Labour-saving machines save us labour, that’s the point. They transport us from the ground floor to the fifth floor. They take us from A to B. They wash and dry and cook and clean for us.
But these machines use energy which produces CO2. It would help if we could use them less or use them more efficiently.
Take lifts. Or rather don’t. If you work on the 25th floor of a skyscraper, fair enough. But lifts are like vertical taxis - you wouldn’t hail a cab to go 100 feet down the road so why summon one to take you a few floors up?
So use less machine power and more of your own steam power. And if you take the stairs or find a way to resist other labour-saving machines, please come back and click DONE IT so we can count how much CO2 we’ve all saved.
Touching the stairs
Stair-climbers James, Jo and Pete risk their lives by trying to reach the third floor. It’s a story of guts and sacrifice; a story of genuine heroes who don’t know the meaning of the word ‘lift’ - or do they?
Lifts Are Not F.A.B
By Michael Wright To illustrate the considerable dangers of lifts, Michael Wright not only reused some old bits of polyboard and silver spray to make a skyscraper, lift shaft and lift, he reused some old bits of airfix for the props, two old marionettes to be the lift victims and one of those victims to be the evil lift-cord cutter. The result: a tremendous piece of psychological insight about lifts and why you should doubt them big time. Music by the very talented Aaron Paul Low of Sacred noise, produced by the very kind London Partizan.
Christmas has passed but hey you can still come and roast your chestnuts on the red-hot fire that is The Magic Condom - a racy new online Panto starring Jodie Harsh and Paul Kaye that promises to be the filler in your stocking.
Your ticket to The Magic Condom is just one click away, so visit the website and watch the hilarious, sexy and interactive safe sex panto.
December’s green thing is all about buying an old thing, not a new
thing. New things are the fanciest and most specced-up things and
have the almost irresistible appeal of being the latest things. But
manufacturing a new thing uses resources and energy, all of which
creates CO2. So instead of buying a new thing, buy an old thing. Old
things save us CO2 and come with less megapixels, for sure, but do
come with character, romance, mystery and history all included as
standard.
The Green Thing is a new, not for profit community site that’s just launched. The idea is to unite people against climate change by making it easy and enjoyable to be a bit greener, with the help of London’s creative industries. Every month you get a different Green Thing to do – October’s is ‘walk once’ – and all you have to do is do it.
The aim of Green Thing is to create people-powered sustainability – to help as many people as possible in as many countries as possible to do the green thing; then to use this people power to get governments and business to take fast actions to reduce carbon emissions and do the green thing too – thereby helping prevent climate change.
Because entertainment is very inspiring and lectures a bit less so, these monthly Green Things are suggested with great content from a growing community of brilliant writers, musicians, designers, directors and artists; as well as some of London’s best agencies.
So if you feel like doing The Right Green Thing for the enviroment why not check it out at:
When we launched i’m Making A Difference, Facebook made an incredibly generous offer. They put up a $10,000 donation, and asked you - the members - to vote on which of our 10 partner organizations should get it.
Well, the votes are in. The choice has been made. The money will be given.
To find out who won, share your reaction, and see what else is up with the i’m Initiative, visit the group. It’ll be great to hear from you.
And thank you, to both Facebook and our members. You’re making a difference.
Best,
The Windows Live Messenger team.
And well I can reveal that the winner was stopglobalwarming.org - what are your views on this? Would you have preferred to have seen another charity win? Or are you happy that they won and believe there are ways that this money can help stop Global Warming?
An international initiative of bloggers known as “Blog Action Day” launched today, with the aim of uniting thousands of blogging voices, talking about one issue for one day. This year on Blog Action Day, which is slated for Oct. 15, 2007, bloggers will be discussing the environment. Major blogs have signed up to participate, including Lifehacker, Dumb Little Man, Lifehack.org, Get Rich Slowly, Web Worker Daily, GigaOm, The Simple Dollar, Zen Habits, Freelance Switch, LifeClever, Unclutterer, Pronet Advertising, Wise Bread and many more.
“For just one day, we’d like to unite as many of the millions of bloggers around the world and speak about one issue - the environment,” said Collis Ta’eed, an Australian blogger from FreelanceSwitch.com, and a cofounder of Blog Action Day. “We want to display the potential and the power of the blogging community, which is a disparate community but one with an amazing size, breadth and diversity. By bringing everyone together for one day, we can see just how much can be achieved, and how much we can be heard.”
I’m not sure how much blogging I will be doing today at the Live Earth Music Concert at Wembley Stadium in London, but I’ll try and do what I can from my MDA Vario II PDA Mobile Phone. Because of course I’ll be trying to enjoy the concert more than actually trying to blog about it live. If laptops were allowed that would be a diffrent mattter! :)
Darren Straight a Microsoft Student Partner is a University of Kent Student who is an avid blogger and technology enthusiast who loves the passion of beta testing new products and services from Microsoft More About Me Contact Me
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