EDI TIMES

(By: Wired.com)

 According to a 2009 Gallup poll, the average employed adult works between 35-44 hours a week.

That’s a huge amount of time to spend in the office, and yet the same people who change all their light bulbs to CFLs rarely give a second thought to getting their to-go coffee in a paper cup.

It only takes minutes to make your workspace a little more environmentally friendly. Here are a few tips to get you started.

Mercedes Benz This article is part of a wiki anyone can edit. Got extra advice for greening up your desk at work? Log in and contribute.

1. Turn off the equipment when you leave for the day. Yes, even though Billy from accounting likes to stay late. An action as simple as turning off a 75-watt desktop monitor when you leave can save up to as much as 750 pounds of carbon emissions a year. A power strip can make turning all the equipment off easier at the end of the day, including coffee makers and microwaves. Just make sure the printer is powered down properly, as printers need to seal their cartridges before shutting off.

2. Buy green materials. Switching to recycled printer paper could save thousands of innocent trees a year — and that’s not including paper towels, toilet paper, water cups and all the other products that make working in an office a comfortable enterprise. Many offices have already stopped buying the formerly ubiquitous bottled water. Talk to your office manager about stocking recycled printer paper or replacing the break room cookies with locally grown fruit. And nix printing out separate agendas for everyone at the morning meeting — slides or e-mailed agendas work just fine.

3. Green your duds. If you’re not lucky enough to work in an office where jeans and Chuck Taylors are de rigeur, you already know that great thing about office clothes is that they’re not supposed to be particularly trendy. Consider buying your crisply pressed trousers and blouses from thrift or consignment stores. Also, avoid dry-cleaning. Most dry cleaners use a chemical known as perchloroethylene, which is dangerous for both you and the environment. «Perc» is a known carcinogen that erodes the ozone layer and can easily contaminate groundwater. Most materials, like silk and wool, can be hand-washed. If you must go to a dry cleaner, look for one that uses green cleaning techniques, such as liquid carbon.

4. Telecommute. E-mailing, instant-messaging and videoconferencing have made working from home easier than ever before. Take advantage of it! Getting off the road even one day a week significantly reduces the amount of gasoline you burn, and you can even use the time you save on the trip to have an extra cup of coffee in your reusable ceramic mug. If telecommuting isn’t a possibility for you, consider asking your boss about instituting a commuter credit program for use on public transportation, or putting up a bulletin board for carpooling.

5. Reusable Cups. Avoid using styrofoam cups for anything. Use a mug for coffee and a water bottle for water. If you recycle at home, you can recycle, reduce and reuse at the office too.

6. Recycle Everything. You can recycle everything from your paper and plastics that might come from the vending machines at work, or paper that might otherwise get thrown away. Some companies will even take your old office furniture to recycle the desks and chairs. You could even donate the furniture to a school near by to not only help the community, but also increase the tax write off for the company. Here is a site to reference: Planet Green.

(By:Wired.com)

Google’s announcement that it intends to build and test superfast fiber-optic broadband networks in a few communities around the United States has a few locations pulling out all the stops to be chosen with some attention-getting stunts that scream to the search giant: “Pick me! Pick me!”

Some cities have (temporarily) renamed themselves with some sort of Google-ish name. Others have seen that and raised, promising to include “Google” in the name of every newborn. And the negative ads are starting to coming out, with some candidates exposing the shortcomings of others.

I understand the high temperature that this particular fever brings. Ultrahigh-speed broadband from a company such as Google would be massive. The thought of having internet speeds one hundred times faster than my current service is pretty damn appealing. So it didn’t really surprise me when my own hometown of Sarasota, Florida, joined the ranks of Duluth, Minnesota, or Topeka, Kansas, or Buffalo, New York, and others in some sort of publicity stunt to draw the attention of Google.

It’s not unfounded. Sarasota has a lot to offer and of course, I’m biased. The whole thing is a great use of social media, with hundreds of Facebook groups popping up and towns making their own viral videos. Trust me, if you’ve ever been to Central Florida along the coast you wouldn’t think that the populace here would even know what a viral video is, much less be able to comprehend making one.

So far, the most popular stunts have been Topeka renaming their town Google for one month, and Duluth making a set of tongue-in-cheek videos with their mayor proclaiming that every first-born child will be named either Google Fiber or Googlette Fiber. Sarasota has made their own video, showing that Duluth is very cold and Topeka doesn’t have much of a view, while Sarasota is paradise (Tip to Sarasota: Put the video on Google-owned YouTube instead of only Facebook. Just sayin’).

Sarasota currently ranks fifth on the list, while Grand Rapids, Michigan, leads the pack so far with over 20,000 votes. Sarasota’s stunt is renaming the popular park, City Island, to Google Island. Unoriginal at best, but the point is the same.

What is the point? The point is that Google has most likely already chosen a destination for their ultrahigh-speed broadband testing grounds. It’s going to be a town with fiber already in the ground, and it’s going to be a town that has something that will really test the broadband. Google is going to need the right kind of technology and industry in order to truly test their network. A hundred times faster than our current internet speeds is fast, really fast. As individuals, do we really need that type of speed in our homes? Well, of course we do. What kind of question is that?

A great side effect of Google Fiber even thinking about coming into a market such as Sarasota, where Comcast or Verizon are the only options, is that it will prompt both of those companies to adjust their current behavior when it comes to high-speed broadband. Comcast has mentioned restricting broadband, while Verizon is still limited to certain areas. Both these activities will have to change in order to compete. Comcast will have to keep unrestricted broadband, while Verizon might want to think about expanding past the highway, not to mention competitive pricing. Google plans on creating an open-access provider network; that is, they’ll provide their service to independent ISPs who will then sell to you, similar to how the phone system operates.

Which again, filters back to price point. Ultrahigh-speed broadband? The future is here, and its name is Google Fiber. Of course, this could be just the start of Google Skynet for all we know. I for one, welcome my new Google overlords to Sarasota, and I’ll let you all know how superfast and awesome their broadband is.

Towns have until March 26 to nominate themselves through Google’s RFI site.

Read More http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/03/i-have-renamed-my-house-google/#ixzz0hoRVtDkq

(By: Wired.com)

Photo by Alan Levine; used under Creative Commons Attribution license.

Why, really, did the 3-D movie trend start? Does anybody remember, before the trend began, thinking “You know the problem with movies? They’re too two-dimensional?” We didn’t think so. 3-D is so entrenched in the movie industry now that commercials for the upcoming remake of Clash of the Titans actually point out that it is “also in 2-D” — as though that wasn’t the norm.

Now there’s talk of re-releasing classic films, converted to 3-D. You really would think people would learn a lesson from the hue and cry over colorization of old black and white films in the 1980s, but apparently you’d be wrong.

Here, then, are the top 10 movies that, for one reason or another, we at GeekDad fervently hope are never … what would the word be? “3-D-ized?” “Depth-ized?” We need a word that evokes the concept of things that looked fine to begin with getting alterations for superficial, faux-cosmetic reasons in order to earn more money. Perhaps something involving Cher.

10. Alien — The chest-burst scene is quite scary and gory enough, without the baby coming out of the screen towards the audience, thank you very much.

9. The Pirates of the Caribbean films — Orlando Bloom is wooden enough in two dimensions. And besides, with the exception of Jack, virtually all of the characters are one-dimensional, so displaying them in three really seems like overkill.

8. The Evil Dead films — Honestly, we’re just afraid someone might injure himself running away for fear of losing an eye to Bruce Campbell’s chin.

7. The Big Lebowski — While the bowling scenes might look pretty cool in 3-D, consider the scene where the thug pees on The Dude’s rug. Or the scene where Walter bites off a guy’s ear. Some things we’re better off not seeing in 3-D.

6. Die Hard — We’re pretty sure we’re better off not being any closer to the bloodied, sweaty John McClane. We’re afraid that people with overactive imaginations might start to think they can smell him, which is certainly not something to be wished for.

5. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home — With all due respect to the late, great James Doohan, nobody wants Scotty’s stomach any closer to them than absolutely necessary. Plus, in 3-D, it would probably be pretty obvious that the closeups of the whales were done with models.

4. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial — If you or someone you love is the sort who gets emotional at movies, consider how much more powerful the emotions would be if E.T. weren’t just reaching out to Elliott, but to you.

3. The Lord of the Rings trilogy – It would be far too likely that all the careful perspective shots director Peter Jackson used to establish the differences in characters’ size would be lost, or at least badly screwed up, by the 3-D conversion process.

2. The Muppet Movie — This is a near-perfect movie, with, at most a few sour notes in an otherwise symphonic masterpiece. It works, as does anything involving Muppets, because it was meticulously filmed so the Muppets were utterly believable as characters. Converting it to 3-D would be bound to make the Muppets look more like they do in real life — that is to say, less like living beings.

1. The Star Wars saga — As though he hadn’t tinkered with the Star Wars films enough already, George Lucas has publicly stated his intentions to release 3-D versions of them. It wasn’t bad enough that he made Greedo shoot first; now he wants to mess around with the whole look and feel of the movies. If we haven’t made our case yet, we have but three more words for you: 3-D Jar Jar.

There are of course plenty more where those came from — feel free to add your own ideas in the comments. Interestingly, while compiling this list, a few films stuck out as ones that might actually be improved by 3-D conversion — look for a list of those next week.

Read More http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/03/the-top-10-movies-that-should-never-ever-be-converted-to-3d/#ixzz0hoPR3ayv