Birnam Designs Blog -- sharing tips, resources, ideas, and more on web development and design

I’m not talking about always closing your database connections, or commenting your code. I’m talking about something a lot more fundamental. Electricity usage.

Our location has four computers, three of which run pretty much 24/7. The biggest machine we have uses about 260 watts, and it trails off from there. So we probably have 650-700 watts of computer running 24 hours a day. I’m no die-hard environmentalist, but that’s significant. On a monthly basis, that tallies up to about 500 Kilowatt/hours on our electricity bill. Ouch! So, today we went out and bought enough CF bulbs — those little Compact Flourescent bulbs where the flourescent tube is in a little coil attached to a normal light bulb base.

We spent about $175 on 39 light bulbs.

But read about how we're saving $1,400!

Punctanym · punk-tuh-nim · Alternate spellings of words that replaces letters with one or more punctuations, numbers, or letters from extended alphabets to create a dynamic cipher based on the physical appearance of the symbols. Commonly used in SPAM and ‘leet.’

Common spam example: Levitra becomes Lev1tra.

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I got to thinking about SPAM, as I sometimes do, and realized I didn’t know what to call these ‘words.’ I couldn’t find a term that already exists, so I give you: punctanym.