By Johnny Canuck
My eye is OK.
Of course I knew that already. But the optometrist was fitting me with some new daily lenses and because I have a astigmatism in my left eye my lens have to be weighted in a specific direction. So you’ll notice some little dots on the horizontal plain and and big OK at the top.
Obviously this only appears on the test lens but I can already see the potential in selling this space to Nike and Viagra. Now that everyone shoots with a 10 megapixel camera, I reckon I can get my eyeball to look like a Nascar.
Cross posted on Planet Fortier
By Johnny Canuck
I know this is a little off track for the Technical angle we usually take on this blog but it follows suit on my own post on the Inconvenience of Saving our Planet that I wrote about last week. A inside joke here at 2 Fat Dads.com is we’re doing it for the diapers, any ad revenue, donations or commission we can make off the Amazon Store all go towards keeping our little ones in clean diapers. So the whole diaper issue became an interesting conversation point here and I though it was about time to break the embargo and actually bring up a real Dad topic for once.
Continue reading The Reality of Cloth Diapers
By Johnny Canuck
Now I will be the first to admit that I’m no saint when it comes to my own environmental issues. I do own a snow blower and drive 6 KM to work; I also suffer from a bad back and like to smell nice for my clients and colleagues.
That said Schultzter’s recent post about the “Safety of Gas Engines” just killed the David Suzuki in me. The reality is that power tools don’t need to meet any government emissions test after their date of sale. Once you buy you Honda mower, you never have to take it to the dealer to get it serviced… ever. So that mower that takes 18 pulls to start, the same one you leave idling when you change the bag would certainly fail any standard California emissions test. There is a clever TV commercial that points out that a badly tuned mower pollutes more that a Montreal bridge load of idling cars. So why are you still using it? Because the alternative just isn’t convenient. The hassle of an electric mower’s cord or effort of a push mower is just too much for some compared to the impact of their 2-stroke on the city’s smog level.
Continue reading The Inconvenience of Saving our Planet
By Johnny Canuck
OK so it’s just a prototype… But in all honesty my daughter’s sense of imagination and ability to create some amazing stuff is mind boggling. The remote to Squawkers MacGraw doubles as a multi-button mouse and is apparently Bluetooth as well as solar powered…
And all this got me thinking about GREEN computing and the recent Apple Ads about the impact the new MacBooks will have on the Planet ERF. I am sure that Apple’s changes will eventually trickle down to the Dell and Lenovo’s and maybe even to Asus, Acer and the netbook gang. But how long will it take and what are we really doing with the of the other laptops we collectively ditch on an alarming annual basis. I, for one, have had quite a ferw Windoes Lappies from Dell over the last few years. The speed increases and requirements for new RAM are insane in the development industry. And of course I want the new machine with the Camera and the Bluetooth and the better non-exploding 
battery. The big problem is that this all ads up. (View my previous post about The Story of Stuff). Here at work, we do have a policy of recycling our higher end laptops down the line from developers to techs then sales and support staff. I must admit that if I worked in support or sales, I would be a little annoyed at getting a machine that a tech has journeyed with for a year: think about all the the bumps, the stickers and the missing keys… Not to mention the state of the hard drive.
So when I think about the the new ads, I wonder how many people are thinking: “Well, if my laptop is so bad for the environment, maybe I should just keep it a little longer. Maybe I’ll upgrade.” The way we have spent ourselves into a hell hole, this attitude probably won’t change. It just pains me to see that much computing power, more computing power than we needed to reach the moon, go into a land fill so toxic that we will eventually wish it was on the moon.
On a personal note, I have had the same first Gen Intel MacBook for almost 3 years now, we bought a second hand Mac Mini and will continue to use a media centre for many years. The Dell it replaced was over 10 years old. It’s not in a landfill yet, I’m just considering the environmental impact of using it as a NAS and letting it FOLD@HOME.
mtl_steve : I'm at Costco (5701, Autoroute Transcanadienne Voie de Service N, at rue Ellingham, Pointe-Claire). http://4sq.com/9U5pz6
schultzter : That Bucky is just brilliant! http://post.ly/SiTJ
2FatDads : If you missed this week's DadCast: http://2fatdads.com/u/8p, you can always subscribe on iTunes http://2fatdads.com/u/itunes
mon_twop_1000 : Today 1 year on Twitter: @cybsports, @TheCheckingLine, @valsimard, @ETlafond, @ErickRemy, @2FatDads
JohnnyCanuck : @mtl_steve well it's about time!
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