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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
One of the problems we have with parking our car in the driveway is that there’s a tree growing in the garden at the side – and overhanging the driveway. Birds perching in the tree do seem to delight in leaving their droppings on the car. No sooner do we clean it off than the birds have been and done their job again.
It’s not an uncommon problem, and I’d never much thought about what I might do about it until tonight when I came across someone asking the same question on Yahoo Answers. (Yahoo Answers is the place to find normal and odd questions – and equally odd answers
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Recently, Computerworld surveyed some 86 companies to find out which ones came top of the list in terms of green IT usage.
Significantly – maybe even ironically - a health insurance company, Highmark Inc, came first
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You may not know much about Branson, Missouri, unless you’re a country music fan. It’s home to dozens of world-class attractions and is well-deserving of the nickname: Live Music Capital of the World.
But Branson has other attractions: a theme park called Silver Dollar City. It has the usual theme park rides, but it’s also home to a number of craftspeople who practice their crafts in the same way as the earlier residents of the Ozarks. Doing craftwork as your forefathers did is certainly one way to reduce the 21st century impact on the environment.
The Titanic Museum is also in Branson. I’ve written about it before in Orble – in fact, the photo of the Grand Staircase replica that I included in my post seems to get picked up by a host of searchers
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If you’re looking for a diet pill these days on the Net, everywhere you go you’ll find talk of hoodia. It’s definitely the flavour of the month, but there are heaps of problems associated with it. Not in terms of side effects, but in terms of actually being able to get the real stuff.
Hoodia is a prime example of the way greed takes over and ruins something that is of value. Pharmaceutical companies, never known for their
Hoodia - new growth; photo by Martin Heigan
willingness to back off from profit, have paid out millions to try and farm hoodia in places other than its natural habitat. But hoodia refuses to be manipulated so readily
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The price of oil is going up and up, and it’s just another thing to add to our woes, with Global Warming and Climate Change hitting us from opposite corners (or maybe the same corner: it’s beginning to be hard to tell!) Soon it won’t be worth paying the car insurance because we won’t be able to drive the thing anyway!
In this week’s NZ Listener, one of the feature articles is on matters green, but there’s also a sidebar a couple of pages later on what the Prime Minister is doing for the planet. To be quite honest, she’s taken her time over some matters, and is hardly showing much leadership so far
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There are now some 200 ‘green’ burial sites in the UK. No doubt the number is much higher in the Germany where green has been in for much longer, but maybe not. I couldn’t see anything about green burial sites in Germany on the Net. I didn’t even get onto looking for them in the States.
Cardboard is the usual choice for the ‘coffin’ and there are number of different models. Claire Wallerstein of the Daily Mail says you can also
Photo by "Sparrows' Friend"
be buried in a “bamboo casket, a moss-lined woven willow nest” – or even a sack. In fact, you can just be buried without any covering, if you’re family can stand the thought of it. (We’ve always buried our family pets in a towel at the very least, so I can’t imagine burying any of my relatives just in their clothes
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It turns out that the second item I was going to mention was also by Richard Watson. He calls it Aggregated Customisation, and notes particularly a company called DayJet. This is a new commercial air company providing corporate jet travel at commercial airline prices.
The company uses Very Light Jets to serve smaller cities and communities as an alternative to driving a few hundred miles for a short visit. A person can save enough time and overnight hotel stay to make the trip cheaper than driving or even flying through a hub.
Though DayJet customers have to book online, there are no schedules. They pick the place to and from where they want to go, the date of travel, and the time they want to arrive. The more flexible their arrangements, the lower the fare, which could in fact be similar to the price of a standard economy flight and a night in a hotel
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I’ve been a bit caught up with trying to get my office sorted out over the last couple of days: I bought some book shelves, and now I have the joyful task of putting all the books that have got themselves scattered around the house after our carpet-laying chaos, back where they belong – or where they now belong.
Plus I’ve been building up the stock of books I’m selling on Trade Me and Zillion – check out my blog dedicated to this aspect – and it all takes time.
Nevertheless, I keep my eyes open for interesting green things – or perhaps that should be interesting things green, and noted a couple of items
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If you read webitz.net you'll find I've announced the following info there too. Well, nothing better than letting the whole world know.
I’m changing the focus of my Random Notes blog - the one that there's always a link to at the bottom of a post.
What focus, you ask? You mean there’s been a focus
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In The Everyday Activist, a book I wrote about a couple of posts ago, there's a 12-Step Anti-Apathy Recovery Plan, obviously a tongue-in-cheek version of the AA's 12-step program.
I think they ran out of ideas around step 8 when they say, Learn a new joke. Okay, that might shake you out of your complacency a little, but hardly seems much of a move forward, even if laughter is the best medicine. But their first half dozen steps are worthy of note, particularly number two, which says: Repeat the following until you believe it: The power to change things and restore society lies within each and every one of us.
We don’t realise just how much we can do as one person. This is why apathy creeps in so often, because we think being only one person we can’t achieve enough. But we’re not asked to achieve enough, only what we personally can. That may be next to nothing in world terms; on the other hand the repercussions may be extraordinary. Often we’ll never know the full extent of the repercussions
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245 Posts dating from December 2006
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