Sorry about the downtime. Some asshole decided to constantly download every file on this site over and over and over again a little over a week ago, and they ended up using several gigs worth of my available bandwidth. I caught it before it got too bad, but as the end of the month came up I was dangerously close to going over my limit. Seeing as how I get hosting for this site for free, I don't want to abuse my bandwidth limits, which are honestly extremely generous. Because of that, I decided the best thing to do would simply be to put the site in maintenance mode rather than have everything disappear with an ugly error message.

On another note, things should be back to normal now that we're in a new month, and I've added a new auto-generated news page: LGBT News.

This isn't just an environmental blog, but a blog about the problems preventing us from creating a truly global community. That means everything from protecting endangered species to politics to climate change and human rights issues, of which LGBT issues are a part and will continue to be covered here.

It's nice to be back home even though I have to get up early in the morning. The minor family emergency has been safely resolved, so all is well. I wanted to write about a couple of different things I saw today while at the airports, but they can wait until tomorrow. For now, it's early to bed since I have a breakfast meeting at 6:30 in the morning.

Oh, there is one quick thing... Discovery Networks new channel Planet Green launches this Wednesday. I believe it replaces Discovery Homes, so you'll have to check your provider to see what channel it is.

Ok, to break totally away from everything this site is about, I have to say I would LOVE to see David Cook cover a little INXS, or maybe even some Veruca Salt. And for a bonus, I think he'd do an unbelievable job covering a few tracks by The Breeders. But maybe that's just me.

No, I was not anywhere near the collision on the green line today. I would have ridden the green C line today, but I got my company car yesterday and decided to drive. Yes, I decided to drive from the North End to Brookline, but so would you if you had a brand spanking new Escape hybrid to drive.

Yes, this is called rubbing it in, but only a little :)

Even though I didn't make any posts today (yesterday now), I actually spent most of the day working on something new for the site. I won't go into too many details because the project is still in the very early stages, but I spent roughly 14 hours today working on it.

The basic idea is pretty simple. My goal for this site has always been to find new ways to promote environmental stewardship, social responsibility, and a feeling of global community. In order to further that goal, I'm constantly looking at new ways to bring information to those who visit here, either once or twice, or on a regular basis. This new project is exciting for me because, if it works, I think it will be the most socially important thing I've ever done.

This doesn't mean I won't be posting, though. I will. I just happened to focus on this one project today because I wanted to get the groundwork laid out and develop a plan of action to make this thing work. So far, I've done fairly well. I've got a basic database laid out and created, and already created a preliminary interface with one of the tools I'm going to be using to get the information out. I ran a few tests a little while ago, and so far I think this is going to work out really well. There's still a long way to go, however, and I imagine it will be several weeks at a minimum before I'm ready to conduct any public tests.

On another note, if anybody is interested in helping to maintain the front page and doing a little blogging on the side, drop me a note through the contact form. One of the other goals for this site is to foster a community of activists, and the more people posting here the merrier.

If you're ever just extremely bored and want something worthwhile to do, go to Free Rice and play that for a while. When you're done with that, if you're still really bored, you can check out the page where I'm testing News Search features I eventually want to add to the site. Judging by my stats, the news search feature is probably the most popular item on the entire site, and traffic has literally tripled since I added it, so I'm going to continue working to make it better.

So if you want to see what I'm working on, go to this page and play with it for a while, then let me know what you think. One word of caution, because it's a beta page, and because I'm sometimes having a drink or two while working on it, the default search may not always be entirely safe for work. Usually it's entirely safe for work, but sometimes I do things like set the default search to something like "nipple" just to see what the results return. So go have fun and play with it.

On a lighter note, you can watch a live stream as your favorite actors and such wander around at the Cannes Film Festival, thanks to IFC.com. There's not much happening right now as I'm typing this up, but I do see that tomorrow on the cam they'll be covering the premier of Kung Fu Panda, which I think looks pretty funny.

Anyway, just something a little different to post.

Today is probably going to be my last day of actually moving in, or so I hope. The laundry is going to take a while, but already the kitchen is mostly put away and I'm basically just sitting around right now waiting on the cable guy to show up. Once that's done, all I've really got to do before next week is go buy groceries, which I hope to do later today. I did pick up a few things yesterday, but I need to see how much space I'm going to have left before filling the cupboards with food.

And a package store. I wonder if there's still the store over on Hanover St.

And in case you didn't notice, I did end up incorporating the News Search feature last night. I just kept tinkering with it because I wanted to see it working, and finally had to put it down around 4:00 this morning so I could get a little sleep. Admittedly it took longer than I expected because for some reason the evaluator in the software I use on this site didn't like the way I was calling certain variables. As a result, I imagine I'll be playing with it quite a bit today until I figure out what's going on, so don't be surprised if I break the search function for a little while.

I'm mostly moved into my new apartment. My Internet connection is up and running quite well, I'm happy to say, so at the least I can hit the web. Cable will be hooked up for the television tomorrow, so I'm pretty much set. The only big things left to do are finish unpacking stuff in the kitchen and wash all of my clothes before putting them away. I don't know about you, but after having all of my clothes on a semi for several days, I want them washed.

Other than that, I've been playing around for a little bit with a new feature I'm probably going to implement that allows you to search the news for any topic. I put together a very quick page here that you can play with if you want, but it's not incorporated into the site yet.

And yes, the default search is for Elisha Cuthbert. It's been a long day and that was much more entertaining than more topical searches.

Well, I'm in Chicago, sitting and waiting to board my next plane to Boston, which looks like it's going to be delayed an hour. This is actually only the second time in my life I've ever been in this airport. The first time was close to two decades ago when I was going to Japan for a high school trip, so I barely remember anything about this place.

At least the delay gives me a little more time to grab a bite to eat and maybe have a couple of drinks before having to board the next plane. Plus there's a couple of elections happening right now, and the bartender was nice enough to switch it to MSNBC instead of FOX. It was actually kind of amusing because when I asked the bartender if he could change channels the gentleman sitting a couple of seats down said "Yes, please!". Seems I'm not the only person here who can't stand that worthless network.

I do have to admit, I'm starting to get tired of the primary campaign. Usually I'm a politics junkie and am either reading about it, watching coverage of it, or listening to it on Sirius, but enough is enough. The primary campaign has gotten too ugly and gone on far too long for my tastes, and I'm ready to get the real campaign started.

I'm not going to get my hopes up, though. I fear that the Clinton campaign will do what they've done this entire primary season and move the goalposts even further back, no matter what the outcome is today.

Then again, strange things could happen and Obama could potentially squeak out a win in Indiana, which assuming he also wins North Carolina, means there's the tiniest of possibilities that Clinton won't want to cause any more damage to the party than she's already caused.

What I really want is for us to have a candidate, so that whoever the candidate is (hopefully Obama) we can start to differentiate ourselves from the Republicans on important issues like the environment, energy policy, and social justice. I just don't see how those issues are going to get any coverage until the primaries are over.

I'll be blogging today from the road, well, airports as I make my way to Boston, so posts may be short and sweet. I've got a long layover in Chicago this afternoon, but rather than leave the airport and then have to deal with TSA again, I'm probably just going to find a bar, have a few drinks, and chill out for a few hours.

I'll also be at a hotel this evening, since the truck with all of my furniture on it won't be arriving until tomorrow morning. Then tomorrow is move-in day, and who knows what I'll get done. But this evening I hope to make my way over to Hanover St. and grab a sandwich at D'Parma. I used to eat there at least three times a week when I was stationed at the Coast Guard base, and it's been about 12 years since I've visited that neck of the woods so I hope it's as good as I remember.

Tuesday afternoon I am stepping onto an airplane and saying goodbye, again, to the Midwest. Having been laid off from my job as a jack-of-all-trades engineer at a small ISP in January, I've spent the last few months doing consulting work as a freelance engineer all over the country. Sometimes I was doing network engineering, other times a little database and software engineering, and once I even consulted for a television show in Seattle.

But to be honest, I'm not the kind of person that likes to travel by plane very much, so I've been job-hunting at the same time. I'd work for a client in San Francisco during the day, and interview for jobs in my spare time. But flying from coast to coast and back to the Midwest all the time isn't really my thing, even though I love to fly. But I only love to fly when I'm the pilot, not when I have to sit in coach and listen to everything that goes with it.

But the few months of freelance consulting I've done has paid off, and one of the clients I consulted for in Boston has offered me a full-time position. I'll still be doing a fair amount of traveling, I'm certain, but nowhere near as much as I've done over the last few months. Primarily I'll be working in the Boston and larger New England area, instead of flying to the east coast one week, and the west coast the following week.

I'm extremely excited about the job, to be perfectly honest. It's not just that I get to move back to my favorite city in the entire world, Boston, but I'm going to get paid to help companies reduce their carbon footprint.

I'm not certain what happened but something broke on the auto-generated news pages. I did a lot of code testing, and at one point actually overloaded the server with too many database query's, but that doesn't explain what broke in my code.

I'm not going to worry about it tonight since I've got a few drinks in me, but I'll get it fixed early tomorrow.

UPDATE: Ok, so something didn't break. I'm not sure what's going on now because I didn't mess with any of the code to get the auto-generated news working again. I just got up this morning and there it was. Oh well, I'm not going to complain.

I'm in the process of adding a few features to the blog pages, so if you're looking at a page and see a bunch of really funky code at the bottom of the page, it's because I'm still playing with it to get it to work. It won't affect the actual content of the page, but just adds a bunch of clutter I'm using to debug.

UPDATE: I've put off the blog page updates for tonight and will probably get to them tomorrow. Instead I'm creating news pages that are entirely automated. Basically, each page has it's own program that goes out, searches for news items related to a specific algorithm, and displays the results on the page itself.

Each time you load the page, such as the Climate Change News page, it will automatically update with new stories related to climate change, assuming it has found any. The only downside is that it's a computer program so the articles aren't always completely accurate, and every once in a while you'll get a story that's not related to the topic. So far that's been only a rare problem.

I'll continue with the other updates later tomorrow.

If you're like me and a complete news-junkie, you might be interested in the EcoWidget from Environmental News Network.

It's currently available for the Yahoo! Widget Engine for both PC and Mac, but coming soon is an Apple Widget and a Windows Vista (ugh) gadget.

The widget displays a running feed of environmental news, snippets from news stories, and a local search for green businesses.