This past year I had a 20KW solar array put in.

For the month of July my electrical bill looked like this:

To translate this, my house uses a lot of juice, especially in the Summer months (air conditioning and such).  I’m not proud of the power use. But in essence, the solar array covered 2,685KWh of electrical use.

Plus, I had an excess of 640KWh.

The DTE program (heavily subsidized by the government) pays me for the energy I produce so I end up with a negative electrical bill.

So does it pay off?  Well, without the solar array, rather than getting about $360 back I’d have paid $286.  That’s a difference of about $650 a month.  Now, the summer months are better than the Winter months.  So let’s assume about $6,000 per year.  The array cost me (out of pocket) around $100,000 (a chunk of that being the clearing of the area and the necessary grading).  So it’ll take a bit less than 20 years for it to pay off. 

I'm impressed.

I can blog to the stardock ecosystem with the iPhone app
Blog Writer.

I just use my forum user Id and pw with the metaweblog URL: https://www.joeuser.com/api/MetaWeblog.axd

I discovered something interesting. Unless I’m mistaken, large address aware 32-bit games may be able access up to 8TB of memory.  I don’t know what tricks the OS is using to do this (a 32-bit process should only be able to see 4GB) but a cursory look indicates when running on 64-bit version of Windows 8, a 32-bit process that is using large address aware is “seeing” 8TB.

Take that with a grain of salt since my guys are skeptical about whether you can actually use any of that. 

If you have Windows 8 and you’re finding it annoying to get around the desktop, you can download Tiles (it’s free). This has been a life saver for me as it lets me quickly get to the things I want to and manage them as such. It’s also completely compatible with the charms bar and the Metro (Modern UI) experience.

 

I originally wrote this on Qt3 but I think this might be helpful to others who are wondering about the effects of working long hours.

Here are my views on the matter:

I think with most people, 55 to 60 hours a week is about the maximum before they start to eat up stored health/sanity points. And even there, over time, you will start to suffer burn-out -- the rate depends on how much you enjoy what you’re working on. But sooner or later, it’ll catch up on you.

Up until last year, my typical work week was 60 hours. That's about 10 hours a day, 6 days a week and I'd take Sunday off for family/video games/etc. I would regularly push a beyond those hours because I was ignorant of the gradual effects of working beyond a healthy dose had on me.

I got my first real taste of working really long hours In 2009, when Demigod came out. It is a multiplayer-centric game with servers designed to help connect users. Like many Internet-centric games, its initial launch overwhelmed our infrastructure and we raced to fix/add to it. That event started a bad habit on my part of doing all-nighters. As a result, my normal schedule rose from 60 to 80 hours even after the 100 hour weeks of the Demigod effort subsided.

Less than a year later, still really not recovered from the work on Demigod and with Impulse really starting to take off, I returned to working on a PC game called War of Magic. It was at the tail end of development and our retail launch window had been set to August. My hours returned to being over 90 a week during the Summer – one all nighter a week.

Here is the part I want to emphasize though: I believed my disposition and work quality seemed just as good as it normally was.  I was wrong. From later talking to my coworkers, friends and family, later I realized that was not the case. According to them, I was like “a heroin addict, I looked strung out and was very difficult to be around.”  Since I regularly engage with the public, this would have significant consequences.

That August, things got even more pressing and I had to increase my work to over 100 hours a week (two-all nighters weekly).  During this time, I considered my disposition and the quality of my work to be just as good as it was at 40 hours a week. It’s like drinking alcohol– but without the pleasure.

The point being, those who say that they can work 60 or 80 hours a week without it affecting them are dead wrong. I was one of those guys – for years.  Luckily (or unluckily) the consequences for this became too obvious to ignore and I changed my work habits.

These days, we avoid crunch times like the plague. We no longer take retail availability into consideration for our product cycles so that we have the flexibility of just pushing the release date back. That’s how big a deal we consider excessive hours to be. It costs us less to push a date back than it does to deal with the consequences of having people work long hours.

I’ve been working on the AI this weekend and making a few proposed balancing changes. For one thing, I moved the tougher monsters away further from starting locations and murdered the remaining “Uhh” sound effects that make me cry the tears of a thousand rains every time I hear them (I get dehydrated a lot).

I’m making my own faction

The Drengin Empire are back, baby!

I’m not above gaming the system until Kael notices this. I should probably tell him that you can combine natural leader with cruel and get +1 attack. Should.

 

I am now ready to bring ruin, death, and pain to the world.

Nice place here. Remember how sunny and pleasant it was because when I’m done with it, it’ll make Mordor look like a resort.

I really need that balanced axe so…please die.

The Drengin Empire are able to train their slavelings.

The seem nice. I wonder what they’ll taste like.

This Apiary supplies food to Arrab. Some people like to “city spam”. Personally, we Drengin prefer a handful of very powerful cities being fed in by distant resources.

 

The known world in 179 AC. Tip: Ctrl-X will hide the UI so you can see just the map.

 

A few other little tips

Kael and I have difference preferences on the map view.  If you hit the 1 key, that’s the default view (Kael’s preference).  If you hit the 2 key you get my default camera view.

The known world in 210 AC. Click on it to get the high rez version.

 

Remember that nice area.  Well the city of Seclur has taken its place. I think I’ll rename it to Drengi for future reference.

Umderdroths. In Elemental: Destiny's Embers it took an iron golem, a Sion, and a champion to take one down.

 

When I'm play testing the game, I ultimately have to pick "a size" when I'm playing with the AI.

I know the forums aren't an ideal way to measure this (in fact, we should just send this data back really) but I wanted to get an informal gauge on what people play at.

Guys like me aren’t supposed to get “rich”. When you look at the most successful (or rich) people in the tech industry they usually have remarkably similar backgrounds.

By contrast, guys like me are supposed to be relegated to some back lab coding drivers.  That was, when I was in college, the dream.  Of course, that dream didn’t come true because I couldn’t afford college and had to work multiple jobs at once to pay for school. I discovered that the best way to make money was to work for yourself and that’s how Stardock was born.

Only through the bizarre start-up circumstances is a guy like me still in charge. Most of the criticisms I’ve read about me are spot-on.  I’m not qualified to run a company.  I’m unpolished, unprofessional and opinionated. I’m *that* forum guy spouting off on what have you.  I have the social skills of a…well, a programmer.

In the early days, I wanted investors. I’ve always known I wasn’t “the right guy” to be a CEO of a business. But at that crucial time, it was the dot-com craze and no one cared about companies making software.  And now, of course, it’s too late. We’ve done well enough that money is more of a…theoretical thing.  I don’t even bother to pay myself any more than necessary to get medical insurance.  Getting a salary or whatever is irrelevant at this stage.

If I have a point, and I really don’t, is that the US is still the land of opportunity. If a guy like me, who grew up in an apartment with a single mother, can make it, there is hope for anyone.

Real-time game streaming service, OnLive was a phenomenon when it debuted a couple years ago.  I think my precise opinion of it was “It’s doomed”.  More nuanced comments can be found here:

http://news.bigdownload.com/2009/03/25/stardock-ceo-speaks-about-onlive/

My opinion hasn’t changed on it even though it is a marvelous technology. I was hoping they’d got bought out or something to be incorporated as part of a larger solution.

See more here: http://mashable.com/2012/08/17/onlive-layoffs/