There are days when I feel we’re shooting for a Darwin Award over at Own Web Now. We’re in these state-of-the-art data centers where everything from illumination, to filtration, to temperature, to bandwidth and right down to power per square foot is regulated.. yet there are days when my folks know just what to say to let me crush the phone and take an early day off:

Oh, thats not a problem anymore – I stripped the insulation from a power strip so I can measure the utilization directly.

I’m at a Ken Lay role in my career where I really prefer not to hear how creative our solutions are getting. I am scared to even go to Dallas or LA or Chicago because they will not sell me enough alcohol on the flight to prepare me for some of those stories.

Anyhow, the reason I started writing this blog post to begin with: Kill-A-Watt. Pablo told me about this gadget earlier tonight and well… $40 is cheaper than an electrocuted engineer. It seems pretty slick, you plug it into the outlet, plug in the device into the gadget and it gives you the power utilization. For the particularly frugal among you it can even break it down in kW/h so you can know how much it will cost you to keep that device on 24/7.

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