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AutoblogGreen for 12.28.09 originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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AGRITOURISM — TRENDS: If your small scale farming operation utilizes agritourism as a way to make money from the farm, here are four travel forecasts from AAA to consider. 1. Train travel is predicted to grow in popularity. With the economy troubles and airline travel safety restrictions becoming a headache, more people are traveling by train. If you have a “How to get here” link on your farm’s website (or even if you don’t), check to see where the nearest train station is to your small farm and let visitors know the distance, providing them with a link to the train station. 2. Nearby and shorter-term travel is predicted to continue. Make money farming by attracting more local and regional customers to your farm’s agritourism destination. If you relied on distant travelers in the past, hold a farm festival for the locals or write a press release on your farm’s B&B as a nearby get-away for regional customers. The title, The New Agritourism: Hosting Community and Tourists on Your Farm shows how to write press releases for your agritourism venture along with numerous ways to attract the local community. 3. “Glamping” is expected to continue in popularity. It’s a combination of camping and glamour. Mary Jane’s Farm in Idaho helped save her farm with this method. The wall tents in her orchard have quilted beds and pretty country furnishings in each tent with a rustic outdoor kitchen (there is a chapter in The New Agritourism on how she started her wall tent project). For the small scale farming operation wanting to just try agritourism out for a month or so without long-term commitment, this might be a fun possibility for the camping and honeymoon months of June, July and August only, then access afterwords how you feel about agritourism in general. 4. And “voluntourism,” the combination of travel with volunteering for a good cause or to learn and enjoy a new experience is expected to continue to gain popularity. The small scale farming community is especially good at this agritourism segment of travel. As two examples we’ve seen, a small vineyard invites volunteers out to learn how to carefully hand harvest wine grapes and discern if and when they’re perfect for picking and gets free labor for the trade; and micro farming families invite the community out to plant a row for the poor – which attracts the media, free publicity for the farm, and new potential farm customers. — www.MicroEcoFarming.com
Daily Random Recipe
INGREDIENTS:
Cornbread Stuffing
Basting Liquid
Gravy
Cornbread Stuffing
To make the stuffing, sauté the onion and celery in the sesame oil. Mix the seasonings into the cubed bread. Combine everything, adding enough vegetable broth to moisten. Add nuts if desired.
Preheat the oven to 400F/200C/gas mark 6. Press the tofu with your hands to form a hollow center, fill with the stuffing mixture and press down. Flip the tofu onto an oiled baking sheet. Remove the towel or cheesecloth. Baste the tofu with 3/4 of the sesame oil and soy sauce mixture, cover with foil and bake for 1 hour. Remove the foil, baste again with the remaining basting mixture, return to the hot oven, and bake uncovered for 20 minutes or until golden. Transfer to a serving platter and serve with gravy.
Gravy
Sauté the onion in the oil until soft. Add the mushrooms and sauté for 1 minute more. Shake the flour, broth and water together in a jar and add this to the onions and mushrooms. Mix in the soy sauce and stir over medium heat until thick.
Makes 20-24 servings
NOTES:
Did you just get cut off? Is a professional driver behaving badly? Was your car towed? Or better, did you see a cute driver (or a really cool car) in the next lane?
CarPong is a fun an innovative idea that allows users to send messages to other drivers by using their car’s license plate number. Like blog commenting for vehicles, this service lets drivers write messages to other drivers, read what others have said about them and search for notes about other drivers. It’s an interesting way to make our cars – and the people in them – a lot more connected in real life, and it just might work.
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Car-to-car communiques remain one of the last frontiers for messaging services and one of the few environments where people are still inside isolationist social bubbles. On the Internet, we’ve mostly shed the goofy pseudonyms and nondescript avatars of the You’ve Got Mail era in exchange for real connections between real people.
CarPong is exciting because it turns the highways and byways into a sort of chat room.
One user called out a license plate of a European spec Ford Fiesta – which might be one of Ford’s special social media fleet. Another sends a helpful hint to a fellow driver to invest in some new tires quickly.
By and large, the site is so far a litany of complaints about others’ bad driving habits. Still, by removing the anonymity of the road, this kind of messaging might encourage more human, more mindful and even kinder driver behavior.
Founder Tony Mastrorio wrote us to say, “I am working on getting towing companies to notify car owners when their car has been towed, where they can pick it up and the associated fee. This aspect alone would make the service very useful for many people.”
He’d also like the site to work a bit like the “How’s My Driving” signs we see on commercial vehicles. An enterprise-level CRM platform might also provide a good revenue stream.
Currently, the site lacks the national or regional userbase of millions it would need to be truly useful. But I can see this idea spreading like wildfire if drivers like the idea of having a virtual complaints/comments box for those with whom they share the road.
On the other hand, there’s something about the encoded and regulated nature of license plates that lead one to a certain expectation of privacy. As with linking our real names, identities, careers, birth dates and even home addresses to our online personas, there may be some initial resistance to adding our license plates to that mix. Currently on the site, plates and profiles are not linked, but users can see all comments associated with other users and any reported license plate.
How do you feel: Would this kind of transparency about who we are on the road lead to better and more personal communication between drivers? Or are our vehicles and driving records best left to principalities more private than the Internet? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Rain barrels are a green garden must have for many reasons. Also, rain barrels aren’t complicated. In fact when my son attended an eco-charter the kids there took on most of the care and use of the school water barrels.
What are rain barrels?
Basically rain barrels provide a way for you to collect and store rain water that you can later use to water plants, water your lawn, wash your car, clean floors and more. You can’t drink rain water straight up though. Rain barrels range from homemade simple contraptions to basic premade barrels to barrels you can buy and paint to artsy or mod premade barrels that are as good looking as they are useful. There are even some totally weird rain barrels available if weird garden gear is your deal.
Why bother?
Coming up; how to build your own rain barrel along with some shopping suggestions if you’d rather just buy a premade rain barrel.
[image via stock.xchng]
Post from: Blisstree
In the English speaking world, the free blogging platforms that stand out from the crowd are Google’s Blogger and WordPress.com. While those services are also popular in Japan, a particularly strong homegrown contender is Ameba.jp., which is now looking to tap into a global audience by launching as a Facebook app. More than just a blog platform, Ameba is unique in the way it has socialized blogs via a virtual online community – Ameba Pigg. Yes, it’s an odd name… But it is Japan after all…
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One of the most attractive features of the Samsung Omnia 2 is its Divx support. Fortunately for the rest of us who do not own one, there is software available that support Divx playback on other devices.
Windows Mobile has had Pocket Divx for some time now, but it just received an update today.
Sadly it does not include a change log, but I have noted the following additions:
Features List:
10-Band Equalizer with Pre-Amp;
PlayList Support;
PlayList Editor;
Web Streaming;
Brightness Control (ARM devices only);
File Association Support;
Hardware Button Mapping;
Shuffle Play;
90 degree Rotate ;
2:1 zoom;
Bi-linear filtering for zoom mode;
Dithering (ARM devices only);
Fast Forward;
Seek Bar;
Volume Control;
Custom File Open Dialog;
Custom Web View Streaming File Selection Dialog;
Keep Alive for device shutoff suspension;
Play At File Open option;
Definable Caching for performance/power utilization. Supported Audio/Video Formats: Video: Divx, OpenDivX, Avi, MPEG-1 w/ FFMPEG mpeg video decoder;
Audio: MP3 and Layer I + II Audio w/ MAD MP3 decoder.
My story: I was on my usual flights between Atlanta and Minnesota and Florida. I had a new episode of house on my phone(don’t ask where I found it) and I tried watching it on my first of two connection flights, but both Windows Media player and HTC players don’t support it. I also tried installing core player and VLC player, but even though the supported the video format, they did not support the audio files. I was lucky enough to be on those new flights that have Wi-Fi in the air(I know, isn’t that cool, I was 40,000ft in the air checking my emails) and I received a free 24 hours use card. I got online to freewarepocketpc.net, and browsed there player selection and found this one. I loved it, I downloaded it, installed it. When I loaded it for the first time, it took a little bit of time, because it searches for all the files that it supports, and adds it to the video selection. It took about one minutes and I was watching House and enjoying it, thanks to the program’s very smooth and constant stream even on high res movies. The flight after that was awesome, I left and was in ATL for a while, but now I could watch all the Top Gear and House that I wanted, and my batteries did not dies till about 3 hours later, since I was using the original Touchpro(with 2 extra batteries).
If you read my story and want a peace of this App, you can get it at FWPPC.
It wasn’t long ago that the US government had never even sold $100 billion worth of debt in a single week.
Now, in the final week of the year (and a shortened, holiday one at that), the Treasury is set to auction off a record-tying $118 billion.
WSJ: With foreign buyers holding about half of the Treasury market, their continued appetite for government securities is essential in order to continue funding mounting budget shortfalls in the U.S. at historically low interest rates. The auctions will be the last offerings of Treasury debt for 2009, adding to a record net supply of $1.48 trillion for the year. They start Monday with $44 billion in two-year notes, followed by $42 billon in five-year notes Tuesday and $32 billion in seven-year notes Wednesday, all matching the amounts offered a month earlier.
Thinner trading conditions during the winter holiday season pose a risk for such large sales. But many market participants said the selloff of short-term notes last week has made them attractive again. The two-year note’s yield, which moves inversely to its price, traded at 0.96% Thursday. It has risen nearly 0.3 percentage point this month, while the yields on the five- and seven-year notes have increased by more than 0.5 point over the same period. U.S. markets were closed Friday for the Christmas holiday.
More power to the Treasury if it can continue to raise such large sums and relatively low rates. But eventually this debt will have to be rolled over, and if the predictions of Morgan Stanley and other comes true — sharply higher rates in the short term — then watch out!
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The end of the year and the holidays aren’t stopping us from keeping an eye out for smartphone news and continuing to bring you comparative reviews in the Smartphone Round Robin. Be sure to check out the latest updates page to see what’s new, or you can follow via Facebook, Twitter, and of course RSS. This week, you can listen to us discuss the iPhone on The Cell Phone Junkie Podcast, so don’t go missing that either. On to the big news of the week!
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I know many people have an opinion on this so I thought it would be a fun topic for this blog. I know many of you have felt the need to yell at or reprimand someone else’s child, I’ve heard and read comments before.
IMG: Sxc.hu
So how would you feel if someone actually reprimanded or yelled at (with cursing) at your child?
Apparently one person thought they had every right to scold some children that were “unruly” and running up and down the aisle in first class (of an airline). This person just happened to be Ivana Trump and she was aboard Delta Airlines and when some kids were running up and down the aisle (apparently during take off) she chewed them out but she also called them: “Little F*****s” and told everyone else to “F” off when they tried calming her down. They even had to land the plane right after it had went into the air where she was escorted off the plane by police.
Was Ivana in the wrong or did she have a right? I do understand the need to get everyone to sit down during a take off and if this was the situation and the parents weren’t getting their kids to listen I can understand in a stern voice telling them to sit down, however not using the choice words she did. Of course a tip for parents, always listen to the stewardess they tell you the safety rules for a reason.
According to the DailyMail:
‘From the initial contact until Miss Trump left the property, she was saying “f*** you” to all the deputies and called the children “little f******”,’ said a police spokesman.
‘She was so belligerent towards other passengers and crew that the plane returned to the terminal.’
She had apparently started complaining as soon as she boarded the aircraft, demanding to be moved to another seat in first class.
At first she was said to have put on a set of headphones to block out the noise, but a crying baby sent her over the edge.
Well at least that’s a good idea, one of the best ways to ignore noises is to drown them out with headphones. Order a set of headphones and watch whatever is on or listen to some music. If you really can’t get to sleep make sure to ask your doctor for some sleeping pills so you can fall asleep on the plane. Either way, always be prepared for noises, smells, etc when going on any public transportation, this includes airplanes.
Passenger Vincent Cone said: ‘She was swearing at the baby.
‘The reason she got so upset was the children and she started screaming, “I want to go back home”.
‘The pilots asked her to leave and she sat back down and refused to leave. Then they went and got a security guy. She kept saying, “Let go of me!”.
I don’t know about you but to me this sounds like a case of being a spoiled brat and I”m not talking about the kids. The fact she was yelling at a baby drives me nuts. Can you picture being the baby’s mother or even one of the kids she cursed at?
Post from: Blisstree
Fast forward to the year 1963. I was visiting my girfriend, Anita, at her home and meeting her parents for the first time. The meal served that evenng was very good but there was an unpleasant odor of alcohol in my glass. I had never tasted alcohol, my parents never had alcohol in our home. It was white wine in my glass and I wished it was water. I hated the taste and the smell of the wine. After explaining that I did not drink alcohol, Anita’s mother took my wine and brought me water. I hesitated doing that, I did not want to upset that evening in any way. The rest of the evening went very smoothly. I proposed to Anita in the downstairs family room in front of a warm fire her father had bulit in the fireplace. She said YES and we were very happy!!!
I did not taste alcohol again until 1972, while visiting the home of the president of the college, where I was teaching. He brought me a glass with with some vodka in it. There it was again, the dreadful smell of alcohol. I pretended to sip some of the drink. When my host was greeting some other guests I poured the vodka on the ground and asked for some sparkling water. I have never tasted of alcohol since that day.
It was not until earlier this year that I realized that my hatred of the smell of alcoholic beverages stems back to the time I was taking those shots during my childhood. I learned to hate the smell of alcohol then and I hate it just as much now. I don’t mind being with people who drink as long as they are not drunk, but I hate the smell of their drinks. It can actually take my appetite away.
I now realize that I do not drink because of my hating the smell of alcohol. That is probably a good thing. Maybe I should be grateful for the shots I had to take in my early years of diabetes. Who would have thought that experience would lead to my never drinking?
Anita and my younger son do not drink but my older son does have some wine with his dinner. I don’t complain but I try to sit as far as possible from him when we have dinner there.
Get ready for a wild ride on the long end of the curve, as the bond vigilantes go to work making Barack Obama and Tim Geithner pay for the bailout.
Bloomberg: Yields on benchmark 10-year notes will climb about 40 percent to 5.5 percent, the biggest annual increase since 1999, according to David Greenlaw, chief fixed-income economist at Morgan Stanley in New York. The surge will push interest rates on 30-year fixed mortgages to 7.5 percent to 8 percent, almost the highest in a decade, Greenlaw said.
Investors are demanding higher returns on government debt, boosting rates this month by the most since January, on concern President Barack Obama’s attempt to revive economic growth with record spending will keep the deficit at $1 trillion. Rising borrowing costs risk jeopardizing a recovery from a plunge in the residential mortgage market that led to the worst global recession in six decades.
“When you take these kinds of aggressive policy actions to prevent a depression, you have to clean up after yourself,” Greenlaw said in a telephone interview. “Market signals will ultimately spur some policy action but I’m not naive enough to think it will be a very pleasant environment.”
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Faithful readers will note that we regularly discuss RFPs, NOFAs, FOAs, SGAs and other government acronyms denoting that grant funds are available. Jake in particular likes to fulminate about especially dumb RRPs, as he does in Deconstructing the Question: How to Parse a Confused RFP and Adventures in The Broadband Initiatives Program. Despite marinating in a stew of RFPs, Seliger + Associates never responds to RFPs/RFQs (the latter being “Requests for Qualifications”) for grant writing services, and there are two basic reasons for our unabashedly stiff-necked position.
The first reason is the most important: I know from over 15 years of working for various California cities, mostly in management capacities, that RFQs/RFPs for professional services are easily wired, “wired” meaning that one firm is going to get the contract regardless of who submits a response. Now, I am not talking about Sopranos-style wiring in which the public official can expect a visit from Paulie Walnuts if the wiring job isn’t done right. Instead, the public official is usually just more comfortable with a certain consultant or has a personal relationship. A city might also want a local consultant but need bids from qualified out-of-towners to provide cover. So a favored firm is identified before the competition takes place. Many public agencies have a requirement to run a bid process before selecting a consultant, and the public official in change of the RFP/RFQ process structures the document to produce the desired outcome. This is usually done by putting requirements into the document that favor the fair-haired bidder.
For example, we recently received a RFQ from a city. I looked quickly at the document and saw that 25% of the available point total was for “knowledge of the local community,” while 25% was for “grant writing experience.” This is obviously wired for a local grant writer, as we would have received zero points under the local knowledge category. Another favored approach is to require the successful bidder to meet regularly with agency staff in person, making it impossible for a non-local bidder to compete. There are other similar techniques, including having a ringer on the selection committee. We receive up to a dozen RFP/RFQ notices per year. I assume this is because we are such a well-qualified and well-known firm that we would provide exceptional cover for a wired bidding process, if we were dumb enough to respond. Not being stupid or naive, we always send more or less the following response: We will not respond to this RFP, but would be happy to provide a fee quote if your process fails to turn up a qualified consultant. Over the years, exactly one public agency eventually hired us after running a RFP/RFQ process. Years ago, when we first started, we would sometimes submit real bids but never got the job, and about 12 years ago stopped wasting our time by responding.
The second reason is also significant: having been in business for almost 17 years, we simply don’t have to respond to RFPs/RFQs for grant writing services. We think we’re the best grant writing outfit there is. We are like Astronaut Gordon Cooper’s response to a reporter’s question concerning who was the greatest fighter pilot he ever saw: ““You’re looking at him!”* For better or worse, we’re as good as it gets with respect to** grant writing. Responding to RFPs/RFQs wastes our time with no reliable prospect of reward. Like lawyers and escorts, grant writers are all about billable hours. Unlike architects, engineers, accountants and similar personal services consultants, who have tons of competition and must respond to RFPs/RFQs, we provide a unique service with few qualified competitors. Don’t believe me? Try a Google search for grant writers and see what you get.
Despite the above, we’ve worked for hundreds of public agencies, including cities, counties, housing authorities, redevelopment agencies, and state governments. We can do so without responding to RFPs/RFQs because some public agencies have minimum contract amounts before bidding kicks in, which means they don’t have to go through the process. Additionally, all public agency purchasing rules have an exception for what is known in the trade as a “sole source contract.” This is because public agencies occasionally face unexpected emergencies and can’t wait for a bid process or will eventually have a unique need—say, grant writing—for which there are so few qualified bidders that there is no point in running a competition.
As long as the public official is willing to place herself on the line, nothing prevents her from hiring us under a sole source contract. When I was a public official and wanted to hire a favored consultant, I simply explained what I wanted to do to the City Manager and City Attorney, wrote the argument in a City Council staff report, if needed, and signed the contract. This is a lot less work than orchestrating a phony RFP/RFQ process. Since I know the sole source approach is always available, and our services and fees are cleverly hidden in plain sight on our website, I assume that any public official who wants to go through an RFP/RFQ process is probably trying to wire it and, thus, is not worth our time to respond.
* In the terrific film version of The Right Stuff, Dennis Quaid delivers this line as “Who was the best pilot I ever saw? Well, uh, you’re lookin’ at ‘im”, with a boyish charm I could never achieve even when I was a charming boy.
** Free Grant Writing Tip: when responding to disjointed RFPs and searching for phases to connect disparate thoughts, alternate between “With respect to . . .” and “Regarding . . .” See, it was worth reading this post for this transition tip alone.
BEIJING — China announced new regulations to increase the use of renewable energy such as wind and hydropower by forcing electricity-grid operators to prioritize their use, in a bid by the world’s top greenhouse-gas emitter to reduce its reliance on …
According to recently released research from the Pew Center, we’re just as optimistic about the web as we were ten years ago during the Internet’s first boom cycle.
At the end of 2009, most Americans in this Pew survey have a dismal view of the 2000s. Between the Iraq war, the 9/11 attacks, economic and political distress and the curse of reality television, the decade has been voted the worst in our collective memory. But one of few bright spots in a tense ten-year period was and remains technological innovation, including the Internet, cell phones and email. Social sites, however, still have a way to go in the public eye.
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Over a five-day period, the Pew Center interviewed 1,504 American adults and asked them to weigh their feelings about culture and technology over time. The respondents’ answers are enlightening.
While positive feelings outweigh negative ones for almost every cultural epoch from 1960 until 1999, our feelings about the 2000s are predominantly unhappy. Fully 50 percent of respondents have an overall negative impression of the past decade, while only 27 percent said they felt positively about these years.
However, almost across the board, technological advances in basic online and mobile communication tools have been a bright spot in our shared perception of this decade’s progressions and events.
Cell phones, email and the Internet were viewed very favorably among all types of Americans, and online shopping and smartphones evoked positive reactions from a majority of respondents, as well. Blogs and the social web, however, earned a solid “meh” from those surveyed.
It is worth noting that the greater a respondent’s age, the less likely he or she was to view these technological changes positively. For example, 45 percent of folks between the ages of 18 and 49 – a huge demographic – saw social networking websites as having positive effects on our society. But after the 50-years-old mark, that percentage lowered significantly to between 25 and 21 percent.
It’s also interesting to note that the dot-com crash hasn’t effected our late-nineties optimism about where the Internet would take us. Most of us still feel, as we did in 1999, that the Internet is having an overall positive effect on Americans.
Again, these responses were subject to age. Around three-quarters of younger respondents saw the web as a positive change, but only 42 percent of people age 65 and older felt the same way. But these older Americans didn’t seem to think the Internet was necessarily negative, either. Their responses indicated that they were unsure of its impact or thought its influence was negligible. Another correlation in this opinion was between a positive view of the Internet and a college education. A full 82 percent of folks with a college degree said the web is doing good things for America.
For more details, read the full study, and do let us know in the comments what you think of the 2000s and where the Internet will take us in the 2010s.
Alien Breed is a game that some remember with great enthusiasm, while others respond with blank stares when the title is brought up. A hit on the Amiga, the top-down title was a little bit Gauntlet, a little bit Doom, and a little bit Aliens. The update is out now on the Xbox Live Arcade for 800 points ($10), and it’s coming to both the PC and the PlayStation Network in 2010.
Without having played the original—I received a gentle mocking for that shortcoming by Team 17 itself at an early GDC where I was able to play an early version of the game—this is one I’m going to have to judge on its own merits.
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Filed under: Morning Scoop
Each morning, we dish out a few links we love.
So just how much walking does it take to burn off all those candy canes? The answer is here.
What do you do with unwanted Christmas presents? That’s the question that Australians are wondering … Read more
I am out of Lantus as of tonight and it’s way too expensive for me to afford on my own.
What should I do? Call my doctor and get samples to last me maybe?
I’m worried.:(
We know that many of you have small kitchens, and space is at a premium. Any tool that comes into your kitchen has to earn its place. So as we poke and prod, and test and review kitchen tools throughout the year, we’re looking for the ones that will really be worth the money (and the cupboard space). Here are 20 tools we reviewed this past year, with all their pros and cons.
