Here are some inspirational words from an x-gamer. I certainly do not spend as much time with games as I used to. The last console game I bought was for the Sony PS2. These days I’m more likely to pick up bejeweled for my phone than I am to think about buying a new game from EB Games. But that said… I know and understand how life distractions can take you away from your ambitions or goals. I like it when he says;
“Do things that create Value
Not consume time“
I honestly feel very sorry for any Olympic protesters today. Downtown Vancouver is swarming with people and the atmosphere is very electric. Art exhibits line the rained soaked streets and businesses are flying flags and Olympic symbology in blatant disregard of the IOC IP police. People are lined up to zip-line across Robson street to the Art gallery. But the coolest thing downtown is the restored Robson Center outdoor ice rink.
To put it into words I’d describe the atmosphere here today as euphoric patriotism. Right now I’m sitting in the lobby of Hotel Vancouver and its a people watchers paradise. I even just assisted two nice ladies with impaired vision find the washrooms. Clearly lost they asked me “Is this a mall?”.
“No this is the Hotel Vancouver and yes those are shops.” Actually LV, Omega and Guchi give the lobby a cruise ship kind of feel. Speaking of atmosphere, I wonder how long the hovering security guards and under cover secret service will let me sit here.
Well back to the show. P
The University of British Columbia is claiming the title of North America's greenest building for its impressive $37 million Center for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), currently under construction and to be completed in 2011. What makes this building the greenest?
According to UBC, it will be a net energy producer with fuel cells, a solar PV array, solar hot water heaters, ground source heat pumps and a biomass co-generation system on site. The building will collect, store and use rainwater and stormwater, so that it's not only providing its own electricity needs, but all of its water needs as well.
CIRS will be a testing ground for sustainable building technologies and all activity, including energy use and human behavior within the building, will be logged. It will also host simulations and performances to educate the public on sustainability as part of its Group Decision Environment Theatre.
Sounds pretty amazing to me, but we'll have to see how it stacks up when it's completed to know if it's truly the "greenest."
via Ecofriend
In the latest interview by Rob Woodbridge of Untether.tv, we get a look at a new company called Tristan Interactive. Tristan’s CEO Chris McLaren talks about his past and what led to the creation of this startup.
Tristan Interactive is an interesting company that is partnering with museums and galleries to build custom tour environments that go far beyond the typical self-guided tours. These tours are powered by a platform they call Autour. According to Tristan:
Autour is a platform for creating interactive museum guides for mobile devices, including iPhone, iPod, and Blackberry. Autour provides museums a complete technology solution to create, manage, and deploy multimedia content on over 40 types of mobile devices (and growing.) The autour platform offers the most on-device features, the lowest operating costs, and fastest time to market of any interactive multimedia solution – significantly superior to both traditional rental devices and in-house software solutions.In this interview, Rob and Chris talk about the Tristan, the challenges of creating apps for multiple platforms, and the history of carrier billing. Definitely worth watching.
Google’s Street View has gone to many strange places, even off-road. But in preparation for the Winter Olympics it equipped a snowmobile with 360-degree cameras and took it to the top of Whistler, the Canadian ski resort where the Games will take place. There are also views from chair lifts, the village, and other places around the mountain.
The slope-side views can be seen in the map on Google’s new Winter Olympics information page. Google should do this for all major ski mountains. It’s a great way to see if you really want to go up to the top of that double black diamond chair lift.
Here is a video showing how they got the images:
Windows: If you like your software open-source, you'll definitely want to check out UltraDefrag, a snappy open-source Windows disk defragmenter.
UltraDefrag is available as a portable application and in a GUI and ultra lightweight command-line only version—the lightweight version is designated as "micro" in the download list and is at the top of the screen, make sure to scroll down for the GUI version if you want to interact with the program like in the screenshot above.
With UltraDefrag you can defragment your entire disk, defragment based on the file and folder—handy if your disk defragmentation is limited to a handful of frequently edited and altered files—and set it up to defragment during the boot process to access files Windows usually has locked.
UltraDefrag is open-source and available for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows. Have a favorite tool for managing your disks? Let's hear about it in the comments.
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