Archive for September, 2008

Current Events

September 30, 2008 at 9:00 am · Filed under Business, Transportation, Vancouver, World

On this, the 500th day exactly before the 2010 Winter Olympic opening ceremony (so says the countdown clock I walk past every morning from the bus to the office), I got a little chuckle from Andy Sanders, a guy who used to work for me from the UK.  A little background on Andy, he proposed to his girlfriend, Kate, when he was living here.  It must have been the mountain air (she worked the gondola at Grouse).  And, one time he dove in front of the truck like a man posessed when it tried to slide down an excessively icy hill on Granville street after a run to a local charity.  Ohhhh Andy.  It is a nice truck, but…. Ahhhhh, I digress.

Anyway, Andy sent me this joke:

“If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago
it would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your  
£1000 would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure
would now be worth less than £5, but if you bought £1000 worth  
of Tennents Lager one year ago, drank it all, then took the    
empty cans to an aluminium re-cycling plant, you would get £214.
                                                             
So based on the above statistics the best current investment    
advice is to drink heavily and re-cycle.”

So there you have it folks.  A lesson on the economy from an English bloke.  They’d never lie to us, would they?

~Thomas

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This is why we do what we do…

September 24, 2008 at 1:14 pm · Filed under Environment, World

Throughout our lives most of us go about our day as we normally would, perhaps refusing to take a plastic bag for the few items we’re purchasing at our grocery store, or remembering to unplug our cell phone charger to minimize our energy use. For the most part, however, we seem to forget that there are several other everyday tasks that could use some improving upon. So today we decided to share some of the stats we’ve come across in our recent research as well as some tips as to what YOU can do to change things.

So, did you know…

…that letting your faucet run for five minutes uses as much energy as leaving a light on for 14 hours?

…or that the average North American resident spends 8 full months of his or her life opening junk mail, junk mail that is wasting millions of trees each year?

…also, that in the United States alone, the energy used for light consumes up to 34 percent of their electricity annually?

…or that 25 BILLION Styrofoam cups are purchased and thrown away in the US alone, which is enough to circle the earth 436 times?!

Mind-blowing numbers right? Well here’s what you can do to minimize your impact without a lot of hassle:

1. Start by turning off your tap while brushing your teeth;

2. Then place a “no junk mail” sign on your mailbox;

3. Next, switch from incandescent light bulbs to compact flourescent light bulbs (also known as CFLs)

4. And finally, never purchase Styrofoam, use paper or glass cups as an alternative.

Does it really make a difference? Read these stats and decide for yourself!

- By turning of the water in the morning and evening while brushing your teeth you could save 8 gallons of water per day, 240 gallons per month!

- If one million people (or all the residents of Calgary) were to stop their junk mail over, 1.5 million trees could be saved!

- Not only do CFLs produce the same amount of light and last up to 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs, they also use 1/3rd of the electricity. If each home in Canada replaced their present bulbs with CLFs, electricity use for lighting could be cut by 50 percent!

- And by using and recycling glass bottles and containers we save 1300 pounds of sand, 433 pounds of ash, 433 pounds of limestone, and 151 pounds of feldspar – over a ton of resources!

We think it makes a huge difference, and with little or no inconvenience to your daily routine it’s easy to do. So lessen your impact, or as Nike says, “just do it” !

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Ad for Washington State Lottery

September 19, 2008 at 3:18 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

As the owner of a company I have to say that ads should be inspiring (you’ll note we have very few). :)

I am a garbage man (albeit an exceptional one), and not an “inspirational ad” type guy. That doesn’t mean I can’t recognize a little creative genius when it comes my way.

I have to say, I saw this ad on television last night, and I had to share it with my intelligent reading public. In all likelihood you’ll see it eventually on the tube, (so much of our Canadian TV is from American feeds), and I think it’s worth sharing.

Ads shouldn’t talk down to their audience. They should inform and entertain, and they should interact with, not treat as lessers. Is it just me or is it annoying as all get out when a ‘knock knock’ joke is explained? Or when the latest McDonald’s ad spends the bulk of their alloted time saying things like, “We’re real ‘yolksters’” and then they explain the punchline. Damn. I tell you what, it turns me off Big Macs for a while.

Anyhow, I digress.

I think we’re all savvy enough to know that buying lottery tickets doesn’t really (in any kind of honest way) increase the odds of winning (about 1 in 14,000,000 for all you actuaries in the crowd). As stated on CBC’s website we have better odds of being killed by a terrorist while travelling (1 in 650,000) , to die – during an average lifespan – of flesh eating disease (1 in 1 million) or being killed by lightening (1 in 56,439). All those events I have to say are pretty unlikely. I still get on planes, I don’t really golf in thunderstorms, but I’m not afraid of them. And flesh eating disease? Well what do you say about flesh eating disease beyond, WOW, that must suck. I intend to buy a lottery ticket today though, why? 8 million bucks is a decent amount of cake, and I like dreaming. Who doesn’t?

And birds might too. Heck, in the realm of winning the jackpot quite literally anything is possible!

I’m comfortable with being a bit self deprecating, and I’m not the most insightful guy, but I think this Ad is brilliant for showing us what the lottery is for. Dreams.

What do you all think? Did you like the ad as I did? Should birds capable of flight be forced to swim around in really cold water like penguins? Or maybe we should make Penguins run really fast like the Emu? Oooooo so many options.

(I endeavoured to find a decent site on the Pot Odds of winning (a stats teaching in college told me that no matter what you won’t win, but if you’re going to play, play when it’s 14 million or more) but it was excessively matt laden. Here’s the link anyway)

I’m not as fancy as Kara or any of the other people that write on this blog, so I’m not going to include the actual video (even though I know it’s possible); I will include the link to the Washington Lottery ad and hope you check it out.

Here it is

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