Kwh produced. This however does not account for time of use, and in our case I was told that we won't be getting a penny of the $38 credit we have with you after a year because we still used 1200Kwh more than we produced (that is correct).

I find this a weird way to look at Kwh pricing. We all know that all electricity is not created equal and that night and winter electricity is cheaper in California. We also know that solar panel folks like us help you, PG&E, not fire up gas plants to make up for the extra load that happens during peak times in summer. This is why you sell that electricity for more money (although many customers for some reason still get a flat price for electricity, which is unfortunate since you don't entice them to shift their load to cheaper times).

In our case, with the current law, we are now enticed not only to stop bothering trying to save further electricty, but we're even enticed to start wasting electricity and use more electrical appliances instead of gas ones, because that electricity will be free (we have a $38 credit that we won't get paid for, so we might as well use up that credit and bring it up to 0). I could also do stupid things like running an extension cord to my neighbours, but obviously you don't want me to do that.

So, can we please fix up the law and just pay net producers like us for the actual credit on their bill up to a certain value if you really need to somehow stop people from producing too much (and I would question that need, but that's a different topic).

for those who missed the math, here's an example for last year (prices are approximate because TOU makes for fuzzy math, but it's enough to get the idea.

Last year, we had a $38 credit (about 470Kwh at 8c/Kwh) and 1400Kwh use. If we had:

In other words, for those who are counting, the current pricing method pretty much puts a $150 "hole" where you can use more or save a total of 1800Kwh and your end bill is exactly the same.

PG&E, this is not a good way to encourage people to be green and save electricity. With our current bill I have no incentive to save any further since I'd have to save a lot to see a single penny. On the other end, we can use about 400kWh (about a month's worth for smaller consumers) and not pay a penny for it.
PG&E: Please fix this, it's broken.

For those who are curious, here is our use/balance for 2011:

. 2010-2011 Total (Kwh) FEB 2011 JAN 2011 DEC 2010 NOV 2010 OCT 2010 SEP 2010 AUG 2010 JUL 2010 JUN 2010 MAY 2010 APR 2010 MAR 2010 . Summer Peak -762 0 -19 -124 -186 -156 -174 -103 . Summer Part Peak -572 11 -78 -100 -151 -108 -107 -39 . Summer Off Peak 1047 95 332 199 188 185 47 1 . Winter Peak 354 68 78 78 18 -16 57 71 . Winter Off Peak 1142 113 331 448 163 0 -28 115 . Total Kwh 1209 181 409 526 287 235 -25 -149 -79 -234 -157 29 186 . Total $ -$38.80 $17.89 $39.60 $51.27 $26.68 $11.61 -$34.95 -$62.18 -$32.44 -$44.34 -$26.49 $2.30 $12.25

And here is 2010:

. 2009-2010 Total (Kwh) FEB 2010 JAN 2010 DEC 2009 NOV 2009 OCT 2009 SEP 2009 AUG 2009 JUL 2009 JUN 2009 MAY 2009 APR 2009 MAR 2009 . Summer Peak -725 20 -60 -90 -151 -172 -173 -99 . Summer Part Peak -531 -1 -60 -106 -112 -119 -113 -20 . Summer Off Peak 1240 110 284 165 230 257 138 56 . Winter Peak 301 76 72 77 -1 -9 63 23 . Winter Off Peak 1317 411 442 422 164 25 -163 16 . Total Kwh 1602 487 514 499 292 164 -31 -33 -34 -148 -47 -100 39 . Total $ -$39.87 $32.54 $34.04 $33.45 $20.87 -$1.63 -$19.71 -$8.08 -$45.81 -$55.31 -$25.83 -$8.13 $3.73

This post is about your work around Tahoe, and what you can do to improve. First, I need to state that Caltrans folks who clear the roads day and night in sometimes horrid conditions, have a very hard job. In my experience with Tahoe, they actually do a good job with keeping roads open in bad conditions with the resources they have.

Yet, they could definitely do better. By that, I don't mean work harder, I'm pretty sure they already work hard during the big snow storms (especially the ones we had this year), I mean by improving communication.

In a nutshell, as much as you do a good job with roads, you do quite poorly with communication. This is partly why I wrote my "Tahoe Road Info for SR88 (kirkwood), US50 (South Lake Tahoe), and I80 (North Lake Tahoe) or making caltrans road reports more liveable" page. But my page is just making the online caltrans info a bit more useful, it does not fix underlying problems with how you communicate (or don't communicate in many cases).

Why the goals below are worth following

So, how do you get there?

Target Goals

So, let's start with my #1 suggestion:

Caltrans: you should announce tentative road changes, and report road changes as quickly as practical, and reliably

To give you credit, I've seen two instances where you did over this ski season:

Now, let's look at a sample of the many instances of what you've done badly with communication:

In just one 10 day period, I noted 5 different examples where the Caltrans web site failed to note some road changes, or did it very late, 4 of them were just in 3 consecutive days (!).

Caltrans, you work hard on keeping roads open, or re-opening them, but I beg you: you *really* need to communicate what you're doing.
Of course, you can't be everywhere all the time, use us, drivers, on roads that have cell service at least (won't help with hwy88, but at least it will for others), and use us to report up to date problems, accidents and road closures online quicker than you can when applicable.

Caltrans blog for each road

Also, the reason why I mentioned a blog-like page, is because it's worthwhile for us to know what you've done in the last days or the last week. It's even useful when you close a road to know how long ago you closed it: for instance when you closed 50 for avalanche control as I was driving up, it was useful for me to know (through my own page, not yours), that you had closed it 1H ago and guess that it'd probably reopen 2H after it was closed, which it did.

I did that part for you by scraping your web page and keeping history for me and others, but you really should do this yourselves. See: http://marc.merlins.org/snow/roadinfo/sr88

More user friendly as well as computer parsable status reports

Another reason why I created this page http://marc.merlins.org/snow/tahoe_caltrans.shtml is because how are we supposed to know where "Peddler Hill" or "Nayak" (really Nyak) are? Telling us a road status between points that most road users don't actually know, isn't useful.
Would it be so hard to give us a graphical map like what Nevada DOT tries to do by parsing your free form text data: http://www.safetravelusa.com/nv/?map=Sacramento ?
I personally have 4 months worth of data from you, and you can tell it's free form text entered by a human. There are some patterns but really it seems to depend on the operator and it's nothing that's easy to parse for computer for any kind of automation. As result, Nevada DOT has even showed incorrect road status for California on the graphical map because they couldn't parse your data properly.

What should you do? Well, I recommend that part of your reports be made out of drop downs so that the format is guaranteed to be the same at all times, and then the operator can add free form text that is useful to humans at the end without compromoizing the computer parsable section at the beginning. As an example to others, those are examples I've seen:

IS CLOSED 1.5 MI WEST OF KYBURZ
IS CLOSED FROM TWIN BRIDGES TO MEYERS
IS CLOSED TO WESTBOUND TRAFFIC AT 4.8 MI WEST OF STRAWBERRY
IS CLOSED FROM ECHO SUMMIT TO MEYERS
IS CLOSED TO EASTBOUND TRAFFIC FROM COLFAX (PLACER) TO THE NEVADA STATE LINE

My point is that all this could be simplified and be made more consistent. Please do what you can there.

Conclusion

Thanks,
Marc

However, when another similarly sized storm arrived the following week, it was hard to miss, especially as such big storms don't happen even once on some years.

We went with Martin and Matt in their chalet in South Lake. The drive on 50 on thursday evening was a bit gruesome because we left just a little bit too late and were delayed by an accident that happened 10mn ahead of us. In the end, we only got there past 01:00 instead of just after 23:00 :-

they need to clean that van :)

Martin's Subaru

Mmmh, the plow guy came that afternoon, but by the evening the driveway was unsuable already.

What can I say, it was a pretty good day, even with just one top lift open :)
This was a really sweet 'just my tracks' run in palisades:

and here is a mashup of other bits from the day:

The next morning, Caltrans had opened Carson Pass at 05:00 but failed to update their record, so it was marked closed until 08:30 :( That's a major fail from Caltrans and almost caused us to go to Heavenly (which sucked that day since everything was closed there).

In the end, we got to Kirkwood a bit past 10:00 and ended up riding Cornice all day, which was more than enough for that day :)

A quick summary of day 2:

The next morning, we went for Kirkwood earlier, but a couple of cars spun out on Carson Pass, closing it for another 90mn. Had we left 10mn earlier, we'd have made it... We were on the slopes around 10:30, which was just around the time that the Wall opened, so I was able to get a couple of rides off it, and they were pretty stellar :)

waiting in line again...

yes, it was snowing still...

a little bit of ice hanging :)

kirkwood staff was shoveling the snow at the top of the wall so that we didn't get stuck

Saturday was a really good day, except for the fact that wind closed the wall, so I only got to ride on it twice. This enticed me to stay sunday to actually ride the mountain that was still closed.

Jennifer went home saturday night because she had commitments on sunday (also she unfortunately hurt her knee by falling off the lift downloading on ice at the top of cornice). I spent the night with Jim and Matt who nicely hosted me at their condo in kirkwood.
Sunday morning, Arturo and Bill who had been stuck at Heavenly the previous day, were able to make it to kirkwood, so we met up.

a couple of skiers climbed on the roof and jumped out. Sweet!

5ft+ of snow wasn't for play, they really had it.

when the wall finally opened, there was a little bit of a line :)

come on Arturo, don't be scared, it's just a cornice ;)

the ride home on sunday turned out to be uneventful

A quick summary of day 3 with Arturo and Bill:

Thanks to Martin, Matt, Matt, and Jim for driving/hosting us.

Now to be honest, I considered the surgery recovery complete after I had fully recovered feeling to my chin (that was after a bit less than 6 months), but with the braces out, it's now 100% complete.

I was also recently asked how long it took me to recover from MMA surgery right after the surgery itself.

Basically, it went as such:

That's about it.
As for how well did it work, well it did help. Unfortunately I was one of the few cases for whom apnea didn't fully go away after the surgery, despite a very successful surgery. It kind of sucks, but at least my sleep is better now (even if not perfect).

United had the sole direct flight from SFO that left at some stupid ass time in the morning, ruining a night of sleep and a whole day for nothing (likely the only takeoff/landing timeslot they could get for a small pond jumper). We did however elect to take that since connecting flights take an extra 4H if you want to make a safe connection where your snowboard is likely to arrive too.

After loading up on groceries, the drive to big sky was a scenic 1H to the very nice cabin. After resting for the rest of the day, we went to Big Sky the next morning.
When we got there, they were all proud of the 8 inches they had just gotten of the last 2 days and their 105" base. I obviously didn't complain about snow, but I couldn't help but smile at how this doesn't qualify as a dump or a powder day in Tahoe :) At the time I write this, kirkwood in Tahoe got over 120" of snow in the last 10 days with 2 storms that delivered over 50" in just 2 days each.

Case in point, the kirkwood page had 145-160 inches of snow for the current storm :)

Kirkwood Snow Stats for 2011/03/27:

Anyway, back to big sky, outside of the stupid early time we had to get up at, we had a good flight. The airport view after landing ain't bad :) and the drive to Big Sky from Boseman was scenic:

nice condos

it was nice and spacious

The next morning, we went to Big Sky, it was nice and sunny with a few inches of freshies left over:

line to the tram was ridiculous (1h)

did I mention that snow coverage was poor? :)

to make extra money, they also had ziplining

The next day, we went to check out the neighboring resort: Moonlight Basin (both resorts share a common area and you cna purchase a bundled ticket to ski from one side to the other). They were a bit more basic and cheaper, but they still had some interesting terrain, although the amounts of it were more limited :)

I found this hut by chance in a middle of a tree run

their best lift was actually uphill from the closest lift, so you had to hike there

the terrain from headwall was much more fun

their trees tended to be more dense than the Tahoe ones.

The 3rd day, we actually got some fresh snow. It was unfortunately too warm, so the bottom of Big Sky was very wet and the snow felt like ice, but when the top opened and we got there, it was better (not great, but much better) and made for some good riding until the end of the day:

And after a good 3rd day, it was time to go home after another nice scenic drive back to the airport:

lower octane gas at altitude for non turbo cars

All it all, it was good fun to check out the 'biggest skiing domain in America', too bad that the coverage was so low (my brand new board got scratched up).
A big thanks to Eva and Gordon for letting us use their nice cabin.

Turns out that the freezer door had not been closed right (almost but not right, and it was enough not to make a tight seal). Unfortunately I found out right has we had left the house for a few days, so the freezer had to suffer through with the air leak, which created a lot of frost inside, but I was able to take care of it as soon as we got home, and all was well.

So far so good :)

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures from inside as cameras were forbidden and we got to go through a metal detector. That said, I got to sit with a controller who worked transatlantic flights (from anywhere on the west coast and between Canada, Japan, and Hawaii).
It was quite informative to see one controller working with a vast array of planes, all on the same 'rails' (airways) with planes negotiating altitudes back and forth. Some pilots would talk to controllers over the radio which would relay the request via computer to the Oakland controller for review and approval or rejection depending on his own judgement and conflict resolution computer.

What was more enlightening was the technology gap between planes that had real time GPS location reporting capability via satellite link, and could directly request altitudes from the oakland controller via keyboard, while older planes' positions were interpolated via their last reported position and ground speed. The mix of technology was almost frightening in some ways.

I then got to spend a bit of time with a controller working the upper portion of northern CA airspace spilling into LA. That one was what I was more familiar with, but nonetheless it was useful to be able to talk to a controller and see how they do their job.

City of Myers

South Lake Tahoe

Deserts from the Party

The next morning, we took the gondola to go the top (thankfully Sky was opened), and we had a nice couple of bluebird days:

Heavenly does have nice views

Pow!

All for me! :)

View of Nevada on the other side

I love those views

Heavenly did improve their signage, especially for snowboarders:

Warning, snow can be cold. Oh, and you can die :)

Thanks Heavenly for warning snowboarders about the long traverse at the bottom

Killabrew has a nice view on Nevada though

But did I mention that Heavenly always had snow problems? This was off Cascades, WTF?

But eh, despite my harping on Heavenly, I had some really good tree skiing between Sky and the top of Tamarack (if you knew how to get around the rocks).

It was actually quite cool to see things like the original Merlin video game my dad had gotten us as a child, and the microcomputers

original game of pong

Eh, our Amstrad CPC 464 is there :)

The craig 1 is beautiful

Apple 1

Oh my, the French TO7 70

They even showed the French Minitel