Here are some photos of the newly-assembled and installed workbench. I've temporarily placed a plastic drop cloth over the top, so that I can work on the messy carbs without damaging the surface. I'll probably add trim and a top of 1/4" hardboard.
Still to come are a shelf, face frame, and doors for the lower part.

Not sure if I'm just procrastinating, but as I was working on the eBike's carbs this week, I realized I really needed a workbench in the garage. I'd been planning to put one in, something that went along part of the back wall, around the corner, and down the side a bit. Tired of hunching over the carbs on the floor, I finally decided I should build something this weekend.
The vision is something like this (although I may not bother with the upper cabinets; we'll see):

I realize what you'll see below doesn't look anything like that, but it will. Someday.
I spent a good five hours (and $280) at Sawdust Shop cutting the pieces for the carcasses of 1.5 workbench-cabinets. I've partially assembled one of them tonight, but I'm done for the day. I'll finish it in the morning, and hopefully make some real progress on the carbs.
Here's a wide shot of the left half of my garage. You can see the beginning of the pedestal near the back wall.

The completed pedestal. I was originally going to just hang the cabinet-workbench from the wall, but the expert at Sawdust Shop convinced me to build a pedestal. This will support much more weight more effectively:

Here the three walls have been screwed in:

A closer view of the pocket screws:

The rear nail strip is fasten to the carcass with pocket screws:

Here's more detail on how the pedestal sits under the cabinet. The floor is pretty heavily sloped, so I will have to shim things up. The wall seems to be plumb, though, which is good.

I rested the top nail strips and work surface on top. Tomorrow I'll glue and fasten them down properly, but this gives you an idea of how it'll look.

In my most recent PG&E energy bill, there’s a little insert labeled “Power Content Label.” It breaks down PG&E’s power mix by type, with 22% of the power coming from nuclear sources. On the pie chart, that wedge is green, which, according to the legend, means it’s “climate neutral or renewable.”
As it turns out, that’s incorrect. Nuclear power requires refining uranium ore to produce nuclear fuel. According to the Lean Economy’s Guide to Nuclear Energy, “Every stage in the nuclear process, except fission, produces carbon dioxide. As the richest ores are used up, emissions will rise," and:

Uranium enrichment uses large volumes of uranium hexafluoride, a halogenated compound (HC). Other HCs are also used in the nuclear life-cycle. HCs are greenhouse gases with global warming potentials ranging up to 10,000 times that of carbon dioxide.

There are more shortcomings of nuclear power. I encourage you to read the whole Guide.

I moved into a new house, got a new Comcast account for my internet & cable, and not four weeks later, they had blocked port 25, for exactly the same reasons they did it before.
I called the number again, and Eric was very competent and agreed to put in the unblock request. He also helped me to understand why Comcast suggests using a port other than 25. It’s not as ineffective as I had thought, but I still don’t think it’s worth the invconvenience.
His reasoning goes like this: By blocking port 25, they prevent most spamming viruses from getting to open relays that typically run on port 25. Even if the virus is updated to use port 587 (Comcast’s suggested port), Comcast’s mail server requires authentication, and so it won’t be able to send (of course, if they hijack your local Mail client, none of that will matter).
Now, if open relays start appearing that listen on other ports, then it won’t matter.
The real problem is this: Comcast claims that they had reports that spam was being sent from my IP address (at the time it was assigned to me), but they won’t tell me anything about these reports. Now, I’m certain no spam has gone out from my house. My wireless network is locked up tight, the access logs don’t show any unauthorized accesses, and I’ve never run Windoze, so there’s no way I got one of those viruses. So, the report must be in error. But I have no way to track that down.
Hopefully, thought, I’ll get unblocked. And maybe the FCC’s point of view will eventually prevent them from blocking port 25 after all.

Customer Service Experience

Before remembering that I had written an entry about this problem (which had the info I needed), I tried using the regular Comcast online chat customer support. The first time I called, they insisted this was a permanent block and there was nothing I could do to remove it. That, of course, wasn’t true. This time they tried to pull the same shit, and after explaining to them that I was able to unblock it before, she said no, now it’s really permanent. As it turns out, it’s not.
I also have been trying to get a PIN number, so that I can get online access to my account. The agent could only give it to me if she called my Comcast Digital Voice number (a service I have but don’t use because it makes my bill cheaper). She couldn’t even call the number listed on my account (which I do use).
Here are a couple of photos showing our conversation (their stupid chat client doesn’t allow copy-and-paste):

I went grocery shopping today at the Safeway in Milpitas, CA. I noticed a disturbing trend: product packages are getting smaller. My first thought was that they’re trying to keep the sticker shock down in this era of rising prices (when I asked the checker about the sizes, he said something similar). But for at least three products I buy on a semi-regular basis, the boxes are getting smaller. And just in case you think it’s my imagination, Consumerist.com regularly reports on the Grocery Shrink Ray.
Breyer’s ice cream now comes in a 1.42 l container; previously it was 1.66 l. Lucerne (Safeway’s brand) yogurt comes in 170 g cups; previously they were 227 g. And I couldn’t find the Kellog’s cereal I’ve been buying lately in the 473 g box, just a 340 g box.
Of these three products, I can only accurately compare the price of the yogurt, because Safeway still had a few units of the larger package on the shelf (and I threw away my past receipts). They were listed as $0.142/oz for the smaller size, and $0.106/oz for the larger.

What’s Wrong with This?

I generally hate marketing, but I’ve been saying, recently more often, that what I really hate is being tricked into buying something. I don’t like large-print low prices accompanied by small-print associated fees. I hate being nickle-and-dimed. I believe in itemization of costs, and price transparency, but don’t attempt to lure me in with anything but the final price of the basic product (in a reasonably usable configuration).
That aside, there’s something more ridiculous going on here. The general consensus is that food prices are going up because energy prices (specifically, fossil fuel prices) are going up. I don’t have hard data, but I suspect that’s a fairly accurate assumption. Part of the price we pay for the food we eat is the cost of shipping it from the manufacturer to the store shelves, and that takes fossil fuels; if the price of oil goes up, so does the cost of shipping, and so does the price of our food.
Now consider that most packaging has a certain amount of overhead associated with it. That is, if I take some number of cups of yogurt or tubs of ice cream and stack them in a box, a certain amount of the space in that box is wasted—it’s the space between the individual containers. Even the cereal box, which can pack very efficiently, has space wasted inside it. Generally, the wasted space associated with packaging doesn’t change in proportion to the usable volume of the packaging. Usually, as packages get smaller, more of that package’s boxed volume is wasted.
For example, the 227 g yogurt container is 80 mm in diameter and 84 mm tall, and holds about 210 ml of yogurt. The smallest (idealized) box that can hold that is therefore 80 mm × 80 mm × 84 mm, or 538 ml, 39% efficient. The 170 g container is 80 mm in diameter (same as the larger) and 71 mm tall, and holds about 150 ml of yogurt. Its bounding box is 80 mm × 80 mm × 71 mm, or 454 ml, 33% efficient.

Hopefully you can see where I’m headed. Oil prices pushed up food prices. Marketers, fearing that this would discourage sales, reduced the actual quantity of product sold so that the price tags wouldn’t appear to rise, but in so doing reduced the packing efficiency of the product. Now they have to make more trips to ship the same amount of product, exacerbating the problem (and wasting precious resources in the process). Not to mention the fact that I now have to go to the store more often, and my electric-motorcycle-to-be will likely not be the vehicle I take. And how much did it cost to retool all those factories?
The problems of packaging efficiency aren’t new. Never having done this exercise before (measuring yogurt cups), though, I never realized how egregious it really is. 33%? Surely we can do better than that. And if Safeway shipped their product in electric trucks powered by the Sun and wind, well, it would be just that much better.