More Green Building Curmudgeon
Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t posted to my blog in about a month. September was challenging for me. I had high hopes for it to be a time of high productivity, but apparently it was not meant to be. The month started out promising: little scheduled travel, few deadlines, and several projects needing attention that I was excited about. It started going downhill almost immediately. I acquired a low-level virus, the flu, or something else that made me sluggish and uncomfortable, that sapped my strength and motivation, but did not debilitate me enough to seek medical attention. Just as I was working my way out of the malaise, my laptop crapped out on me.
Computers Save So Much Time
A trip to the computer store confirmed that the patient was terminal with no hope for resurrection. A replacement computer was about a week away, so my very helpful independent computer store was nice enough to give me a loaner, an old but working laptop. After about eight hours of data restoration work, I was back in business with some limitations and missing only a few documents that were skipped in my last backup. Finally back to work, with the month almost gone, I slowly began to gain some momentum. A week later the new computer arrived. After another marathon session of data restoration with everything seeming to work fine, I turned it off and went to sleep.
The Blue Screen of Death
The next morning, just before I headed out the door for a long drive to inspect a house for a client, I fired up the new machine and got the blue screen of death. AHHHH! I threw it in the car, and stopped by the computer store to find out they don’t open until 10AM. Off to my meeting. Later I stopped back by store on the way home in the early PM. We spent about an hour diagnosing the problem, and they decided that they needed to work on it for a while. Luckily, they were able to fix it without losing any of my data, and my computer was ready by the end of the day. I kept both computers running for another few days until I was confident that the new one would actually work. After about a week, I returned my loaner with reasonable confidence that I now have a truly functioning computer. Out of all this, I have finally decided to take the advice of several good friends as well as my children and switch to a Mac, probably sometime before the end of the year. After a 20+ year relationship with PCs, it’s time to move on.
Green Building Misinformation Abounds
But enough of my tribulations. I will wrap up with a brief comment on a presentation I saw recently. At a local Remodelers Council meeting, an industrial hygienist and air-quality expert told us about controlling pollutants on job sites to protect both staff and home occupants. The information was reasonably interesting and the speaker was clearly qualified and experienced in the area. He pointed out that he was one of the few people in his field who actually worked on single-family homes. What really got to me was his discussion on fresh-air ventilation. His position was that he preferred homes that had high infiltration rates because then he didn’t have to worry about active ventilation systems.
Definition of Stress: Resisting the Urge to Choke the Living Daylights Out of Someone Who Desperately Deserves It
Repressing my natural urge to start yelling at him, I waited patiently until he was finished and, as politely as possible for me, pointed out that using uncontrolled infiltration for fresh-air ventilation was a bad strategy, both from an energy and an indoor-health standpoint, and that it was dangerous to promulgate this particular position in the industry as it runs counter to the very heart of green building. Unfortunately, he was not to be swayed, and I didn’t have the energy to start a fight. Luckily, the event was not that well attended, so his damage was minimized. While I do appreciate that this gentleman has a strong background in air-quality issues, I find it very frustrating that he completely missed the air quality/infiltration/energy efficiency connection, and just strolled merrily along with his restricted view of homes. Green building is so multifaceted that it is critical to be able to look at it from every point of view in order to be successful. In his case, he was just one of those blind men checking out the elephant, each describing very clearly the part they were touching, missing the big picture by a mile.
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4 Comments
Good choice
About the Mac, I mean. They are much less troublesome, and they're also much less prone to random, brief-but-irritating GUI hangups. Of course, this means that if you have to use a PC (at work, say), it's all the more annoying...
There's been some interesting back and forth between Apple and Greenpeace over how green Apple and their products are. This recent article suggests that Apple may be one of the greener options, despite their ongoing contentions with GP:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/09/apple-reframes-the-green-debate-backs-it-up-with-new-data.ars
Don't give up the fight!!
Carl, the biggest problem we have "down here" is uneducated homeowners. This presenter is exactly why there is so much inertia in green building - conflicting information about healthy homes. When so called experts make outlandish claims about what's good for a home, it only stalls people from doing anything. Next, some expert will present that the recent floods are good for homes because it will keep homeowners skin moist and young looking...
Once You Go Mac .. You Don't Go Back!
Mac was clearly not the gist of your post, but as a Born-Again Mac Convert I can't say enough good things about the wisdom of your decision. I too resisted the advice of close confidants for years until about 18 months ago when our in-house PC network crashed repeatedly. After my wife stopped me from literally throwing an expensive laptop out the office window, I counted to ten and headed straight to the Apple store. One of the best business calls I've made in years! And, there is an easy way with a third party program called Parallels to still be able to run Windows in a partitioned, virtual machine ON you Mac. We use this for the few programs like MS Project for which there isn't yet a good Mac alternative.
As for the meeting speaker ... typical "old dog, new tricks," situation. Some of those guys are like turning an aircraft carrier. I've given up on arguing (I mean conversing) with most of them and instead just preach our gospel whenever we get a chance in hopes that we will eventually drown them out in the public arena and they'll have no choice but to recognize the error of their "we've always done it this way" beliefs.
Come to think of it, that actually sounds a LOT like I was with MACs vs. PCs .. so maybe that was the gist of your post after all?? I guess we all have our own aircraft carriers to turn around...
I switched to a Mac and have never looked back!
I have been a Project Manager and Windows Systems Engineer in the computer industry for the last 15 yrs and I switched to a mac about 2 yrs ago for my personal computer. I simply got sick and tired of having to rebuild my computer several time a year due to slowness, malware or virus attacks (Even though I had up to date protection) and the only remedy was a complete rebuild. Since owning a mac I have not had a single problem and to be honest have grown to love the interesting feature set Mac brings to my computing world. I do however run Windows on my Mac via VMware Fusion which, allows you run Windows and Mac OS X side by side. The nice thing is that when you experience an issue on Windows you can simply revert back to a previous snapshot getting you back up and running in seconds. As great as the Mac is there are still some apps that I like that are only available on Windows. There are other Mac Specific apps that can do the same job; I just wanted to stick with what I knew. As someone else previously mentioned the architecture of Mac OS X is much less vulnerable to attack than Windows there are 150000+ known viruses for Windows where there are only 1000+ for MAC. Also don't let the hype fool you about the upcoming Windows 7; which will be released in 2 weeks. I have been one of Microsoft's beta testers for about 6 months now and while they have definitely made some improvements over Vista; it still is built on the Windows Registry architecture and will be plagued with many of he same problems.
Lastly, there is the social aspects of the Mac. By getting a Mac you are automatically becoming a member of a fun, interesting group of people that simply love life with their Macs! They tend to be people with a creative expressive way of thinking and have an energetic, adventurous spirit. To be honest I did not notice that until I switched myself. I am definitely not saying that those same types of people do not use Windows (because there are many things that I really like about Windows) I am simply saying that there is a certain "positive" embodied energy around the brand that you will definitely notice and grow to love.
Please feel free to contact me anytime if you have additional questions or concerns about switching to the Mac platform and I hope that my comments added value.
Regards,
Stephen Bowser
LinkedIn- http://www.linkedin.com/pub/4/379/368
Twitter- http://twitter.com/stephen0719
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