Wu Wei

How much energy do you use at home?

My one bright idea over Easter has bit the dust.

I was reading an article in the Economist about kit which allows you to monitor in real time how much energy you are using at home. There are two options: the Owl and the Wattson. They both work by a unit clipping onto the main electricity cable of your house, which then transmits wirelessly to a display panel which you can put in your living room. I particularly liked the Wattson as it looks cool and changes colour from blue to red as your electricity usage increases (so you can go and turn some of your appliances off).

I thought we could demonstrate this in Georgia on our exhibition stand and in our office. But then we noticed a snag. In the UK, the cable from the meter to the fuseboard is normally easily accessible so it is not a problem to clip on the wireless unit. In Tbilisi at least, all premises (offices and houses at least) have been remetered, so that the meters are situated at the entrance of the building in a big cabinet so the meters are easily read, and maintained by the electricity company. So the connections are not accessible, eliminating all the illegal and unmetered connections there were before and making it difficult to make any new ones. Even in our office the main cable from the meter is enclosed in the wall plaster and not easy to tamper with.

So the new measures to prevent illegal connections make it impossible for us to use the Owl and the Wattson. Shame.

Work and blogging

No this is not about being dooced and there is no risk.

Just that we decided that the easiest way to build a website for our project, which we could regularly update ourselves, was to use a blogging platform, and for reasons of familiarity (our web team, not ours) we have ended up with Wordpress. So maybe I will be able to see how Wordpress and Typepad compare.

Sometimes it's a bit frustrating knowing how to do things in Typepad and not in Wordpress. But at least when people tell me it can't be done, I can argue with them.

The website's not public yet so nothing to see.

No internet

Some sort of normal service has been resumed in the WuWei house, at least in Georgia. The internet claimed to be working when I rented the flat was always being repaired due to a fault in the cable somewhere. Finally over Easter, the fault was somehow repaired and my connection to the world is restored. Not sure exactly whose connection I have got, since I have to put in the IP address. The last time I had to do that was in my house in Kosovo, where the connection was repaired on the telephone pole so it was clear it was not a totally legal connection.

It's surprising how much you get to rely on information on line. Without internet in Oxford (same problem, much more incompetence, and more grumbling later). In order to manage my life I had to make long lists of things to look up on line at Costa Coffee (I know I swore never to go there but they have wireless, power points and half-decent coffee, which makes them better than most internet cafes). I couldn't quite feel I wanted to be seen in "Help the Aged" which also has an internet cafe. I can just about cope with my pensioner's bus pass, but am not ready for a zimmer frame yet.

However, even with the internet I was not able to discover whether in Georgia the clocks went forward. Based on the TV clocks it doesn't. So I was cheated out of an hour's sleep this morning.

New country problems

I wonder how long it takes to get new countries into the dropdown box for countries on websites.

Librarything has this new feature Librarything Local where you can put your favourite bookshop, and local book events. I was trying to add the Dukagjini bookshop in Pristina as one of my favourites, (review here) and so of course I wanted to add the country Kosova. In some boxes, like those in Outlook, you can just write in, in the field, so it was never a problem for addresses when I was working there, or for Montenegro, come to think of it.

But in Librarything, there is no way to enter the country Kosova.

So apologies to Kosova and Dukgjini Bookshop.

Neocounter flag for Georgia is wrong

Apologies to my Georgian readers who are greeted by the wrong flag on Neocounter. I have told them but they haven't replied yet.

It seems they didn't notice the Rose Revolution yet.

Pirosmani

I managed to get a (pirate) copy of a film I had wanted for a long time: Pirosmani by Georgi Shengelaia (the same name as my landlady).  I remember watching the film at the London Film Festival when it first came out.

Niko Pirosmanishvili was a painter in the naive school. Here's some of his first, but he also did great scenes of Georgians feasting and dancing, some of which you can see being copied by painters exhibiting in the artists' market at the weekend.

     

and I also found some more urban paintings which I hadn't seen before, here.

Tbilisi really has changed a lot.  Here's the funicular railway, which doesn't work now.  The hillsides are completely built up now.  And the seaside at Batumi, plus a strange painting of a train with cows which have perhaps dropped dead in fright?

   

He also does people:

   

Woman with Easter eggs                            Physician on donkey

In some strange way they remind me of LS Lowry, though he paints quite different subjects.

I seem to think I saw an exhibition of his paintings in Washington in 1985, but now it seems there is an exhibition in France for nearly three months from August 31, 2008 to November 11, at the Museum of Vezeley.

There's another website with paintings here, from which I got these.

 

Technorati tags: Tbilisi, Georgia, Pirosmani, LS Lowry

Not much pagan fun in Georgia

I asked my colleague what happened on Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras in Georgia and asked whether  there was any festival like Uzgavenes in Lithuania for "killing winter".  It seems not.

I enjoyed my time in Venice and Slovenia blogging this time last year.  He blamed it on the Soviets, but Maslenitsa hasn't disappeared in Russia. 

Not much to write about here, then. I suppose it comes of having been Christian since 400 AD, unlike the Lithuanians who held out till 1200 or so.