Sunday, December 9, 2007

Going green

This week the United Nations held a climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia. The goal of this conference is to bring together representatives from all countries and agree on a roadmap to fight climate change.

Climate change is a topic on everyone mind these days. It seems that the latest trend involves involves "being green" - environmentally friendly. Governments, corporations, individuals are all making an effort to reduce their impact on the environment. So, I would also like to announce my effort that I am making to become more environmentally friendly.

A pet peeve of mine is the unnecessary printing at work. I notice people consistently printing emails, articles, and books, which could be easily read from their computer screen (don't even start me on the misuse of colour printing). Now, I tend to read a lot of tutorials on the Internet for configuring applications so it is convenient for me to print out the article and follow the instructions, but once I am done with it, I end up recycling the article.

I have decided to not print anything unless it is required for documentation. I have found that setting up another monitor (dual monitor) has made it easy for me to avoid printing articles.


The nice thing with a dual monitor is you can drag and drop applications between the monitors, basically you have increased the allowable space for your monitor by 2. If your interested in setting it up, you can follow the instructions here. Now, you may argue that another monitor requires extra energy, but I do shut it down when I leave work and as the picture above indicates, I am focusing right now on saving the trees :)

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Seven!


I visited the dentist today to get my seventh tooth extracted. This tooth had not grown out all the way and had been causing pain for some time now. I have always had positive experiences and rarely felt any discomfort during any visits. Even the first six teeth that I had extracted were not that bad. In-fact, when I got my wisdom teeth out, I was given laughing gas, which would trigger laughter as I felt discomfort. I felt like Joker from Batman, laughing internally without making any noise ... lol.

Dentists have always been nice to me, reassuring me during painful moments, and keeping things positive during negative times. However, sometimes I feel dentists are too nice. I have never understood why dentists make conversations during a visit. I am a nice guy and don't want to be rude, so I express facial acknowledgment of discussions, obviously unable to make verbal confirmation.

During a visit a few months ago, the dentist told me her story of the issues she faced with her cell phone provider. It was an entertaining story, but I wonder if she felt odd talking without any feedback from the talkee, or perhaps, she needed to take her mind off looking at patients teeth. Hopefully, I did not eat gobee and roti before visiting :)