Blogs

Glad He's On Our Team

Sometimes you run into someone who’s a pain in the ass when he’s on the other team, but you love having him on your team. Tim Bray is such a person, as in his recent Udell and Vinoski: _“Hey Jon, our criticisms of WS-* are specific and have to do with issues of process and stability and technical quality and a demonstrated lack of interoperability. It is badly-engineered technology, using it will increase the likelihood that your project fails, and it is not suitable for use by conscientious IT professionals.

The Value

It may sound crazy, but my friend Hal writes some of the best stuff about youth hockey that I’ve ever read. His latest post talks about kids tournaments, but its really about kids growing up, and the role that hockey can play. Last weekend my son’s team played in a tourney in Rhode Island. After making it through the preliminary round unscathed, they won their quarter- and semi-final games cleanly, putting them in the finals with the local team who they’ve played at least a dozen times in the last three years.

Is All CO2 Equal? - Part 4, Space Shifting Revisited

In my last post on carbon offsets, we looked at various aspects of “space shifting”, or the practice of emitting CO2 in one location and offsetting in another. In that I asked whether this really worked in practice, and I got some excellent comments and emails that indicate that it does. I got a number of people suggesting that CO2 mixed pretty quickly, but the most direct was from Marcus Sarofim at MIT, the CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere mixes every 1 to 2 months within a hemisphere, and 1 to 2 years between hemispheres.

Blackbox "cracked"

Check out InfoWorld’s “12 crackpot ideas that just might work”, especially slide 13.

Patience on a Beautiful Morning

Got up at 5am this morning and headed to the airport. I got to Wash DC on Tuesday before the winter storm really hit here, and worked all day in Washington yesterday while it raged up in Boston. This morning its beautiful and clear, but the airport is still catching up. I’ve got a seat on the 7:45am shuttle (now showing 8:15am), though the 6:45am is still at the gate, so I’m assuming there’s still going to be some hangover from yesterday when both airports were closed for most or all of the day.

The Eco Dialogue at Sun

It’s great to see the level of dialogue about the environment continuing to grow within Sun. Here’s a few recent links and notes: First, we’re getting tremendous response from our first CSR report. It’s causing discussion inside the company and with many of our external stakeholders. Congrats to Marcy and the team who did a great job pulling it together. This will be updated annually, with the next release in the fall (we’re going to get on a schedule to match our annual financial report).

The week in carbon

While I’ve been dealing with the theoretical aspects of CO2 emissions, lots has been going on in the real world (as the gamers say). Gill Friend summarizes it all here.

Is All CO2 Equal? Part 4 - Space Shifting

Following the last part in this series where we looked at times shifting of CO2 offsets (offsetting the CO2 at a different time that it was emitted), in this post we’ll look at space shifting, or offsetting the CO2 at a different place than it was emitted. Dell’s program involves planting trees in order to sequester the CO2 due to PC usage. The CO2 emissions will occur at a power plant somewhere near where you’re using the PC (although with today’s power grids it may not be all that close).

Crazy weather

The Onion chronicles our crazy New England weather.