the mind of britney meadows at work

Apr 20 2009

Earth Day

Earth day is coming up this Wednesday!

What will you be doing to show some love to our planet?

One thing I’ve been doing is working on not using so many plastic shopping bags! So whenever I go shopping, I bring along my own tote bags. And not just to the grocery store either!

Here’s a sample of some images I’ve created for CafePress!

More and more plastic shopping bags are piling up in our landfills!!

Consider the following shocking facts about plastic shopping bags:

Plastic bags are made of polyethylene
Polyethylene is a petroleum product
Production contributes to air pollution and energy consumption
Four to five trillion plastic bags are manufactured each year
Americans use over 380 billion polyethylene bags per year
Americans throw away approximately 100 billion polyethylene bags per year
Of those 100 trillion plastic bags, 1% are recycled
It takes 1000 years for polyethylene bags to break down
As polyethylene breaks down, toxic substances leach into the soil and enter the food chain
Approximately 1 billion seabirds and mammals die per year by ingesting plastic bags
Plastic bags are often mistaken as food by marine mammals. 100,000 marine mammals die yearly by eating plastic bags.
These animals suffer a painful death, the plastic wraps around their intestines or they choke to death
Plastic bag choke landfills
Plastic bags are carried by the wind into forests, ponds, rivers, and lakes
There are alternatives to plastic bags. All of this death and pollution is unnecessary

What are your thoughts about plastic bags?

Happy Shopping!

Really Amazing Recycled Art!

http://www.designswan.com/archives/recycled-art.html

Recycled plastic rugs!

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Jan 19 2009

My computer has been broken for 3 weeks. My hard drive had some sort of issue and wouldn’t boot back into windows after I did an update 🙁 so I ordered a 1.5TB hard drive from Newegg (was a SeaGate) which turned out to have a firmware problem. Mine wasn’t the only one, there were many others, it was even on Engadget and whatnot. Anyway, I had to RMA it to SeaGate, paying another $10 for shipping, and it took about a week and a half to finally get another one. Now I’m running Windows 7 (64bit) which is fantastic, however I’ve already managed to BREAK the sidebar gadgets. They just don’t even turn on now, they still exist on my system, they just aren’t working. But it doesn’t matter because when Windows 7 is released, I’ll buy it and reinstall everything. Another thing that broke was my installer. I was trying to patch Call of Duty 4 and I kept getting “1628 failed to complete installation”. The fix is found HERE.

I also ordered 4GB more RAM, bringing my total to 6GB. I’m excited for that. Next on my list of things is to get a digital TV tuner, this way I can avoid having to deal with a stupid converter box.

Another note. I got thte 2.8GHz MacBook Pro (320GB 7200RPM hard drive, 4GB RAM) and I love it… with the exception of the keyboard, which I also love don’t get me wrong, mine was just messed up. The “A” key from the get go was all weird, and the “B” key popped up on me when I was typing. I loved my PowerBook’s keybaord, it was wonderful, except the back lighting was dumb because the keys were silver. My MBP’s back lighting makes more sense because the keys are black. So yesterday I went to the Genius bar at the Costa Mesa Apple Store and they took my baby away and will have it for 7-10 business days. This is because it’s uni-body design makes it so that they will have to replace that whole top part to fix the keyboard… partially because they don’t have the individual keys yet. This is good for me though because now I’ll have a new keyboard. Oh another reason they’ll have it so long is because it was the custom ordered one… yup. Oh well. I’ll miss it while its gone, at least I have Call of Duty 4 and Left4Dead on my desktop to keep me company.

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