http://earthship.darfield.com

http://www.earthship.com

http://ourecovillage.org

And, of course, a big part of sustainability is reuse:

http://www.freecycle.org

http://freegeekvancouver.org

The movie that kicked all of this off for me is Garbage Warrior (http://www.garbagewarrior.com). The first preview I saw didn't catch my attention at all. I probably wasn't ready for it, and for sure it's a serious head-first primer for most people, but check it out.

This is a private joke, but if you get it you'll love it.

Executed daily by Cron, it notifies me by email of any files which exceed the limit.

I wrote this because Evolution started to misbehave whenever a mail file exceeded 2GB in size. The notification mail in this case goes to the user's mail account user@localhost.

#!/bin/sh

# Change to mail directory - in this case for Gnome Evolution
cd ~/.evolution

# Create a temporary file to hold the results
largefiles=`mktemp`

# Find all files 1800 MB and larger and store the list in a temporary file
find -size +1800M > $largefiles

# Test for existence of the temporary file, and if present mail its contents to the owner
if [ -s $largefiles ]; then mail -s "Mail folders approaching 2GB limit" $USER@localhost < $largefiles;
fi

By the way, I'm looking for a better way to neatly post snippets of code. The box above needed tweaking this way and that to make it fit, and still it's not great.

If anyone has a slick way to do this on WordPress then I'm open to suggestions.

Edit: SyntaxHighlighter Evolved did the trick for displaying code
Edit: Changed to mktemp to handle the temporary file

A quick search turned up these highly-recommended instructions on migrating to WordPress from Blogger, and in fact Blogger importing is part of the standard feature set of WordPress. Fancy. I really did shop around for hosting, but I settled on bluehost.com because they are wordpress-ready and highly rated by the folks at wordpress.org.

Migration was easy enough, including set up of my 3 email addresses and 60 aliases. Why aliases? Sign up for a newsletter/website/product, and give them their very own email address to contact you. If they spam it, just delete the alias. Thank you and goodbye. This alone is almost justification for having my own domain and mail server, which takes me back to my original point; the management interface is able to import the entire list from a csv or xls file!

Anyway, enough raving about this for now. Bluehost.com good. WordPress good.

-M

It would be wise to remember
that the same people who would stop you
from listening to Boards of Canada
may be back next year to complain
about a book, or even a TV program.

If you can be told what you can see or read,
then it follows that you can be told
what to say or think.

Defend your constitutionally protected rights.

No one else will do it for you.

Thank you.

-From "One Very Important Thought" by Boards of Canada

For accomplishing this I am promised a moderate amount of good luck.

If I do my very best, but fail to contact the requisite fourty-thousand people, I won't be entitled to any of the promised good luck, but nor will my soul be stolen tonight by a tribe of midget voodoo practitioners. Instead I'll be subject to a lesser punishment, such as all of the food in my fridge spoiling or a mysterious rash that lasts just long enough to cause my girlfriend to leave me.

The magic of the heartwarming message is lost (and some of them are quite good) when it's followed by hollow promises or threats if I don't do exactly as the author says. It's a little insulting as well.

In order to maximize the possible benefit of the message and minimize my annoyance (I'm soooo sensitive sometimes), I've set up a special email account. Please direct all such communication to null@overtorqued.com. Anything sent there will be automatically dispersed into the ether, thus broadcasting the glad tidings to the entire universe. If all goes well it'll rack me up some serious Karma points too.

A good message will spread on its own strength, without need of insulting the reader's intelligence.

We've all had this lesson and so we rightly equate the value of something to it's price. Moving forward with that logic, things that are inexpensive or free may, in our minds, be perceived to have little value.

Some time back I had a friend with a puppy discipline problem. In an effort to help (I have raised a few dogs in my time), I pointed out a number of strategies that should work, not the least of which was professional training. A poorly disciplined dog can be a long-term problem, and it's totally unnecessary.

None of my advice was implemented, and to my knowledge the dog still loves to defile the carpet and take food from the table. My advice was ignored, in part, because it was free. A free thing has no value right? Worse yet, I became the sounding board for subsequent puppy issues which were surprisingly no longer of interest to me.

It is indeed better to pay too much for a thing than too little.

Yes, I talked to my boss from the shitter.

Shh.....

Am I the only one stunned by the lack of gratitude for this goodwill gesture? I'm glad my government and others are willing to aid other countries in need, but enough is enough. When MY tax money is being wasted and/or funnelled into corrupt governments, then forget it. Furthermore, we're talking big dollars.

If I go to the bank for a $10,000 car loan (small beans), they demand justification, accountability, and security for their investment. If I crash the car I still owe them the money. If they just forgave the loan, they'd be doing me a huge favor; I'd be free of that debt and no longer need to fund it.

What these nations need is to learn basic concepts of money and accountability. Perhaps they need to stand up and overthrow a corrupt government or two also.

Sadly they didn't have the solid upbringing I had, an upbringing that culminated in a single conversation. It went something like this: "We've done our best to raise you, and we think we've done well, but now you're an adult and the responsibility is yours."

I don't know how to teach a nation to stand on their own two feet, nor how to overthrow a corrupt government. I do know, however, that rewarding bad behavior results in more bad behavior, and from experience that it's counterproductive to help someone in a way that makes them more dependent.