This is the first in a series on green initiatives certain cities are undertaking to improve their public spaces and co-create a healthier environment. First up is Barcelona, where one neighourhood is tackling energy use, light pollution, and security with wirelessly-controlled LED street lights. It's pretty nifty. As someone who has to put up with streetlights shining in her bedroom window and notices when the stars look dim, I'm hopeful this technology will gain traction in our brightest cities. Via GOOD.

Expect to hear about Copenhagen, Portland and Curitiba (among others) soon!

This daily green blog challenge is in celebration of David Suzuki's 75th birthday, supporting the David Suzuki Foundation. Please help me out by sponsoring me online now.
Note: I am writing solely on my own behalf, and do not claim to represent the David Suzuki Foundation or its views here.

I've been working for awhile on giving my blog design a facelift. As tends to happen with design projects that are drawn out at length (as is the case when it's not my full-time work), I know more at the end than I did at the beginning. I mean, yeah, that's supposed to happen, naturally, with any project, but these ones that would otherwise be condensed into a short time frame take place over the course of months that are packed with learning that occurs outside their context. That learning tends to fall into either design (look at how much better I've become!) or programming (look at what I've learned how to do!). Sometimes it's outside influences like new technology that didn't exist before, or of which I did not know. Well, this time around, it's not so much my visual skills or my technological skills, but my thinking that has changed and grown since I embarked on this miniature quest. And it's quite, quite recent.

Blogs and websites are constantly evolving. As a result one can probably expect users to be evolving too — in fact, with the presence of RSS readers, we hardly need spend time on people's blogs in our web browsers save to comment. User behaviour changes with technology. This is clear. So when I have a model for my blog that is almost 3 years old, I have to wonder... what is still relevant? What features do users actually use and how do they find information?

I googled this already but Google help me I didn't find an answer. That, therefore, is where you come in. The question I pose you is: how do you use blogs? When you arrive at a post, what helps you move on to another post (assuming you enjoyed the content or found it helpful)? How do you navigate the information — through tag clouds, categories, recent comments? Are lists overwhelming or redundant?

Your feedback will help me determine what features are of most use to you when you read my blog. Thanks in advance for helping me out.

A side note: in its next incarnation, I expect comments to appear immediately on thirteen cent pinball. Hooray! The facelift is a modernization, rather than a redesign, so the overall visual "flavour" of the blog, if you will, shall remain the same.

I used to despise the word "blogging." I suppose one tiny particle in my brain still winces at the word (I've been known to avoid "fads" or anything with a lot of hype, like Harry Potter... don't ask), but I've succumbed to doing it, anyway. Let's face it, it's the writer in me, and it allows me to write plotless things because I'm not good at plot.

So right now I'm not enjoying the phrase "Second Life." Be it a craze, something I roll my eyes at, or something I'm maybe afraid of, it's got that edge that just irks me. I'd compare it to MySpace or YouTube, although I signed up for MySpace just over a year ago. It brought me something wonderful that changed my life (call it luck or fate), which I won't discuss here, but I've sort of dropped off the face of the MySpace non-planet since — I do have a first life, and it's called SCHOOL.

I'm taking a social sciences/studies course about blogging, confession, user-generated content and YouTube. Our discussions cover a wide variety of interesting things, and it seems we tend to agree. Then again, we're all around the same age, we go to a smallish school with a specific range of creative types, and we all live in Vancouver. Not everyone is from Vancouver, or even Canada for that matter, but somehow our ideas seem to fit. Either that, or the people who disagree aren't speaking up.

While some of us are busy gawking about who's next to be booted from Rockstar: Supernova, scientists have been writing papers to be published tomorrow in Nature about a supernova that "happened in February, 2006." (Why didn't I hear about this in February?) At any rate, the star's death lasted nearly 40 minutes, extraordinarily long, and as such, telescopes were able to capture the event. No, we don't get to see it, but you can read about the phenomenon and the theories it has sparked.

The funny thing is, the star is about 440 million light years away, yet the writer says it happened in February. Rather, we witnessed it in February, because it actually happened 440 million years ago (give or take a few months). It's so incredibly fascinating, though, to realise one can see back in time millions of years. I wonder what our part of the universe looked like back then?

Wyden to Block Telecom Bill Without Net Neutrality

Ads promote pollution, article by David Suzuki in Common Ground. (By the way, Suzuki is pronounced "SU-zu-ki" not "su-ZU-ki".)

This article is about ads promoting carbon dioxide and how it's not a pollutant.. yeah right. It's also about WHY they are present and the effects this propaganda could have. I read in National Geographic that higher temperatures and higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide cause ragweed to grow faster and more potent. That causes some pretty bad allergies for people sensitive to it. The other thing is (and this is not surprising, really), people in developed/industrialized nations are more likely to have allergies than in non-industrialized nations, and those becoming more industrialized are finding this problem to be increasing. Suzuki quotes one of the ads, "There's something in these pictures you can't see. It's essential to life... The fuels that produce CO2 have freed us from a world of backbreaking labour. Now, some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant. Imagine if they succeed. What would our lives be like then?" What would our lives be like? Well maybe there would be less children on inhalers, for one.

Consider the record-breaking and near record-breaking temperatures sweeping across North America right now. Is that not an indication that something's wrong? Stop denying it, people. Why doesn't it make sense? Why do we destroy without considering the long-term consequences? (Clear-cutting/mass logging, dumping waste, excavation, burning, controlling natural forest fires so they're now beyond our control, etc.)

And FINALLY...
If any of you are musicians or aspiring musicians playing guitar, bass, or drums, or just like to dabble at it every so often, you may have made use of free online tablature. I have just learned that due to copyright infringement, my favourite guitar tab websites have been shut down or crippled. I understand to some extent where the MPA is coming from, but what are young musicians to do? What if there's some underground band whose official sheet music doesn't exist or is impossible to find? What will happen to budding talent? This is all about money in the end, isn't it, not about people.

I played piano for over a decade and never ONCE bought sheet music myself. It was always gifts because I couldn't afford it. I also didn't usually like the arrangements, especially for pop songs and ones with vocals. Sheet music for piano is IMPOSSIBLE to find online, and chances are what you're looking for in paper isn't even there or doesn't exist. I still won't buy it; I'll just go without. I'll just figure it out myself. If I can't get guitar tabs for free, I'll try by ear. The tabs are the INTERPRETATIONS of listeners, where if one doesn't want to tune down to sharps or doesn't own a capo, one can often find an INTERPRETATION that suits one's preference. That's unlikely to happen in official books. (Sometimes those aren't even published in the correct key, period, just to make it easier for players.)

If it's really such an issue, if it's not money but ethics, why has this taken so long?

It reminded me of the "death of the internet" article I read (see my original post about this), and how companies would be paying to be first in line, essentially. Well the article linked above seems to suggest to me that the real deal is in engaging with your audience, and having people interested enough to write about you in their blogs. What happens if blogging is shut up by the slow lane of people who can't pay to have their site given priority bandwidth? Companies lose a good deal of their network, their word of mouth promotion.

So I ask you, governments, companies, internet service providers... what good would you be doing yourselves?

Bell's move to monitor us an ominous portent
Fears of corporate information fishing arise as Internet providers take steps to monitor users' online activity

Ian Mulgrew, Vancouver Sun
Published: Monday, July 10, 2006

We should be concerned about the erosion of our civil liberties in the post-9/11 world and the very real Big Brother-style monitoring of our Internet activities.

The Canadian Bar Association has long argued lawmakers went too far in the wake of the World Trade Centre strikes and did not build in enough checks when they gave law-enforcement agencies greater powers ostensibly to combat terrorism.

Still, when Canada's largest Internet service provider, Bell Sympatico, amends its service agreement with customers to create an environment of institutionalized cyberspying on behalf of the government, we're entering a whole other realm.

Bell three weeks ago told its customers it's reserving the right to monitor, collect and on request provide to police a list of every site you visit and every keystroke you type while connected.

Other ISPs have or are expected to follow suit.

Please read the rest. It will only take you a few minutes.