Sunday, January 7, 2007

Thinking globally, acting locally

After watching An Inconvenient Truth, I resolved to do something every day about global warming, and to post progress reports on my blog. Except I didn't have a blog. But now I do. So I will.

Since making that decision, I resolved to start recycling paper, glass, plastic, and tin and aluminum cans. Living out in the sticks as I do, that's not as easy as putting the recycling bin out front on collection day. I have to cart the stuff to the recycling station myself. But that's a small price to pay when you consider what's at stake. I've been seeing a PSA on television that says the energy saved by recycling a single glass bottle is enough to run my TV for an hour. I guess we need to recycle at least 24 bottles a day then, because that's about how many hours the blasted thing is on.

Yesterday I went to the county dump. I had gotten tired of waiting for the trash to be picked up by the people we pay to do that; they hadn't shown up since about a week before Christmas, and the cans were overflowing. So I hauled the trash to the dump myself, and took along a large box of paper (mostly boxes left over from Santa's visit) for recycling. I hadn't yet accumulated enough of the other stuff to bother taking it. I did make one pleasant discovery, though - I won't have to separate the glass from the plastic from the cans. They all go in the same bin anyway! So now instead of three separate cans for that stuff, I have one. It's filling up pretty quickly, too, although it won't if I start squashing everything before it goes in there like I should.

Today I went through the trash in the kitchen and pulled out a number of plastic and glass bottles and an aluminum can, and walked them out to the garage where I'm keeping the recycling. Hopefully I'll get the family trained soon not to discard what can be recycled, but until we all get in the habit, I'll have to follow behind them.

I've made several trips to the garage with individual bottles since then. It's a longer walk than the kitchen trash can, but hey, I can use the exercise. I need to drop about a hundred pounds anyway. (Yes, a hundred. Really.)

Tethered!

A year and a half after partially passing a four-foot drop test, my PowerBook has finally given up the ghost. The hard drive is failing, and the system won't boot. So now I'm chained to my desktop.

The good news is that I was able to fire it up in Target Disk Mode and copy most of the contents to my desktop machine. The bad news is that unless I get ambitious and install the hard drive out of my daughter's old iBook (whose display failed a similar drop test some time ago), the PowerBook is kaput.

Getting a new MacBook or MacBook Pro is not an entirely unpleasant prospect, and even without this new impetus, could have been justified by my career situation - I'm probably about to enter the ranks of itinerant IT workers, and may have need of a machine that can boot the Operating System From Hell - but I hadn't planned on making that investment just yet. But what's a guy to do? Have you seen the smartphone commercial where the guy is "lost without it"? That's what I feel like without my wireless laptop.