This installment is way overdue, but better late than never! In the third and fourth parts of this series, I provided detail about the solar panel array that we planned to have installed on the roof of our new home. In this post I’ll describe how we structured the decision process for the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) portion of the installation, and which one we picked. Everything is installed and operating now, so the next installment will be an update about the installation process and...

In the third part of this series, I provided detail about the solar panel array that we plan to have installed on the roof of our new home. In this post I’ll provide a very quick update on that, based on new information that we gathered during the on-site survey by the installer. The installer did a follow-up site survey mid last month, and unfortunately came to the conclusion that our roof space wasn’t quite sufficient to handle 24 panels on the south face, or 6 panels on the east face. Their...

In the first and second posts of this series, I laid out my general reasoning and plan for incorporating solar power into my new home and covered the basics of solar power systems and integrated batteries. This post will go into more detail about the choices we’ve made regarding our solar installation. Details about our battery system choices will be in the next post of the series. Let’s recap the original goals for our solar+battery system: Have enough solar capacity to reach annual “net zero”...

In the first post of this series, I laid out my general reasoning and plan for incorporating solar power into my new home. This post will go into more detail about what that means in theory, and how it plays out in practice. There are five general types of systems to consider when having a discussion about electric service with and without Solar power (and/or battery storage): Electrical Grid Only - This is the configuration of the vast majority of residences and businesses. Power is provided...

This past May my wife and I finally pulled the trigger and bought what we intend to be our “forever home.” We’d been looking for several years, and just had never found the right house, in the right place, at the right price. We ended up with a ~1,700ft² house just outside of Port Townsend, WA, in a newly-constructed development. It’s all one level, on just over a quarter of an acre of land, with a nice back patio and flat yard for the dog, and has a three car garage - all things we were looking...

As I mentioned in The End of an Era, this past Friday was my last day as a Starbucks partner. I am now a proud Starbucks retiree, but my working days are not over quite yet. This morning I’ll log into my work laptop for the first time and officially start my new role as a Chief Technology Advisor with World Wide Technology (WWT). I’ve been working with WWT for well over a dozen years as a customer, starting way back in 2011 when I was a freshly minted director running infrastructure services at...

After nearly 17 years as a Starbucks partner (Starbucks employees are considered partners because we all have equity in the company), the time has come for me to move on. Since the first week of June last year (‘23), I’ve been on what is called in Starbucks parlance a “Career Coffee Break” AKA sabbatical. If you’ve been a partner for at least ten continuous years you become eligible for a CCB of up to 12 months. It’s an unpaid leave, but you otherwise retain active status for the purposes of...

The default syndication mechanism for Hugo is RSS 2.0. This is great, and it works perfectly well, but for a few reasons1 I wanted to provide an Atom feed instead. As I dug into what it would take to make this happen, I uncovered a number of good resources that pointed me in right general direction, but no single comprehensive “how-to” guide that I could follow. I’ve tried to collect up the steps and resources that I used below so that it might help others that want to do the same. I have also...

After a lot of poking, reading, web-searching, and talking to friends who know the area, we have set our plans for the first phase of our “great loop” of the western US. As part of my time off for Career Coffee Break (CCB), we want to see a bunch of the sights in the western US that we’ve never had a chance to vist. Places like Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, and the Grand Canyon, to name a few. Our initial thought was to just “wing it”, but based on research we’ve determined...

As of this June, I’ll have spent 16 years as an employee of Starbucks Coffee Company. Roughly half of my total career has been in service to Starbucks, and I can say without a doubt that it’s been the best 16 years of my career so far. So many great people, so many amazing things to work on, so many opportunities to travel to far-off places and meet other Starbucks partners who are making the Starbucks mission come to life. It’s been a roller-coaster ride for sure. It’s taken me from the heady...