Bombay trip

 

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del.icio.us Tags: Hyderabad,Green,Growing,Gardening

In one of my previous posts, I had outlined the experiments I am conducting with coco peat, which is supposed to be tropic's equivalent of Peat Moss. I chose, basil, lavender and cucumber seeds. I have also selected some other flowering plant seed which I do not remember at this point. The biggest mistake happened was, the seeds have got mixed up.

I got lots of seeds and bulbs from Holland. That was in January. But because of some problems and uncertainty of we continuing to be in Hyderabad, I took a look at the package only in March. by then some of the bulbs had rotten and spoilt the packages of some other seeds too. At least the paper part of the seed packages were gone and the seeds were intact in their plastic bags. So, some of the seeds I can not identify and label them when I am planting. Pretty dumb isn't it. But I could compare with the un-spoilt seed packages and could identify. But still not 100% sure of everything.

Also, I need to come up with some mechanism of name tags. I am in India, and some times, things which are very simple to do in some other country, will be extremely difficult here. So far, in Hyderabad, gardening stores I have not seen name tags that are used for identifying seedlings. Any way that's not a big thing. I could use some thing else instead. May be I will check out some places in Bombay.

Any way, coming back to the seedlings, I remember reading that raising Lavender from seeds is very difficult. Wait let me tell you, it was no April 10 and today is 18 April and I see them germinating and they are about few millimeters in length and beautiful pale green leaves. I could not take pictures because the whole day preparing for my travel in the night. I will see those beauties only on 23rd. They are under foster care till then with my neighbor.

One problem I have noticed with coco peat, is that the porosity is very high and seedlings are not firmly positioned in the growing medium. I do not know how to correct this problem yet.

April 20, 2009. Bandra Railway Terminus, Bandra, Mumbai.

Tomorrow I have to be in Valsad, and from Bombay or Mumbai, the best way to travel to Valsad is by train. At 6.50 am from Bandra Terminus. Surat intercity express. I have come here to book the ticket and its about 2 hours wait I think. Nothing to do, as having a wait-listed ticket is better than not booking and buying a current booking tomorrow. The booking/reservation counter is about 1km from the actual terminus. So I can save about 30 minutes in the morning.

Today, I gave some photography tips to Ravi, who has to shoot some products and he is not very versed with the camera ( a Polaroid 8 M pixel point and shoot). He is a good artist who has learnt, layouts etc, without any formal training. I showed him how using a stand with self timer mode drastically increases the image quality. Need to show him some simple post processing techniques to increase the image value.

I think coral and Photoshop will have similar features.

More updates later.

Energy Efficient Office Buildings

del.icio.us Tags: power consumption,electricity,green living,responsible towards environment,earth,office,saving,power

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These days, because of economic downturn as well as good sense of reducing wasteful spending on energy consumption, lot of Corporations, firms and offices are finding ways of reducing their energy consumption and hence their carbon footprint.

Lot of ideas get floated, some implemented and some discarded once the fatigue sets in.

The fundamental idea is, not to haste in the design of office interiors. It is possible to design energy efficient buildings without actually becoming very expensive to construct and still be very attractive office structures. Designing the buildings right in the first place is less expensive than retro-fitting them later for reducing the energy expenditure. A lot of common sense is required though. Of course, which is not so common.

Use of natural light and properly insulated office work spaces can reduce the electricity bills drastically.

Places like India, has abundance of natural light. But I see more and more office buildings making not much use of this. Excessive dependency on artificial light. And more electricity consumption.

When India is reeling under the power crunch because of explosive growth in various sectors, we need to chip in for controlling the wasteful spending on the energy.

Every degree increase in the ambient temperature inside the office space can save lots of electricity and hence money. The comfortable temperature can be any where between 21 to 25 degree Celsius. But rarely this checked continuously and corrected. Also, if you are at a lower temperature, your body consumes more calories and hence you will eat more, chances that you will put on lots of weight. Be aware of that.

Having indoor fountains is another greatest of energy efficiency blunders. Think about it. Fountain is a fluid and to maintain a constant temperature of a fluid takes more energy than a solid.

The following is the mail, which I have received today on the ways to reduce power consumption in software companies. I do not know the origins of these statistics, but they are not entirely without base.

Let me know your ideas to save energy both at work place and at home. If its good for you, I am sure it will be good for many others too.

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Power Consumption - Desktops - We could save a lot

The average power consumption of a desktop when it is fully functional is about 300-400 watts per hour depending on the graphics card and other power driven equipments connected to your desktop. And when the system is idle, it draws approximately 150-200 watts per hour. A 17 inch monitor alone draws approximately 80 watts per hour.

The above are just an approximate statistics of power utilized by a standard PC provided by any software company to its employee.

Now let me take an example of an IT firm which has about 10,000 employees. Assuming each employee using a desktop, there are 10,000 desktops being used by the firm. Assuming that the employees ideally work from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM (Approximately). I am quite sure that almost all employees would just lock the system before leaving for their homes. This means that the systems will be idle for about 14 hrs a day. So taking account of the 10,000 employees of the firm, number of hours the systems are idle in a day is approximately 1,40,000 hours.

Now summarizing the above cost factor and idle time factors:

Power utilized by a idle system : 200 watt-hour
No of idle hours of desktop of a firm : 1,40,000 hours
Total power consumed during this period : 2,80,00,000 watt-hours = 28,000 KWH
So this comes to approximately 28 Mega Watts Hour just for one software firm with 10,000 employees.
Now let me summarize this for just one city, Bangalore. Statistically, Bangalore has around 1000+ software firms. Assuming that there are around 5,000 desktops being used by these firms, the total number of desktops in Bangalore alone will be around 50,00,000.
Again summarizing the above,
Power utilized 10,000 desktops : 28,000 KWH
Power utilized by 50,00,000 desktops : (28,000 * 50,00,000) / 10,000 = 1,40,00,000 KWH = 1,40,00,000 Units

If you are surprised, then probably you have not yet realized that the above figures are only for a single day in Bangalore.

Alone in Bangalore, the power wasted in a month is about 42,00,00,000 Units.

Don't you think all this could be just prevented by a simple "Alt + F4" and "ENTER" before you leave for your house. These are just statistics of a single city, 42 crores of power units per month can be saved by just switching off your desktops before you leave for the day.

And for those people who think that blank screen saver could save power, it has been very much evident that a blanking screen monitor consumes 30-40 watt-hour in comparison to "NIL" of a monitor switched off.
Of course, System in standby mode absolutely utilizes no power, but again a desktop power settings usually has a standby mode gap of one hour. Let me not get into those calculations again.
Its quite simple,

Switching off the monitor with blank screen saver saves 40 WHr.
Switching off the monitor in general saves 80 WHr.
Switching off your desktop saves overall 150-200 WHr.
Setting standby mode for system saves 90% of power utilized after idle state.

So for the next time, you leave your office for the day, please switch off your monitor, switch off your computer and help save precious power. Just to save your 2 min's to start your desktop in the morning, why to waste crores of precious power units, ask this to yourself and you can provide your helping hand for a noble cause to care for our environment.

The statistics above may be approximate, but the purpose can still be served even if each one of us could save one power unit per day.

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Quote of the day:
Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual. - Terry Pratchett