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Why I’m glad I paid attention in chemistry

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Yesterday, I replaced the thermostats on my water heater, and since I had to turn the power off for that, I decided it would also make sense to flush it since it’s about 6 years old. Anyway, drained it completely, ran cold water through it for about 10 minutes, then filled it back full of cold water, and turned on the power.

I was kind of surprised that it took over an hour to completely heat the water. Then today, I started thinking about it and thought “wait a second! I minored in chem. I should be able to calculate this”. So, let’s see what we know, and then do some basic math!

Knowns:

  • Water heater size is 50 gallons
  • Element size is 4500 watts
  • Incoming water temp (ground water) is 61F (right now)
  • Water heater thermostat is set to 115F

Since we’re dealing with Imperial units here, we’ll stick with them (as painful as that may be).

  • 1 gallon weighs 8.345 pounds (lbs)
  • 1 watt/hour is equal to 3.412 BTUs

Quick definition of BTU: “The quantity of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree at a constant pressure of one atmosphere”.

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Netflix

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A lot has been going on at Netflix as of late. First they raise prices by up to 60% in some cases. Now, they’ve come out and said “oops, our bad, we raised prices because we’re splitting the company into two orgs, one for streaming (Netflix), and one for DVD-by-mail (Qwikster ((Let’s not even get into the fact that the name is an abomination of English))).

Excerpt from email sent to all Netflix subscribers:

For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something – like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores – do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us). So we moved quickly into streaming, but I should have personally given you a full explanation of why we are splitting the services and thereby increasing prices. It wouldn’t have changed the price increase, but it would have been the right thing to do.

So here is what we are doing and why.

Many members love our DVD service, as I do, because nearly every movie ever made is published on DVD. DVD is a great option for those who want the huge and comprehensive selection of movies.

I also love our streaming service because it is integrated into my TV, and I can watch anytime I want. The benefits of our streaming service are really quite different from the benefits of DVD by mail. We need to focus on rapid improvement as streaming technology and the market evolves, without maintaining compatibility with our DVD by mail service.

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are really becoming two different businesses, with very different cost structures, that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently.

It’s hard to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”. We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

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WordPress Admin SSL subdomain

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Update: With the help of “mvied” we were able to get WordPress HTTPS to solve this issue. Version 1.9 supports Shared SSL and Shared SSL Admin. There is a nagging bug with cookies, but “mvied” is extremely helpful, and even took the time to login to my site, and muck with the plugin code to fix some annoying, but not show-stopping bugs with certain images not loading in WP-Admin. The thread where the public part of the discussion happened is here.

Since switching on Cloudflare on my site, I’ve been forced to disable SSL administration since CF won’t proxy SSL unless you pay for it. So, I’ve been searching for some way to have wp-admin and wp-login re-direct to a different subdomain (like ssl.staze.org) for administration functions. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get this to work.

This page on wordpress.org seems to indicate it’s possible, but looking around online, and trying everything listed yields no successful results.

My hope is that I’ll find something, and post back here how it’s done, since information is scarce. If anyone knows how this is done, please contact me. I hate not having SSL enabled since I don’t feel comfortable using the iOS apps to post, or logging into my site from elsewhere in the world.