Good question:

- apparently we wanted to spend more money. Haha. Ugh - the pole mounts certainly increased the cost a fair chunk.

- topography of the land. We're on the northern slope of a hill, with a lot of trees up top. There are just two decent locations for solar on our property, neither of them roof mount: one would be a ground mount on the east border of our land and the other was the pole mount in the current location. Pole mount on the west side won out for a few reasons: that part of the land was already torn up when the retaining wall was replaced, it didn't mess with the neighbor's view to the northwest, had fewer potential shading issues, and it does allow for height flexibility to deal with taking care of the lawn, dealing with snowfall, etc.

They were going to be about a meter lower but I wanted the taller poles for the snow and lawn care issues. That, and the potential for winter shading from snow piles created as I plow the upper area to the south. It was a matter of 'better safe than sorry'.

As you mention, we don't see pole mounts here often, either. Let's face it: they cost significantly more and can be a bit of an eyesore for the neighbors. For some reason granola-head Wisconsin hasn't seemed to have adopted solar much at all, which is curious to me since we get the same amount of sun annually as Florida. The bit I have seen in my travels has mostly been found on farms, and those are anecdotally about 50-50 ground and roof mount. Pole mounts are used when there are shading problems or land-use problems. Or if someone wants to use a tracking system, but those are going out of favor - high installation cost, high maintenance, high repair cost. Nowadays it's cheaper just to get more panels instead.

Who knew Electrician's Crack was a thing?

Happy Birthday! Hope you get the time to enjoy the games.

My dad did the same thing to me about 18 years ago when he was selling his boat. He put this pic of the boat online and there I am bent over checking the oil, my ass on display for any and all. :P

Outside, gawking at the blood moon for a solid half hour while munching marmite&cheddar on toast.

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More black than brown but yes, verrry salty. The trick is to know how much to smear on, how to stay below the critical spread density, beyond which it is totally inedible...
Some butter, sub-critical-spread-density marmite spread and cheese = Yum!

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The Moon.

And Mars.

And the ISS.

This.
Finally the weather was fine and lunar eclipse with Mars looked awesome.

For today: forest.

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GOG's 10th birthday. :)

Happy birthday. :)

P.S. The correct spelling is excited.

Got the RX7 back from the body shop. Looking good again. Stupid deer.

Figuring out how to use handbrake, the video converter. It works great! Had no luck with 'any video converter' or 'freemake video converter'. Handbrake's quicker, and compresses far better by the looks of it. Took a 600mb recorded video from my phone down to 77mb with minimal quality loss.

Power company gave the thumbs-up and our solar setup went live about an hour ago. Woohoo! Cloudy day and it's still cranking out 4+ kW. Just checked the meter and we've already 'sold' our first kilowatt-hour to the grid. Realistically, we're just banking it until winter, but still.




With the extra 'free' electricity, now I gotta put my laptop to work mining digital currency so we can pay for this thing. haha!

Well, it's Friday, and in about 6-7 hours I'll be home. So that makes me pretty happy. I can barely keep my eyes open, and if you were to ask me now, I'd say I can't wait to get home and go to sleep. But the truth is I'll probably just end up playing something. Xanadu Next has been waiting for some love for months now. I played it for a couple of hours, and because the game felt like a hack and slash, it didn't occur to me to be careful saving. I just assumed the character would spawn in town once he dies and I'd be able to try again. NOPE! I got a game over, and the game started over, with the 20 minutes intro boat ride. That sapped all my enthusiasm for the game.

Sounds like you've learned a bad habit over the years.

When playing a game, *always* save frequently (unless the developers decided to be evil and either not let you or make it costly).

I am surprised how often people don't follow this very basic piece of advice when playing games, and how often developers decide to be evil about this.

Why do developers do this? I want to play the game; I am not interested in an intro cut scene that can't be skipped and comes before I have had a chance to become acquainted with the game; let me actually *play*!

(I exclude visual/kinetic novels from this, as such games are solely about story and don't gate gameplay with story segments; I specifically do not exclude JRPGs, as I actually like the gameplay in such games.)