I don’t get too personal on my blog.

1. My blog is about my professional life (mostly)
2. It’s just the way I am

But on the way home last night I was thinking about how I might define a perfect day and thought it could be a good insight into who I am. You might not care but Chris-ten-years-from-now might, so I’ll write it for him. I think the exercise is healthy as long as it’s not taken too far (ie. I don’t plan on arranging my whole life around constructing this day exactly); but in general believe that this image should be used as a guide towards what I would like to be doing with my life and what I would like to accomplish.

• 7:00 – 7:04 am
  • Wake up to kisses from my girlfriend and two puppies. Lie in bed thinking about what I can accomplish that day. Smell the pot of coffee brewing on a timer downstairs.
• 7:04 – 7:47 am
  • Watch the Daily Show from the previous evening while drinking a cup of dark roasted, aforementioned coffee and noshing on a scone or waffle. Check on the status of my house and see how the renewable energy storage system is holding up after a night of not being able to collect energy.
• 7:50 – 8:00 am
  • Walk to my own business/workshop/office just down the street. The weather in my dream-world would of course be beautiful all year round and would never have rain or snow (except on days I’m free to go sledding). Be greeted by my employees/co-workers/friends at the office.
• 8:00 – 11:32 am
  • Work the whole morning on a new device that will allow people to better harvest energy from the environment in a friendly way (energy scavenging perhaps?). I don’t have more details about this part of my perfect day because the device hasn’t been invented yet.
• 11:32 am – 12:13 pm
  • Lunch with everyone around the office. Bounce ideas off of people on how to better improve the energy device and how to get it to places people need it the most.
• 12:13 – 2:34 pm
  • More work. At 1:24 pm I get that awesome feeling you get when you realize you just discovered something no one else has ever discovered (I have had that feeling many more times than it has ever been true…in this case it would be). The product still needs some development, but it’s at that moment that I know it is a viable solution and something that can be made and sold to people who need it.
• 2:45 – 3:45 pm
  • Celebratory massage (Sometimes you just gotta chill out).
• 4:00 pm – 5:47 pm
  • Soundcheck and a light rehearsal with my band. It goes flawlessly and everyone is very excited about the show. We decide at the last minute to include a cover of a song that we think will be a crowd pleaser (for all ages).
• 6:02 – 7:47 pm
  • Dinner with family and a small group of friends at the local bistro. We have some kind of a duck dish paired with a few Great Lakes brews. It is absolutely delicious. The entire meal is complimented by intellectually stimulating conversation and friends getting to meet family.
• 8:01 – 8:53 pm
  • Relax with bandmates backstage. Visit from tech/nerd/music fan who wanted to meet us and we all hang out.
• 9:00 – 10:45 pm
  • A night of jazz and funk in front of friends, family and fans. The fans are people that are genuinely interested in the type of music I play. The friends are from all over the country and have come back for this show. The pianos and organs and pedals and amps have all been inspected, repaired and sometimes created by me. I also get to debut a new effect that has never been used before in music production. In lab tests the new effect makes people want to get up and dance 46% more than music played without it. I had previously decided to call it a danceofonium.
• 10:47 – 12:30 am
  • Hanging out backstage with all of my friends that were nice enough to come to my show. Friends from different parts of my life get to meet and get along really well. Everyone there enjoys good music, food and beer, all of which are being served up liberally.
• 12:56 am
  • The day ends as wonderfully as it starts: a kiss goodnight from my girlfriend and puppies. I drift off to sleep dreaming of tomorrow.

I know someone out the might ask “But if you feel like music is such an important part of your life, why do you do engineering?” A valid question. First off, I think engineering is an even more important part of my life. I don’t think our chosen work should be taken lightly, as it’s 1/3 of our lives roughly, and because of that I sought out work that continually challenges me and allows me to try different things every day. I think that engineering allows the part of me that wants to impact the world and leave a legacy behind that has much further implications than music. Engineering (and specifically electrical engineering) is collaborative, creative and can have a very positive impact on millions of people. While I feel that music can do the same, I don’t feel like that’s the reason I play music and I’m not sure I would want to play music to try to change the world. In the end, I play music for myself and for my friends and if other people enjoy it, that is an added bonus.

I’m curious, what is your perfect day like? Have you ever thought of something like this before? I think it really can give you and those around you great insight into what you aspire to be and do with your life. I would love to see what you have in mind in the comments on this page or a link to a post you write about your perfect day.

First off, a smart grid does not yet exist. It’s not exactly dumb, but it’s unwieldy and needs some help getting itself under control.

So let’s think of the electricity grid as an elephant.

It’s big, it’s powerful and it takes a ton of work to get it moving in one direction or another. It’s also really expensive to get it from one place to another. If you want to move an elephant over a distance of hundreds of miles, it’s going to want some peanuts, after all.

A Smart Grid in this analogy is the trainer that controls the elephant.  The consumer is a person off in the distance, holding a peanut. And elephants love peanuts, so they will naturally go where they are. The trainer might be able to guide the elephant towards the people willing to pay the most peanuts. The trainer might also be able to tell the consumer to save their peanuts because getting the elephant at certain times of days will be expensive. And for the health of the elephant, he can say “enough is enough” and start to scale back how many peanuts the elephant is really allowed to eat that day. In the end though, the trainer is only guiding the elephant. The things that truly are controlling the elephant are how much energy he has and how many peanuts people are willing to offer him.

So how does an elephant relate back to the actual power grid? Well, think of a typical coal power plant. The coal is used to heat water, the water turns to steam, the steam turns a turbine and then the water is cooled and recycled to be used for another cycle. The AC power is distributed to transformers that step up the voltage of the signal to thousands of volts before the power is pushed through transmission lines. When you flip a switch in your house, you allow current to flow into whatever device is “requesting” power, thereby utilizing some small portion of the total energy on the grid. Now, if there were 10,000 people trying to turn on their clothes dryers simultaneously, the system will likely not be able to keep up. More power stations could come online, but the instantaneous need would instead likely cause blackouts and brownouts to occur, leaving customers without power. So what they do is try to curb everyone turning on their clothes dryer at the same point every day by charging a lot of money for using the power then. They say, “Why not run the dryer at night? We’ll make it worth your while!”. The Smart Grid/Trainer is there to try and balance the needs of the consumer and the ability of the power generators. It will hopefully save people money and allow power generation facilities to avoid turning to readily available energy (coal, natural gas) to fulfill the demand.

A smart grid has a potential to bring a lot of engineering jobs, especially in waning job markets such as the US. I plan to write more about the Smart Grid because I truly believe it will bring some innovation and employment to whoever jumps on the technology first. There are a lot of pieces to the eventual solution–some more interesting than other–but all deserve analysis and consideration in determining what will result in the most efficient eventual system.

Do you know much about the Smart Grid? Have you experienced any development or funding activities for it yet? Please let us all know in the comments!

Thanks to exfordy for the photo