We replaced our PV array last October, due to ongoing production shortfalls. I have not heard the final diagnosis, but it was clear the panels were malfunctioning because they were maxing out at 72% of their rated capacity.

A few months into the new system confirms the magnitude of the problem: the production numbers for November and December were the best ever for this system. January and February tied previous records, and in April this array smoked the previous best by 32%!

The new panels are 130-watt units, which is a small upgrade in theoretical capacity from the previous model (125 watts), but I think the performance gains are due primarily to the fact that the new array isn't b0rked.

I made a timelapse video during a recent drum session, showing the kit going up and the recording gear swarming into place. It's a promo for my new website, which is a audio recording blog and microphone database and search engine. Tune in for gear reviews, mic shootouts, and studio tours... and if you're comparison-shopping for microphones, try the mic database, which has over 400 mics with more coming daily.

(Contact me if you want to help out -- there's a free T-shirt with your name on it.)

Anyway, the soundtrack on the video is an excerpt from one of the songs I recorded during the session. The full song will be released later this year on Andrew Thomas' new CD.

If you know anybody who owns an iPhone, you've probably seen this at the bottom of their emails:

Advertising via the email "signature" is nothing new; it was probably invented by Hotmail in 1996, and is used widely today. Lots of webmail and message-platform vendors promote their products this way.

With that in mind, check out the signature on the email I just received from my little sister, a Gmail user:

Is that not brilliant? Apple bought the signature line from Gmail to promote the iPhone!

That single line of text beautifully captures the sense of lust the iPhone inspires.

I was in awe of this little line of text. Was Ridley Scott in on this?

But no, it's not a real Apple campaign. Not yet, anyway. My sister made it up, in sarcastic protest to all her hipster friends who can afford iPhones.

It's too good not to be real, though, so (with my sister's blessing) I'm offering it to Apple. Give TBWA the afternoon off. We got your iPhone campaign right here.

But please send an iPhone to my sister.

Dear PG&E Customer:
Pacific Gas and Electric Company is constantly striving to improve products and services for its customers. We are excited to introduce to you our latest improvement.
Beginning this month, the "detail of bill" section of your energy statement will be double-sided. This new format will reduce the amount of paper used for each statement creating a better, more environment- and customer-friendly bill.
...

So, my 2-page electric bill now fits on a single sheet of paper.

Unfortunately, the letter proclaiming this savings was printed on a second sheet.

Most interesting article I've seen in the paper in a while:

French horn player Meredith Brown had a busy weekend.

Last Saturday morning, she drove from her home in Vallejo to San Rafael for two back-to-back rehearsals with the Marin Symphony, then played an evening concert in San Jose with the Symphony Silicon Valley. Sunday's schedule was more grueling: morning rehearsal in Marin, afternoon concert in San Jose, evening concert in Marin.

And you thought your commute was rough.

The headline was have violins, will travel. The story describes the crazy lifestyles of the classical musicians who populate the Bay Area's part-time orchestras. None of these orchestras employ full-time players, so the musicians have to work with more than one. Sometimes six or eight.

The pay isn't great. The days are long. The oil changes are frequent. I'm not sure grueling would cover it.

But the players love it. I mean, they'd have to.

While Meredith Brown was putting in the 5000-10000 hours of practice she must have put in to become a professional classical musician, I was writing assembly code to draw Backgammon screens on my C=64 and solving Rubik's Cube and so on... which leads me to the following analysis of her weekend commute.

Vallejo to San Rafael is 30 miles... San Rafael to San Jose is 65 miles... San Jose to Vallejo is 70 miles. Her weekend total would have been 30+65+70 (saturday) plus 30+65+65+30 (sunday) or 355 miles, assuming she didn't go home between services. Drive like that 7 days a week for a year, and you'll put 62000 miles on your car.

When you commute, you pay twice, both in dollars and in hours. My 80-mile drive to the office regularly takes 120-160 minutes. If these musicians ever run into traffic, there's a good chance they're spending more time driving than they are playing music.

Anyway, here's the documentary, already on DVD: Freeway Philharmonic, the classical road warriors. At $25, it will cost you less than Ms. Brown spent on gas last weekend.

PS. I used to work with Bruce Chrisp, who, with his wife Meredith Brown is featured in the SFGate article and the Freeway Philharmonic documentary. If I recall correctly, Bruce retired from a very promising career in web design to pursue music full-time. Knowing what he sacrificed, I'm awed by his dedication.

Update 2008-02-09: Bruce got in touch to announce a new website, Freeway Philharmonic, which names the local musicians and orchestras, announces news and auditions, and more.

52 hours with no light and no running water. 52 hours of early nights, of dirty dishes that can't be washed, of hauling buckets of rainwater to flush toilets. 52 hours of the walls closing in. 52 hours of sweaty lunchmeats in a dank refrigerator, assaulting the senses of anyone who dares to venture inside.

52 hours of the beer smelling like salami.

We coped with the outage fairly well, and when I say "fairly well," I'm lying. We depend on electricity to live, and I bet half the population would begin hunting their neighbors for sport within 72 hours if the lights ever went off for good.

Photos from the Great Storm of 2008

Five years ago, we lost power for 75 hours -- just over three days with no lights, no heat, no running water. It was miserable, but I was home alone at the time, and I coped reasonably well (as far as you know).

This time it's worse. We're only 30 hours in, but we have three extra bodies in the house, including two houseguests and one toddler.

The electric utility hasn't even given us an estimate of when they might restore service. They haven't even come out to assess it. PG&E reports 450 separate outages, and ours apparently doesn't rank high enough to warrant any attention.

I figured out today what the problem is. It's nothing mysterious or difficult to diagnose -- there's a live electrical wire laying in the street. Some thoughtful neighbors have strung yellow "CAUTION" tape across a couple trash cans to prevent folks from driving over the cable and electrocuting themselves.

Just above are a couple of extremely tall redwoods leaning about 2045° off of vertical. If the tree they're leaning on gives way, the whole lot will end up on the road, which among other things means I'll have to walk the last mile home (with 20 lbs of ice and six gallons of water).

Anyway, you have to figure that if PG&E can't spare a crew to come out and coil up a live wire that's been laying on a wet street for a day and a half, then the power situation must be pretty bad.

During the last long blackout five years ago, I commented that I'd rather spend money on a solar-electric system than a generator. I've done that, and just like last time, sunny skies have returned long before the electricity. But I've since learned that grid-tied PV systems don't work without the grid. So although the system on my roof could easily power us through a houseful of warm showers and overdue loads of laundry, it's as cold and dark as we are inside. We'll end up buying a generator anyway.

Your mom sent you a Psycho Kitty kard.

What would you say to someone whose goal is to plant 8 million trees in an African desert?

Fortunately nobody asked me, and they're proceeding with the project. It got a kick-start last week when the folks behind the Web2Summit conference -- O'Reilly Media and CMP Media -- purchased a tree for each of the conference's 1200 participants. I love the idea; it's the most thoughtful and most environmentally-conscious conference schwag I've ever received. Read more about it.

(I wonder if Dale Dougherty had something to do with this decision? His post from April about wasteful conference schwag may have been a tipping point. The Web2Summit did have a schwag bag, but it was much emptier than normal -- significantly less paper waste -- and the bag itself was meant to be reused.) (photo credit: violet.blue)

Anyway, kudos to O'Reilly and CMP and whoever sold this idea to the conference organizers.

I planted a second tree just now. Here's my Tree-Nation profile.

For each of the past three years, I've spent the Summer and Fall on rehearsing and recording drum parts (resulting in this CD and this one plus one tune on a sophomore release from the same guy -- watch for a record announcement here shortly -- and a couple other songs (1, 2, 3)).

I call my studio "Borrowed Time" in part because it's a terribly clever play on words, but mostly because it was only a matter of months until my son was old enough to move into the space I'd been using as a live room. That day came last March. It was a great move for his independence and maturity, but not so great for my two-bars-a-day recording habit.

Nonetheless, the recording projects continue. I'm only about 40% through the material for my upcoming solo record, and my prolific friend Andrew has already written the material for his second CD, the drum tracks for which are due by the holidays.

Fortunately I had the foresight to pick up an electronic drum kit late last year, so I've been doing all the preproduction work in headphones. The plan was to rent a local room, move in for a long weekend, and do the final tracking on my acoustic kit quickly.

It would mean less tweaking, fewer takes, and hopefully a little more spontaneity.

Last weekend was the first of the season's two recording sessions. I spent about two hours getting the drums in and up, about four more hanging mics, routing cables, and getting sounds.

Click to see photos from the 2007 sessions.

Needless to say, due to time constraints I had to make a few compromises. I didn't sound-check my second snare drum or the other two of the three available snare mics, or spend a day experimenting with room mic position. But, having done this several times before, I think the sounds I got were better than in any previous session.

The kick-drum sound this time was far superior, due to a mic-positioning tip I picked up from Marc Senasac. (In a nutshell, the external or ambient kick mic needs to be a couple feet away from the drum, not up against the resonant head.)

I got bit by a few gremlins on my first day. One of the room-mic channels had an audible, pulsing white noise problem that I first attributed to the mic's proximity to a breaker box in the corner of the room. However, moving the mic, then swapping the cable, had no effect. Then by happy chance I discovered that the channel was producing the white noise even with no mic plugged in. It was my first bad-channel experience, but no doubt not the last. I'll identify it faster next time.

The other gremlin was pure user error -- a couple new insert cables have a much tighter fit than I'm used to. Two of the four didn't get plugged in all the way and caused some bad hum in my compressor chain. I diagnosed this quickly on the second day of the session.

In terms of gear, I had only three new pieces:

• PreSonus DigiMax FS 8-way preamp, replacing the Focusrite Octopre LE, which I never liked. In close listening tests, I can't tell one from the other, but I liked two features of the DigiMax:
  1. stepped attenuators allow easy gain-matching of overheads and room mics
  2. each channel has an insert chain. The Octopre LE required me to patch compressed signals back in through an additional input, muddying the signal path and burning twice as many inputs as should be necessary.

• New TRS insert cables custom-made from Canare cable, replacing molded consumer-grade Hosa gear. I honestly doubt I'd be able to hear a difference here, but I needed more of these anyway and, what can I say, I'm a tweaker.
• a Crown PZM mic. I was hoping to get some interesting room sounds through this, but it sounded really trashy to me. It's not a defect of the mic, which sounds beautiful for casual voice recording. More likely, it was a combination of the room and the placement. If I could have put this out of line-of-sight of the cymbals, or even outside the live room, it would have been much more interesting. But these options were not available, so I replaced it with a large-diaphragm condenser in case anyone downstream in the production process wants a mono, retro kit sound as an effect.

On the 2nd and 3rd days of the session, I knocked out four songs, one of which I'd literally never played before -- the album's cover tune, an old Paul McCartney song. Overall I think it went well, and it should be very interesting to hear how these songs get built up on top of the drums.

This was the input distribution (for my reference):

• Digimax FS
  1. Kick, internal (insert: RNC)
  2. Kick, external
  3. Snare, top (insert: RNC)
  4. Snare, bottom
  5. OH, left
  6. OH, right
  7. (dead)
  8. unused

• Mackie 1604
  1. Tom 1
  2. Tom 2
  3. Tom 3
  4. Tom 4

• Digi-002
  1. Hi-Hat
  2. Ambient LDC
  3. Room, left
  4. Room, right

Shopping list for the next session:

• Studio-style telescoping boom stand -- one of the professional models with a 20-lb stand and a 10' boom
• I'm having my three Oktava MK-12s hod-rodded by Michael Joly.
• I want a new high-hat mic. Not sure which way to go here yet.
• I want a ribbon mic too; maybe a Karma K6.

I'm delinquent on my promise of a couple weeks ago to reveal the solution to my PV array's under-production problem. I hadn't wanted to chatter about the issue until we'd actually solved the problem. Our installer, SPG Solar, and the panel manufacturer Kyocera have since come through with the ultimate solution, so I'm ready to tell the tale.

Back in August, we thought we'd found the problem right away when we flipped open the DC disconnect switchbox and a gallon of brown water jumped out.

Yes, jumped. It was alive. And seriously nasty... we're having to repaint the splash zone.

Long-term readers may recall that the DC switchbox flooded once before. Statistically speaking, this is nearly impossible. As the field supervisor and chief system debugger from SPG commented, "I've only ever seen this problem two times in six years... and for both of them I was standing right here on your porch."

The problem, this time, was different -- not so much that water was getting in, but that it couldn't get back out. The counterintuitive reality is that outdoor switchboxes like these are built on the assumption that moisture will get in, so they come equipped with punch-outs to allow for draining and ventilation. In January 2004, when our first DC switchbox was replaced, the installer (who is no longer with SPG) failed to pop open the drain holes. Ironic, no?

So, the first step was to replace, and actually upgrade the DC disconnect switchbox. We were confident that this would solve the problem. But it didn't.

SPG's crew then tested each module on the roof. One was found to create a voltage drop, and was removed, but this didn't affect total system output.

Next they tried a spare inverter... no change.