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.
Just edited and posted the first-ever player written post on Road Sign Math.
Moved to Dreamhost and WordPress 2.3
It’s been a couple of busy late nights here for me. I’ve been doing major work with my websites, including this one.
The last two months have been rough for thingelstad.com. There has been a lot of downtime and slow responses. I moved to TextDrive (no link for these guys) a while back and it was just horrible. I don’t feel like using the kind of language I would need to describe how much I was frustrated with TextDrive. Let’s just consider it a bad period.
I was looking for a new provider and a friend recommended Dreamhost. I started looking into it and liked what I saw.
They had an amazing promotion for their 10 year anniversary for a year of hosting for $9 ($119 with a $110 discount) so I went for it. I’m absolutely loving Dreamhost. The administrative interface is slick and fast. The directory layout they give you makes sense. You can even SSH in and do command line things when needed. This is a huge saver from time-to-time. On top of all that, Dreamhost buys carbon credits to neutralize their data center. While I’d rather they used real renewable energy, this is a start.
Since I was burning the midnight oil already I decided to make the jump to WordPress 2.3. I was being uncharacteristically cautious due to the big changes with tagging in 2.3 and the potential for plug-in and theme incompatibilities. I decided to just go for it. It wasn’t rough at all. I had to manually add the WordPress tagging system to my theme, but otherwise things went very smooth. I’m now running 2.3 on all sites and it’s humming right along.
If you aren’t using the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plug-in, you need to. This thing is a huge time saver. I upgraded 4 WordPress sites with it and it was smooth as silk. Huge thumbs up!
Moneyball
I just finished reading Moneyball. This book was recommended to me by a friend who really likes baseball and feels that it’s very odd that I don’t like baseball. You see, I love numbers. I love patterns. I love graphs. And according to Moneyball, baseball is all about numbers.
Moneyball was a really enjoyable book, and it succeeded in making me appreciate baseball a lot more and I will definitely enjoy the games even more. However, after reading it the main thing I was left with was how backwards the baseball establishment has been for so long. You mean that statistical analysis may help you determine how a player will perform? Wow. Stunning stuff.
The way Lewis writes this book makes it sound like there is a strict set of two camps. One that plays by look and feel, the other that plays by spreadsheets. I’m sure it’s not that simple, but it makes for a wonderful story and is very well written.
If you like numbers, and have much of any interest in baseball, you should take a read through Moneyball.
Iconize Me Avatars
I’m giddy! It’s like Christmas around the Thingelstad house. Why? We have new avatars!
Several weeks ago a friend of mine clued me in on this service at Iconize Me! Iconize Me is the brain-child of Paul Sahner who decided to start creating caricature based avatars for people online. Iconize Me! is a great service, but it’s completely overloaded. They’ve stopped taking pre-orders again. Huge plus, you get vector images back. Can’t wait to make my 10 foot poster!
I think this is brilliant. I’ve always just used a head shot photo but using a real photo is, well, a real photo. A drawing is a little less personal but still gives you that individual identity. Enough of the words, here is my new avatar. (These images are all much bigger than would be typically used.)
Of course I didn’t want to be the only one around the house with a cool avatar, so we got them for the whole family!
Here is Tammy’s
Mazie got one too of course. She does have an account on the iMac after all.
And lastly I as trying to find a good option for an image for this website and to use as “cover art” in iTunes for home movies. Voila!
Lunch at Trotter’s Cafe in St. Paul.
Throw out all your plastic now! It’s killing you!
Uh oh, I think I just bricked my BlackBerry
Yep, BlackBerry is bricked. Have to send it in. Ugh.
Pleading that the seat next to me remains unoccupied.
Flying Rule #754: Don’t leave your stupid bag 6" outside the overhead!
Flying Rule #755: Don’t open the closed bins!
Viewing a PowerPoint presentation that would make Edward Tufte scream.
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!