Getting My Green On

I watched An Inconvenient Truth over the weekend, and it points people to http://www.climatecrisis.net/, which has a page about what you can do at home to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I went through the list and identified some of their suggestions that were applicable to me. I decided to look into / think about:

1. Using cold water to wash my clothes. Started doing this.
2. Switching 100% of my home electricity over to clean, renewable energy. Done.
3. Installing an insulation blanket around my water heater. It turns out this isn't necessary because I purchased a water heater in the last 5 years, and it's cold to the touch, which is apparently a sign that I wouldn't benefit much from an insulation blanket.
4. Installing a low-flow shower head in my shower.
5. Replacing all my regular light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). I already use some CFLs, but I could do better.
6. Using a clothes line instead of a dryer. This is how my clothes were dried while I was in China, but I don't think I'm ready to make that a regular habit here.

So, a new shower head and new light bulbs are what I have left to do from my list, and I'm committed to getting those done this month. Doing #2 felt good, and having the option to do that is something I love about Seattle. I'd urge everyone to watch the movie and decide for yourself if you think there's a problem, and if so, whether you are comfortable with your contribution to the solution/problem.

Books, Geography, Basketball, Movies, Todo

We won our last basketball game and lost the one before that, bringing us to 4-4. Both were good games for me. Last game, I jumped out of bounds to save the ball, throwing it backwards in the hope that the ball would end up the hands of my team, only to hit one of my teammates in the face and give her a bloody nose. I felt terrible =( It wasn't broken, though, so that's good.

I had to return a book to the library last week before I finished it, making it the second of its kind in as many months. I put another hold on it, but it could be months before it gets back to me. I might have to go finish it at Barnes and Noble or something. In a way, maybe it was a good thing because I won't write about it until I finish it, and I want to start linking my book posts to J's new book site that isn't quite ready for release yet. Hurry, J!

I've been slowly learning more geography. After learning all the countries on all the continents, I've moved on to European capitals and mostly have them down. I used to run through a study list a few times a week when I was learning countries, but I haven't been doing that recently. I need to get into that habit again. As with countries, I'll do African capitals last; maybe I'll learn Asian capitals next. I need to remember to continue reviewing everything I've learned so far, too.

Over the last week or so, I watched The Illusionist and Pan's Labyrinth. Both were good, though the latter was less about the labyrinth than I originally thought it would be and wasn't about Pan at all.

I have a growing list of things that need to be done. The fairly recent wind storm damaged various sections of the fence around my yard, so I need to deal with that. The fence was poorly made to begin with, so some of the options are: build a new fence all together (expensive), fix the sections that were damaged (less expensive but then I've still got a crappy fence), or get rid of the fence and use some sort of greenery to act as a barrier. Some time this year, I also want to look into replacing at least some of my carpet and re-painting my house. J mentioned pergo as an alternative to carpet, so I'll look into that, too. I need to figure out where to volunteer next, as well. Well? Get to it!

Basketball, Board Games, Spam Greylisting

Lost our basketball game last week, bringing us down to 3-3. We beat this team before, and we should have won this time, but we just weren't shooting well (IMO).

I was re-gifted a board game called Evolution for Christmas, and I took it to a "game night" hosted by some friends last weekend. A couple people said it was their new favorite game, and it was enthusiastically called, "Game of the Night." Perfect re-gift!

After hearing a friend singing the praises of greylisting, I implemented it on my mail server. I've had great results so far. I've only received a handful of spam in the last few days, and spam assassin has caught most of those. The downside is that the first email you get from every legitimate sender is delayed for a while, but once the source re-sends it, the sending address is whitelisted and not delayed again. It was definitely worth the 5-10 minutes it took to set up.

Your Kung Fu Is Good

Kung Fu Grindhouse is their name, and watching bad kung fu movies is their (drinking) game. I was late in meeting up with T and M, so I missed the beginning of Eight Diagram Pole Fighter. I did catch all of Avenging Eagle, though. If I had to pick a favorite (bad kung fu movies aren't really my thing -- I was there for the social value), I suppose it would have been E.D.P.F. Part of the drinking game involved someone playing a gong every time you were supposed to drink, which got annoying after about the first ten *gongs*. Those playing the game were apparently supposed to drink, among other times, whenever someone died, which, in a non-kung fu movie, might be the equivalent of having to drink every time someone on screen completed a sentence.

Poverty Prevention Proselytizing

For Christmas, my family likes to avoid the typical conspicuous consumption that overtakes so many people that time of year. Instead, we either re-gift, make something, or donate to good causes in each other's name. I chose to make donations this year and thought I'd take the time to write about the organization I donated to, a Seattle-area non-profit called Unitus. I heard about them through Guy Kawasaki's post titled, "The Gift of Giving." Unitus is involved in the microfinance industry, but not in the way that most microfinance institutions (MFIs) are. Realizing that there were already many overlapping MFIs and wanting to maximize their own impact, the Unitus founders opted to help fund existing MFIs and help them grow into self-sustaining organizations, not reliant solely on donor funding as so many MFIs are. They estimate that their MFI partners were spending 80 percent of their time fundraising (!), and as a result of partnering with Unitus, they claim their MFI partners are growing (in terms of clients served) about eight times faster than the microfinance industry as a whole.

There's a lot more information about them on their site. If you're interested in getting involved in microfinance, you should check them out.

"Five Things About Me" Meme

I've apparently been "called out" by K to participate in some sort of "list 5 things most people don't know about you" meme. I'm not normally a meme sort of person, but I'll do half of this one. That is, I'll try to come up with a list of five things, but I won't call out anyone else =)

1. I have a perfectly good (albeit cheap and antique-looking) bookshelf that can hold all of my books, but it's been sitting there mostly empty for 6-12 months. All of my books are piled in stacks on the floor a few feet away.
2. I've been told that I'm related to Mother Goose, but Wikipedia says, "no specific writer has ever been identified with such a name." I'll have to ask the genealogists in my family what the deal is there.
3. I've never owned a television. I stopped watching it regularly when a teacher challenged our class to stop watching it for a week. I did, and the non-watching habit largely stuck. I don't normally participate in phone-based polls, but someone called me one time to poll me on my television watching habits, and I was oddly excited to participate and (legitimately) skew the numbers. To my dismay, none of the available answers even took into consideration that I might not watch TV. I tried answering all their questions with, "I don't have a TV, so I don't watch TV," but they kept saying I had to respond with one of their pre-set answers, so I was stuck having to say things like, "I watch 1-2 hours of TV a day" and "I have 1-13 TV channels available to me."
4. Growing up, I watched two of my friends get into a car accident that involved their car rolling a couple times and skidding upside down into a ditch. I stopped, ran up to the car (and it was dark out, so I couldn't see into the car), and kept yelling their names, but they didn't answer. For what felt like an eternity (but was probably only 30 seconds or so), before I heard movement in the car, I thought they were dead. They later said they heard me yelling but that it sounded like I was really far away.
5. This very minute, I'm tired and am going to bed. You probably could have guessed that, but you didn't know it, so my obligation has been fulfilled.

working from home, basketball, relaxing

Being able to work from home, where there are few distractions, and nearly finish a project I only started yesterday for work: good.

My team winning today's league basketball game with a shot as time expired: great.

A leisurely-paced walk home in the snow, after dark, on quiet side-streets; picking up two new books from the library; taking a warm shower, further warming up with a cup of hot chocolate, and generally relaxing: priceless.

As an side to my statement above about work, I started to see the potential benefit of having multiple monitors. I always thought virtual desktops were good enough, and I guess I still think they are when one's job consists of doing many small projects. But when you're coding, testing your code, referencing web pages, and manually querying databases as part of a single project, having to jump around to different virtual desktops (or worse, having all those windows on a single desktop) kind of stinks. I read an article recently about what the best bang for the buck is with respect to monitors, and it said three 21" monitors for around $1,000 was probably the best bet, as opposed to one bigger monitor (or even a 37" HDTV) for around the same price. I don't have the link handy, though, or I'd give it to you.

Leff mentioned that you could add feeds to the Blogger sidebar, which I didn't know. I thought about sharing items via Google Reader, but after some thought, I've decided to share things via del.icio.us. So, there's my new del.icio.us feed on the right-hand side.