So, you wanna save the planet do ya? And, while you’re at it save your favourite oceanic creature, the rainforest and then the rest of humanity? Well, first things first. Get the word save out of your Earthy vocabulary. Saving can come after we do one important thing, and that is adapting. Now, before I fill you in on some ways to adapt (which you’ll have in the coming weeks), I wanted to share with you one of the easiest things you can do if you’re needin’ an instant gratification fixin’. So what’s the answer? Donating of course! It has never been easier to help an organization – whether it’s an international one with a big following or a small grass-roots one down the street. When I say donating I’m not saying to give away a big lump of cash per say. There are other ways you can help an organization like, being a representative at an event, donating your skills to aid a specific project, attend monthly meetings and share your ideas or become a member of an organization and help them grow. Don’t get overwhelmed here, set yourself some do-able goals. Donating to an organization that aligns with your personal values just feels good. To give you an example, this year my friends received an adoption of a Canadian animal species from WWF-Canada and a protected woodland plot from Ontario Nature’s Trees in Trust program. Last month, I ditched the act of giving a material, meaningless gift and instead chose to support charities and invest in the future of our planet on behalf of a recipient. The best part was that it was all done online!

Here are some of my personal favourites:
http://www.fsccanada.org/default.htm – Making sure that trees are harvested responsibily
http://www.treesontario.ca/ – Planting 10 million trees a year across Ontario year by 2015
http://www.ontarionature.org/ – Protecting Ontario’s wild species and spaces through conservation, education and public engagement
http://www.350.org/en – Raising awareness and educating the world about climate change
http://www.environmenthamilton.org/ – Providing Hamiltonians skills needed to protect our green spaces
http://www.peta.org/ – Educating the world about the safe, responsible treatment of animals
http://www.niagaraescarpment.org/ – Protecting Ontario’s Niagara Escarpment
http://greenventure.ca/ – Community-based workshops to lead to a sustainable lifestyle
http://rbg.ca/ – Promoting public understanding of the relationship between plants and us
http://wwf.ca/ – Conserving Canada’s wild spaces and Canadian species

If you’re like me, you hate to miss any part of a movie, especially when you’re paying $184 for it (including popcorn and pop) at the theatre. Lucky for us, there’s now this hilarious new site called RunPee.com where they give you the best times during a movie when you have a window of time to…well…run and pee.

They are even kind enough to give you a rundown of the 3 minutes that you will away (it’s scrambled to avoid any spoilers).

A really good site for those who can’t seem to make it through a movie without going to the bathroom. Another example of a simple, silly, hilarious idea that actually has a purpose.

http://runpee.com

A few months ago, I had the unfortunate experience of a hard drive crash in my laptop. It was a fairly new laptop, so I had very little data on it, which was lucky, but, since is was fairly new, I also hadn’t had a chance to back it up.

It took me at least a week to get the thing back to where I wanted it, with all the sortware I wanted, all the tweaks I liked, and any settings that make Windows Vista tolerable to work on in a demanding environment. (that’s a whole different post altogether…).

Anyway, long story short, it was a horrible mess, even with a limited amount of data on it, and at least some data already backed up on a separate drive.

It’s amazing how much people live on their computers now! Family photos, e-mail, resumes, important documents, critical work/business files…you name it.

There are many solutions out there for backing up on both a file level, and a complete computer level.

On an image level, you can back up your entire computer, including operating system, settings, applications, pretty much a snapshot of your computer at the time you take the image! For this, in a Windows envrironment, I use Acronis’ TrueImage, which does a great job. I hear that iBackup is a pretty good solution for Mac users. But I’m not an Apple guy, so take this with a grain of salt. These applications both back up your image to a hard drive or physical location, so it’s still susceptible to physical damage.

If you’re just looking for just a file level backup, you may want to look at an online service. This way, your data is available from anywhere, and if your house burns down, everything is off-site, safe, and secure. Something like www.carbonite.com is about $5 USD per month, and works in the background, backing things up as you change them!

If you are using Twitter for business, or fun, don’t forget to add yourself to we follow, a Twitter user directory.

You get three tags you can associate to your Twitter profile, and it allows people to search for you in a different way.

Chris and Dan having fun with paper and scissors…

Chris Farias – kitestring creative marketing + design
www.kitestring.ca

Okay, here’s a link that I heard about last week. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure, but I figured that since most of kitestring is now on Twitter (@Chris_Farias, @jennhudder, @the18 (Brandon), @creative_error (Alisha), @DanielMercurio, Geekie where are you!?!?!?!) I thought this was at least a topical link: secrettweet.com.

Chris is really going to love this one. People can post totally anonymous tweets to the site, confessing their secrets, and some of them are pretty crazy. You can comment, or reply to them right from your Twitter account if you want, or do it from the site. There are some interesting things in there.