164 - Inconvenient Truth

Lest y'all think I'm stuck in a rut and have totally forgotten my cartooning career, here's what I drew last Saturday...

The truth is I haven't seen the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth. With mid-year performance review approaching, I thought I'd gripe about the whole performance thing a bit. I hate all non-techincal aspects of my job, including timesheet, metrics, performance self-evaluation, expense report, etc. Just leave me alone to whip up scripts that can changes x accounts in one-hundredth the amount of time it would take a regular bloke to do manually. Likewise, I hate Windows computing, but it's not much of a choice in corporate America. How people put up with Windows I can never understand. My latest woe with XP is that if I ever go into screen lock with Ctrl + Alt + Del, I cannot get out of it until I press the power button, which of course try to shut the computer down. The only thing I can do is then switch to NetIQ DRA, which always asks if it should save the current setting (that's an annoyance in itself) and select Cancel. What craps!

In Inconvenient Truth, the point is that we all must do something about global warming. Too much heat trapped in the Earth's atmosphere causes more ice becoming water, more severe hurricane, etc. We must drive less, support more responsible farming method, buy local to cut down on transportation, and so on.

Being a self-proclaimed environmentalist, I cannot help sharing some of the things I do everyday that I think help the cause championed by Inconvenient Truth:

- Turn off computer monitor when go to lunch or go home. An extra benefit is that when I control the office PCs via VNC when working from home, I don't have to worry about prying eyes.
- Turn off DSL router at night. I share my DSL connection with my brother via wi-fi, but he sleeps early, the latest is 11pm, so when I turn in for the night at midnight or later, no one needs the router to be on. Thankfully, my interest in Bit Torrent was brief, so there's absolutely no need to keep the thing running all night.
- Do origami to cut down on garbage. My latest creation, The Ring, is a big hit with my nieces and some neighborhood girls. Hopefully, the kids will keep the origami for a while, thereby saving some space in our collective trash heap.
- Print at work as little as possible. I sit just across the aisle from a network printer but I rarely print anything. In my line of work, we create many network accounts based on request forms. The form maybe two or three pages long, but the gist of it can be jotted down on a piece of paper. All I usually need the employee number, and maybe the first and last names. Oh, if it's one of those lengthy Indian names, then I'll try to bring the form on one screen and use another screen for input.
- I work in New Jersey where there is no deposit law for soda cans. There are recycling bins in the office, but I doubt anybody actually do anything with them - they either are treated as garbage bins or even if they are not, I suspect the cleaning people go around with only one collection bin. What I do is I would take home all my empty bottles and cans, either one at a time or let them pile up and bring them back to Brooklyn, NY in one trip. When I put those bottles and cans together with my other recyclables for the City of New York to collect, at least I am sure they have a better chance.