In other news, I’ve had a bunch of people start following me on twitter the past couple days. This would be cool, but I have no idea who these people are or why they might be interested in following me. They’re probably just hoping that I’ll “re-follow” them, but that’s just not gonna happen. I don’t get people that just follow any and everyone just hoping that some will follow them back. Why are they so obsessed with gaining more followers? I’m only going to follow people that I either a) know personally, or b) have interesting things to say about things I’m interested in. I don’t care who follows me (i’ve got nothing to hide), but if they’re doing it just to get me to follow them back, they might as well look elsewhere. That may not be proper “twitter etiquette,” but that’s just the way I roll.

Plant With Purpose

It’s a question we all ask ourselves when we see people suffering. As human beings, we want to help—but how?

For us, the breakthrough came when we saw first-hand the connection between poverty and the environment. Many people think of poverty and the environment as separate issues, but in fact they are hugely interdependent. Most of the world’s poor are rural poor. Many are subsistence farmers, completely dependent on their environment for survival. But as a result of widespread deforestation, the land isn’t providing like it used to.

Land that once bore bountiful crops that could be sold or eaten, isn’t producing. Streams that used to provide water to drink, now run dry. Out of desperation, the poor cut down more trees to sell as firewood, even though doing so means further destroying their one chance of survival.

By reversing deforestation, Plant With Purpose helps the poor restore productivity to their land to create economic opportunity out of environmental restoration. Since 1984 we have helped more than 100,000 people in some 230 villages lift themselves out of poverty through our holistic approach to sustainable development.

We invite you to join us, and Plant With Purpose.

• I recently installed the Release Candidate of the next version of Microsoft’s operating system, Windows 7. There’s been a lot of positive buzz going around about Windows 7, in vast contrast to all the negative press surrounding Vista’s release a few years ago. I installed the Release Candidate on a separate hard drive to test it out without tampering with my Vista installation, and have been using it almost exclusively for the past couple weeks. Even though it’s not considered “stable” by Microsoft, it seems to me to be quite rock solid. It’s not a huge departure from Vista, but there are some cool new features and it promises to be more stable and not as much of a resource hog as it’s predecessor.
• Once I had Win 7 installed, my first move was to download my favorite browser, Firefox. I figured since I was testing a pre-release OS, I might as well test out a pre-release browser as well, so I grabbed the 3.5 beta 4 version of Firefox. Some of the new features include faster JavaScript rendering, private browsing, and improved tab management and recovery. Other than the occasional crash, the only downside of running the beta is that many of my extensions are not yet compatible.
• Finally, today I upgraded the software that runs this blog to the 2.8 beta 2 version of WordPress. I’ve only had it installed for a few hours, so I can’t really make a judgment about it yet, but I’m excited about some of the new features.