Yeah, I don’t know what they are, either, but some of my bike-commuting friends suggested that they might be a mythical type of biker, an uber-cyclist, if you will.
I took a couple of quick photos on my way home at night. The atmosphere was foggy, so I couldn’t use a flash, and when I came back the next day the road crew had unhelpfully corrected the sign. Bother!
Phi Tau does an amazing job recycling and composting as much as possible. There has been a long line of dedicated recycling chairs/sustainability coordinators over the years, and the current officer, Ashley Morishige, has continued to expand and improve the system.
Recycling and composting in any situation can take time and energy, but recycling and composting at a fraternity can be an especially big challenge! Thankfully, Phi Tau has amazing support from the FO&M people that pick up all of the trash, recycling, compost, and bulk trash.
I’ve assembled a gallery of photos on my Zooomr account which you can view in blog format here.
Here’s a view of the outside bins:
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I have just come into the ownership of two awesome kitchen toys. Both of them came from the kitchen of a summer camp who, I can only imagine, needed to clear out some old equipment.
The first item is The Eagle, a powerful, hand-cranked kitchen slicer:
This bad boy was made by The Eagle Tool & Machine Company, Inc. based in Springfield, Ohio. The company is still around under that name and now has a website.
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I was looking up some articles on The Dartmouth when I ran across an article from 1995 about BlitzMail.
The article was humorous in nature, but some piece of it really showed how active development was at that time:
But, with the passage of time, many integral aspects of Dartmouth have changed, the most basic of which involve Kiewit’s bi-annual updates of our beloved BlitzMail. We now have campus-wide bulletins, unlimited nickname space, blind carbon copies, address books and instantaneous delivery. As fond as I am of the original grind-it-out BlitzMail system, I have gradually become accustomed to the technological wizardry that has accompanied my four-year stint at Dartmouth.
Oh BlitzMail, you have your quirks, but you were amazingly good at what you did, especially during the time you were under active development. You will be missed.
–Q
I was shopping at the local food coop last week and saw a sign that said “Take an online sustainability survey and be entered into a raffle to win a free green home makeover!”
Well sure, why not? I guess I could use a little greening of my home, or I could hand the prize off to a friend. So I picked up one of the paper slips containing the information, shoved it into my wallet, and continued with my regularly scheduled shopping trip.
As I was cleaning receipts out of my wallet this morning, I rediscovered the piece of paper. It had a short, well-written message asking people to “[T]ake a moment to fill out this survey to benefit sustainability research,” and listed a url on surveymonkey.com. Simple enough.
A little problem: the url is 68 characters long and includes a 30-digit uid containing the chars [a-zA-Z0-9_]:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=xfGOwGwNz9CKRjd2_2fjBKUg_3d_3d
I took these pictures just as the sun was coming up over the mountains one day earlier this month. I probably should have been asleep, but I just had to stop and get these photos. The light was absolutely perfect!
(click the photo for the rest of the set)
This past Friday Ashley the Younger and I had an opportunity to meet with Jay Welenc, Operations Manager of Housekeeping Services at DHMC. Ashley and I got a lot of good tips about green cleaning products and learned some ways to make our cleaning more effective. We even got to see DHMC’s ActiveIon space-age “activated water” spray bottle.
Ashley and I have been working on moving Phi Tau away from unsustainable, harsh chemical cleaning products and towards green cleaning products. We’ve been trying to find sources for products and figure out which products are most effective. Central Stores carries some environmentally-friendly products, but doesn’t offer consultation on which products work well and why we should use them.
While researching products online I remembered seeing a presentation by DHMC Housekeeping talking about the new sustainable and green cleaning products the Hospital is using. With such a strong interest in green products, I was sure that the Housekeeping department would be able to help us out.
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Last week was rather busy for me. Right after I got back to the Dartmouth campus from a tour of the composting facility I had to hightail it to Carson (the “pseudo-building” glued to the side of Berry Library) to attend a class in Digital Document Management (DDM). Over the course of two hours, Dartmouth Records Manager Wess Jolley [PDF] described some of the ideas and theory behind DDM and presented analysis of the progress Dartmouth has made towards transitioning from paper-only offices to largely DDM-only offices.
Although the management of documents at Dartmouth is very large and complicated — Jolley described us like a “small town” in terms of document diversity — the College is making steady progress towards bringing DDM to the various departments. As Dartmouth doesn’t even have DDM software selected yet, and given the hurdles associated with transitioning and retraining employees to use a digital system, it will likely be several years before a majority of the departments are wholly switched to a digital document management system.
DHMC is getting rid of their Frialators. For ever.
On July 4th, the Frialators are going away and the cafeterias will no longer be frying food in them. Or so I’ve been told. I’m not sure if this means that all fried food is going away, but at least at the Colburn Hill cafeteria it means no more onion rings, fried shrimp, fried fish, or……french fries.
I got downstairs at about 1:40, making sure that I got in before the end of lunch service at 2:00. With Friday off as a holiday, this was our last chance to get fried food. Unfortunately, all of the fried food was gone!
But wait…what is this? A lone box of fries, hiding at the back of the warming tray, was trying to stay uneaten for as long as possible. I don’t usually get fries, but on this one occasion I knew I had to make an exception.
They were delicious.
(Click the picture to see these fries in giaganto-size)
Links:
Things that have escaped from my mind 