2007
- In 2006 American’s consumed 30 billion bottles of water spending $15 billion. Think of those 30 billion water bottles in landfills. Only 25% of them are recycled. (Okay, 22.5 billion water bottles in landfills.) That’s 2 billion pounds of plastic.
- 75% of New Yorkers when given a blind taste test prefered New York city tapwater to bottled water.
- EPA standards for city water are more strict than FDA standards for bottled water. For example, city water is tested 100 or more times a month for coliform bacteria, and bottled water once a week.
- It takes 1.5 million barrels of crude oil to create the plastic bottles. 37,800 18-wheelers are in use every day to haul bottled water around the US.
- If you paid for your tap water at the same rate you pay for bottled water, your water bill would cost $9,000 a month.
iPhone software update failed, restoring iPhone firmware to attempt again. Biting nails.
iPhone breathing again with 1.1.1. Phew…
Feeling like the guy that dissolves in the storm of papers in the movie Brazil.
Starting to question if I will EVER be able to transfer 100 gig of data up to Amazon S3.
I need a ship.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Electric Arc Radio
A little over a week ago Tammy and I went with some friends to see Electric Arc Radio. You may have heard about this group of writers under their other (or previous?) name, the Lit6 Project. The show is hard to describe, this excerpt from their website sets the stage well:
Imagine this: four writers living together in a little house on a city street, with Alan Greenspan (yeah, that Alan Greenspan) holed up in a back-yard treehouse and a punk poet next door. Greenspan plays the clarinet, badly, the poet steps up on occasion to lay down a few soft words about life, living and the pursuit of whatever, and the writers invite a band to stay with them as they all scramble around each other’s egos.
The performance was really cool and very fresh. There were a lot of laughs. Tammy was head over heels for it and can’t wait to go back. It’s a bit quirky, entirely in a good way.
There is another show this coming weekend, Sept. 29th. Go check it out! I think you’ll enjoy it! That’s really the only point of this article, to try to raise awareness of this cool thing going on in our city.
2007 Minneapolis Bike Tour
Tammy and I got to be one of the 4,500 participants in the very first Minneapolis Bike Tour a couple of weekends ago. I road with my Ironman Brother-in-law. We road the short route and Tammy and her sister rode the longer route.
This was a really great ride. It seems like it’s Minneapolis’s answer to the St. Paul Classic. I’m really glad they started doing this and even more glad it was so popular. I’m looking forward to riding it again next year. If you enjoy the bike, make a point to do this ride in 2008.
Sitting at my desk, sweating. Thinking about how much I hate our office space. Around 83 °F in office.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Too hot to be sitting at a computer. Over 80 in my office.
First Twitter reference just made at OPA Tech Day.
Done with the short route at the Minneapolis Tour bike ride
Stop Drinking Bottled Water
Tammy has been leading the way on a number of environmentally conscious improvements in our house. We’ve done a lot of big things like our solar heat project and buying wind credits for all of our electricity. But these larger efforts are somewhat “mailing it in”. You do them once, write a check to someone, and continue as you always have. They don’t require you to change behavior at all. Recently we’ve been working harder on these types of change, including starting to compost and using air conditioning more sparingly. Tammy however has been pushing even farther, looking at where she buys clothing, where items comes from and what we bring into the kitchen.
Over the last year or so we’ve weened ourself off of the traditional grocery stores. We’ve been longtime co-op members and shop at Lakewinds. However, for a long time we supplemented with occasional trips to “normal” grocery stores for other items. We no longer do this, having pushed those items out of our kitchen. We can happily report there are no trans-fats, and no high-fructose (or otherwise) corn syrup products in our house. Shopping exclusively at a co-op makes this much easier to do. We recently got new sheets for our bed and she persisted her search there. She found bedsheets made of bamboo that have a much smaller footprint on the environment. By the way, the bamboo sheets are awesome.
She has recently declared no more bottled watter. She read Garbageland a while ago and that really got her thinking about trash (hence our push into composting) and bottled water is a huge problem in this regard. We now all have our Sigg bottles and eschew the ubiquitous bottled water in favor of bringing our own along. The September 7th edition of The Week goes into much more detail on this problem in it’s briefing entitled The High Price of Bottled Water. Here are some highlights I felt needed to be shared.
The only value being provided here is convenience. The water isn’t better. It’s just in a nice, convenient package. A simple change in behavior could help us out in so many ways.
I’ll be carrying my Sigg bottle more often… get yourself one!