No, it isn’t a marketing graphic for the Apple iPad. It is the cover of a 1992 manual for the GO Pen Computer. Lately, there’s been a lot of media hype over how Apple is changing the face of computing as we know it. The cover article in Time Magazine (Inside Steve’s Pad) kinda took me over the edge. Et tu, Time? Not that I’m all that surprised, Time is definitely staffed by “unabashed Apple fans”.
Fin and I have been on a documentary kick here lately, so when our next movie choice came up, we decided on “No Impact Man”. Fin was fairly excited to see it - “No Impact Man” is one of several environmentalist blogs she follows. As far as documentaries go, the film itself was fairly interesting and well put together.
Colin Beavan decides to put his views into action by making “no impact” on the environment for a year. He does this by removing various modern conveniences from his life (the biggest of which is apparently toilet paper), and attempts to reduce the amount of trash he outputs.
Yesterday was a beautiful day and I got a couple outside projects finished up. I cut down and bundled some tree branches and my parents house for them and also finished the walkway at our house between the house and the garage:
Tomatoes, 3 different kinds:
“Duh” you say, “Yes, I know seeds are small”
Ok, ok, but, really, have you ever stopped to think about how small seeds really are compared to what they produce? An 80-100 foot elm tree from a seed the size of a peanut. An entire 8-12 foot tomato plant from a seed the size of less then half of a grain of rice that reproduces itself over and over and over and over in the fruits that you eat. Its just amazing to me is all.
Sometime toward the end of my college career, I made a sudden switch away from the standard bar soaps into the domain of “body wash”. One of the common questions I get when discussing soap is if I can make a liquid soap. The answer is yes I can, but it wouldn’t be body wash. Body wash is interesting to me, in that it’s recently become more and more popular.
It constantly amazes me the number and amount of things we take for granted on a day to day basis. Personally, I like to think I’m rather smart. For all of my modern day “knowledge” if I was thrown in the wilderness, I likely wouldn’t live past a season. Think for an instant about everything you use without thinking about it - electricity, microwave ovens, natural gas heating, internal combustion engines. Part of this blog was attempting to understand such things, and what better place than something people have taken for granted in our society for decades - soap.
While it’s a bit late in January to post this, I still feel a need to continue my yearly ritual of posting the things I’m planning on accomplishing over the new year. This years resolutions are largely related to the purpose of this blog, so I’m going to post them here.
1. Reduce / Eliminate trash at the office
Together, Fin and I have reduced our monthly trash output (excepting the ongoing project of reducing our junk count) to roughly a single trash bag a month. However, at work, I’m still outputting a considerable amount of junk - mostly disposables associated with eating lunch. My new goal is to start using washable clothes, and silverware at work. It’s way too easy to get caught into the trap of using that stuff when it’s readily available, and everyone else at the office is.
On Friday, the science project of an 11 year old resulted in the evacuation of a middle school. A 2 liter bottle with “wires sticking out”? It must be a bomb! Hackaday (a nerd blog) has a great editorial on the misgivings of people seeing home made electronics.
Sadly, these responses don’t seem limited to just electronics anymore. Any number of backyard projects insight an odd mix of fear and anger - line drying of clothes, making your own soap or laundry detergent, home construction projects / DIY jobs, backyard gardens, the list goes on.
2009 has been an extremely eventful year. If you told me at the start of last year, everything that would happen - I probably woulda thought you were joking. One of the things that I drive Fin crazy on, is that I tend to view plans more as guidelines, than actual plans. So, it isn’t really surprising how this years events are going to turn up in terms of ‘accomplished’ and ’not’.