Got some new gizmos

Got some new gizmos over the holidays? Don't chuck out the old ones. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can donate pretty much anything that's electronic to the Alameda County Computer Recycling Center. Donate before Jan 1 to claim a deduction on this year's taxes.

And if you have an old cell phone or two (or three) lying around, you can mail them off to Collective Good. Some of the programs that this recycling group partners with, like Working Assets, offer free shipping labels online.

One of the more

One of the more ludicrous Slashdot comments in response to my recent treesit article:

My new plan:
1) Quit school
2) Find a tree that is about to be cut down.
3) Sit in tree
4) Have people deliver me food.
5) Get a laptop and internet access, FREE!

Whether or not you agree with the politics of treesitting, these people are most certainly not up there because they've stumbled upon some great scheme to get free food and Internet access. When I visited Remedy's sit in November, I was wearing a sweater and a jacket and was shivering from the cold anyway. Fortunately, I got to get back in my heated car after a couple hours. Those treesitters don't quite have the same luxury. Given the storms that have hit the California coast this past week, I'm sure no one on their 4x8-foot tarp-covered platform in the Headwaters Forest is thinking to themselves, Free food? I've beat the system!

What's with it getting

What's with it getting dark before 5:00pm these days? Shouldn't daylight savings time be in the winter, when you actually need it?

Rain makes city streets

Rain makes city streets seem more like city streets.

You know it's raining

You know it's raining hard when water is spilling down your chimney.

That's going to leave a mark.

Last month, I drove

Last month, I drove up to Eureka to cover a story about a group of activists who are about to set up the world's first tree-sit weblog. The article is now online. So is the blog.

(And no, I wasn't the one who came up with the headline for that article.)

A couple things that

A couple things that don't yet exist, but that I'd like for Christmas:

SpamAssassin for my telephone.

The ability to include regular expressions in my Google searches.

How is it December

How is it December already?

If you live in

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and you haven't used Transitinfo.org's Trip Planner yet, you're doing things the hard way. The site figures out how to get you from point A to point B using public transit. But rather than simply showing you some annoying time tables, it selects routes based on your criteria -- like when you want to leave your house, or when you want to arrive at the destination. It even lets you choose how far you're willing to walk to the bus station, and then shows you "walking maps" that outline how to get from the station to your destination. Genius.