Hydro Ottawa's new Time-of-Use rates

I received today the notice from Hydro Ottawa explaining their new Time-of-Use billing scheme.

Quick look at the new rates

My conclusion is that it seems to raise costs for the average use case, but it's possible to lower costs slightly compared to their current level by shifting usage to off-peak periods (though I think it's unrealistic to expect to be able to save money). The price for on-peak usage (6 hours per day on weekdays) rises a lot.

The old "anytime" rate, on my latest bill (April-June), was 6.8 cents/KWh.

The new rates are:
Off-peak: 5.9 c/KWh
Mid-peak: 8.9 c/KWh
On-peak: 10.7 c/KWh

Assuming a constant load (unrealistic), and weighting these rates by the number of hours a week they apply, you get a new composite weighted rate of 7.29 c/KWh, about 7% higher than the current "anytime" rates.

If you want to keep paying the same amount as today, you'd have to have a usage profile solving for (X: off-peak, Y: mid-peak, Z: on-peak):

5.9X + 8.9Y + 10.7Z = 6.8

(any point on that plane will yield the same cost as today's rate, but the practical application is unintuitive)

So with a weighted rate only 7% higher than today, I think it's not going to be terribly more expensive, as long as you make at least a token effort to move usage outside the On-Peak timespan.

Reporting

The reporting is actually pretty cool:

It presents hourly, daily, and monthly stats, and allows downloading the data as a spreadsheet. This is actually an improvement I've been wishing for for a long time, in contrast to the previous data, which only gave you monthly usage. Now I wish I could get the same data for my gas consumption.

Caprica: familiar places

I sat down to watch Caprica this week (Season 1, Episode 6) and I was so surprised to recognize the location where the Graystone cocktail party was held!

It's quite clearly filmed in Gatineau's Canadian Museum of Civilization!

The Graystones dancing (filmed in the great hall of the museum):


For comparison, here's a shot of that hall; note the columns and totems in front of the window:

Photo Credit: flickr user Яick Harris

This shot, a few seconds later, prominently features one of the museum's Inuit sculptures. If I recall correctly, it's somewhere up on the second floor.


I wonder when this was shot - it looks like summer outside, which means if the view isn't retouched too much, it was shot before this winter?

Les Grillades (Ottawa)

Today's food post is a bit weird: I'm giving a big thumbs up to a restaurant without being able to write much about what I had there, for the simple reason that I'm talking about Les Grillades [85 Holland ave], and they serve Lebanese food, which I'm not very acquainted with. So... here's my fantastically uninformed post about a Lebanese brunch.

I went in for Sunday brunch with no idea what to expect, and let me tell you, this isn't a typical Ottawa greasy shawarma shack! This is a real restaurant.


We started off with a bit of turkish coffee.


A plate of fresh veggies awaited us as we sat down. Incredulous, I inquired of one of my Lebanese companions: "So you just eat... the onions... raw? Really?" I'm certainly not known for turning away from raw foods, so I dove in carefully with some green onion (verdict: not bad, but apologies for my breath afterwards):


Then the brunch dishes started arriving. We didn't actually order anything specific, just "brunch". I was introduced to Labneh, a sort of strained yogurt (delicious!):


Some meat and cooked cheese:


And what was probably the best dish we tasted: this was made from fava beans, it was extremely tasty, and I was told the name (possibly 'Foul'), but it was unfamiliar and escapes me now:


All in all, loved it, and at around 100$ for a table of 6, quite reasonable.

Learning with Bridgehead

Earlier this week, I had the immense pleasure of attending Bridgehead's course on coffee / espresso. The crowd was awesome - all coffee lovers looking to take their espresso-making skills up a notch. Held at The Urban Element, which I've been dying to visit for some time, the course covered two main topics:

The first part (by Mr. Ian Clark), on identifying flavour components of coffee, tasting demonstrations, etc., was interesting but of limited everyday use for me. I (and I suspect I'm far from alone in this) tend to find one or two varieties of beans I like and always go back to those. Still, lots of fun.



The second half (by Laura Perry), gave me much to think about as I prepare my customary morning latte. When pulling an espresso shot, I've often been focused simply on trying to coax my equipment into getting the extraction time right, with little attention given to tamping technique and temperature control.

Biggest discovery of the class? The amount of coffee Laura packs into a portafilter. I've probably been under-dosing my shots for years now!

Feast of Fields Ottawa 2009

My guest post on Feast of Fields 2009 just went up on TheFood.ca! Check it out.

Design I like: Ottawa recycling collection calendar

No complaining today - I'm so happy when I stumble across an element of visual design that's so well done I can't help but stop, smile, and consciously notice how pleasant it is. I'm doubly surprised and delighted if it's from the government, because, you know, bureaucratic design-by-committee isn't exactly renowned for its tasteful results.

• I love how the grid itself doesn't contain a single written word.
• I enjoy the simplicity of the blue/black lines indicating which type of recyclable materials are being collected this week. (Although this requires explanation if you're not from Ottawa - blue boxes are used for glass & plastic, black boxes for paper and cardboard.) I applaud the designer for targeting his work to his audience (Ottawa residents), for whom the blue/black bars are self-evident.
• I have a soft spot for the cute leaf icon (indicating pickup of garden clippings, again, obvious if you live in Ottawa, so it's the know-your-audience principle again).
• But most of all, the stroke of genius is the arrows indicating that the statutory holiday on September 7th offsets regular pickup dates by 24 hours. An incompetent designer would've required a paragraph of text to explain that. This author does it with a big orange X and five arrows. (Note how the arrows and the X are painted in the same orange to tie them together, and that orange isn't used anywhere else in the grid.)

I find this calendar extremely inspiring. Hat tip to you, anonymous designer. I've had Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information on my Amazon wishlist for a while, but I think noticing this tonight is the push I needed to finally go ahead and order.

Conversations with strangers

[JP walks into the sauna, two guys are just sitting.]

Stranger 1: hey
JP: hey [sits]
Stranger 2: we're shooting a movie.
JP: mm-hmm
Stranger 2: it's called "Sweaty Fuckers 2"
JP: hah
Stranger 2: it's a porno
JP: yeah, I wonder if a video camera would survive in this hot, humid environment
...
...
...
Stranger 2: THAT'S his comment? You've got nothing against the gay porno, but you want to know if the humidity would damage the camera?
JP: pretty much; this is Kanata, dude

This is so typical of conversations I have.

Overheard in Ottawa

"No, we were waiting for you at the *other* 'Pho Bo Ga La with a blue sign on Somerset'..."

This Week in Food

Ice Cream at The Piggy Market

A few coworkers recommended I check out Pascale Berthiaume's (who provides the ice cream for the Wellington Gastropub) ice cream, now being sold in Westboro at The Piggy Market. They're located in the rear half of the old, now defunct, Westboro Market.

I gave them a first visit this week to check them out, and so far I've a very positive impression of the place. I stopped in on my way home from work on Thursday, around 20:45. They had been closed for an hour and forty-five minutes, but they still let me in to buy ice cream as long as I paid cash (the charge machines and register were closed for the day); they get 6 out of 5 stars for service. Again, on a coworker's recommendation, I picked the Peanut Butter Salted Caramel flavour.

Outstanding! And check out the ingredients: yolks, cream, sugar, peanut butter, caramel, salt, vanilla. That's it! Goes for 10$ a tub.

Ron Eade on Butter Prices

Omnivore's Ottawa weekly supermarket specials roundup includes these few words from Mr. Eade:

Anyway, my gold star of the week goes to three chain stores, Price Chopper, Food Basics and Superstore Loblaw for selling various brands of butter, salted or unsalted and sometimes both, at $2.97 to $2.99 a pound. Really, I can't understand how stores get away with charging $4 or more for a pound of churned animal fat. (I'll bet it has something to do with the government-sanctioned cartel marketing board that controls milk prices. Reach for the sky, buddy, this is a stick-up.)

Now a complaint like this about the price isn't too punchy in a vacuum - we need to put it in context to see if there's really anything to gripe about when it comes to butter prices! How does this compare to the rest of your grocery basket?

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada provides a bit of historical data for retail prices of various dairy products.

They also provide an overview of the butter sector, but this report is quite misleading; it significantly understates (by 50%!) the price of butter as they got the units wrong, claiming an average price of 3.84$/Kg in 2005. In Table 2, they present the AC Neilsen retail price survey data in $/Kg, adjusted to what I assume are 2006 dollars, but the Neilsen price survey measures the price per pound of butter (454g). I wonder how many people noticed the error.

It's best to ignore the above report then, and go back to the original data, in nominal dollars per pound of butter. As we can see from the series representing the price of a pound of butter, retail has crept up towards the 4$ mark for the last few years, but the nominal price, from 2006-2008, has hardly increased.

I've plotted this data against milk prices and the Core Consumer Price Index (which includes dairy products, btw), using 2004 as a baseline:

So it seems that although the price of butter has shot up a bit faster than core CPI around 2004-2005, it's been relatively flat even in nominal dollars over the last three years, meaning it's actually gotten cheaper in real terms.

Hardly cause for panic! Happy cooking.

Booking a table

This impressed me a lot, it's very slick:


GMail managed to look into this restaurant confirmation email and see that it referenced an event at a specific time, so it created a link to add to my Google Calendar!

Following the link to their website reveals, however, that reservations are done through some third-party widget that's not OpenTable.

It's a shame that restaurants in Ottawa are fracturing their reservation systems across several providers like this, just like online classifieds for the city are fractured across Kijiji, Craigslist and UsedOttawa, reducing their utility for everyone. Restaurant reservations are the sort of service where these third-party hosted reservation service providers can hugely benefit from network effects. Once one service reaches a tipping point (like it seems OpenTable is achieving in some US cities), it will enable the creation of location-aware mobile apps and a whole bunch of other useful services for finding restaurants around you.

It seems to me that as a restaurateur, you'd have see huge benefits from going with a large provider that's essentially advertising your restaurant for you by publicly listing availability of tables. You'd want to go for the dominant service that could offer this, which hasn't (yet?) happened with OpenTable in Ottawa...

Caught one!

As an apartment dweller on the top floor of a triplex, I have no upstairs neighbours, only an unfinished attic above me. Since outdoor temperatures started dropping with the arrival of Winter, I've had a few uninvited houseguests making a ruckus up there.

After a few (unsuccessful) attempts to look around with flashlights to see what was up there, my landlord and I eventually set a trap with some almonds and peanut butter.

Today we caught ourselves our first attic-dwelling squirrel! I know what I'm eating for dinner*!



*: Actually the squirrel is being driven away from the house and gently released into a park.

Chapters

has earned the unfortunate honour of being nothing more than a physical, browsable storefront for amazon.ca.

I was in recently to wander amongst the stacks, when I picked this up:


Looks tasty, but 55$? Out comes the iPhone...


You can order straight from the iPhone-optimized website; my stuff should be delivered to the office by Friday. The sad thing for Chapters is that I really don't see how they can effectively compete here. Amazon, with no physical locations (that Chapters location at the corner of Rideau and Sussex has got to be pricy) and massive economies of scale, will always have lower overhead and be able to compete on price, so only shipping costs and delays can hurt them here, and I'm willing to wait 5 days for cookbooks.

I suppose the sensible thing for the brick-and-mortar player in this race is to attempt to provide a better experience, but if you're selling books, I don't really see how you could do that... Ideas?

This Week in Food

Will Ron Eade wake up with a head of lettuce in his bed?

First up is Ron Eade's column from Ottawa Citizen blogs, where he heaps some well-deserved praise on Kevin Mathieson (of Art-Is-In Bakery) for his bread. Eade says it's better than ACE bread (n.d.a.: no shit), and I for one am glad to note that the supply problems I was hurting from a year ago seem to be a thing of the past: whereas last year, getting your hands on Art-Is-In bread required much haste in returning home from the office, this year I find that retailers aren't consistently running out by late afternoon.

Eade calls New York Times' Mark Bittman's bread recipe a good replica of Art-Is-In's, which I have to humbly disagree with. Bittman's recipe is good, it's my go-to recipe for homemade bread, but I hardly think it's close to equal to Mathieson's.

I think it's awesome that he can get away with saying:

I'm not kidding when I say you need a six- to eight-quart heavy cast-iron Dutch oven with lid. Every kitchen should have one.

Yes, every kitchen should have one - but when I say anything like that, people roll their eyes at me. If you're a newspaper columnist though...

Amate

Got around to trying Amate (link goes to ottawafoodies.com) for some quick Mexican take-out. I came in a few minutes before they decided to shut down for the night, and ordered a tostada with some puerco pibil. Unfortunately, I only got a tiny spoonful, maybe 40g, of pork but hey, what I tasted was good. I think they're still going through opening pains and are a bit disorganized, so it's not fair to say more at this time - let's give them a few more months.

I'll probably try my hand at making puerco pibil myself (in more generous quantities) when I get a free afternoon.

Malak Pastry

I've lived in Westboro for over a year and had never tried Malak Pastry, despite it being right at Carling/Broadview - shame! It's a bakery offering up a range of baklawa (which I'll admit I know little about). I asked for the shopkeeper's recommendations and got a few samples to try before buying, and was incredibly impressed. Delicious! They weren't yet listed on OttawaFoodies, so I'm adding them presently.

foods++;

Finally, I've tried sauerkraut (at a corporate event at the office, no less), bringing my 100 Food countdown (previously blogged about) to 57% completion. Moving up 1% in two months is a rather pathetic pace, so I'm going to make a bigger effort.

Sure, but what year?

That's what I call optimistic.

I really, really, wish I could afford one of those condos, the artist's renderings I've seen look pretty sweet. Also, expensive.

Coffee Shop Technology

I'm sitting in the Westboro Bridgehead, working on a presentation on my MacBook Pro.
Observations from the coffee shop:

• A 50 year-old looking woman is texting. She's typing pretty fast, too.
  
• No one is wearing iPod headphones. Everyone is here to enjoy the atmosphere, I like that.
• Among the people typing away on laptops, the Mac market share is 100%. ONE HUNDRED. Way to go Apple.

Kimchi

I just want to post a pointer to Ron Eade's recent blog entry about making kimchi at home. A quick perusal of the instructions reveal it's a fairly involved multi-step process, but overall it still seems simpler than I'd ever imagined.

I buy my kimchi at 168 Market on Somerset, but they seem to only have a single variety and it's not quite as good as what they serve at, say, Seoul House. I've asked around and people seem to only be aware of 168 Market as a source, so perhaps I should try making my own someday - I'd just have to massively scale down the quantities from Mr Eade's typical batch size!

Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter. --Jack Benny

I got ID'd at the LCBO this week. Youth is still mine. Made me happy :)

How to steal a car

I dropped off my car at the Honda dealership this morning to have them investigate the mysterious Check Engine light that came on yesterday. This post was inspired by what happened tonight when I swung by after work to pick up the car - I'm not chastising them for the security flaw, I mostly just find it charming and cute.

I was there about two minutes, and this is the conversation as I remember it, see if you can spot the tiny flaw:

[I enter the service area of the dealership and walk over to the clerk, then sit down in front of him. A car key is lying on the desk, sporting a little tag with my last name scrawled on it in big block letters: DAIGLE.]

- Clerk: Hi!

- JP: Hi, picking up my car...

- Name?

- Daigle

- Oh yeah, just closing that file now, here's your key.

- So what was wrong with it?

- Coolant temperature sensor failed.

- Huh.

- Yeah, it was under warranty, so you're good to go!

- Thanks, good night!

[I exit the dealership, key in hand, and drive off.]

Human beings are usually the weakest link in any security system :)

A Few Snapshots From Westfest 5

Last weekend was Westfest 2008 (Westboro's annual music festival, in Ottawa), and due to a craaaaazy week at work I didn't really have time to post any snapshots until tonight (although they were on my Flickr feed, if you're following that). Here, enjoy!

It pretty much rained the whole weekend (and every single day this week - ugh!), so I only managed a few pics during a rare moment of sunshine:

^^^ A few concertgoers hanging out

^^^ A hip-hop band out of Manitoba called Grand Analog. They were actually pretty great!

^^^ Their lead singer, trying to rev up the crowd (not completely successful, but oh well)

^^^ I like this couple, they have the same weird hairdo and fit together so well

^^^ The Candy Store, a new shop that just opened up on Richmond Rd. Haven't shopped there yet. (I'm not really a sweets and candy kind of guy - I'm sipping a blended nectarine/tofu shake as I write this.)

^^^ This kid was hilarious, more on him in a second

So here's the story: the boy was in the American Apparel boutique, and being rather small and questionably behaved, he managed to sneak right into the display case. He then - and I am not making this up - started caressing the legs of the female mannequins. Then, he started pulling on clothes, on both the male and female mannequins.

The depressing part of the story (for me) is that in a five-minute span, two different women asked me if he was my son. Ouch. To think that I'd have a kid already - that's a huge, depressing, dose of "you're not getting any younger". Maybe my youthful good looks* are increasingly a thing of the past.

 

*: Just "youthful looks" might be a bit more truthful, but who's counting ;)

Random Notes from DemoCampOttawa9

All right, I want to jot down a few comments about DemoCampOttawa9 before I go off to bed. Now, I'm a software developer. I'm not a startup entrepreneur, nor an investor, nor someone in any way qualified to comment about how insanely great or ridiculously and laughably stupid a business idea is, so I'll just stick to talking a tiny bit about what I saw tonight. Oh yeah, the pics are up on flickr right here if you're interested, the license is Creative-Commons, and sorry about the wacky colours, it was your typical low-light restaurant / bar room.

DemoCampOttawa is a semi-regular series of meetings where members of the Ottawa high-tech community can go up on stage and show off hardware, software, services they're working on.

First, a big congrats to Alec Saunders for being a smooth and lively host. A nice thing about this evening is that no one that presented was a slick, practiced, PR person - every single presenter was a techy, and that made for an accessible, informal feel.

First up was a presenter from SIMtone. From the demo, they basically seem to rent you a WinXP virtual machine running in a datacenter. You don't just connect over RDP however, they provide a light Java client that runs on very modest hardware that can give you access to your VM instance. The presenter didn't have time to explain how they balanced the hosted VMs across physical boxes, or how much CPU and bandwidth you're allowed to use, etc, but he was accessing it over WiMax and it seemed to work OK. [note: we have WiMax service in Ottawa???]

 

We got an engineer who implemented a GPU on a Xilinx FPGA. He had it running live on a demo board, but didn't go into much detail about whether he was generating the video signal himself too or if he had much extra hardware on there to do that, etc.

This is Richard Mayer from Protecode. He demo'ed an interesting Eclipse plugin and associated web service that fingerprints external code added to your development projects and tracks the licenses under which it's distributed. It seems the big value here is in the massive database of publicly-distributed code they've built up. Their software can identify not only third-party libraries and source files added to a project, but small chunks of code pasted in as well.

 

Martin demoing Stockify, a web app for evaluating value stocks. The app looks at historical P/E ratios and earnings growth of public companies.

And finally, Joel and Pascal from picsphere, which makes workflow-management software for event photographers. We've seen plenty of photo-workflow management apps before, but this one seemed to have novel ways of importing the pictures, keeping them tagged by subject, and allowing instant sales at the point of capture (from what I could see in the demo). They were pretty cool because they really didn't project the condescending elitism you usually get from everyone in the photography industry, they felt more like purveyors of software for a more regular-guy, amateurish market (and probably a much larger one, IMHO).

Phew, that's it. I'll surely attend the next meetup, this was overall an interesting night.