Since I moved in 10 years ago my water heater has been old (it was made in 1980). And yet it continues to last and get older. For a while I considered a solar water heater. I have a south-facing roof right above where the water heater is. But solar systems are very expensive and complicated. Years ago I priced out a system that was $2000 including two solar panels, pump, and a heat exchanger to heat water using hot antifreeze from the solar collector (you can heat the water directly but have to remember to drain the solar collectors any night it will go below freezing). You also need an 80-gallon water tank, which was not included. That would never pay for itself and, on top of that, there was no guarantee you would always have hot water. And the time you really need it, in the morning, is the time you have the least of it. So you still end up buying a backup system.
Year: 2007
New Fridge
Yesterday I went to Sears to check out the refrigerators I had been researching all week. I had narrowed my choices down substantially by picking 1. Energy Star 2. Top Freezer 3. Icemaker 4. 18 cubic feet and 5. White. Sears narrowed my choices down substantially further by offering something that fit all of those criteria and selling it for only $500 with free delivery. Nobody else could come close. Lowes had a Whirlpool, which I would have rather gotten, but it was a hundred dollars more and they would have charged for delivery.
799 Refrigerators
I have been thinking about replacing my old brown refrigerator for a long time. But, because it works fine (even the icemaker), I haven’t been in a hurry. I read something about refrigerators using more electricity than anything else in the kitchen and I knew that the era of brown refrigerators couldn’t have been that interested in efficiency. I found a website run by Energy Star that can calculate what your old refrigerator really costs you compared to a current Energy Star model. Mine is so old that I didn’t think they would have my model, and they didn’t (at first), so I entered the cubic feet and guessed at the year as being before 1980. It said I could save $250 a year. That didn’t seem possible. Later when I entered the model of my refrigerator without hypens, I found some similar sounding refrigerators made by GE from 1980 to 1984 and guessed I could save more like $100 per year. Still, not bad. (Follow up: I wound up saving almost a third of my electricity, at least $200 a year).
Movie Review Database
I had thought about converting my movie reviews, currently a bunch of HTML web pages, to a database using MySQL and php. Then I thought I could just use Microsoft Access which I’m pretty familiar with to create HTML pages. I had done something similar at work where we had a database of companies and I was able to create an index page and then separate pages for each company. Then we would move the pages generated to our website. That site has since been replaced by a dynamic web-based application under a (very expensive) contract.
Right now I have an archive of every movie review by the year the movie was released. I am also using frames to navigate by using two frames: one with a drop down list of years and another frame with a list of movies for that year. To make it easy, I just have a separate HTML file for each year that consists of a drop-down list and is loaded when a year is selected. One other thing I do at the end of each year is generate a ranked list of all the movies I saw that year. That’s easy in HTML, but the tricky part is that I break ties and sometimes rank independently of whatever grade I originally gave the movie (so I might have a B- ahead of a B movie once I think about it). On that ranking page I give a short summary of my review for each movie. Using an ordered list, it is easy for me to insert a movie, since I am not coming up with the ranking numbers, but letting the HTML do it based on where the movie falls in the list. The HTML assigns the numbers, not me. This makes it really easy to add a movie to the list or change places of a movie.
Amazon MP3 Service
I have bought 194 songs from iTunes now. I thought Apple did a great thing in providing a simple pricing scheme and software that made it easy and fun. They also offer a very good selection of songs. And now they have video, movies, and TV shows. The only downside was that the songs could only be played using iTunes on the computer or on an iPod. 
However you could still burn the songs to a CD and play them wherever you wanted. Governments in Europe have insisted that Apple stop selling a proprietary format, wanting to avoid another Microsoft type of monopoly. Some music labels now sell high quality songs (MP3’s are generally have less sound quality than CD’s) on iTunes without any restrictions on how the songs are played (and charge an extra 30 cents). Other music companies have said they will stop partnering with Apple altogether because they do not like Apple’s terms.