| A Warning about Perf Go Green |
[Nov. 27th, 2009|05:34 pm] |
I fell for claims made on packaging earlier this week. I was at a Walgreens and decided while I was there to pick up garbage bags. They sell a brand called Perf Go Green which, aside from being made from recycled plastic, claims to be biodegradable. I was a bit skeptical about the claims on the box that "our plastics totally degrade in 2 years" and "1 product leaves 0 harmful toxins behind" until I noticed on the top of the package "ASTM D6954 Compliant." I was assuaged and bought a box. My curiosity piqued after I already used a bag, and I have since found that ASTM D6954 is not a standardized specification, but a standardized guide for testing biodegradation. I am not the only person who has been confused by this. This excerpt is from a letter by the executive director of the Biodegradable Products Institute which I found on Greener Package:
As stated previously the goal of ASTM D6954 was to provide suppliers a method for generating and PRESENTING data from which the scientific community and customers could draw their own conclusion.
What is disappointing is that so little data has been reported since ASTM D6954 was created. For example, no data has ever been shown to support claims like:
• “With Perf Go Green, In 2 years, 1 bag leaves nothing harmful behind, Nothing”
• “Reverte™ - which when added to the PET plastic resins at the manufacturing stage of bottles, will cause the finished PET bottle to oxo-biodegrade after a specifically programmed shelf life – in landfills/streams/rivers etc.” (Planet Green Bottle)
Additives to traditional resins to promote biodegradation may well have value in specific applications and disposal pathways. Until the community of additive suppliers correctly uses documents, such as ASTM D6954, to generate and publicly report data, their far reaching and unsupported claims of “biodegradability” will continue to be met with skepticism.
Regards
Steven Mojo
BPI Executive Director
Remember, those who come after me, that the proof is not in the packaging, recycled cardboard though it may be. Someone is counting on your ignorance to sell their product. |
|
|
| Why I will never travel by airplane |
[Oct. 19th, 2009|04:20 pm] |
Mouse-over text: A laptop battery contains roughly the stored energy of a hand grenade, and if shorted it ... hey! You can't arrest me if I prove your rules inconsistent! |
|
|
| Why I can't stop looking at things on the Internet |
[Sep. 28th, 2009|09:11 pm] |
And people wonder why I never get anything done. Live, from Twitter, it's Amanda Palmer's dowry.
amandapalmer: @AbahJake i will only marry @neilhimself when he can provide me with an adequate number of nigerian dwarf goats. (that's a lot of goats.)
neilhimself: @amandapalmer Pick your favourites from http://bit.ly/28FYfa & let me know how many you'd like. (Or do I have to give then to your dad?)
bethofalltrades: i leave the computer for long enough to get a cookie and find that @amandapalmer is bartering away her hand in marriage for goats.
bethofalltrades: what will happen when i leave to go run errands?! listen, people, this assistant does NOT tend to goats.
neilhimself: @bethofalltrades my assistant used to say the same about bees. And now she loves them. Perhaps the goats will be the best bit of your job.
bethofalltrades: @neilhimself i might be talked into caring for BABIES but never goats.
amandapalmer: @neilhimself you can have me for 30,000 nigerian goat dwarfs. talk to my dad about how you will fit them in his backyard in DC.
neilhimself: @amandapalmer He'd need 1500 acres to put the 30,000 goats on. I foresee problems but will start buying goats and sending 'em to him anyway.
amandapalmer: @neilhimself if you start sending goats to my father he will probably be upset. |
|
|
| SotM: a little something from darkNES |
[Sep. 21st, 2009|02:34 am] |
One of these days I'll have to make it to a Gothsicles (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) darknes and eevilyounggirl) show.
All eight bits of me are solidly committed to side-scrolling
And no enemies can vanquish me or the power I'm controlling
But I suddenly scream "Shit!" because my guy has just been hit
with my hit points indicator less than full
But it's quite inconsequential and my wrath will be torrential
For the following one second I am invincible!
( hidden ) |
|
|
| WWDnDGD 2009: Definitly not what I expected, and yet... pleasant. |
[Sep. 20th, 2009|01:35 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | d&d | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  contemplative | ] |
| [ | music |
| | eels - Fresh Blood | ] |
So, I went to a Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day event, today. Part of me wishes that I had chosen a different location to attend, but part of me also wishes that I hadn't overslept, forgotten to get gasoline last night or gotten lost on the way in the first place.
Anyway, this year it fell on September 19th, which is also Talk Like a Pirate Day, so the adventure involved pirates. Or at least, I think it did... see, the group I played with didn't even play 4th edition. The DM didn't even use the maps or the miniatures she was given. She also didn't have any premade characters. There wasn't anything directly connected to the release of Dungeon Master's Guide 2 in use.
Oh, and I was the only adult in the whole room; everyone else was like 10 years younger than me, so yeah... I walked in on an event that was basically set up in only the most tangential way with Wizards of the Coast. It was pretty much an excuse for them to play D&D today and I was expecting something a bit more professional than that.
But I was using the day as an excuse to do the same thing. While I doubt most people at the table knew what they were doing, they seemed to have fun, and that's really the most important thing at the end of the day. I just wish that I had fun, too. Fun for me is a better return on my time than what I experienced: spending an hour making a druid who would only cast one spell and had his animal companion attack once. I got to see just how little you can do in 3.5 as a low level spellcasting character. That and the rules-lawyer in me was really irked, 'cause no matter what edition of D&D you play, second-level characters don't roll in the 30s.
Happy place... happy place... OK.
Those complaints out of the way, time to focus on the positives. For one the DM went for rewards over challenges and the players got quite excited over them. They had been given a treasure map, after all, so even if the danger might not have been a match for the rewards, the rewards were still enjoyed by the players. Either she knew her audience, or her desires for the game matched everyone else's very well.
I will also say that I like how she got so much mileage out of turning the party's own perceptions against itself. I came in to them making battle plans as their ship was surrounded by the tentacles of a kraken-like creature. It turned out to be a corpse. The pirate cove's entrance was guarded by velociraptors, but only two of them ever came onto the rowboats. The traps inside had all been triggered before we ever got there, but the rogues still feared them. I kinda caught on and didn't really do anything to disturb that mechanic. It wasn't exactly as spooky of an atmosphere as I would have hoped for in a long-deserted pirate hideout, but it wasn't too bad. It probably helped that these high schoolers seemed to all be in band/choir/theater and did tend to be a bit more inventive than I expected.
So, while I was stuck with taking a backseat to most of what was going on in the game, I did get to see what another generation of D&D players was like. Different than I was expecting in a few ways. The gender ratio was 40/60, which means that yes, there were girls there. I've met plenty of girl gamers, but only one of those meetings was during tabletop roleplaying. I got the impression that there were mostly juniors there, but some might have been freshmen and they were easily accepted. My high school days involved few interactions with upper-classmen. Plus, no one I played with in high school ever used props, while three people had pirate hats and one was in full costume and had a foam sword.
Oh, and not only did someone say they read xkcd, but someone other than myself stated, "I attack the darkness." Just the day before I was thinking that it would never work on a drink label, but I think that's evidence in support of it. I almost wanted to nod in approval and smile knowingly, but in the end I thought that might seem too creepy. Still, I offered some small bits of advice which I hope were helpful, even if they don't have statue-built-in-my-honor implications. I hope that they continue to enjoy the game. |
|
|
| Norton Internet Security 2010 beta |
[Sep. 10th, 2009|03:30 pm] |
OK, so the beta is over, and my 14 day subscription (first of two allotted) happened to coincide with ending about 10 minutes ago. I was able to very quickly renew the beta subscription, but not before Norton Internet Security shut the fuck down. The anti-spam (even though I never turned it on) the anti-virus scanner, but most importantly the firewall all turned off. Now, these aren't the days of Windows 98, so it probably turned the Windows XP firewall back on, but that doesn't leave me with a good feeling. I told my family to invest in a security suite so that they would get all the protection that year-long subscription entails - not so that all those anti-malware defintions can be revoked if my schedule doesn't coincide with the day their subscriptions end! The product is admittedly simpler to install, but I have a grandfather who would not know how to best configure it without my help.
You were doing so well, Symantec. Things still run very noticeably slower on my business-class test machine (suited mostly to word processing and Flash video), but the trade-off is surely lessened on anything made after 2007. I didn't like the fact that it ran an idle scan 10 minutes into the full-system scan I explicitly started, but I figure that might be improved in the final version (we'll see). But deactivating the suite when the subscription expires? That's cold. I've heard horror stories about people not being able to change settings after a Symantec product's subscription ends, effectively locking their firewall in whatever configuration it had... but is removing the firewall entirely a solution?
September 14th addendum: Well, the suite shut down on me tonight, ahead of schedule. I confirmed that it did turn the Windows XP firewall back on and that I cannot:
A.) Run manual scans
B.) Run idle scans
C.) Change any settings whatever
D.) Retrieve passwords stored in the Identity Safe
We'll see if uninstallation allows the retrieval of those encrypted passwords. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Aug. 29th, 2009|10:52 am] |
|
With the one year anniversary of the death of a friend's father approaching, I'm going to attend to a fundraising event. I believe it is for Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, but I know for certain it will be bowling. My friend's father lived for less than a year after diagnosis. |
|
|
| Help wanted |
[Aug. 23rd, 2009|01:47 am] |
| [ | music |
| | The Crüxshadows - Regrets | ] |
Wanted: someone to prevent me from staring at pictures from WGW and similar events. They make me want to spend all my dollars on vests or coats or glasses/goggles.
 |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Aug. 21st, 2009|12:35 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Lemon Demon - Smell Like a Cookie All Day | ] |
So, I saw RiffTrax Live tonight. Veronica Belmont hosted, Jonathan Coultan played two songs, including "RE: Your Brains," and Something Awful made two shorts for the show: one of which was about a grain trade show and the other was "Berry Watch." The short that RiffTrax did was "Flying Stewardess" and was better than I thought it would be. But "Plan 9 from Outer Space" was as bad as I remember and Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett were funnier than I hoped. The feed had three small interruptions, but they were all during the short. Everything else went well. It was quite enjoyable.
And yes, Tor Johnson looked exactly like a fan coming out of Transformers 2.
Now, to prepare some more for my first attempt as a Dungeon Master tomorrow. What's that, Penny Arcade? You have a story to tell me what may happen if I do it wrong? Isn't it great that if I don't read and write enough to prepare, someone might remove my ability to do both? *nervous laughter here*
Oooh, the softcover handbound copies of Hob are getting closer to shipping. Perhaps to me? Yay! Now if only I could afford one of those Charlie Darwin t-shirts. |
|
|
| Death came for him in 1979. With nasty, big pointy teeth. |
[Aug. 11th, 2009|10:18 pm] |
Internet service outages lead to strange thoughts. If I had the skill to do it, there would be a "motivational poster" of Jimmy Carter being attacked by the killer rabbit of Caerbannog. Also felt a need to express that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a poseur compared to Nelson Mandela. Since I can't assault your eyes with that, your language centers will have to do. I also tried to play Guitar Hero 3 left-handed yesterday, but I'm a perfectionist-procrastinator.
I attempted to install Ubuntu on my main PC because I'm a terrible person who needs to stop using WinXP as a crutch. Once I got to what I assume was a login screen due to the blinking cursor, however, there was a flashing orange/brown and bright, light blue screen. It is even uglier than it sounds. So, maybe the Windows 7 beta video drivers weren't as bad as I thought they were. Perhaps my video card is dying, but back then it was shutting down instead of giving gross graphical errors. This would be the second one I have outlived, if true. |
|
|
| Surprisingly, a public entry with my thoughts. |
[Aug. 6th, 2009|03:15 am] |
I commissioned an illustrator, today. I got to watch her work using UStream and provided feedback during the process. Video compression artifacts would be the con to this method of doing things, but this was quick work and intentionally not the best quality possible. I'm happy with the end result, but it did get me thinking about the ramifications and possibilities of using screencasting in this way. That and artist compensation.
I will be visiting my grandfather this weekend, whose ailing knee may not actually require a replacement (as first feared), but rather his ACL is the problem. I think my longer-than-usual hair may not be well received. I am contemplating whether or not I can actually donate to Locks of Love. It may be detrimental to job hunting, which I desperately need to do. I don't even know if I can reach a 10-inch ponytail at all, let alone in less than two years. Sometimes I think that living in this house (which has more mirrors than people, none by my doing) has made me vain. Then I remember that it is the tactile portion which I miss when my hair is short. Is anyone willing to hire a wind-blown madman with little experience? |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 31st, 2009|04:53 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Local H - Fritz's Corner | ] |
It seems I wasted July.
Dragon Boxes will be produced in the USA.
I went searching for the meaning of "First We Take Manhattan" again, and found comments to the effect that it was about the World Trade Center crashes. ...it was written in 1986. "I reject your reality and replace it with my own," much? |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|01:05 pm] |
So, I finally got around to checking out a closer-to-intact version of Palin's resignation speech.
Do you hear those noises at 1:30, 2:34, 3:39, 4:40 and 5:50? I think the waterfowl are hecklers with expert timing. Especially during that basketball analogy that she gave; maybe she should have decided whether or not the rest of the country is a threat or an ally, before giving that? Although, if it had been me, I would have added some vocalizations during that MacArthur quote.
I would say that her charges of defamation are going to go down like a lead balloon, but I just watched the episode of Mythbusters last night where they built a lead balloon. |
|
|
| Easily amused, huh? |
[Jun. 30th, 2009|03:14 pm] |
Why We're Here - A Chick Tract written by H.P. Lovecraft
Modern roleplayers try (and fail) to recreate a fantasy epic: The DM of the Rings.
"Well don't look at me. You're the lunatics that wanted to go through this RP designed for historians or linguists or whatever. I just wanted to play MechWarrior!"
"Wow, looks like Elrond Hubbard is going to be talking for a while."
"Looking for non-magical places in an adventure game is like looking for a spot to build a house with a yard in Manhattan."
"I'm not sure what the challenge rating is on an infinite number of orcs... but I'm betting it's more than you're supposed to give to a single low-level fighter."
"Laying aside the long dull tale of why you aren't dead, how you beat a balrog, where you got all of this new gear, or how you got here before we did... Could you please explain why you are hanging about in the woods instead of chucking a fireball at Saruman!?!" |
|
|
| From the June 15, 2009 issue of Newsweek |
[Jun. 28th, 2009|04:40 pm] |
Why I Took This Crummy Job - by Stephen Colbert, Guest Editor
No, your eyes aren't deceiving you. You're reading Stephen Colbert. And for that I apologize. The last thing I want is to contribute to the corrosive influence of the print media. I prefer to yell my opinions at you in person.
( continued ) |
|
|
| Trains |
[Jun. 16th, 2009|03:13 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | nostalgic | ] |
Taken from the June 13th broadcast of Vinyl Cafe.
Everyone assumes that the highlight of riding this train across Canada is the scenery. When you tell them you've been on the Canadian, they want you to tell them about the mountains. That ride from Jasper down the Yellowhead Pass and down the Fraser River Canyon. What they never ask you about are the people you ride with. Here's what happens.
You arrive at the station and you look around at everyone in the waiting room as you wait to climb onboard. And you think to yourself, "Glad I bought that book. There's no one getting on this train who I am remotely interested in talking to. I'm sticking to myself." And then by the time you get off, you're trading phone numbers and addresses with all your new best friends.
During this trip I have met and spoken to, and I put forward made friends with, the following. A mother from Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia who is teaching her daughters about the country by spending five weeks traveling across it by train. An ex-cabinet minister, the Attorney General actually, from a provincial government. The president and founder of one of Canada's biggest construction companies. A lawyer who is deaf and specializes in legal work for deaf people. And a Crown Attorney who works in cases that concern DNA evidence.
Meal times are the crucial times. It's dusk. The sun's settling: behind the mountains one night, the prairie another. ... And stranger #1 leans forward, smiles over the silverware and says, "I want to tell you a story." Of course, they don't say those exact words, but they might as well. Night after night I heard the most heart-felt stories. About a son killed by a drunk driver. About a marriage that has endured for decades. About a woman and her blind husband; he walks behind her through the swaying cars, his hands on her shoulders. Before this trip they cycled thousands of miles around America on a tandem bike.
There's just something about a train, something about being in motion, about being in that strange land which is neither here nor there, that allows us to open our hearts to one another. We have left, but we haven't arrived. And as the days go by, we lurch between the cars smiling and nodding at one another, slowly sharing more of ourselves than we typically might at a coffee shop or a water cooler. Our feet aren't on the ground, we are off-balance. Yet, the further we go the more grounded we feel. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
