I took the car in for regular maintenance yesterday and they laughed at my odometer reading. It appears that we’ve only driven about 2000km in the last 8 months! This is pretty significant and has been part of our plan to reduce our environmental impact while improving our health.
In fact, there are only a few reasons we ever use the car:
- getting out of city for hiking & canoeing,
- transportation for Scouts & Guides,
- and occasionally lugging stuff around.
The car is almost a permanent fixture in the parking garage and if it weren’t for the above reasons it would probably be sitting on a used car lot somewhere.
So how do we get around? First of all, we planned the location of our home very carefully to be close to everything we need. I think the premium we had to pay for location is easily offset by fuel savings — and far more importantly — time savings, health benefits and reduced stress from not having to endure a commute. I work from home and Agnes’ lab is only a five-minute walk away, but we could easily commute to anywhere in greater Vancouver via public transit or by bicycle if this were to change.
Don’t let gas prices get you down. After all, they’re only going to go up.
I’ve just released a new version my keywords plugin for WordPress. Jerome’s Keywords version 1.5 finalizes the new tag cosmos and most-used keywords list functionality. Some minor bugs and annoyances have been fixed along the way too.
By far the most time-consuming part was revising the documentation. The plugin page now includes more “how-to” information and includes most of the tips and sample files scattered throughout earlier comment threads. Drop by the plugin page and check it out.
Known Issues & Future Plans
- The duplicate keywords issue reported by theanomaly has yet to be resolved (or duplicated).
- Add a “relevant posts” feature that returns posts with a high number of similar keywords.
- Enhance the edit page to suggest relevant keywords used in the past.
- Automatically parse post links tagged with “rel” and add their tag to the keyword list.
CBC reports that the main “front” of the seal hunt opened today. I’ve been reading up on it ever since an acquaintance sent me an e-mail last month about the Humane Society of the United States’ (HSUS) opposition of the annual hunt. What I read on their website shocked and appalled me — but not for the reasons you might think.
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Agnes pointed out this article on CBC.ca today. It’s refreshing that the U.S. Secret Service and Treasury Department can take a break from fighting terrorism and the deficit to care for a single-parent family of ducks trying to make a go of it in these troubled times. Proof that a kindler, gentler administration is in charge.
American families worried about the safety of their children can take hope from this story: just camp out on the Treasury Department’s sidewalk and you too will be taken care of and “relocated to a wetter and safer location.”
Well, as long as it’s not slated for drilling oil…
I’d like to introduce my new sidekick: L’il Stiny.
L’il Stiny is actually a Linksys NSLU2, a tiny network file server for USB2.0 hard drives. I first found out about this nifty device sometime last year when Jim Buzbee published an article on Tom’s Hardware entitled “Hacking the NSLU2″. The idea was intriguing but only took root the other week when I realized a serious need for additional storage.
Out of the box, the NSLU2 is ridiculously small (less than 6″ tall) and acts a file server on your network using up to two USB drives. It runs Linux on an ARM processor, serving files via Samba. Not long after Jim’s articles exposed the unit’s internals, a small community arose dedicated to opening up this little processor for other uses.
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