Life On The Road

So what had I done to deserve this ceramic trbute? Well, I'd submitted 2 ideas to a company ideas scheme, and as an entrant had received a mug. Not only that, but the mug (stated shipping weight 2Lbs) had been couriered from the US of A! Carbon footprint anyone? Or put it another way.. "my ideas went to America and all I got was this lousy tee-shirt mug. As for the ideas; well now, I'm quite happy to talk about that if you leave me a comment and an email address, but if I said that it was concerned with high-speed data query and report generation then you'll get an idea.

As to whether I'll submit more ideas, hmmm... well put it this way - if I want a set of coffee mugs then I'll nip out to Morrisons and buy a 6-pack for a fiver. Nuff said!

As far as my green credentials are concerned, I'm finding an amazing increase in the amount I'm recycling: so much so in fact that I'm currently filling my recycling crate (see pic) to overflowing in just under a week. At the same time my "real" rubbish bin is taking just over 3 weeks to fill up and I'm sure if I tried a bit harder I could make it go the month. Bear in mind that this is mainly for 1 person and it makes you realise just how stuff we've all been throwing away in the past, which really worries me. The solution in my case is to use my "real" rubbish bin for recycling and confine the real rubbish to the crate. I also need to start being more careful about what I actually buy: sadly, the major supermarkets are still insisting that if I buy organic, or something vaguely free-trade-ish, it gets supplied in a non-recyclable container. Well what I'd say here is "wise up - we all need to pay a little more otherwise we're going to be in real trouble in a decade". If the supermarkets could agree on a pricing strategy and agreed on a sensible pricing strategy then we'd all benefit.

On the computing side, I'm well aware that I'm running a phat server 24/7 and sitting right next to it is a fanless mini-ITX server that takes a fraction of the power. In fact it's bothering me so much that I'm taking steps to move my two domains onto the smaller box, after testing that it has the balls to run the software. It may be that it's partially successful but in need of more speed in which case I'll have to bite the bullet and build another, faster one. Once that's up and running I plan to donate the old server to a needy school which can use something of that power: it's too old to sell to be honest but if someone needs a decent Unix server then that's what they'll get.

More greenery later..

Well at this stage I've only received an out-of-office autoreply so I'll have to see what happens later when the recipient returns. It's a rich multi-national, so lets see how it goes. More later..