Robsterworld

After an indepth conversation with my father on the causes and possible solutions to Global Warming, and seeing The 11th Hour on TV the following day, I’m more convinced than ever by the seriousness and need for urgent action to combat this problem. Many campaign organisations who are trying to combat global warming seem to focus their efforts on either preaching to the converted, or trying to convince people to petition governments to take action. My perspective on this is that petitioning governments is unlikely to be effective, because pretty much any decision made by government designed to combat global warming is not going to be popular, and the unfortunate reality is that the number one priority of most senior politicians is staying in power.

Carbon Dioxide emissions are caused by the combined actions of a large number of individual people. Getting people to change their behaviour is key to solving the problem. Campaigning to people directly to change their behaviour could well be more effective than trying to convince government to introduce measures to change people’s behaviour.

I think many people are resigned to it being such a big problem that there’s nothing they personally can do about it. If people can be convinced that its down to them to act, and given a clear and concise list of changes they can make in their lives to help out, this may be the best chance for real change.

After watching a documentary film called “Who Killed the Electric Car?” I started looking into electric cars and discovered one that most people don’t seem to be aware of, the Tesla Roadster. The Tesla is very different from most existing electric cars. Its a good looking sports car, it does 0 to 60 in 4 seconds, has a top speed of 130mph and can travel 250 miles per charge. Its a light relief from previous efforts that tend to be ugly, slow and not go very far between charges, an example being the G-Whizz. Tesla have proved that electric cars can be cool, and plan to follow it up in 2008/2009 with a cheaper, larger appeal family saloon car.

Links:
Who Killed the Electric Car
Tesla Motors

General Motors have launched an advertising campaign called “Live green, go yellow” which promotes their Flexfuel vehicles. Flexfuel means they can run on any mixture of petrol and ethanol, up to 85% ethanol (known as E85).

E85 is far better for the evironment as ethanol is produced from wheat, grain and other crops which take carbon dioxide from the air as they grow, and release a similar amount when they are burned. Unlike fossil fuels which realease carbon dioxide that has been accumulated over millions of years.

According to their advert they have already produced 1.5 million Flexfuel cars, however many people are unaware that they own these vehicles. GM are trying to address this lack of knowledge by fitting yellow petrol caps to all new Flexfuel vehicles, which is what the “Go Yellow” slogan is about. Existing GM (and other manufacturers) car owners can apparently check their vehicle serial number here to find out if their car is E85 compatible.

This is definately a step forward, it would be nice to see something like this happening in the UK. The furthest we’ve got with low-emission fuels so far is a single Hydrogen Fuel Cell Bus

Last Thursday I went for an interview for a marketing job with Traveline, the organisation which provides public transport information via phone, web and text. A part of the interview I had to give a presentation on a subject of my choice, so I decided to do something relevant, which was “How to get commuters out of their cars” giving the benefits, the reasons why people are in their cars and what can be done to change it. They seemed quite interested in my ideas, but I didn’t get the job. I don’t really have much proveable marketing experience, so I guess I could have been as interested as you like in public transport but without the right experience its not much use.

Its a real shame for me, as I was looking forward to the opportunity to make a difference.

Its safe to say its been quite a while since I’ve updated this weblog. I got back today from a long weekend that started off with Play circus festival near Market Drayton. I started juggling clubs towards the end of last year and have been going to a workshop in Cardiff run by Nofit State Circus. When I heard there was a circus festival with 4 days of workshops, cabaret, fire shows, bands and 500 people, it sounded like something I shouldn’t miss, and I was right. The whole weekend was good fun, I spent most of the days doing workshops or otherwise practicing and the nights enjoying the cabaret and fireshows. Thurs and Fri night I tried not to drink too much so I would get something out of the workshops the following day, but on the sat night that plan went out the window, and there was much drunken festival style sillyness, including comedy disco dancing followed by skanking and doing the conga to a ska-punk band. It was light when we went to bed, so didnt end up going to workshops or doing anything much on the Sunday.

My pal Viv who I’d gone the the festival with had arranged for us to stay at a friends farm near Oswestry on the Monday night, but considering our worn out state we decided to make our way there a day early. The farm we stayed at is in a North Wales Valley with great scenery, most of which you can see from the front garden of the farmhouse, and made a great place to relax after the festival before going back to the “real world”. I came home with some eggs, after seeing the chickens that laid them.

In all a great weekend. Met some new people and came away with a few new ball and club juggling tricks to try and was inspired by some great performers.

A nice surprise at the festival was the toilets, they were chemical toilets like you’d expect at a festival but they were cleaned every day, and had regularly replaced toilet paper. If you’ve never been to a festival that might not sound like much, but If you’ve been to Reading or Glasto you’ll understand.

The disapointment of the weekend was the food. There was a cafe serving vegetarian and vegan meals, and I’d heard there would be a meat option. It turned out that the meat option was a choice of bacon sandwiches and burgers available for an hour each day, which seemed to have vanished on the sunday. I love bacon sandwiches but there seems to be a strange series of assumptions involved there, that if you do circus skills you are probably a vegetarian, and if you do want to eat meat then you want something greasy and unhealthy. Its fine with me if people are vegetarian and I respect the argument for it, but I don’t like having it forced on me. Maybe that’s what it feels like to be vegetarian.

There are 2 very useful plugins available for Firefox if you’re a webmaster:

Web Developer extension
Has far too many functions to mention, but it is very useful

Alexa/Google Pagerank toolbar
This is quite useful as it shows you Google PageRank the same way the google toolbar for IE does. Also displays Alexa rank and sends stats back to them.

This week IT Productivity Center reported Firefox’s market share as being 10.28%, more than doubling its share of the market since January with a 6.05% rise. Meanwhile Internet Explorer lost 1.78% of its share, showing that Firefox are a serious contender.

Also this week Firefox announced that they are nearing 50 million downloads, which they are celebrating by giving away comemorative coins to users who promote the browser in an inovative way. Join the party and get your copy of Firefox.

This week I’ve been trying out the GMail spam filter and although I have no idea what rules it uses to decide what is and isn’t spam it seems to route about 90% of spam to the spam folder and so far no genuine emails have ended up in the spam box.

A couple of weeks ago I bought myself a mega drive from a friend who was clearing out his house, and this week I had micro machines 2 in the post from someone on ebay, which was lucky because the novelty of sonic 1 was starting to wear off (along with the frustration of me and my housemate constantly dying on labyrinth zone). Micro machines 2 is possibly the best game ever made when it comes to gameplay. Ifyou take advantage of the fact you can plug 4 pads in you can have a really good laugh on it with a few mates.