My Wet Coast Life

My 4th theme has finally been published by iGoogle and i thought i would showcase them here because you'll have a very hard time hunting for them due to iGoogle's newest theme category is done broke and until recently fixed, had the inability to find theme when searching...even by the theme's name

What? Did I just say Google is broken? Well, sort of...
Google provides iGoogle which is a way to customize your own Google homepage with a bunch of gadgets. These can range from news and sports, to quotes and weather. If your a programmer with basic XML knowledge (or you can even use a tool), you can make your own theme. You can even make it so the theme changes based on time of day and/or day of the week.

For the last couple months, the Newest iGoogle themes category has been broken and not showing new themes (but i doubt those theme submitted will be complaining). Then you couldn't search for your theme unless you knew one or two magical words in your description because anything else would yield no results. It could have been the word "is", "the", etc... but use something actually related and buried in pages upon pages of results. The search issue was only recently fixed but the newest category issue still exists.

I find this funny that one of, if not the, world's biggest search engine's own search and services is broken, or at least a service is broken and for so long. The group setup for iGoogle Themes tends to not really get a response and lately just gets more spam than help (You'd think Google with all there power would have developed better spam protection for its users forums and groups. Just saying...) And in the end, if you do get a response, it tends to be you getting pointed to the iGoogle section of the Web Search Help Forum at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search?hl=en where it is more likely to be seen by someone at Google. *sigh*

Are you affected by the iGoogle newest theme category fail?

Luckily, submissions are still working but take about 4-6 weeks to show up. Drawback is, you don't know when it is added (hey Google, why not notify us, you have our email in the XML??) and there are a lot of themes in iGoogle and with the Newest sections broken, no one will even find it unless they were searching and happen to match something in your description.

Well, now that that is out of the way, on to my 4 themes...

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Link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=nasa-one-man-stealth-plane

Every week day, i get into my car at o'dark o'clock for the daily commute to work. Depending on traffic and weather, it can be as quick as 15 minutes or take over 1 hour +. 90% of the commute is highway driving but there are still people that drive well below the speed limit in the fast lane or are to fearful to pass a big rig and in turn hold everyone up.

How do i get around this? Well, i looked into teleporting but the idea of being split up into tiny molecules and essentially "faxed" to your location has drawbacks...if you ever sent a fax, you would know and the movie Timeline has a good example of what could be achieved, but this is a movie magic example and i am not even touching Star Trek...

Now today i came across NASA's new personal flying suit called "Puffin". The Puffin has a cruising speed of 240km/h and the ability to get up to 480km/h and a range of about 80km/h. They have plans to bump that up to 240km range in the next couple years. Well, that suits my commute distance and would make for a much quicker, and more enjoyable commute. Plus, being powered by electric motors, it is also environmentally friendly.

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Link: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2825896/Number-of-kids-injured-playing-computer-games-soars.html

So for a lot of us, when we were kids, it meant long days outside playing with friends, climbing trees, building forts and best of all, interacting in person.

With the digi-age upon us, there are less kids on the real playgrounds and more stuck in front a T.V. with controller playing games until their thumbs hurt, had blisters or they can't stare at the screen any longer...

We are loosing our social interactions to posts, tweets or emotes and i can only wonder how our next generation is going to handle social environments where all they know is hiding behind an avatar chatting with friends a few characters at a time.

A recent article showing the number of kids injured playing computer games is soaring while traditional childhood injuries such as falling out of a tree or hurting yourself biking or skateboarding is dropping.

There has been a 50% drop in youngsters aged 15 and under hurt climbing trees (or falling out). The total was 885 compared to 1,796 seven years ago. As for leisure sports, there has been a 57% drop in injuries for skateboarding, rollerblading, skiing and other skating related accidents.

Now in one way that is good as injuries are reducing, but wait, serious repetitive strain injuries are up 60%! Those strained thumbs are not able to handle the abuse kids these days dish out and i can only assume the lack of outdoor activities increases the chance of injury as they are not exercising or building the correct muscle mass or doing the proper exercises to avoid that strain.

"Doing physically challenging outdoor activities teaches children how to deal with risk - and they learn about their own strengths and weaknesses."

As a parent myself and having a PC, Xbox 360 and Wii, i am at a cross road for this.

Do i ban it completely so he gets more interest in sports and outdoor leisure activities and avoids repetitive stress injuries and live in my basement till he's 30? Not really feasible in this day and age with the onslaught of game advertising everywhere you go.

Currently, i allow my son to play but in moderation but as he gets older, i can see me greatly reducing video game play time and most likely creating a ratio option. For every 3 hours of outdoor time, he gets 30 minutes of console time. This hopefully will reduce him coming home from school and playing games till the sun comes up. Now how many arguments this will generate, only time will tell...

Well, if you've read this far, what do you do to control game time for your kids?

Do you think our next generation of leaders are going to have the social skills required for life?

Are they going to be able to handle challenges without a retry option?

There is no game over, do you want to continue? in life...

Link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/the-incredible-shrinking-condo/article1443864/

Now i am not a fan of apartments after spending most of my life living in a house. Most apartments i did live in were fairly large 1 and 2 bedrooms on average 8-900+ square feet. I just prefer to open my front door and see lawn instead of a hallway, not have to do my laundry in a communal room and wait around so someone doesn't make off with my clothes and be able to go out the back door and enjoy a yard and BBQ.

I got to house sit for my sister in Yaletown area of Vancouver and started to see the shrinking domicile. Her one bedroom (with den) was just over 500 square feet and i felt confined. But it worked for her as she was hardly home and needed a place to eat, sleep and do laundry, other than that, she was out and about. If your a person who likes to chill at home, cabin fever sets in very quickly and if more than one person, doesn't take long to encroach on the others space...

Now why am i talking about that? well, to make affordable housing more affordable, they have come out with an apartment/loft measuring a mere 270 square feet!
That works out to be smaller than 2 parking stalls or about the size of a sailboat living space. Now for those on low income, this can beat the hotel/motel room until you see the price. They want $750/month for this or about $2.77/square foot where my 900+ square feet one bedroom in North Vancouver worked out to $1.12/square foot. and was 3 times the size for only $200 more a month! Now i understand it comes furnished with built-in wall beds, tables and flat-screen TVs but you kind need all the space saving designs available when the space is so small. It is is to be affordable, rent should be around $500/month and the $750/month price should include a separate room at the bare minimum...

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This morning, the people of Haiti got dealt another blow with a 6.1 magnitude earthquake only 9.9KM deep and 60KM (35 miles) WSW of PORT-AU-PRINCE. With this large aftershock, it compounds the efforts of relief workers and creates panic among survivors who less than a week ago survived a 7.0 Magnitude quake. The initial quake was only 10KM below ground, hence why the damage was so severe. They can expect more aftershocks in the coming days and weeks but hopefully the strong ones are over with.

In comparison, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Western Washington in 2001. The quake, whose epicenter lay 11 miles northeast of Olympia and 30 miles deep, was the largest to strike the area in more than 50 years. There was sever damage but no where close to Haiti as this quake was deeper and building construction techniques are a lot better than Haiti, where a lot of houses are made of sheet metal or sub-standard materials

We are now inundated with images and videos coming out of Haiti showing the catastrophic damage and devastation to this poor country. A couple interesting image is a before and after image of the presidential palace, a port and a stadium.

The BBC has created an interactive map to see what has occurred and what is happening in regards to relief efforts.

This area lately has not been good for earthquakes. On January 18th, a 6.0 Magnitude quake rocked Guatemala and parts of El Salvador, and the epicenter was located about 97KM (60 miles) southwest of Guatemala City.

Haiti is in for some tough times ahead as they will still be recovering from this quake (barring no more major ones strike) and come summer time when hurricane season starts, could easily destroy or damage any reconstruction efforts setting them back to square one.

The world is responding to this humanitarian crisis with tonnes upon tonnes of food, water, medical supplies and shelters and thousands of relief workers and military personal. Millions of dollars have been donated to help support this crisis and the rebuilding process.

Google has released a plug in to help mitigate all of the different missing persons databases and can be accessed below and also has created a site with additional information on ways you can donate at http://www.google.com/relief/haitiearthquake/