For one hour on Saturday March 28 at 8:30pm, switch off for our planet earth.
If it’s a clear night, go outside, check out the night sky you’ll be surprised what you can see.
Earth Hour 2009
From their about page:
“What began as a campaign to get Sydneysiders to turn their lights off, has grown to become one of the world’s biggest climate change initiatives. In 2009, at 8.30pm on March 28, people around the world will turn their lights off for one hour – Earth Hour. We’re aiming to reach one billion people, more than 1000 cities, all joining together in a global effort to show that its possible to take action on global warming. Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia with 2.2 million homes and businesses turning their lights off for one hour. Only a year later and this event had become a global sustainability movement with up to 50 million people across 35 countries participating. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square, all stood in darkness, as symbols of hope for a cause that grows more urgent by the hour.”
“What began as a campaign to get Sydneysiders to turn their lights off, has grown to become one of the world’s biggest climate change initiatives. In 2009, at 8.30pm on March 28, people around the world will turn their lights off for one hour – Earth Hour. We’re aiming to reach one billion people, more than 1000 cities, all joining together in a global effort to show that its possible to take action on global warming.
Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia with 2.2 million homes and businesses turning their lights off for one hour. Only a year later and this event had become a global sustainability movement with up to 50 million people across 35 countries participating. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square, all stood in darkness, as symbols of hope for a cause that grows more urgent by the hour.”
So what does any self respecting programmer do when he finds himself awake at 2am after Thanksgiving?
Do some coding of course!
In this case I decided to finish up that holiday shopping budget I had been putting off. Using this simple little javascript application you can tell exactly how much you can afford to spend on each person.
http://lab.coderjoe.net/holiday-budget/budget.html
Just choose your overall max budget, enter the names of all those people you will be giving gifts to, and rate them on a scale from 1 to 10!
Easy as pie.
Happy Holidays!
UPDATE: The Terms of Service have been updated as of September 4th 2008 to state that you retain the rights and copyright on all things displayed with or through “The Service”. The EULA is no longer a problem and I look forward to giving Chrome an in depth try. (See the EULA here: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html)
How often have you tried to install an application only to be stopped by a dialog asking you to agree to some terms of service (TOS), or an end user license agreement (EULA)? Now how often do you actually take the time to read through these terms to see what you’re agreeing to?
Read the rest of this entry »
The Pradipta 416 caused all of this in less than 24 hours. This is why I love the internet.
http://groups.google.com/group/pradiptas-rolodex
For the full story see here: 416 Random People with RoR…
What do you do when you have a GPS receiver, the internet, and a penchant for treasure hunting? You go Geocaching! Geocaching is a game where you quite literally use multi-million dollar satellites to hunt for boxes in the woods.
The game works as follows:
The caches themselves range in size from magnetic key holders to ammo boxes painted and marked with the word “Geocache”. All caches contain a small logbook where finders can sign the date of their find, their nickname, and maybe even a quick description of the fun they had hunting.
Some of the larger caches are variable treasure troves of trinkets. Geocachers follow a policy of trade equal or trade up. This means that if you stumble upon a cache with a nifty goody you’d like to snag, you must trade that item for something of equal or greater value. This ensures the boxes stay stocked with things to keep everybody entertained.
The caches themselves vary in difficulty from easy to find, to incredibly hard. To make matters worse, since some people may frown upon the idea of geocaching, you generally must stay as inconspicuous as possible while caching. After all, the last thing you’d want to do is give away the cache to someone else hunting, or even worse be witnessed re-hiding the cache only to have it stolen.
The number of people enjoying this interesting hobby is often surprising. Chances are if you’re out caching you’ll bump into another person doing the same. Caches are so wide spread that if you’re anywhere any park, or city, chances are you walk right bye more than a few each day.
I began caching with a few friends from work known on geocaching.com as DrDonut and Raegx. Since then our caching adventures have taken us to various beautiful parks around the Rochester area. I’ve even revisited some of my favorite spots from high school only to discover caches present in the area.
The joy of the find and neat swag aside, the real fun of Geocaching comes from the community itself. The game itself is entirely community run. Geocachers make the caches and post them to the site. Geocachers find the caches. Geocachers police the caches and warn people when they need maintenance. But most importantly, geocachers all seem to be cut from the same adventurous cloth.
An overbearing theme for all caches seems to be to get you to look at your world a little differently. Many caches are placed in such a way that they will take you somewhere you might never know existed. Walking the trail, or even a bit off the beaten path, you’re sure to see something cool and have a good deal of fun.
Happy caching!
February 14th, 2009 
Life, Other Interesting Links 