My house is serviced by Waste Management. A company, supposedly, on the forefront of thinking green and working to recycle and minimize pollution. Well, I can tell you guys that you are doing it wrong! I don’t know if this is standard procedure, but I for sure know that other companies, which offer recycling, don’t do it that way.

Here is my problem with them. WM asks its customers to separate recyclables from their garbage into different containers, something that is necessary to make recycling easier. But when they come to pic up my garbage and recyclables, they are both dumped into the same container. To me that does not make any sense. Supposedly they sort out the garbage at their station, but then why would you ask your customers to separate these objects if you are just going to put them back together and then “waste” money to pay someone to separate them again? Other companies have trucks, which have compartments for the different recyclables and waste. Why doesn’t WM have these type of trucks?

I think that combining the recyclables with the garbage, just to separate it again at a later point, ruins much of the potential recyclables, like paper products for example. Many times the garbage bags have juices and liquids in them as well as sharp objects. When they are put together and then compressed inside the truck these bags break and all those liquids flow out soaking into any potential recyclable paper products and thus ruining them.

BTW, WM new has a social network called Greenopolis, which is part of their Think Green educational program.

We live in the suburbs now. Tonight Amanda and I went to the grocery store. As I was parking the car I noticed that there are 3 cart double stalls on each side of each lain. They were placed every 3rd or 4th parking spot. Coming from the city I was baffled to see that many cart stalls, when in the city for a parking lot two to three times that size of the one we were in, there is usually at the most 3 cart stalls.

From what I have observed, there aren’t that many active shoppers, at any time, to justify the need for so many cart stalls. I don’t think that the store even has enough carts to fill those stalls. I guess Amanda was right when suggesting that the ‘burbs’ folk just don’t like to wall far. Plus in the city, the stores spend their money on buying the carts with the range-lockable wheels.

If I was not involved in the online advertising sphere I wouldn’t have probably noticed this, but this morning I visited att.com and Vonage.com. Ever since I can say that about 85% of the banners I have seen on all of the web sites I have visited, so far, are att and Vonage!

Oh noes, I’m being tracked on the web. Lol. I should probably check which company is serving the banners.

I spend massive amount of time on the Internet, partly due to my job. In that time, I have come across a wide array of websites. I have seen a lot of useless sites, but thanks to a recent mass mail email mistake by the insoshi.com project my email became available to a lot of people, and some of them turned out to be spammer. What a surprise there, right? Anyway, one of those assholes sent out this sites - hamtoss.com. Now I know I have seen the most useless site.

You know what? Thinking about it as I write this, this site is not useless. At least not for its creator(s). Its purpose is to collect emails for that spammer. It shows you, the casual surfer, a silly animation. You like, you think it is funny, and you fall in their trap - “wanna know when we toss something new?”. You read this, seemingly harmless, words and you provide your email address. Damn that’s genius.

I think I will use one of my SPAM trap emails to see how this turns out.

I just spend 15 minutes blocking splogs and scraper IPs for jutiagroup.com. It is a pain in the rear. I have to spend time sorting through comments, that are marked as SPAM, to make sure there aren’t any good ones. Almost always they are bad, and 99% of the time they are trackbacks from scraper sites, that steal content and place it on their ads bloated sites. Do they really believe that having a trackback link makes it OK to steal the content?

Ahh, it is so annoying!!! That is the problem when you have a real site that allows commenting. You have to deal with this kind of crap. This doesn’t happen as often on this site, though. But I had one last week on my post about Alerth Thingy, now that douche doesn’t have a Google Adsense account any more. I hate this loozers.

By the way, I ended up blocking freehostia all together from being able to read content on Jutia Group. There were a lot of trackabcks from blogs hosted by them this time around. So more no longer!

Now that’s a cool birthday cake. A cake shaped like a helicopter with a functioning rotor. Sweeet!!!!

You can find the instruction on how to make your own here on Instructables, an awesome do-it-yourself site.

One of the topics in today’s newsletter from Cookthink was soy sauce. I was surprised to learn that one of the ingredients I use when making beef jerky derived from leftovers. More precisely:

When the Chinese were fermenting soybeans for a flavoring paste in the 2nd century BCE, they realized that the liquids left behind were also pretty tasty.

Buddhist monks took the process to Japan, and by the 1600s it developed into the standard recipe of fermented soybeans and wheat we eat today.

ColonelTribune (ColonelTribune) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out ColonelTribune’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/ColonelTribune

I wonder why is the Chicago Tribune linking to so many twitterers! Is the newspaper tracking down locals on Twitter trying to gain back some of its readers, because the newspaper industry is dying and more and more readers/subscribers are lost to the web and up to the minute news reports? Or is it trying to gain new readers by showing that it is a newspaper that is “cool” and runs with the web crowd.

With today’s integration of Twitter into all possible CMSs, someone is spending a lot of time finding Chicagoans, and I think the Chicago Tribune is trying out to save itself from drowning by trying various methods and options. But, just like many others in the next few years it will either go close to 100% digital or die. If and when it goes completely digital it will have some serious competition from already established news sources with a long following by the web crowd.