A power meter is now installed in the upstairs lunch room in Halifax at the company that I currently work for. It measures the power consumption of both vending machines at the same time (using a power bar).
The meter shows both the current consumption in Watts (W) and the accumulated energy use in kilo Watt hours (kWh). I installed it yesterday at 2:45pm and will let it run for 1 week (to get good data).
After that we will do some cost/benefit analysis regarding the potential installation of vending misers.
If you are in our Halifax office you can go and see for yourself how the consumption kind of alternates between roughly 150W (between refrigeration) and roughly 800W (during active refrigeration).
If you want to do something similar with other electric appliances, e.g. at your homes, you can buy those power meters devices at Canadian Tire or similar stores. This is the one that I am currently using.
I just tested my personal “résumé” – British would say “CV” – website at oliver.doepner.net successfully on IE8, IE9, Firefox 3.6 to 9, latest and older Chrome versions, Opera 10 and 11 and Safari 4 and 5.1. It works on all browsers and looks fine.
You might wonder if I have all these browser installed? No, I don’t. I used the amazing browserling.com service that runs all the various browsers in virtual machines “in the cloud”, and embeds the UI in their website. Cool stuff and currently free for everyone to use!
One caveat with browserling.com is a tool called IETester that they use to emulate the ancient IE5.5 and IE6 browsers. Its seems to have bugs related to PNG graphics which prevented reliable testing. So if anyone out there still uses IE5.5 or IE6: Please visit oliver.doepner.net and let me know if you can see the photo of me on the page with the transparency effect.
On the newer CSS3 capable browsers, my site now sports drop shadows and rounded corners, using border-radius and box-shadow.
I also tested W3C standards compliance (XHTML, CSS3) and all my pages did pass those tests as well. What a nice way to end the computer oriented part of the day …
