The title is a deliberate misspelling. An event in the last two weeks has got me thinking about EWaste, and the way it is treated in the US, and likely the entire developed world.

About two weeks ago, #1 son told my wife to “STOP THE CAR!” as they were driving down the road near our house. Thinking he was mad, she did. #1 son leaped out and returned to the car with an HP Pavilion Desktop, in the vain hope that it could replace his current dinosaur computer.

This morning, I completed the configuration process by adding a wireless network card to this machine and they are now up and running with a computer from 2006-07, rather than the one they had been on up until then, which was from 1999 (seriously).

This leaves me to wonder why someone would dispose of a machine that is still perfectly functional. A machine that could have been donated to anyone of a number of causes to help those far less fortunate than we are.

I may complain incessantly about my lack of a MacBook ($|Pro|Air), but in the area of technology, I am well off. I have an excellent pair of servers that host my sites. Have a number of older machines in my basement to serve a variety of purposes, including development. I have my personal laptop and a very powerful work-provided laptop. And my wife has the most powerful machine in the house, to get e-mail and cruise Craigslist.

We are not computer-challenged. Yet, I do not take the disposal of any of this technology lightly. If I do dispose of technology, it goes into the city garbage ONLY on hazardous waste days. If I can, I give the machines to organizations who can use even a very old machine.

The processing of EWaste is a shameful burden that the wealthy of the world impose and throw down to the down-trodden. We pass along the poisons to those who are least able to say no, without a second thought.

To find and reincarnate a computer on the street is the act of a truly geeky family. To have thrown the computer to the curb in the first place is a sign of the shameful ignorance in our society for what is done with EWaste.

Are you being a responsible computer owner, as a person or a corporation?

Tags: corporate citizen, developed country, e-waste, ewaste, personal responsibility, recycle

If you are a long time reader, you know that we have three very large Sugar Maples in the front yard of our house. This allows us to do our very own back to the farm routine every spring: tapping the trees and making Maple Syrup.

It sounds like a romantic exercise, and is often portrayed that way. Well, let’s shatter a few myths this morning, shall we?

First, in order to extract the sap from the trees, you have to know exactly where to drill the hole. Yes, drill into a beautiful old tree; once you get past the general tree-hugger, “trees are our friends” mindset, you realize that this is no worse than you getting a blood sample taken. In fact, all of the tap holes from last year have healed over, or couldn’t even be found.

The objective when choosing a location to tap is to find the trees arteries. I have learned the secret technique: find a spot where there in a large exposed root, and see if it traces up to a large branch. Jackpot. The best kind combine this with a line in the wood that looks exactly like Schwarzenegger’s neck veins after a couple of hours of heavy lifting.

Once the tap is hammered in and the bucket|recycled milk jug is hung from the tree, all you have to do is collect the goodness every 4-8 hours.

Now comes the paint and plaster peeling component of the job.

Maple sap contains 1 gallon of syrup for every 40 gallons of sap. This means that Samantha has been boiling the trees’ gifts to us non-stop for the last 3 days. The house is just now starting to smell like maple, as we keep supplementing our base with more and more sap.

Saving money on the humidifier, let me tell you.

The trick to doing this in a suburban neighbourhood is getting past the disbelief and concern for property values that the neighbours show. They seem to think that this harvest of nature’s bounty is unnatural and should be zoned out of existence or regulated in some way. The best way to overcome resistance is to bribe them with some of the end-product. Every neighbour we bribed in this way has smiled and started drooling when they spot the buckets on our trees.

It is a great experience, and a reminder that there is a very interesting world beyond this plastic box I pound on every day.

Technorati Tags: maple, maple tapping, maple syrup

Tags: app, EAD, gif, HTTP, IE, IM, it, Om, One, PHP, pr, recycle, Technorati

Ok, so it’s not completely new; it’s recycled from our former CTO. And it came with 256MB of RAM. How can a CTO even consider only 256MB of RAM sexy?

Anyway, I ordered 512MB to supplement whatever I find in here, and off I will go.

And if anyone is curious, it is a Dell Inspiron 8500. A step up from the Thinkpad 600X I had been using. And thankfully this is one of the only Dells with a pencil eraser pointer, not just the glide pad. I have NEVER liked glide pads.

Ok, I have spent the last 3 hours tweaking this thing…off to do something resembling work.

Tags: ads, Dell, it, Om, One, recycle