Smart Energy

I suppose, like me, you’re one of the 7 billion minus 1.3 million who have so far managed to miss this.

DSIRE is a handy-dandy site for answering the question “how do I go green?” when you want help making your home or office more energy efficient.

DSIRE is a comprehensive source of information on state, local, utility, and federal incentives and policies that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. Established in 1995 and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, DSIRE is an ongoing project of the N.C. Solar Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.

Incredibly, Microsoft and Disney ranked very high in trust, according to the Boston College-Reputation Institute 2009 CSR Index. Disney ranked #1 in the index. Others in the top 10 were Google, Honda of America, Johnson & Johnson, PepsiCo., General Mills, Kraft Foods, Campbell Soup Company and FedEx. (This comes to me via Environmental Leader.)

That blows me away, because Disney is a purveyor of crap and a copyright monger. If it weren’t for Disney keeping the wraps on Mickey Mouse, we’d have sane copyright laws in this country — and likely in the rest of the world, too, which, as with drug laws, has been pressured by the U.S. to be ever more restrictive.

But that Microsoft scores so high is just insane. I mean, this is the demon tribe that makes our lives miserable with Office! Not to mention the insanely bad SharePoint (bad for business, bad for Web content management; oh, well, it just sux!). People, wake up! Here’s what Microsoft is really like, via Slashdot (and an update here from ComputerWorld):

“Windows Presentation Foundation” plugin that Microsoft slipped into Firefox last February apparently left the popular browser open to attack. This was among the many things recently addressed in the massive Tuesday patch. “What was particularly galling to users was that once installed, the .NET add-on was virtually impossible to remove from Firefox. The usual ‘Disable’ and ‘Uninstall’ buttons in Firefox’s add-on list were grayed out on all versions of Windows except Windows 7, leaving most users no alternative other than to root through the Windows registry, a potentially dangerous chore, since a misstep could cripple the PC. Several sites posted complicated directions on how to scrub the .NET add-on from Firefox, including Annoyances.org.”

From Inhabitat:

The final results just rolled in from this year’s Solar Decathlon, and team Germany’s sleek surPLUShome finished first in an incredible upset victory! The German team took top honors in the Net Metering and Engineering categories this morning, steamrolling the competition to secure their second Decathlon win. This year’s home features a sleek, dark facade that is almost completely covered in photovoltaic panels and can provide more than twice the amount of energy it needs.

We wrote about the Solar Decathalon here, too.

Greenwashing is a big problem for people trying to make informed decisions about, well, almost everything these days. We’re especially concerned about it because the sustainable building trade is starting to bubble up — meaning scammers, already visible — will become more common. We’ll keep you posted on what we see going on in sustainable building as time goes on, but for now, here’s a list of the world’s ten biggest greenwashers, via WebEcoist and Sustainable Dwelling. No real surprises here:

• BP
• American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity
• GM
• Exxon Mobil
• Monsanto
• Malaysian Palm Oil Council
• American Electric Power
• Dow Chemical
• Fur Council of Canada
• Fiji Water

Diego Stocco took grafted bits of a violin, a viola and a cello to a double bass and came up with an awesome mutant monster.

I came up with a quadruple-neck experimental “something” that I thought to call Experibass. To play it I used cello and double bass bows, a little device I built with fishing line and hose clamps, a paintbrush, a fork, spoons, a kick drum pedal and a drum stick. I hope you’ll like it!

Diego Stocco – Experibass from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

You’ve no doubt heard about “social media” and perhaps about how frivolous it seemingly is, what with Facebook and Twitter and internet addiction and all.

But all along there have been serious uses for social media, as the top blogs and wikis prove. And with the “track changes”-like annotation tools in YouTube and SoundWave, videographers and musicians can get feedback on drafts of their projects in ways that were, up to now, impossible.

I’m predicting social media is about to get truly serious, truly useful, and enabling of collaboration in as yet undiscovered ways. That’s because Google is about to enter the fray.

They’ve got what I think will be a killer social media ap, called Wave. On the surface, it’s just another way of doing email. But it isn’t email at all, at least not in the one-to-one or one-to-many way we think of it now. A Wave allows contributors to add new and edit existing content in real time. A Wave can be private and one to one, it can be private within a group, or a Wave can be posted to a blog and opened to the public.

Wave is in beta right now and probably won’t see a public release for at least a few months. But for some initial thoughts on how it might be used in research, check out this article about using Wave to, first, collaborate on a paper and, two, its use as a laboratory recording tool.

I’ve just learned that writer Ray Federman passed away. I spent a delightful quarter studying literature and creative writing with Ray in the mid-1980s at UC San Diego. My friend Shawn Rider, who studied with Ray at the University of Idaho in the early years of this century, created a code poem tribute to the beloved novelist.

Ray Federman

There’s a great post by doron on WFMU’s Beware of the Blog about the just ended Future of Music Policy Summit ’09 Wrap-up. With the RIAA insisting on a dinosauric profit model that requires servicers (e.g., sites that sell or let you stream music) to license music from “owners” (the four major record labels), the question arises: is it possible to sustain a business based on legally licensed music?

It really looks doubtful because the major labels, addicted to the legal services provided by the RIAA, continue to behave like parasites instead of partners. As doron writes:

All the comments I heard throughout the conference about the difficulties of building a sustainable business model around legal music licensing seem to suggest that the recording industry has perhaps not made as much progress in the last five years as they like to think. One need only look at ASCAP and BMI’s decision to go after Apple for royalties on 30 second clips of music that are meant to entice people to buy full tracks that the idea of a symbiotic relationship between the music industry and those that try to deliver their content to consumers may never come to pass.

I am rooting for Spotify, first and foremost, because they have a really great product but also because if they can’t make a go of it, even with the major labels on board, then it’s safe to say that nobody can. The road is littered with companies that have tried and failed.

Here at Smart Energy Advisor we haven’t made a big deal out of it, but Karen is an alumni of the national Sustainable Building Advisor program. As her blushing groom to be, I like to brag about that from time to time and the NSBA program folks just handed me the opportunity, as their marketing folks have done a handy job building a portfolio of success stories to share with those of you eying the program with willful intent. They’ve got a long article with success stories on the NSBA site but, being a videographer myself, I’ll go for the visual embed: