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Ok, I wanted to quickly write up about the stuff I've been learning at those LiveGreen meetings. A couple weeks ago we talked about Toronto's waste disposal -- someone in the know explained how green bin waste is taken care of. Rather than just being cooked for a couple weeks (as some places do), it actually gets processed. First, everything's ground up into a finer mulch, to which water is added, making a slurry of guck. It is then put into a spinning tank, letting centrifugal force do the work of separating out the different parts so that heavier or lighter stuff (wood, or diaper tape, etc) is conveniently removed from the main mass. Tt this point it goes through the cooking stage (if I recall correctly, maybe not?), before it is mixed with regular soil as, by itself, it contains too much salt, etc. I also learned that, while there are no regulations in terms of how much non-City garbage has to be recycled, private waste disposal companies are actually quite good about...

It pains me every time I think about it -- my parents have sold their house. They've done so many renovations in anticipation of it going to the market, you'd hardly recognize it now. Well, the interior anyway -- the kitchen is completely redone, upstairs is all hardwood, as are the stairs. The cobblestoned backyard patio they've had for a while but looking at it now I'm amazed anew at the result that my dad put so many hours into. I really should visit them more often. I've just about picked out a new video card, and am aiming for either the XFX ATI Radeon HD 5850 ($280) or the XFX ATI Radeon 5870 ($380). I'd forgotten that there are so many flavours of each GPU these days. I used Ars Technica's system picks to help me get to my decision, which I've always found useful in the past. My current card, a Sapphire ATI HD 4870 x2 (2x1GB), conks out whenever I start doing anything that tasks the 3D GPU stuff, though at times (and more frequently with each ...

Ok, I did mean to update earlier but I've been... preoccupied of late. Well, my video card slowly dying is part of the excuse to be sure. I only realized today that it's actually over two years old! Seems like I only got it last year. Have I been playing games on it for that long?? It's a tiresome bore, I'll tell you. And I'm somewhat torn on what to "upgrade" to -- I bought my Sapphire ATI HD 4870 x2 2GB for $580, and it's now worth $300 new, which is actually about what I would like to spend, money not flowing as easily as it once did for me. I'll have to bite the bullet soon enough, there being a stack of games (Civ 5, Dead Rising 2, StarCraft 2, Fallout New Vegas) beckoning me to return. So Toronto voted in Rob Ford! What rot, what rot. I'm sure most of you are by now aware of the "amalgamation gap", the stark difference in voting attitudes between downtown Toronto and the suburbs. I mean, on some subconscious level I suppose I kn...