Gregory Heller Get in touch

Writing

The blog

725 posts on careers, communication, technology and civic life, since 2005.

  1. An Inconvenient Truth

    Via WorldChanging : The movie An Inconvenient Truth will open at the end of May. Participant Productions is getting people to pledge to see the film when it opens in their market (at the film’s website ClimateCrisis.net) . The ClimateCrisis site also has a nifty carbon footprint calculator. The Calculator got me feeling really guilty about air travel. This past weekend I met a guy while in the desert south west of LA who is working on carbon pollution credit trading. I should admit that we talked about these issue while in a climate controlled house baking in the sun and 100 degree ambient air temp. We talked about TerraPass which allows you to buy carbon credits for your driving. I suggested that someone should start “AeroPass” to allow travelers to buy carbon credits to offset their air travel.

  2. Laptop theft and data security

    Yesterday, as I was preparing for another leg of my rock star tour, I heard this segment on marketplace about data security and laptop theft. It is worth a listen. Here is the summary: Imagine someone steals a laptop from your bank or your phone company. It happens more than you might think, and that has some major identity theft and security consequences. Employees of big companies not only fail to secure the data on their machines with encryption, apparently, they also just leave them in the back seats of their car! Rich mentioned to me that a man was stabbed during a laptop heist in San Francisco, and my googling for the story lead me to this story about thieves prowling conferences specifically to steal laptops not only for the hardware and software value, but also for the value of the data (client lists and personal data).

  3. Getting information to consumers about the products they buy

    WorldChanging ran a great post on the GreenScanner , a public database of consumer opinions about the environmental accountability of over 600,000 products. Basically the Green Scanner is a website that allows a user to enter the UPC from the bar code label on a product and get information about the product. Green scanner focuses on environmental issues around the product, however, there was a great discussion in the comments section of the post about other projects brewing to provide consumers with other information about the products they buy. One of them is GrassCommons . Another similar concept is the Reveal Label , and yet another is the Lowdown on Logos concept from Jim Hightower’s organization.

  4. We’re made out of corn!!!

    This is a great story from Science Friday about corn. The author of “Omnivores Dilemma”. Corn is in almost everything we eat, and our carbon is from corn. A bushel of corn is 56 pounds of 20% of oil consumption is for food growing, more than for transportation! Corn is over produced. And the government subsidizes corn production to the tune of 50 cents a bushel. There is a dead zone size of NJ in the Gulf of Mexico caused by nitrate fertilizer runoff from Iowa! Listen the audio. I might try to read the book .

  5. Drupal Camp New York

    Drupal Camp NYC will be an opportunity of people interested in Drupal and developers interested in learning to develop sites with drupal to get together and learn from each other.

  6. DrupalCampNYC and 3 of our sites get a plug from Micah Sifry

    Deanna Zandt (who we work with on the Jim Hightower sites) pointed out that Micah Sifry referenced JimHightower.com along with a number of other Drupal sites over on the PDF Blog along with DrupalCampNYC which we are sponsoring and helping to organize along with Noel Hidalgo (the man on the ground) and some other folks.

  7. Jim Hightower is podcasting!

    Our client Jim Hightower has been podcasting for 6 years. He just didn’t know it! For about the last 6 years, Hightower has been recording daily “Common Sense Commentaries” that air on radio stations around the country. When we started talking to Hightower’s organization we realized that these 2 minute commentaries were ready made for podcasting. Earlier this year we relaunched JimHightower.com which features the text transcripts and now downloadable mp3 audio files of each daily commentary. You can subscribe the the PodCast feed either via FeedBurner or iTunes .

  8. Deanna Zandt on the Lower East Side

    I had the opportunity to talk to Deanna Zandt while I was in NY. We talked about her upcoming move from the Lower East Side to the South Side of Williamsburg. (video link after the jump)

  9. Zunafish? I can’t see how this will work out

    While I generally like the idea of “re-use” and swapping and freestore and all that, I can’t see how this company Zunafish.com will work out. Basically you have to trade items one for one with other users, and the items must be of the same category. So I have a dvd… “When We Were Soldiers” let’s say. You watched it, and once was enough, so you think, let me put it up for trade along with these other 20 war and Mel Gibson DVDs I will never watch again. Some one sees my list of movies and figures I are a war movie buff, and they have “Saving Private Ryan” so they offer to trade… But I am a war movie buff, I already saw “Saving Private Ryan”.

  10. 15 minutes for the environment

    I just took about 15 minutes to call 9 catalog companies and have them remove me from their mailing lists. Upon returning to NY from some time in Seattle i had a stack of catalogs nearly a foot high waiting for me. The 9 calls resulted in me being removed from 12 catalog mailing lists. I have about 4 more calls to make, and I am sure, upon my next return, there will be some other catalogs that had not come in the last month. The most difficult to be removed from (and only obviously outsourced call center) was the Dell Catalog, which took over 8 minutes. Some of the easiest were tool and home furnishing companies who just needed a code from the back of the catalog.