Toilet Paper Wedding Dress

Who knew you could make a nice looking wedding dress out of toilet paper?  Cheap-Chick-Weddings.com has been holding contests were contestants make wedding dresses out of toilet paper for the last few years.  In the picture above you can see the winner for 2010.  They’ve got plenty more images from the same contest and previous years.  Amazing…

You can find plenty more on this terrific blog.

CNN has an article on how the US enabled the recent Chinese hacking of Gmail via a backdoor created for US government searches.  So how can you protect your email from hackers, corporations, and governments?  Easy.  Encrypt it.  Here’s how to do it for free:

- Download Mozilla’s Thunderbird and use it as your email client.  It works on Windows and Mac machines.

- Click Here to install GNU Privacy Guard on your computer, open source PGP software. The will allow you to encrypt and decrypt messages.  (You can find the Mac version here.)

- Download the Enigmail extension for Thunderbird. In Thunderbird click Tools, Addons, Install, and then browse to wherever you downloaded the Enigmail file to, to install it.  (Mac version here.)

- Once it’s installed, you’ll see an OpenPGP button in Thunderbird. Choose Key Management, and Generate a New Key Pair. Choose the email address you want to use the key for, and make up a good password with difficult letters, numbers, and characters.

- When you’re done, right click your key and email it (only the “public” half will be emailed) to your contacts. Have them do the same. Then you can send and receive encrypted messages that hackers and spies won’t be able to read even if they get your messages.

What about the important files on your computer? Go get TrueCrypt.  It’s free, and you can encrypt anything from your entire computer to important files only.  That way if your computer is ever stolen or hacked, no one will be able to access anything you don’t want them to.

I first blogged about Vibram Five Finger shoes back in May of this year, and posted on the horror of modern shoes shortly after.  These shoes have quickly become the only thing I wear, and today I received the newest model in the mail…the black KSO Treks pictured above and below:

The KSO Treks are only sold in stores, and they’re out of stock throughout the country.  Fortunately though I was able to find them at GSS Gear due to a tip on this awesome Five Fingers forum.  The Treks are made of leather, compared to the synthetic material on the KSO’s, and they’re insanely comfortable.  Additionally, the soles are a bit thicker and have crazy treads as you can see in the picture below compared to the KSO’s:

Really, these treads are crazy:

Since I’ve been wearing Five Finger shoes almost exclusively for the past year, I’ve come to hate modern shoes, which are terrible for your feet.  All it takes is a month or two of wearing Five Fingers to realize how caged your feet have been!  Granted, Five Fingers are not cheap, but they’re the best shoes you’ll ever wear, period.  Not only that, but the Vibram Five Fingers customer service is incredible.  Although I really hate to admit it, I had a problem with my beloved FF’s.  The straps on my KSO’s were fraying:

I called Vibram and they advised me to bring my shoes back to Massey’s where I purchased them, in order to get an exchange for a brand new pair of shoes.  Now that’s customer service!

So go ahead, ditch your crappy shoes and get yourself a pair of Five Fingers!

My last post dealt with the need for alternative sources of energy, to save money, decrease pollution, and help slow climate change.  A cautionary post should be added, as the race to develop and utilize alternative energy is not all good.  I took the above picture on a trip to Borneo in 2008, riding in an Iban long boat on a multi day trip deep into the jungle.  Here’s a picture of what much of Borneo is becoming due to the demand for alternative energy:

After spending time in the jungle, seeing the incredibly diverse flora and fauna and the lifestyles of the few tribes still able to live there, it was depressing to see how much of Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo was being deforested to make room for palm oil plantations.  These plantations are wiping out jungle around the world at an unbelievable rate, to satisfy the demand for alternative energy.

The fact is, palm oil and ethanol are worse for the environment when you consider the cost in energy, water, land, and fertilizer to grow the crops necessary for production.  AND, they’re destroying enormous amounts of jungle, driving plants and animals into extinction and producing more CO2 as the jungle is cleared and burned.

While developing GOOD alternative sources of energy is necessary, it needs to be done in a smart manner.  An alternative to oil is no good if it does worse than oil.  While this should be obvious, it’s not being practiced now.   For further reading, here are two great articles from Foreign Policy:

Seven Myths About Alternative Energy

Is a Green World a Safer World?

In our quest to decrease pollution, save money, prevent deaths due to limited resources, and slow climate change, we need to think smart.  Renewable resources like wind and solar are great, but they’ll no doubt have their own problems.  Clearly, the best option for everyone is to reduce consumption.  What’s the point of moving away from oil only to destroy life even faster!?!?

But lets just ignore reality and assume that human pollution is not warming the planet.  Fine.  Since when is reducing pollution a bad thing?  Since when is saving money a bad thing?  Regardless what you believe about climate change/global warming, it’s just plain smart to utilize renewable energy sources. In addition to using renewable energy sources, all of us can likely save money by reducing our energy bills. Tools like the P3 Kill A Watt make it easy.

Right now we’re getting most our energy from countries we ought not be sponsoring.  When the oil is gone we’re going to be doing the same thing if we don’t get in the race now.  China is killing us.  We’ve got the technology already, it’s just that we’re not using it.

Folbot Citibot, Bagged

If you like adventure, exploration, freedom, water, and cool stuff, you need to get yourself a Folbot folding kayak.  There aren’t many things I like more than my Five Fingers, but my Folbots are definitely one of them.  The picture above is a Citibot in a backpack.  It weighs about 30lbs, and is extraordinarily easy to transport.  Here’s what it looks like in action:

Ottenstein Stausee, Austria

Docked Citibots, Ottenstein Stausee

The Citibot is perfect for travel.  It sets up in 10-15 minutes, and allows you to go to places you’d never see otherwise, and at your own pace.  There are several other folding kayak brands, but to me Folbot makes the best all around kayaks for a number of reasons.  They’ve got a model perfect for every purpose, they’re very easy to assemble, the customer service and community is the best there is, and the prices are FAR better than the competition.

Citibot, Honey Island Swamp, LA

What else will allow you to get up close and personal with a giant gator?

Gator, Near Lake Pontchartrain, LA

While the Citibot is very easy to take anywhere, other models are better suited for open water and harsher conditions.  Chris Patton is taking his Kodiak on a serious expedition around Greenland.

For longer trips where you need to pack a lot of gear and food, or when you just want more wiggle room and a faster boat, you can’t go wrong with the Aleut or Yukon.  Here’s an assembled Aleut and half assembled Yukon:

Jean Laffite National Park, LA

Yukon in Swamp

Before I had these kayaks I’d often find myself looking at water in various places and wishing I could easily get out and explore it…coastline, beaches, rivers.  Now I can open up my trunk, walk down to a beach with a boat in a bag, and be out on the water in a few minutes, exploring areas that most tourists never get to see.

Dubrovnik, Croatia

Croatian Coast

…did I mention that Folbots and Five Fingers are a perfect mix???

FFF

In line with the last post on Twitter, Facebook, and the demise of the web, the New York Times has an article on the health effects of constant texting.  Not only is excessive texting bad for your thumbs, but it’s also likely to be bad for your mental health!

So what do texting, Twitter, and other social networking sites have in common?  They all encourage a high frequency of short and relatively meaningless “communication”…further dumbing down society.  With constant low grade interruptions it’s no wonder so many people are diagnosed with ADD these days.  According to the NYTimes article, the average teenager gets/sends 75 text messages a day!  As a “punishment”, Reina was limited to 166 messages per day.  Imagine that.

This obsessive, constant texting is not only bad for mental health and development, but it’s also incredibly rude.  How many of you have been in the middle of a conversation with a real human being when they started texting…or for that matter, answering their ringing cell phone over and over again?  I’m going to start a new rule: I won’t talk to anyone who answers cell phone calls or text messages in the middle of a conversation. Interactions with real people should take precedence over virtual communication.

Two years ago I gave up my cell phone.  It was one of the best decisions I’ve made.