David’s Random Bits

I know not everyone agrees that carbon offsets are a good thing, but until we learn to live without things like cars and heated homes I think they are a good way to do something now. For those of us living in and around Portland we have a new way to help reduce our carbon footprint: buy energy from cow poop:

https://www.nwnatural.com/services/smartenergy/smartenergy_landing.asp

Lyza signed us up and now at least our natural gas usage is carbon neutral. Equally, if not more, important is showing consumer support for new technologies like this to figure out better ways of getting energy in the future. Come on people, let’s be progressive!

At first I thought this was a great idea:

http://www.chumby.com/

I liked the idea of having an alarm clock-like device that is displaying the information I most commonly seek, in realtime and always accessible. Similar to the way I keep my most commonly accessed sites open in tabs in my browser, ready to be read when I have a moment. But the more I thought about it the more Chumby bothers me. I still like the idea of streaming websites, but why have a separate hardware device, and why does it cost $200 ?! Especially since it will be streaming you ads in addition to information. I think this should be purely a software product. Give me a app I can install on my smartphone, or as widget in OSX, or even a stand-alone application. I guess that goes against their whole idea of not needing a computer,  but I think smartphones would be an ideal platform for their technology. Then again, they are probably planning on making their profit on the hardware, which will never work.

My Gmail account suddenly shows significantly more storage space:

You are currently using 363 MB (8%) of your 4384 MB.

I still haven’t seen the IMAP option in my Settings yet, which is the feature I’m really waiting for. Oh, and a more detailed (e.g. phone, address) “Contacts” so that I could keep that as my central contacts storage to sync my mobile phones. Does anyone know of a good contact manager? I’d like to free myself from having to sync with Outlook.

My friend Carl recently shared this excellent track with me:

Mike Doughty - Haughty Melodic - I Hear the Bell

Unlike everyone else who likes indie rock, I never really got into Soul Coughing or Mr. Doughty’s solo career. But I really love this song so I might have to look deeper into his catalog of work. Does anyone have a recommendation of where to stat?

Bruce Springsteen - Magic - Radio Nowhere

This is the opening track off of The Boss’ latest release. Overall the album is good, but not as good as I was hoping. The E Street band definitely puts the good ol’ fashion rock back in Bruce’s music, but has always had a bit too much saxomaphone for my taste. To be fair, I have only listened to it once, since I was too busy listening to Radio Nowhere on repeat.