Composting for apartments!!

COmposting is one of those practices that I would love to do (as we do have a large patio and lots of areas for gardening) but haven't found a practical way to do it, as we do live in a condo. This looks very promising - especially as it purports to not be smelly. - a factor that is very important when you are living in small places. Also, it claims to accept pet waste!

Anyway, check out the article... all I really want to know is - where can I get one???

Article courtesy C|Net blogs.

It's the little things...

My plane is delayed this morning due to fog (which is funny because we are heading to San Fran - fog central) but the airport has placated my little techie heart by providing free wifi. I'm sitting here surfing, listening to music and happy as a clam... or maybe that is the beginnings of excitement in anticipation of getting my shop-on. Watch out, Claude! ;-)

Ok... I really don't have anything to say. I'm just wasting time. Hope you all have a good weekend, if I'm not back before then.

Update: I guess the fog wasn't really that amusing - turns out the fog was in San Fran, not in Vancouver, which I probably should have realized by looking out the window. As I had woken up at 3:30 that morning, I'm giving myself a bit of a break on that one. :-)

Rules of collecting...???

Whenever I make the time to read Shelf Awareness, I always find something of interest that I want to share. Today it is a little tidbit about a fellow, Tim Toone, who collected a first edition of every book that J.K. Rowling published. His collection of 553 books is going up for auction next week and it is estimated that they collection may sell for as high as £40,000. I find the number rather surprising as J.K. Rowling hasn't stopped publishing... so essentially it isn't a complete collection... or would that not be taken into consideration? I guess I always assume that a person would collect an author that is a bit more established (I'm referring to length of time as an author. I'm obviously not judging this by number of books sold.) . Then again, the more I read this, the more I realize that my own assumptions are really coming into play here. Why shouldn't he collect a relatively new author - there is no rule that someone has to be dead before you start collecting their works. On the other hand, it seems like a bit more of a challenge to collect a particular author if they aren't still actively publishing books.

By my calculations, if he spent an average of £20 per book, then he has made a profit of over £28,000 - not a bad take, really. Perhaps I should start being more active in my husband's quest to collect Stephen King... ;-)

Original article

Messages from the interweb...

From the top search terms that have lead people to my blog over the past month, two of the search strings are:
alternative to telus" +"long distance
and
telus ld access charge

So... I'm thinking TELUS customers aren't all that happy about the new long distance charges, ya think???

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone out there... hope your day is filled with love from good friends, lovers or just very friendly strangers!!

Deep Thoughts... Don't let the commercialization of the day ruin the sentiment. Today is a day to let people that mean a lot to you know that you are glad they are in your life. Yes, we should do that everyday but that doesn't always happen - so having one day that is set aside for sweet sentiments isn't such a bad thing.

Just like a Care Bear Stare, I send love and good wishes out to everyone who reads (and, what the heck, to those who don't read my blog too - what can I say, I'm feeling generous today).

and ps... my husband sends me the best valentines... ;-)

The future of YouTube

A little something that I thought was interesting this morning...

YouTube had a big shindig in NYC last night and Google, along with the celebrations, shared some info on the direction they are planning to take the video website. Apparently, they are looking to program in a website feature that recommends other videos to you, based on your viewing history - think Amazon's recommendations or StumbleUpon. ALso, Stephen Chen, Chief Tech Officer at YouTube, is "really excited about content on really, really big tvs" so it looks like they will be formatting their videos to have better pixelation to be able to view them on a larger screen - or at least I would hope they would because blowing up the quality they have now wouldn't really be worth it. I would love to see the quality of the videos improve, even if just a little, although they only have so much control over this as they are only as good as that which people upload. (I should clarify - I mean the visual quality of the video. I recognize of course, that YouTube and Google have no control over the content and storyline of the videos - that's part of the beauty of YT!) Google is also planning on improvements to YouTube's video editing tools.

For more information, read the article I found all this info at C|Net News.

Not much to say...

It's been a busy week. Not much exciting has gone on... well, that may not be true, but I tend to be focused on other things than blogging this week. Our resource centre at UBC went under construction (along with the rest of the hospital) at the end of last week/beginning of this week. That has kept me pretty busy trying to keep everyone aware of what is going on, rescheduling volunteers, moving computer equipment, etc. At this point, I feel good about it. I think everyone is aware and I've covered pretty much everything. Few more emails to go out today - but that is the case everyday isn't it?

One little thing that is neat (although I found out about this last week). Schmap, an interactive tourism guide, has selected one of our photos for their Boston Guide. It is a photo of the Duck Tours. I should actually credit that to Katie, as she is the one who highly recommend the tour to us (as she and her husband had lived there for a couple of years, we figured they knew what they were talking about :-). If you would like to take a look at the guides, go to www.Schmap.com.

They contacted us a couple of weeks ago to give us the choice of having them consider the photo for their guide. Once we agreed to it, although we do keep copyright of the image, they took a look at the photos they had to choose from and made their final selection. It sounds like they find all of their images through Flickr. They are certainly not the only ones to do this. We've had a number of our India photos chosen for various guides and webpages, which we generally don't mind.

Well, time to go do some more stuff around the house. General pick-up and then off to work for an hour to meet one of my volunteers. Hope you all have a good weekend - and don't spend too much time on Friday afternoon surfing and reading blogs!!

The obligatory Super Tuesday post...

So, I've been trying not to obsess about this today, but, well, that's not going to happen. I noticed Google is getting in on the action and making the information easy to access via a few little tools they have cooked up. Check out the table below with all of the latest results for the states that are voting today. Ok, now off I scurry to start repeating my mantra for the Democrats to win in November... any Democrat.

Also, a good friend sent me links to a couple of interesting bits and pieces, although I doubt the first needs me to blog about it - I'm sure it is getting plenty of coverage.

• will.i.am's video inspired by Obama's speech
• 20 minutes of so on why I am 4Barack (Lessig)

Again, may say I am not for Barak or Clinton (or if I am, I'm keeping it to myself), I just want a Democrat - any Democrat - in office come November.

Is it just me?

... or does this seems a bit excessive in the packaging dept? The little Voyager box was shipped inside the big brown box - which was more than twice the size of the item (not to mention the item that was inside the voyager box is just a little thing that sits in my ear).


Off to the recycling bin it all goes...