Cleanups Update Sept 2010

Well the summer was going along great and both Avening and Glencairn parks seemed to be very easy to maintain this year... Until mid August then the only party this year was held. They cleaned up all the beer bottles and cans(they are worth money) and at least a lot of the garbage. Unfortunately the park was at a level where there was hardly a speck of garbage. Just the bottle caps from way over 100 beer were a pain to pick up. I have really come to hate the labels on beer bottles. Why does everyone tear them off then rip them into little pieces and throw them on the ground. Then the cigarrett butts of course and a bunch of other tiny peices of garbage. Although there only ended up being 5 small bags of garbage each bag is full of hundreds of small pieces of garbage. I am happy to say that Glencairn is almost back into shape... I ran out of garbage bags so there are a few pieces left to cleanup... and of course there will always be tomorrow.

I did a little experiment of my own after the party... I did not clean the park up intentionally. Why? When I go to the park and am cleaning I run into people and many proceed to tell me how they clean the park all the time as well. So I thought I would give them the chance... Plus there is a group from the community that publishes that they maintain the park so I figured surely these people could at least pick up the bigger garbage that was left before I do the rest... Of course I was dreaming, I new that ;) .... After 3.5 weeks I couldn't stand it anymore and cleaned the park a few days ago. Not even the most obvious garbage right on the main path was picked up(pop bottle and McDonald's junk), nothing, nada. Please, when you see someone else cleaning don't tell them how you clean that unless you really do. You might run into someone like me who knows you are lying.

Of course Avening has been a dream. Sometimes I wonder why I bother since there is so little garbage. At Avening I can clearly see the community(at least a few people) realy take pride in making their park a beautiful place. I go to the remote sections if I want to cleanup anything because everything else is a already so clean. No beer bottle caps, not even cigarrette butts. It is quite amazing. Avening should get an award for the way they maintain their park.   

Electric Cars...Are we really ready?

Although I think electric cars are the future I have some major concerns.

1. What happens to dead batteries??? Right now we don't manage this well. What are we going to do with these monster car battery packs? What about the spent lithium? Is there any environmental issues?
2. How much supply of lithium is there? Can it support the current/future demand? To go all electric will require a lot of lithium.
3. We are experiencing electric brown-outs now due to high usage. What happens when we all want to charge our cars? Surely the current infrastructure can't handle the load. A more distributed design MUST be in place to support electric cars.
4. What about the fine metal dust from the generators? The friction wears the pads which creates dust that floats in the air or cakes to machinery.
5. Does the electric noise or battery discharge affect animals/humans?
6. Is there any affect having all that electricity surrounding us? 

You would think with all these concerns I would be saying slow down... but I am NOT! Athough there are issues with electric it is still far superior to the fossil fuel choices. I want to make sure we don't just switch to a different pile of crap. We need to do this for our descendants and it has to come quickly to ensure we actually have descendants.

Park cleanups 2010 update

Well I have been cleaning both Avening and Glencairn parks this year and there is quite a difference between the two. Glencairn requires much more of my time for cleaning. Each week this year the Glencairn park has built up a garbage bag full of crap plus at least one large item(like tires/metal). Avening on the other hand requires picking up 10-20 small peices of garbage each week with no large items. Although Glencairn is a busier park the problem seems to stem from only a very few people. There is at least one person that smokes at least 5-10 cigarrettes per day in the park. At least I pick up that many butts of a specific brand almost daily(plus other butts). Another lets their dogs(multiple large dogs) crap all over the park. Fortunately this year there hasn't been any major dumping going on and there has been a few people actually picking garbage up. Glencairn does not seem to be having any major parties this year(usually there are 5+ already) so the garbage has been dramatically reduced this year.
No matter how I look at it the parks are cleaner and easier to maintain this year than previous. The amount of garbage I see is noticably less than previous years. Especially butts and beer bottle caps. However since the outhouse has been removed from Glencairn some people have used the park as a bathroom and left toilet paper in several places(not nice).
Oh well, there will always be something that could be improved.  

Soccer / Football... why I don't like it

I have been watching the world cup and it reminds me why I don't watch soccer. There are 2 primary reasons...

1. Low scores. Too many games end in ties and the ball basically is bounced around center field most of the game.
2. Wining. Any sport I know if the players faked penalties that obviously they would GET the penalty. The players seem to wine and cry all game long about penalties that should have been called. Suck it up! I have seen hockey players get booed off the ice for trying to fake a penalty.

These 2 issues really make it hard for me to get interested in the sport. I do like to play the game... just don't like watching it.

Wireless Internet Sticks

If you are looking at getting the Rogers RocketStick or Bell/Telus versions of the same thing(Wireless Internet) here is some helpfull stuff I have found...

1. Rogers is by far fastest. I tested Bell and Telus sticks(latest) against Rogers HSPA(7.1mb) from the same computer in the same house using several web based speed testers. Rogers was consistently 10+ times faster then Bell and at least 8 times faster than Telus. Rogers has since gotten even faster with HSPA+(21mb)

2. DON'T GET YOUR STICK FROM ROGERS! If you go to Futureshop right now you can get a free netbook($299) if you sign up with the 2 year plan.

3. Make sure you get the HSPA+ stick even if service is not available in your area yet. It s a better quality stick. Model MF668... I think the old one is MF638.

4.If you don't watch video on the web you probably can get away with 500mb plan. You can always upgrade later without problem but you are penalized if you downgrade. You can get a real idea of your usage in first 2 months when downloads are "free"... Be careful, that is not quite true... They don't tell you that they will charge you if you go over 5gb(so I heard).

I got my HSPA+ stick from Rogers on Sunday only to find the deal at Futureshop on Tuesday. Deal only on for short time so if your interested go now. This might get more convoluted when I take the stick I bought on Sunday back to rogers today. Update you if there are any issues.

Avening Cleanup 2010

After picking up 2 full bags of garbage at Glencarin I went to Avening park on Thursday  to check it out and found it to be very nice and exceptionally well maintained. I could see that at least a few people take care of it already but it looked like a spring cleaning had not been done so I decided to do a cleanup. This park is much larger than Glencairn with a lot more public area. It even has a covered pick nick area.

In a few hours I covered most common areas of the park. What a difference between this and Glencairn park. There was only one tire found throughout the park and NONE in the water. The only "wierd" thing was the truck seat(pic below) but it looked like it was used at one time. Virtually no cigarette butts or beer caps. Most garbage is cans, bottles, plastic, paper and cloth. Not the funky stuff encountered at Glencairn. However, since this is the first time cleaning Avening it is possible I may find funky stuff in future visits.

In total there was approximately 5 bags of garbage, one tire, one plastic bucket, one rust metal piece, and one truck seat. I consider that extremely clean for a first cleaning. Especially considering the size of the park. Glencairn has more garbage than this every month. What a surprising pleasure Avening park was.
 
If you are passing through Avening I recommend you check out this park(just north of bridge on west side). Avening is located on Airport Road 2-3k south of CR#9.    
Below are pics of the park and garbage collected at Avening...

Sign with park name out front

This was all the garbage I picked up. Relatively nothing.

Here is the truck seat found in the woods

Dirt road into the park

Covered pick-nick area and my bike ;)

Park area

River looking north

River looking south

Park area

Nice large tree just starting to bud.

More park

There is much more park here than the pics show.The only way to know is to check it out yourself.

Glencairn spring cleaning 2010

Well I am back from Florida and one of the first things I did was get my motorcycle out and went and cleaned Glencairn park. After keeping it clean last year until I left for Florida(see other "cleanup" posts) it was actually quite easy to clean it up this spring. There were very few large items this year with most stuff smaller than a pop can(lot's of those). As you can see by the pics below there were only a few bags or garbage this spring. However there are now 2 new tires in the river(not in pics) plus another one cleared from the woods. I will have to remove them later in the year when water warms up. There does not appear to be anything else in the water at this time. Not sure why everyone throws tires in the water. It would be much easier on me if they just threw them in the woods. On top of everything you can dispose of tires for free now. Anyway, right now it is hard to find a cigarette butt in the park again... clean again... except the 2 tires  ;)
I am going to look at cleaning Avening and/or EdenVale parks in next few weeks. Anyway here are picks of the garbage and Glencairn park after cleanup. This only took 2-3 hours. You could probably clean your local park in the same amount of time... Give it a try, you might be surprised by how good YOU will feel. Screw every one else... THINK OF YOURSELF ;)