On the memorial page to my dog Heloïse that it’s intentional you can’t find from the top level of my website, the MIDI the gramophone plays – rollicking! piano! badly charted if we’re being honest at least as far as the rhythm goes! – is the song I sang to her when she was sick. The page features pixel kitsch that goes far beyond what you see on Lialina’s archives for its being self-conscious and chosen in a latter era. And for all that affectation, even now: if I click on the thing and hear the music I cry.

Anyway. It’s obviously mortifying to admit, but I want to give you that as context before you go look at these pages about people’s dogs. Social media tuned all of our instincts for how to present ourselves online, how to signal to each other correctly. The web publishing people did before that tuning seems wildly different, and I think it’s easy for those who weren’t there to cringe at it, or to project something onto it that was absent at the time.

Well, I’ve put my money where my mouth is, so I guess I’ll form it as a prescriptive opinion: the sincerity of people loving their dogs So Much they had to write HTML about it is something we need more of in this world, even if it’s embarrassing at the edges.

Rituals? I can’t stop myself. They’re so good. Absolutely breathtaking. Humanity’s finest work, perhaps. They make no sense. It’s all about beauty, about made-up meaning, about art. Rituals add unnecessary, arbitrary extra requirements to a simple action. Light a candle first. Kneel. Wear a certain outfit. Carry flowers. Make this shape with your hands. Take off your hat, or put it on. Not that hat, the special one.

Pick up your feet in a car crossing the state line so you don’t drag it with you. (Be grateful, people of Vancouver and Portland, for my family’s care in this matter. Imagine the logistical nightmares otherwise incurred.)

A year ago I installed a 4 kilowatt solar fence. I'm revisiting it this Sun Day, to share the design, now that I have prooved it out.

The solar fence and some other ground and pole mount solar panels, seen through leaves.

Solar fencing manufacturers have some good simple designs, but it's hard to buy for a small installation. They are selling to utility scale solar mostly. And those are installed by driving metal beams into the ground, which requires heavy machinery.

Since I have experience with Ironridge rails for roof mount solar, I decided to adapt that system for a vertical mount. Which is something it was not designed for. I combined the Ironridge hardware with regular parts from the hardware store.

The cost of mounting solar panels nowadays is often higher than the cost of the panels. I hoped to match the cost, and I nearly did. The solar panels cost $100 each, and the fence cost $110 per solar panel. This fence was significantly cheaper than conventional ground mount arrays that I considered as alternatives, and made a better use of a difficult hillside location.

I used 7 foot long Ironridge XR-10 rails, which fit 2 solar panels per rail. (Longer rails would need a center post anyway, and the 7 foot long rails have cheaper shipping, since they do not need to be shipped freight.)

For the fence posts, I used regular 4x4" treated posts. 12 foot long, set in 3 foot deep post holes, with 3x 50 lb bags of concrete per hole and 6 inches of gravel on the bottom.

detail of how the rails are mounted to the posts, and the panels to the rails

To connect the Ironridge rails to the fence posts, I used the Ironridge LFT-03-M1 slotted L-foot bracket. Screwed into the post with a 5/8” x 3 inch hot-dipped galvanized lag screw. Since a treated post can react badly with an aluminum bracket, there needs to be some flashing between the post and bracket. I used Shurtape PW-100 tape for that. I see no sign of corrosion after 1 year.

The rest of the Ironridge system is a T-bolt that connects the rail to the L-foot (part BHW-SQ-02-A1), and Ironridge solar panel fasteners (UFO-CL-01-A1 and UFO-STP-40MM-M1). Also XR-10 end caps and wire clips.

Since the Ironridge hardware is not designed to hold a solar panel at a 90 degree angle, I was concerned that the panels might slide downward over time. To help prevent that, I added some additional support brackets under the bottom of the panels. So far, that does not seem to have been a problem though.

I installed Aptos 370 watt solar panels on the fence. They are bifacial, and while the posts block the back partially, there is still bifacial gain on cloudy days. I left enough space under the solar panels to be able to run a push mower under them.

Me standing in front of the solar fence at end of construction

I put pairs of posts next to one-another, so each 7 foot segment of fence had its own 2 posts. This is the least elegant part of this design, but fitting 2 brackets next to one-another on a single post isn't feasible. I bolted the pairs of posts together with some spacers. A side benefit of doing it this way is that treated lumber can warp as it dries, and this prevented much twisting of the posts.

Using separate posts for each segment also means that the fence can traverse a hill easily. And it does not need to be perfectly straight. In fact, my fence has a 30 degree bend in the middle. This means it has both south facing and south-west facing panels, so can catch the light for longer during the day.

After building the fence, I noticed there was a slight bit of sway at the top, since 9 feet of wooden post is not entirely rigid. My worry was that a gusty wind could rattle the solar panels. While I did not actually observe that happening, I added some diagonal back bracing for peace of mind.

view of rear upper corner of solar fence, showing back bracing connection

Inspecting the fence today, I find no problems after the first year. I hope it will last 30 years, with the lifespan of the treated lumber being the likely determining factor.

As part of my larger (and still ongoing) ground mount solar install, the solar fence has consistently provided great power. The vertical orientation works well at latitude 36. It also turned out that the back of the fence was useful to hang conduit and wiring and solar equipment, and so it turned into the electrical backbone of my whole solar field. But that's another story..

solar fence parts list

$1100 total

(Does not include cost of panels, wiring, or electrical hardware.)

The suspicion that all this is élite anxiety in the face of a democratizing mediascape deepens when you consider what the attentionistas want people to focus on. Generally, it’s fine art, old books, or untrammelled nature—as if they were running a Connecticut boarding school. Above all, they demand patience, the inclination to stick with things that aren’t immediately compelling or comprehensible. Patience is indeed a virtue, but a whiff of narcissism arises when commentators extoll it in others, like a husband praising an adoring wife. It places the responsibility for communication on listeners, giving speakers license to be overlong, unclear, or self-indulgent. When someone calls for audiences to be more patient, I instinctively think, Alternatively, you could be less boring. In a sense, what attention alarmists seek is protection from a competition that they’re losing. Fair enough; the market doesn’t always deliver great results, and Hayes is right to deplore the commodification of intellectual life. But one can wonder whether ideas are less warped by the market when they are posted online to a free platform than when they are rolled into books, given bar codes, and sold in stores. It’s worth remembering that those long nineteenth-century novels we’re losing the patience to read were long for a reason: profit-seeking publishers made authors drag out their stories across multiple volumes. Market forces have been stretching, squashing, spinning, and suppressing ideas for centuries. Realistically, the choice isn’t commodified versus free but which commodity form suits best.

There’s something question-begging about the framing there as ideas existing pre-formed and then either being posted online or sold in stores, being “warped” either way. This is sort of in the right direction, I guess, in acknowledging influence at all - but…

In general I think we’re all pretty uncomfortable with the idea that the little homunculi who live in our heads aren’t able to steer us in the ways they want. Desires for desires. I’m being tongue-in-cheek about the mental model there, but the reviewer is being too cute by half in denying the difference between being absorbed in a book and being rendered incapable of making it through a paragraph without twitching away to other thoughts.

Capacity and incapacity: we don’t just prize the patience-demanding works because of prestige dynamics. (Am I allowed to say that’s a “luxury belief”? It’s often seemed to me that it’s only held by those who’ve never had their own world expanded beyond what they grew up with, either because they grew up fully within the blah blah intellectual heritage of civilization blah or because they have managed to make it to adulthood without realizing such a thing meaningfully exists.)

Hayes himself confesses to spending hours “utterly transfixed” by watching old carpets being shampooed.

This is being used in context as evidence that we maintain our ability to pay attention. Conclusion: we’re cooked.