Day 72

Day 72 - 15.01.10

Finally went to the shop and remembered to buy proper cocoa and milk. I've been having hot chocolate (no sugar for me, thank you very much!) every night ever since.

What productive thing have you done today?

Last Sunday there was enough fog to kill a horse, if fog could kill horses that is. This is a walkway leading into the sea and the same walkway seen from the sea. The part is that it was -17C or colder on most days then so one could walk on the ice around Lauttasaari pretty safely. Right now we're in the -4C area and the ice around the bridges is slowly coming apart. On a side note, to get the height/width to fit nicely for the two photos above I totally just broke out with x and y equations. It's like that time a bunch of us shared a taxi and I calculated how much everyone had to pay me back with coefficients. And just because... here are some things I would love right now: - hot chocolate - grapes that have actual taste - finally getting around to sorting out my bills - finding that perfect couch for the flat soon

Who am I going to have to keel today?

I use very little electricity compared to the average person. Even though I cook and bake a lot. I really dislike overheating the house which is probably why my final bill is always much lower than what my electrical provider predicts. And so... topic of the day: those lovely electricity providers. Electricity is relatively cheap in Finland and it's relatively easy to pay with online banking. What amazes me most is the load of crap they send along with your quarterly bill. Sure, it's better to get some information about your past consumptions than not get anything at all but whoever made the template and the calculations for those things was an idiot. First of all you get a nice graph that shows you how much you consumed every year. Or at least that's what you think it is as it have 2009, 2008, 2007, etc. written in big. No, actually when you look closely it's taken from a certain month in 2007 to a certain month in 2008 and then to a certain month in 2009 but those month do not match up. Basically you have a bar graph where the data is not spread evenly. Here are the durations under each bar on my bill: 12.10.2004 - 21.11.2005 (405 days) 21.11.2005 - 25.10.2006 (338 days) 25.10.2006 - 20.11.2007 (391 days) 20.11.2007 - 15.08.2008 (269 days) 15.08.2008 - 31.12.2009 (503 days) Of course the amount of electricity used for the length of 503 is way larger than that used for the length of 269 days... what's the point of the graph? At the bottom you have a tiny chart that actually tells you how many kWh you consumed per calendar day for each period, something that might actually be useful! Why is that at the bottom? Why did they decide to use a useless bar graph? Who knows! Actually yesterday we had a lengthy discussion about measurements and electricity companies. The law in Finland requires that by 2014 everyone should get readings in "real time" about their electricity use... by "real time" the government means "once a month". I kid you not! It's not like the readers would cost that much, the guy who told us about the readings and how to make them is the CEO of one of the largest companies for the sale of measurements. These guys estimate that the initial cost per reader would be 8 euros and would have a monthly operational cost of 20 cents. Why are they taking so long then putting them in place? Heck, even in India they're ahead of Finland in this domain and they have hundreds of millions of homes to equip! Perhaps I wouldn't be taking this so badly if I weren't working in a field close to electricity providers but sometimes I just feel like tearing my hair out.