Puzzlepieces – March, 2007

Greening businesses, one step at a time - somehow I got dragged into writing an article for my campus paper this week about an event (Environment and Business conference) I was attending.

Anyhow, writing for a newspaper just felt really wierd, almost like going back in time . I’m much more accustomed to my blogging style (obviously). The article was supposed to be a fixed length, of course, which just feels funny. Writing from a semi-neutral tone was the hardest part, I’m so used to using “I”… it just seems so drab otherwise.

Then I submit the article to the editor. “So, I guess you edit it and send it back to me?” I asked naïvely. Of course not, they just make their changes, then publish it, with my name on it of course. Naturally I’m not hugely in favour of the changes, as what person likes their writing modified? My biggest complaint? They took away one of my exclaimation marks.

Oh, one last point… I wasn’t responsible for the headline, subheading, photograph, or photo caption.

2006-2007 SYDE 461/462 Workshop Projects - I’m no big fan of my school itself, but I’m a huge fan of the students. Today I checked out the systems design engineering fourth-year project on display and pretty much every one of them was amazing, and many of them look very commercializeable or otherwise realizeable. Note that the list on the page is incomplete, some of my favourites aren’t listed there.

update: I’m not the only one that thinks so: Touchscreen Smart Mirror: Widgets in the Mirror - Gizmodo

BarCamp / BarCampWaterloo - went to the third BarCampWaterloo today, it was pretty cool. It’s always neat being able to talk to people without first mentally determining how to explain it, where you can throw out words like microformats and OpenID without getting confused looks.

This time there was actually food (thanks to Tech Capital Partners), which improved matters greatly. Turnout was small to begin with (hmn, Saturday morning), but overall was not bad, with a record two females. It would have been nice if more people had presented, but it wasn’t hugely deficient, and I got to learn about ham preservation.

I showed off my Quizify tool (no link, it’s still not quite ready), and it seems like people liked it. Larry liveblogged some of the event, and in the crowd photo, I’m just too far to the right side to be in the shot

I’ll miss the next BarCampWaterloo (I’ll be in Seattle), but hopefully can present or at least attend the one next fall. Thanks to Jesse for putting all this together.

London Free Press - Local News - Ban on clotheslines put through wringer - so for a couple of weeks I’ve been pondering putting together a one-page poster infosheet to convince people to hang-dry their clothes rather than use appliances. (Also need to work towards accomplishing this myself).

Today on CBC Radio I hear that some cities are banning clotheslines? I’ve never heard anything so isane (well, okay, anything from the Bush administration, but still).

They’re more environmentally friendly, cheaper, make clothes last longer, etc. The supposed “problem” is that people don’t like seeing each others’ clothes. That’s just ridiculous and is yet another symptom of the North American attitude of everybody being afraid of each other. So much for community.