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After doing research on flashlights, I thought it would be neat to get a solar battery charger. Then you could run the flashlights for free! I have links to some solar products on my iPod battery web page. I found a couple of posts on Candlepower Forums about solar chargers and the experts there seemed to wonder what the point is. A decent solar charger will cost nearly $100 which will buy a lot of batteries. If you are camping then you would have to carry the solar charger with you and then leave it in the sun while it charged batteries. Why not carry some extra batteries? Even the better ones will take all day to fully charge 4 AA batteries and that would require full sun and probably moving the solar panel to get the best exposure throughout the day. Will you have time for that?

It is still intriguing. Some of the solar chargers have an internal battery that the panel charges and then you plug your device (iPod, Palm, phone, or battery charger) into a USB jack on the charger (at night I guess) and get juice from the internal battery. That’s good because you don’t want to leave your batteries or your iPod in the sun all day.

One of the better ones may be a folding one made by Powerfilm. The key is to get plenty of area and this one folds out to get extra coverage, but can be folded up to about the size of a wallet. The advantage and problem is that it uses thin film solar cells which won’t crack like the glass ones, but are not as efficient either (so it needs more area). I couldn’t find a whole lot on user experience for these things. Most of the other ones I’ve seen have much less area but are using more efficient solar cells. Some of them are clearly junk and might require several days of sun just to charge a few AA batteries.

The only other use would be for a prolonged power outage, but even then I have a battery charger that can run off of the car lighter and I could probably charge batteries at work and bring them home. Now if the power grid fails for some reason, then it might be nice to have a solar charger, but if that is the case then I might have bigger worries than if my iPod or flashlight will work.

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Tropicana is having a promotion lately where you can enter a code off of a carton of orange juice and save 100 square feet of rainforest. Publix had a good deal on orange juice plus there was a coupon for $1 off two half gallons, so I stocked up today (no Trop50 for me!). I entered my codes and am now up to 1300 square feet. The website has a page of Top Rescuers. Of course I’m nowhere close, but I was surprised to see that the top team is the US Air Force Academy cadets with 53,600 square feet (an acre is 43,560). Second has 50,800 and third is quite distant at 13,300. But even the cadets pale in comparison to Brendan of Franklin, Massachusetts who has saved 172,800 square feet. If the academy were an individual, they would come in 4th. The total saved so far is 35 million square feet.

Tropicana Top Rescuers

I was looking through Time magazine’s photo essay on Obama behind the scenes at the White House and saw this picture of the president with his aides.

He’s wearing the same socks as me! Several years ago I decided that instead of trying to match up socks, I would just buy a bunch of one kind of sock and that way I wouldn’t have to match them up or worry about losing one. So I have a whole drawer full of this kind of sock. You can’t tell it from the online picture, but from the picture in the magazine I was able to tell further that this is an earlier version of the sock that you can’t get anymore (so don’t bother trying, Jeb). I went to replenish my supply of socks recently and wound up with similar Nike footies, but they are not quite the same. Now I am back to two kinds of socks, but even so I only have to pull out three socks to ensure a match.

Also, I have to say that Obama made yet another great decision in picking this particular sock (though maybe Michelle picked them out; they’re not very expensive). Although Dad called any sock of that style “sissy socks,” they are comfortable and they have lasted a long time.

I had heard about Zenni Optical from Mom who heard about them from Clark Howard. He raves about how cheaply you can get mail order glasses from them. I wasn’t real happy with the clip-on sunglasses that came with my new glasses I got last year from Lenscrafters. They were connected by magnets, but not very securely and the extra weight made my nose hurt after wearing the glasses with sunglasses for a while.

I had looked at the Zenni Optical website before but I needed my pupil distance (distance between my two pupils) which was not part of my prescription. So that held me back, but when I was at Lenscrafters I asked for that measurement and wrote it down for use later (65 mm; it turns out it isn’t that hard to get someone to hold a ruler over your eyes and tell you what it is).

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I’ve been kind of obsessed with the level of Lake Lanier since the media made such a big deal about it last year or so and said it could run out of water completely, or that they might have to use dead zone water that was stored there since the beginning and completely out of oxygen. None of that ever happened and the lake is actually up 10 feet from last November. In fact, just this week it was announced that the drought is over.

Though the amount of water per inch of lake varies, an article from the AJC in January said that 1 foot of Lake Lanier is equal to 10 billion gallons of water and could supply Atlanta for 25 days. That article also said that Lake Lanier holds five times as much water as Lake Allatoona, which is now full.

Part of the problem with the water level was due to a bad gauge at the lake which led people at the dam to release billions of gallons of water, or about 2 feet.