Zible

Today is Blog Action Day 2009 and this years' topic is Climate Change.

We all contribute to global warming through our daily activities, so here are 5 ways to reduce your impact:

1. Shower faster – you will use less hot water. Heating water is one of the the most energy intensive activities in your home.
2. Use EcoBalls – stop using washing detergent, start using these hi-tech ecoballs instead! We've used them for 3 months and they work well for us.
3. Turn down your heating 2 degrees – you can save a massive amount of CO2 (and lots of money) by heating your house to a lower temperature.
4. Turn off your computer – or at least, put it into standby. Obvious, but it is easy to fall into bad habits.
5. Switch to Ecotricity – the UK's first 100% renewable energy company. Great customer service and they genuinely care about the environment. All their power comes from wind turbines.

Read my Blog Action Day 2008 post: Help nurture entrepreneurs in poor countries.

I'd like to buy a highly efficient water filter to make healthy, potable, odourless drinking water in my home. The tricky thing is, how do you measure efficiency?

There is a debate going on at MetaEfficient about what constitutes efficiency. The reverse osmosis water filtration process is put forward as a solution even though it consumes electricity and outputs more waste water than it outputs drinkable water. Does that sound efficient to you? Me neither. The meta-efficiency is measured as follows:

"When assessing a product, we consider not only its energy efficiency but also its embodied energy, toxicity, affordability, and usability."

That's sensible, but you can't roll all these things into one score because they are measured by different means. Furthermore, people have different perceptions of what is important. $100 might be a lot of money to me but it could be cheap to you. Environmental impact might be important to you but it might be critical to me.

The solution would be to rate products on separate factors and provide multiple scores, e.g.

• Life Cycle Assessment (LCA): taking all environmental impact into consideration, measured in a unit such as joules. Incredibly hard to do accurately.
• Usability: gauging how well it does the job and how easy it is to use. Scored out of 100.
• Retail price: in £/$/€
• Running cost: in £/$/€

Only when you separate the important aspects of a product and measure each one in an standard unit can you compare products effectively.

It takes a true geek to do such in depth research and comparison for water filtration systems. It will happen eventually – the internet's global reach makes in-depth comparison a viable business proposition. But in the meantime, can anyone point me in the direction of a highly efficient household water filter, regardless of cost?

Just been listening to Robin Grey's latest track: Younger Looking Skin.

And I love it.

It's one of those tracks that gets your foot tapping involuntarily. At 5min 30sec it's longer than most of his previous tracks yet it leaves you wanting more, more, more. No wonder Fensepost says he's "truly one of the greatest hidden treasures in the European underground" and that that he is "at the top of his game".

Join his mailing list to receive dates of his gigs in London and new song releases.

Here's the video of Younger Looking Skin:

I look forward to the day Google Health launches in the UK with the same services it offers US users. Features like "Import medical records" and "Explore health services" are for US users only, but Google Health is still useful for the rest of us.

They've just added a new feature to let you upload scanned paper documents. I think its the sort of system the NHS is gradually adopting. My GP typed notes into her computer during my last visit. It's a giant leap forward from paper, but to benefit fully from digitised patient records, the patient should be able to access and contribute to their records. Nobody cares more about their health than themselves and perhaps their immediate family. Letting people fill in the gaps will lead to better care and greater involvement by the patient. It is also a step towards self-diagnosis, a faster, more accurate and cheaper solution than going to a doctor.

I'm using Google Health to keep track of my daughters' immunisations. I've shared the profile with my wife so that she can contribute too. When our daughter is old enough, she can take over managing her health records and she'll have a full history without gaps.

A top executive has argued that government regulation may be required over the position of search results in Google.

Bad idea.

Government regulation is the absolute last resort. It might start with good intentions and the Government might have a light touch, but it would open the floodgates. Regulation only becomes more onerous and cumbersome over time. It stifles businesses ability to innovate, it slows progress and it takes some of the fun out of business.

In the free market, if Google screws up, we can go to Yahoo or Bing or another search engine. If they all screw up, a new competitor will rise. It is a self regulating system.

I trust an honest company (such as Google) more than any government, sadly.

Extreme close-ups are a piece of cake with Magic Touch. In 3 minutes, I knocked together this impressive zoom:

Click to zoom in.
Please enter your unique code for JS file!

Very handy for showing huge photos without taking up much screen space.

With my parents approaching their seventies, I couldn't help laughing at this…

I was recently diagnosed with AAADD – Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder

This is how it manifests:

I decide to water my flower tubs in the front garden.
As I go to turn on the hose I look over at my car and decide it needs washing.
I go to get the car keys from the porch and then notice the post on the porch table.
I decide to go through the post before I wash the car.
I put my car keys on the table, put the junk mail in the bin under the table, and notice that the bin is full.
So, I decide to put the bills back on the table and take out the rubbish first.
But then I think: “I can run down to the post-box when I take out the rubbish, I may as well pay the bills first.”
I take my cheque book off the table, and see that there is only 1 cheque left.
My other cheque book is in the computer desk, so I go inside the house to my desk where I find the can of Coke I'd been drinking.
I'm going to look for my other cheque book, but first I need to push the Coke aside so that I don't accidentally knock it over.
The Coke is getting warm so I decide to put it in the fridge to keep it cold.
As I head toward the kitchen with the Coke, a vase of flowers on the window ledge catches my eye … they need water.
I put the Coke on the window ledge and discover my reading glasses that I've been searching for all morning.
I decide I better put them back on my computer desk, but first I'm going to water the flowers.
I put the glasses back down on the window ledge, fill a container with water and suddenly spot the TV remote. I must have left it on the kitchen table.
I realize that tonight when I go to watch TV, I'll be looking for the remote, but I won't remember that it's on the kitchen table, so I decide to put it back in the living room where it belongs, but first I'll water the flowers.
I pour some water in the flowers, but some spills on the floor.
So, I set the remote back on the table, get a towel and wipe up the spill.
Then I head down the hall trying to remember what I was planning to do.

At the end of the day:

The flower tubs aren't watered;
The car isn't washed;
The bills aren't paid;
There is a warm can of Coke sitting on the window ledge;
The flowers in the vase don't have enough water;
There is still only 1 cheque in my cheque book;
I can't find the remote;
I can't find my glasses;
I have absolutely NO idea what I did with the car keys.
Then, when I try to work out why nothing got done today, I'm really baffled because I know I was busy all damn day, and I'm really tired.

I realise this is a serious problem and I'll try to get some help for it, but first I'll check my e-mail.

If this isn't you yet, trust me … your day is coming!

It's reassuring that the UK is still producing high calibre politicians. People like Daniel Hannen (MEP). Watch his 3 minute assassination of Gordon Browns' failed economic policies and wasteful expenditure of money we don't have…

Daniel Hannen became Britains' youngest ever MEP in 1999 and even now is only 37 years old. He has authored 7 books, most recently The Plan: Twelve months to renew Britain. If his actions can match his words, he would make a worthy Prime Minister. Read more about what he has to say on his blog.

This October, I'm flying direct from Stansted (Essex) to Kuala Lumpur for £99 one-way inc. tax thanks to Tony Fernandes, the entrepreneurial founder of Air Asia. It's a budget airline with no-frills and it flies from Stansted (a superb airport in a bad location) but for £99, that's an all out bargain. The nearest competitors cost upwards of £250 one-way.

My mate Carl is looking for the best flight price for his trip to Malaysia this summer, so lets point him in the right direction…

The first thing to note is that you must to hunt around. For every one of my last 8 trips to Malaysia, I have booked through a different website. The prices change on an almost daily basis. Sometimes a comparison site has an exclusive offer, other times the airline itself is offering a discount for going direct to them.

I wrote before about how you can get a cheaper flight and see somewhere new with a stopover. Another option for the globetrotter is to fly into Kuala Lumpur (KUL) and out of Singapore (SIN) so that you can check out Singapore for a couple of days.

Now its over to you to start searching…

Airlines:

• Air Asia – flights from £99 one-way if you're lucky – £180 one-way is more likely. Pay extra for food, entertainment, choose your seats. If you are tall, it is worth the small upgrade fee for a seat with extra legroom.
• Malaysia Airlines – direct flights from London Heathrow to Kuala Lumpur starting around £650 return. It's a decent airline but overpriced because of a lack of competition. Maybe that will change now Air Asia is on the scene.
• Emirates – direct flights from Heathrow to Kuala Lumpur starting around £650 return. Great airline but pricey.
• Gulf Air – stopover in Bahrain. Return flights starting from about £500 though they currently have a special offer of £411 if you fly by June 14. Good airline.
• Qatar Airlines – stopover in Doha. Return flights starting from about £540. Good airline.
• Singapore – stopover in Singapore.  Return flights starting from about £650. Excellent airline.

Flight comparison sites:

• LastMinute.com – scans all the major airlines.
• Ebookers – ditto.
• Expedia – customer service is poor but hopefully you won't need to contact them.
• Opodo – often its the most expensive, but twice it's been the cheapest for me.
• Kayak – great search tools and interesting charts of historical flight prices, but has never found the cheapest for me.
• Thomas Cook – they don't just do holidays – you can book flights too.

Post a comment below to let us know how you got on.

The Labour government has today proposed the creation of a state bank so that UK businesses and citizens can go deeper into debt by borrowing directly from the state.

This is an extraordinary idea from a government experimenting with ever more wild and expensive ideas. A state bank with loose lending criteria would only prolong this recession.

It's too late, there is nothing the government can do to stop this recession. It could do things to limit the damage, but so far none of its policies or bail-outs have given confidence to the people (a cut in income tax would have) and our currency has plunged at its fastest rate in history.

If there are two essential requirements of a government, they are to foster a stable economy and avoid war. This government has failed on both counts. Brown became "Mr Boom then Bust" and Blair took us into an illegal war against our will. The UK is crumbling under Labour.

Gordon Brown did nothing to prevent a giant property bubble from inflating since Labour came to power in May 1997. Property prices tripled in the 10 years to September 2007 (Nationwide). The collapse of this bubble is the primary cause of our dire economic predicament.

What goes up must come down. But Labour won't accept that. They want to return to the days when getting a £X00,000 mortgage was as simple as signing on the dotted line. That's why they might create a state bank. But it will do more harm than good. This government wastes money on everything it does, be it IT projects, special advisers or general inefficiency let alone ID card and civilian spying projects that have no place in our civilised nation.

The solution? Laissez faire. The private sector should provide banking services, not the government. The banks lent too much money during the boom and now they are compensating for that by lending more carefully. This is a good thing: it helps existing borrowers concentrate on paying back their debts and requires new borrowers to properly justify why they deserve a loan.

This will be a severe recession. But we are British – we'll deal with it and we don't need government interference.