This year has been busy and exciting and just plain exhausting. But I’ve finally found some time to upload a bunch of the articles that I’ve had published this year for alive and blush magazines. The majority focus on green issues. I’ve been somewhat typecast as the devil’s green advocate, being asked to find flaws in all manner of righteous green concepts. To read one, click on the image.

Baby’s nontoxic nursery: Preparing a healthy space for your newborn. What paints should you choose when decorating baby’s new room? Surrounding your new child with noxious fumes is the last thing you want to do.

Lawn warfare: Pesticide and herbicide use in Canada. I interviewed the PR person from the David Suzuki Foundation as well as a professor of biomolecular chemistry to write this one.

Get in the habit: 10 easy ways to shrink your carbon footprint. This one is self explanatory. But did you know the concept for a carbon footprint was derived from those newfangled desktops in the early 90s that stood upright instead of lying flat?

In it for the money: Green initiatives that are good for our ecology economy. This is one of those slightly cynical pieces. The intro comes from a really funny ad for IBM that you can watch here on Youtube. The art department did an awesome job with this one.

The eco dilemma: Why electric cars won’t save the world. Once again, an alternative look at a green deus ex machina (a term, incidentally, that I had originally used in the intro - but my editor wisely replaced this rather academic term with “save the day”).

Selenium and cancer: Good news and bad. A short piece on the links between cancer and an antioxidant called selenium.

Two very short pieces: Cleaning our lakes - about a government restriction of phosphates, and When TVs die - about the switchover from analog to digital and the potential aftermath of discarded TVs in our landfills. 

I’ve been taking a long break from blogging, but have been swamped with other projects and personal stuff. But I thought I’d take this opportunity for a cool retrospective trip through the interwebs. Now, you may know that Yahoo’s Geocities is closing this October. Well, I’ve managed to save my oldest website from imminent oblivion through the painstaking process of re-coding each html file, capturing all the other files through a Firefox plug-in, and giving it a new home on this server. Ah, Geocities…those horrid, visceral backgrounds, the ghastly html code, the weird wavy headers, the site design that makes Myspace look like a contender for the User Interface award. So, why bother? Well, there is soul in this site, and a rawness that is appealing in strange sort of way.

So, here it is.  There are lots of links that don’t work, but that’s not the point. The point is to preserve this little piece of history so that when Geocities dies, Negotiating Reality lives on. See you when I see you.

I wish I had more time to blog this month, but alas, you can look forward to a paucity of blog posts. Even my tweets are running dry. So, in the meantime, what better way to get your reading fix than to indulge in some licentious drivel. To celebrate 60 years of “pure reading pleasure”, Harlequin is offering 16 free eBooks for download in various formats including PDF, ePub, eReader, and MS Reader.

Even if you’re not into this genre, and admittedly, I’m hardly the target audience either - do you know how lucrative this market actually is? A few years ago, I got a book called “The Art of Romance Writing” as a gag gift, but am now seriously thinking of writing a racy novel and retiring on the inevitable movie deal.

You may as well recycle those newspaper classifieds, because that old school job-finding tool belongs in the 20th century. Spurred on by the recession, a number of tech-savvy people have started blogging on various “new school” ways of getting a job. Tech evangelist Robert Scoble has some crafty tips. I tend to agree with him when he says your blog is your résumé. After all, google my name and this blog is the first search result (and if you are a hiring manager, then please note my correct formatting of the word résumé!).

Local writer and social media consultant Monica Hamburg talks about how to tap into the hidden job market online in her excellent blog post. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Java programmer or a hairdresser - creating an online presence and fostering a network can benefit you. If nothing else, it’s way more fun than cold calling!

The first entry of 2009! Granted, this isn’t the most updated blog in the world, but I’ve managed to keep wordbit going for around two years now, which is not bad. I recently tried to find the oldest blog in the world, and this site claims to have been blogging since 1987. But that’s just their opinion - blogs in their modern incarnation haven’t been around for more than about 10 years.

Well, I’d like to wrap up 2008 on a personal note and let you know what’s been going on in my life - besides from recently getting engaged, which I’m really excited about.

On the work side of things, I recently extended my contract at Vtech by another 6 months. I asked for more money, which they were happy to give me. It’s been a great experience no matter what happens. I’ve been working primarily on a business phone system, but have also helped out with the Internal Product Specification (IPS) for an internet radio, which I quite enjoyed. This product recently made its debut at CES and was reviewed on Engadget. It’s nice to be able to finally talk about this stuff! I have one at my desk and really enjoy it - I can totally recommend this nifty little device. The guys put a lot of love into this one.