Wampum

Update: PayPal now works (guess I'll bump this to the top as well.)

I wasn't sure last year if we'd be running the Koufax Awards this year; a number of issues really impacted my enjoyment of running the awards (a two-three month commitment of hundreds of hours), including bad behavior on the part of some nominees as well as just not being able to cover the costs without taking money out of our kind of already empty pockets.

But, I've thought long and hard, and have adopted a much mellower attitude, one which may impinge upon other's appreciation for the awards process, but which suits us here. One, we're not increasing our bandwidth; we've been lucky enough to have been allotted decent, though not overwhelming, bandwidth due to Eric's previous work, and we're not going through the hassle of begging for funds to fatten it up, just in case everyone discovers a new category is up at the same time. If you can't get through, try again later, it's that simple.

Second, I'm not putting up with bad behavior from nominees, whether it's stuffing the ballot box or undermining their blog partners. The Koufax Awards are meant to be fun, a celebration of all the talent and diversity of the Lefty blogosphere. It's a chance to fatten up blogrolls and catch up on all the things we missed over the past year. It can not be merely viewed as a competition, or else, it's just not worth running. I personally love reading all the amazing things you all have to say about each other; it truly is the very best part of my job. I will thus only continue If I can keep it that way.

So, I do in fact want to keep going with the awards this year. And while we'd certainly appreciate any and all alms sent our way during the awards period, our needs to host the awards have greatly decreased, since we're going with our current bandwidth and hosting. We do have one need at this point, A/C power.

See, in order for us to work essentially around the clock, like we do during the Koufax nominations, we'll need to be "hooked up" to power, which, in an RV, means we either pay through the nose for an electric campsite (in California, $35-50/night) or we head out to BLM or Forest Service lands, boondock for free and run the generator. I personally, for many reasons, including relative poverty and dislike of tight quarters, prefer the latter.

Our current generator is a Kipor KGE1000TI, which produces 1000 watts, or 9 amps/hour. We have a battery bank of 440 amps worth of power, attached to our 2000W inverter/100Amp charger. Thus, it takes us over an hour of running the generator to replace every 10 amps we use. If we run the inverter (attached to the satellite and computers) for most of the day we use up about 150 amp hours per day, which equals abouth 18 hours of running the generator. Not a good solution all around.

I should have opted for a larger generator in the beginning, but, to be honest, I didn't know. We can't even hook up our current generator to the charger, as it doesn't produce enough volts to run the damn thing.

So this is what we need.

A Kipor 3000 watt inverter/generator, which will put us back about $900. Much less than the few thousand we'd need for fatter bandwidth, and being able to fully charge the batteries every day will lengthen their life considerably (they're wicked expensive batteries.) However, we'll be able to run the inverter's charger, which will charge the whole battery bank in a few hours. Much cheaper, and environmentally friendly to boot.

So, as soon as I get our PayPal account worked out, we're going to start fundraising for this puppy. Of course, our Amazon account works fine right now, but most readers seem to prefer PayPal for some reason.

So, just a heads up. We're easy, we just need power...not a lot, just enough.