Although I’m not some extreme environmentalist, I do like to do what I can, where I can. Not to mention that I don’t like waste. Although we didn’t do it for earth day, we recently created a worm bin.

What’s a worm bin you ask? It’s pretty simple really, you take a container of some sort, fill it with wet newspaper (you can see the dry stuff in the picture to the left), and then you put worms in it.

The worms will eat the paper, and cardboard too, but the best part, is they will eat your food waste too.

When I say food waste, I mean vegetable and fruit scraps, coffee grounds, coffee filters, tea bags, etc. You don’t want to put cooked food, meats or animal waste in there though.

  The fancy name for this is either worm composting, or vermicomposting. If you’re interested, just do a search for “Worm Bin” at  your favorite search engine. Here are some plans to make a set just like mine.

The bins I made were made out of 3 10 gallon Rubber Maid containers, and I think in total the materials cost a whopping 15 dollars. Now to be honest, I did hire some shady contractors to do the work, and they wanted to be paid in cookies. So I didn’t include cookie costs in the project budget.

We purchased our red worms from “Uncle Jims Worm farm” and those were the most expensive part of the project, they were $20 for 1000 of them (free shipping).

So far, everything is working out great. I’m waiting for the worms to catch up to the food supply though.

Once the worms are done chewing up all that food, the “castings” (what we call poop) can be harvested, and used to provide some terrific nutrition for you lawn, vegetable garden, or even your house plants.

The way I see it, you already bought all of that food, coffee and tea, why not get a little more use out of it, and save some landfill space while you’re at it.

Posted in environment, EarthDay, Projects 2 Comments »

Have you ever had one of those projects, where you just have the hardest time getting anything done? That’s how it seems to be with my current project.

I mentioned in the last post, that Art and I are getting ready to launch a new web site and podcast. Art has taken over the web master duties, I’m taking care of Podcast production, and we are both going to be creating content for the web site.

Now, Art is making leaps and bounds on the site, and it’s really coming along nicely. Me on the other hand, I’m wallowing in non-productivity.

I’ve can only put in 2 or 3 hours every night, and I even have to skip a night here and there. That should be plenty of time, right?

Remember Mike, “slow and steady wins the race”.

I’m going to keep plugging away, and we hope to have something up by Wednesday or Friday. When we do launch, I can give you all a URL or two to look at.

(Art, we still good on Wednesday? Maybe Friday?)

I’m planning on doing a bunch of video tutorials, and last night I was working on a opening screen for the video, and it came out really nice. Then I realized that the right side of my title is getting cut off by the you tube logo. I may try blip.tv or some other service and see if it works there.

I’ve got three videos recorded, but I still have to edit and narrate them, I’ve got my VMWare Server set up, and my first virtual machine running.

I’m really can’t wait to tell everyone about what we’ve been working on, but I want to wait until we’re ready. After re-reading the above, I can see that I am making more progress than I thought. It’s just that I want to have launched it yesterday, and already have started working full time on the project. Patience Mike, Patience.

Just a little bit of a giveaway, the picture here is a cartoon of me, and it’s part of our logo. The daughter of a friend of ours was nice enough to create cartoon characters of Art and I. We scanned them in, and Art has been doing some incredible work to make a logo.

OK, that’s enough for now. Stay tuned.

Posted in Projects, WebSites, BlogNewsandUpdates 6 Comments »