So here I sit. I’m hiking through the bowels of Ontario trying to find a lookout over pen lake. Nothing says nature like walking through the forest, Rihanna and TI blaring live your life for inspiration on the iphone and having the ability to check my email and blog about the hike at the same time.

I find in nature my sense of hearing is sharpened and I hear all nature sounds. Or maybe I’ve been in the city for too long.

Alas, the lookout. Now to take some pics.

Animal count: 1 deer, 1 chipmunk and a lot of deer poo.

And here we go, some pictures from my new camera. Playing around with the settings and trying to figure this thing out!

When we first got into Barcelona this past trip, we noticed a bunch of people on funny looking red bikes. Instantly I was curious to know what sort of system it was, was it free? where did you get the bikes from? how do they keep track?

Well after walking around the city for the next couple of days I got all the goods on this great program. It is through a company called Bicing. There are over 100 stations across the city with rows of bikes that sort of hang off a metal bar. These stations could be down a side street, by schools, or metro stations. Everytime I saw a station I thought how conveniently located it was.

To get a membership with Bicing you need to provide them a credit card and sign up. Once signed up you get a Bicing card. There is a post at the end of the rack of bikes where you scan your card and it simply tells you what bike you are to check out. We watched some user check out a bike, so we saw how this worked first hand.

The bike sits on the rack on two little knobs that are under the basket in front of the handlebars. Once you have checked out a bike, a light goes green and the rider pulls out the bike. Probably about a 30 second process.

Returning the bike looked pretty easy too, you simply ride up to a Bicing station and drop in the two knobs where there is an empty space and the light turns red. Done.

The cost for a yearly membership is 24 euro. When you check out a bike you are charged 0.30 euro per half hour up to 2 hours. After 2 hours it is 3 euro per hour. I guess this system is in place because they aren’t leisure bikes that you take to the park, you ride the bike to where you need to go and return it. If the bike isn’t returned in 24 hours you are charged 150 euro. This pretty much guarantees that there are always bikes available at all the stations. We never saw an empty station.

The bikes are outfitted with a wire frame at the front for your bag and many of the bikes, but not all, were outfitted with lights so you could ride at night. I guess in a climate like Barcelona’s this system is useful all year around. If we had this system in Toronto I would definitely use it to get around the city. It just seemed so convenient and efficient.

We saw Bicing trucks around the city that must travel around to the stations and make any Bicing repairs and general maintenance.

We saw a lot of people using this transportation system. At times we
wished we had accounts so we could hop on and get to where we needed to
go. It is environmentally friendly, cheaper than the metro and a heck
of a lot better for you than driving everywhere. Barcelona in the past years has added great bike roads everywhere in the city that makes riding a bike a lot safer than it used to be. I don’t know if there are any systems like this in North America, but I wish someone would do something like this. Even if it was just between March and October it would be useful here in Toronto.

Oh Dubai. Again thinking outside of the box. This building isn’t a reality but the Ziggurat is being proposed by a company as a way to move forward to a structure that is self sustainable and environmentally friendly. Even though it is just a thought, it is a neat concept. And who knows, Dubai will probably make it a reality. I always dreamed about a city where there were no cars and moved by people movers, but I never thought it would be in a pyramid shaped structure. It almost seems sci-fi to think that up to 1 million people could live in this thing. Plus they want to add biometrics and facial recognition technology for security. Movies like Minority Report are becoming a reality quicker than I expected!

Click here to read the full article.

Now I’m cool, and more environmentally friendly. Thanks to Gav I have a new JWT Aluminum water bottle. Isn’t it pretty? (We got two so you get one too Brad!)

I was reading that although that aluminum is 100% recyclable (and of course you won’t get poisoned by it like you do plastic) it does take a lot more resources to actually process the aluminum than plastic. A lot of the aluminum is moved around the world to different locales during the manufacturing process which in turn takes a lot more energy and resources than making the plastic bottles.

This week I was able to convince Brad to stop the Toronto Star from coming daily. Now that he has the NY Times application on his iPhone and he can read the news on the go, on the subway or online there was really no need to have the paper come every day. I was finding that our recycling mainly consisted of unread newspapers. We are still going to receive the weekend Toronto Star but we’ll see if that ever gets opened.

On another note, I was really annoyed when I would annually go down to the mail room and see all the yellow pages sitting there in stacks. They would sit there for weeks until I guess the condo would remove them. Who uses Yellowpages anymore? Doesn’t everyone have a computer in their house or access to Google one way or another? Okay, maybe my Nana may use the Yellowpages since she doesn’t have a computer but isn’t it easier for her to just call me or my mom and have one of us look it up online?

It made me sad to think that all that yellow paper was just going to get recycled and never used. I would think that it would be more cost effective for Yellowpages to start a subscription service and only print and send out the Yellowpages to customers that want it. I’m sure the cost behind mailing it would be cheaper then printing surplus books that never get used! And as my friend Gav said, who wants Yellowpages sitting in your home, it is fugly… maybe if it was wrapped in Louis Vuitton leather or something (he didn’t say that, I did).

The Yellowpages did arrive in our lobby a couple of weeks ago and I was happy to see that they have shrunk the size of the books to a thin manual size. But two weeks later, the stacks lay unopened, and just waiting to be recycled.

Lastly, what happened to regular phone books? I guess those have dissappeared. Do houses still get them? I haven’t seen a phone book in years. I guess they rendered themselves useless because people use cell phones so much, and now that there are services like VOIP and multiple phone companies, chances are you wouldn’t find the number you were looking for anyway. I remember playing in the phone book looking up names and always getting a great satisfaction that there was only one Ishiwara in the phone book. Until I got my own line, then there were two!

I bought an old fashioned glass ketchup bottle thinking that environmentally it would be better than the newer fancier plastic ones. I’m not a klutz so I didn’t have a fear of it being dropped and there are no kids to worry about. I liked it, it worked, I would give it a strong shake before pouring so I never had a problem and never needed a knife to extract the sauce. But there is something to be said about the little squeeze nipple that the new bottles have that nicely pushes the ketchup out and pulls that last little bit of the drop back in. Keeping the opening clean and ready for the next use. The glass bottle has become gunky with hard ketchup flakes around it. I don’t want to use a paper towel to wipe it after each use, that is wasteful too. So I think I may have to go back to plastic. Convenience has won over environment. Once again.