Posts (page 2)
What celebrity do you most often get told you resemble?
Submitted by Leets.
It's a toss up between Malcom McLaren, Mick Hucknall, Lou Reed, Leo Sayer and Harpo Marx depending on when I last got my hair cut and how hard I've been living.
[Update] OK, Seth Green too apparently, but I think he needs to age a little bit to catch up with me (just a little)
testing the new group... delete this later
I was asked to put one of my photos into the Flickr solar ovens group. Here it is:
I want to work out how to make a portable one of these. I suspect that one with a fresnell lens is more the go for portability.
The cycle path at Sea Cliff Bridge at the northern Illawarra was originally built with a shared pedestrian/cycle path as well as the road. For some spurious reasons, the RTA decided that this was a bad idea and now the cyclists have to share an absurdly narrow and dangerous cycle path with a mixture of local traffic, tourist traffic and big trucks from heavy industry. Someone is going to get killed, if they obey the rules, and the RTA should be held responsible when this happens.
Check out this Flickr photo set for more details.
I sent an email to Green Electricity Watch recently, but they were not gracious enough to offer me a reply. So here's the (edited text) of the email. I've edited out the bit about design issues that I also mentioned. I buy my electricity form Jack Green who are one of their "Don't Buy" recommendations because they use existing green energy (i.e. hydro electric from the Snowy Mountain Scheme mainly.
...
There are problems related to your rating system and data presentation. I don't think that you should have explicit "don't buy" recommendations for green energy that comes from old electricity sources. To explain why I think this, consider the impact of air conditioning on the electricity network. As someone who does not use A/C at home I am subsidising the peak load generating capacity required by A/C users - so effectively I'm paying for things like poor house design etc. In the reverse case, they are not subsidising me for using new green energy and I would be expected to pay a premium on my electricity bill to do so. So I am opposed to paying a premium for new green energy for this reason - doing this helps maintain the status-quo and gives the impression that green energy is an exotic luxury.
At the same time, purchasing old green electricity at the same price as coal generated electricity has an important function - it increases demand and sends a strong message to government (if enough people do it) that the renewable energy sector needs greater investment and that improving investment would likely be a vote winner. As far a lifestyle decisions go, most people are fundamentally "lazy" and will take the path of least resistance. As activists I think we need to enable non-activists to make easy decisions. Therefore I think you should change your "don't buy" recommendation to "buy with caution", and include an explanation of why. At the moment the "don't buy" recommendation is potential ammunition to our political opponents who don't want to see increased renewable energy capacity.
Finally, I think you also need to present more detailed data about the performance of each retailer. While percentage scores for retailers appear in the report, I think you should include more fine grained information as well.
Again while I applaud what you have done, the implementation needs to be improved slightly.
So after years of poor posture (I remember getting hassled by a teacher at school about it), I've taken up yoga so that I don't end up a hunchback in 10 years time or so. First day of the new term I couldn't remember if the class started at 5:00 or 5:30 so I tried to look it up on the web. Poor me, couldn't find it, but it turns out that Johnny Batchelor does have a website although it is not "Googleable" at the moment. Short of some more impressive search engine optimisation, this should fix that problem :D.
And yes, after 6 lessons I am able to stand and sit up straight more easily.
p.s. The heading for this post is a quote from an old Indian guy my wife stayed with here.
Like many, when I first heard about rice cookers (maybe 15 years or so ago) I was unconvinced. That was then. Now I'm completely convinced, and seeing as I have to use electricity for cooking anyway (except for barbeques when I use spare bits of firewood we have around from the hundred or so trees we've planted over the past 5 years) it's probably a good bit more efficient than the electric hob. When the old rice cooker broke after 10 years or so, I used the microwave for a bit, but it wasn't as good. I still have the magic touch. Visiting friends a few months ago, they were amazed at the 2-volumes-of-water-to-1-volume-of-rice-method.
Anyway, the question is would I spent US$1000 on a rice cooker? Well, if US$1000 was loose change for me (which it ain't), I might. As they I say in tla land, that's pfn
Woah Voxeterians,
My wife can spend infinite quantities of time pottering in the garden (as well as doing useful work), wheras my approach is to stick something in the ground and leave it for a couple of years to see how it does. So we have a bargain, I tolerate her pottering, and she tolerates my endlessly poking the computer. (Although just for balance we both claim that what we're doing is acutal work). Anyway, above is a picture of some social invertebrates. There's a book out about primitively social insects that I know is in my local library, and one day I'm hoping to give it a squizz
But my head is too full of other kinds of crap to do that kind of recreational reading at the moment - maybe I'll save it for the summer holidays. Todays recreational reading is brought to you by the Scottish town of Falkirk:
A monster tree somewhere in the bush near here. This tree is probably 200+ years old and has survived rapacious logging.
The second pic is of some South Americal religious art.
Really I'm just playing with vox again. I'd like my wife to use it for her support material for school (it's science) but the fairly hefty system requirements (in that a lot of computers in schools are old, flakey and crappily maintained) , and the ads on the page probably mean that it ain't going to happen.
In any case I should be getting back to the lightweight social-web stuff I've already 80% done.
Alex is visiting so I thought I'd show him vox.
