Monday, April 28, 2008

Recycling Sucks

This video brings up some of my biggest fears about recycling:

http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/92358/detail/

Those fears being that recycling is a stupid waste of time that doesn't do jack squat for the environment. Now you can probably poke holes in some of Penn and Teller's arguments, but I've heard a lot of these points made on their own before.

Recycling is definitely inefficient. That is the reason why it costs so much money to recycle everything except aluminum cans. Actually, recycling aluminum costs too, but it is cheaper than mining new aluminum. Yeah, there's a reason that recycling plants cost the city rather than bringing in income. It's because recycling aluminum doesn't cover the cost of getting rid of all the other recyclables!

Meh, it is pretty easy so I guess I'll keep it up, but I wish they'd find something cheap and environmentally friendly to do with my recyclables. Maybe throw them in a landfill?

Friday, April 11, 2008

Final Blue 2.0 Activities

Yay! I made it to the final set of Blue 2.0 activities. I'm going to try to finish these in less than a half hour when I get to legitimately go home for the weekend. Luckily, I already have at least three social network accounts so this should be a breeze.

Facebook

Here is my Facebook profile page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=622809383.

Facebook is the social networking site that I currently use the most. I have more friends and contacts there and I just prefer the look of the site. I AM starting to get fed up with all the stupid applications that people want me to add. No, I'm tired of being a zombie and don't feel like screwing around with that any more. I don't want to be a pirate. I don't want to be a ninja. I don't want a garden. Stop asking me already! Well, at least I'm only getting spammed by people I know, unlike some other sites, such as:

MySpace

I think this is my MySpace page, but I'll have to check the link when I get home: http://www.myspace.com/jovialpessimist.

For some reason Lexmark doesn't care if I go to Facebook, but it totally blocks Myspace. Why do they do this? I dunno maybe the same reason they block the comic http://alienlovespredator.com/, but let me view the non-stop sex jokes and scantily clad cartoon ladies at http://www.leasticoulddo.com/. Yeah, basically it's because our IT department has no plan and no idea what it should be doing. Anyway, the look of MySpace profiles are much more original than Facebook's, but that doesn't usually mean they look good. Plus, the barrage of music from everyone's profiles is a little annoying, but it is a good place to keep up with a band and also not a bad place to check out some music.

For my last networking site I'm using LinkedIn. This is my profile there: http://www.linkedin.com/myprofile?trk=hb_side_pro.

I don't really like the site. It's boring, it's a hassle to use effectively, and it seems to be designed strictly to market yourself. I guess that is what it is designed for, but I find that aspect a little repellent. I'm glad all your business buddies think you're great, but why do I care? I suppose it's partly because I am suspicious of self-promotion and don't do much of it myself. It may work really well for those who are self-employed, but I choose not to have that type of job.

Oh well, so there are annoying parts to all of these websites, but there is certainly some value there as well. I do find it unlikely that many kids are going to use these kind of sites to contact and interact with their libraries, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. It is nice to be able to find old classmates and people you worked with without having to do more extensive searching. I've caught up with a few people who I would have totally lost track of without these sites.

Done! Four weeks of activities in less than an hour. Yeeee-haaaaw!

Blue 2.0 Slacker Catchup Time

Alright, I'm not motivated to start any other big projects right now so I'm going to see how many Blue 2.0 activities I can get through in an hour or so.

I've had a flickr account for a while and you may have already seen my happy hour pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/94418552@N00/sets/72157603953660545/

I have tried some strictly free photo sharing sites and I must say that I prefer flickr to anything else I've tried so far. I do find it a little non-intuitive to figure out how to bring up my photo sets and share them. I had to click around for a few minutes before I a set link to my Blue 2.0 photos.

Since I'm not really happy with the quality of my microphone and I didn't have anything interesting to talk about, I'm just going to talk about my favorite podcast. It is the podcast for the NPR show, This American Life. They always have the most intriguing stories about weird people and places and they always manage to look at their stories in a slightly off-kilter manner. I am now totally addicting to the program and have to listen to it every week, even if they're just playing reruns. Luckily, they do have their whole audio archive online so I can slowly make my way through many of their early shows that I didn't catch the first time around. Oh yeah, and did I mention that they're doing this crazy live show that will be broadcast to movie theaters all over the country? It's an odd thing to do, but I think I have no choice but to check it out, especially since This American Life will be playing at two theaters in Lexington. Well, I had to plug the show. Does this make me a non-profit shill?

OK, this brings me to the YouTube portion of weeks 9 & 10. Unfortunately, YouTube is blocked at work for me, but I did just watch this the other day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl6hNj1uOkY

It was actually linked from Neil Gaiman's blog where he mentioned that there is a sharper version of the video here:

http://www.andrewthomashuang.com/MOV_Doll_Face.htm


I think it's a really nicely done little animation/movie/whatever you want to call it. It does hit you over the head a bit with the message that you can destroy yourself attempting to achieve the beauty portrayed in the media. However, the mechanical motions of the jack-in-the-box robot and the way it interacts with the human face are really quite striking. I'm going to have to go back to Andrew Huang's site to see what else he has done.

Ha! Who says the time estimates for these activities are too low? I just completed the activities for weeks 9 & 10 in less than a half hour! Well, it helps that I already had a flickr account and some familiarity with podcasts and YouTube, I suppose.

Oh well, on to weeks 11 & 12 in my next post!

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Beware of Lead

Where else would you put lead, but in Hillbilly Teeth?