LEAVES, LEAVES, EVERYWHERE!!!

Star Tribune reports today that Twin Cities law trades traditional black plastic lawn bags for compostible ones.

Although, I would prefer people to compost their leaves than throw them out, even I have too many leaves for this to be reasonable. Either way, I think this is a good idea for both the environment and a streamlining of the utilities. The claim is that it will help save money for state waste haulers since they have to separate the bags once the leaves end at their final resting place. Aside from that, the obvious reduction of disposed of plastic is a plus.

However, one annoying issue for me is that I pack the bags around the basement windows to add extra insulation through the winter. Since, the law goes into affect before Spring, I won’t be able to ditch the leaves I have already bagged… and I am not sure that the compostible bags won’t disintegrate before the winter’s end. Hmm… what to do.. what to do…

The other thing I noted about the speech is that she spent most of her time defending herself and the rest of the time blasting Obama. She repeatly posed a question to the affect of “What is Obama’s plan?”. I ask, what is her plan? She spoke very little of what she stood for. For what I understand her to stand for, I would think she would have brought those things up to rally the Rebulicans more.

I think I do have a soft spot for her with the whole “small town” thing she is playing up – and rightfully so. She is saying that she is a “Washington outsider” and is not playing the politico game. She claims she wants smaller government and other things I agree with to an extent.

However, it will just be interesting to see how this pans out. I just feel like McCain/Palin ticket will divide Rebulicans far more than they thought her as VP would divide Democrats. I forsee a lot of economic conservatives and otherwise hardcore conservative strongly dissapproving of her for what she brings to the table. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

We had pretty much non-stop food and drink sponsored by the likes of Peace Coffee, Bruggers, Chipotle, Dominos, etc. Best Buy, VISI, iQ marketing and many other’s sponsored with raffle prizes (I won a blue ray version of “The Prestige”). There were Band Hero challenges, some sort of dance competition, and more. I got to meet a bunch of cool people including Konr Ness (team mate) who Jon talks a lot about and also the infamous Mark Courtney who I heard a lot about from when I worked at Sierra Bravo. Mark sold me a pack of smokes midway though the deal for a can of Brawndo and a few bucks.

My team was the Mighty Polymorphic Power Rangers, lead up by my good buddy Jon. Jon was so excited about the event, that he bought us all Brawndo pimp packs. It was hilarious. We figured it would make us win at staying awake… We were paired with the Riverview Economic Development Association which is a business association for one of the poorer areas of West St.Paul. Brian, the representative from REDA was awesome. He was probably the youngest representative from any of the non-profits there (probably my age), and I think that greatly helped with with the communication and such. It also helped that he was a really cool guy and very very appreciative. As, one of the judges said in the end, every non-profit said their team was the best… however, I know I saw some angry faces on some of the representative’s faces with the other teams.

Sadly, our team didn’t win the overall challenge, but we created one hell of a site for REDA that they are sure to love. The site is still in progress and our team established a continued support contract with REDA to finish up their site and allocate time for bug fixes and additional support. Brian even extended an unofficial “I’ll totally take you guys (and gal) out for beers” offer. I dig it.

We developed the site using the Zend Framework with the Justin Hendrickson’s Rend extension to ease things up. This was my first time using Zend, and while I have much experience with similar frameworks, I wanted to take a more designer oriented roll with the project.  Our team had 1 strictly graphics designer, 1 guy food with CSS/Graphics/Markup, Jon and I who are all around awesome, and the rest were mostly back end peeps. So our team was programmer heavy. As such, I took more of a roll to work on markup and stylings from the designers. I gained a bunch of jQuery experience that I had otherwise not had including an awesome form UI similar to Pownce, a pretty slick image rotator, and various other bits. I also spent about an hour coming up from scratch with the UI for a google style calendar (sands a lot of bells and whistles). I was slightly proud of myself that I could bust out the PHP for the calendar on short notice since I had never done that before. Building a calendar UI is actually a bit of a logical challenge… especially at 4am. One of the other team members spent around an hour just looking for a prebuilt chunk of php to generate the calendar layout, and finally I was just like “here, let me do it”. In spite of not being around developer types much in the last year, it is good to see that my skills have not feigned much. However, I definitly was humbled in many ways. I am not up on Zend, ModX, and a lot of the stuff like installing SVN, networking, etc. I should probably know this stuff, but eh.

One thing that did get to me a bit was when all the non-profits were talking at the end. It was bittersweet since I have recently stepped down from Exec Director with Adamantine Arts. The heads of these orgs were so excited about the future of their orgs now that they had such amazing sites. I miss that sense of optimism. My optimism had been waning over the last 6 months, even in spite of starting our own mentoring program. Oh well. What is next is a blog for another day…

Anywho, that is my official post on f1.  Holla.

Now that it is over, I’m feeling a bit bummed about the whole thing.

So, what does this say about the changing zeitgeist. Will marijuana be decriminalized? What are the implications of this? Will other drugs replace pot as the “eh” drug? Will future candidates respond “that is the point” when questioned about their meth usage? I’m not sure what side of this issue I am on. I envision a future of upper middle class kids skate boarding around the burbs high, listening to Rage Against the Machine thinking to themselves “I can relate”… An alternative future is a more peaceful and loving America. Another alternate future is a bunch of fat stoned American’s making the stocks of food chains with delivery skyrocket.

The Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil.

An interesting quote I jotted down while riding bike and watching Richard Branson on Charlie Rose tonite. A perhaps obvious, but not embraced thought from the talk was that there is one side to the alternative energy issue that fossil fuels are destroying the environment and it needs to be stopped. The other side is that we are a fossil fuel burning society and we need to figure out an alternative out before we run out of fossil fuels. I googled the quote above and found that it was from Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani from ‘NYTimes article The Breaking Point’. . If the Sheik is correct, we can explore new energies all we want, but unless they are widely adopted, it will be a moot point. Interesting Indeed.

I googled it. But, I wasn’t able to find much information online aside from a blog from Paul Soglin in the Madison area. From the looks of it, ATT&T is trying to maybe push out public access tv from the urban areas of Wisconsin to replace it with their own programming targeted at college students? This is all under the guise of providing more options to all residents of ‘Skani? The cable television market has been notoriously poor at providing service to rural Wisconsin residents, which gave rise to small Co-Ops like Chibardun who serve a specific area.

Take this with a grain of salt. I don’t know the whole story. I am no longer a WI resident, but this stuff sucks and WI residents should look into it and be pissed off.

Here are the vids…

Dude… why does AOL’s video player have some much extra HTML to copy/paste?