I made the decision to migrate from urpisdream.com to marilynburgess.com, and completely abandon the Urpi brand. I have been grappling with my personal brand for quite some time.  I came up with the brand Urpi’s Dream in early 2009, after a trip to Peru, where I earned the nickname Urpi. I adored the name, and was eager to embrace it as a part of my online identity.

Fast forward a few months and you have me juggling 3-4 separate brands, and not being able to devote myself to any. Today my focus has next to deserted my Urpi’s Dream blog, and it’s brand. When I look at the old Urpi’s Dream blog, I don’t even get that guilty feeling that I’m neglecting something important to me. The content I intend to write on my personal blog is very dear to me. It is the personal brand, or identity that I no longer feel close to.

In the name of simplicity, I am embracing my name and my home as my personal brand. Marilyn Burgess from Vancouver, BC.

Well, I believe I am due a rather large piece of humble pie. I made a huge oversight in the last verion of the Kiva Wordpress Widget. It was actually a bit of an oversight, mixed with a mistake, and a little bit of forgetfulness. That’s neither here nor there though, so lets get to the point.

Version 2.8 doesn’t delete its own cache files. This causes the cache directory to grown indefinately, which is really quite a problem! Not to worry though, the new version not only deletes the last cache file as 2.8 should have in the first place, upgrading the plugin will delete all the unessesary files the plugin has created. This is so important that I decided it should get the version number 3.0!

I’m quite sorry if this mistake caused anyone any trouble on their servers! I strongly encourage every one to upgrade as soon as possible. Either upgrade via the handy Wordpress plugins center on your blog, or manually upgrade.

If  you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

It’s Blog Action Day! The day when bloggers all over the world join their voices to speak on one particular topic. This year we’re talking about climate change. Personally, I think climate change is a rather nebulous term that fails to incite emotion and does nothing to call people to action. Rather than rant on about that, I’ve decided to focus my efforts on Blog Action Day in a positive direction! Lets explore the concept of carbon credits to determine if they may help stabilize our climate.

Green House Gases

We have all heard of green house gases. They are the fumes given off by both human and environmental processes that go up into our atmosphere and get caught up there, trapping the suns energy in our atmosphere; causing the overall temperature of the planet to rise, quite like a greenhouse. The following graph from Environment Canada describes the sources of these harmful gases:

Environment Canada (2004)

The largest culprit is clearly Industry, being responsible for over half of the gaseous emissions on the planet. Regular folks, like you and me, are responsible for our fair share as well within the categories of Transportation, Products, and Heating. I expect that we also have a part in that Industry piece, as Industry is busy making stuff for us to consume.

Everyone knows there is a major problem here. We have to cut back on these gases to reduce our negative influence on our planet, if we wish to continue to call it home sweet home. Turning this big ship around is not an easy task. It involves breaking well-ingrained habits of individuals and business, as well as counteracting the incentives that exist to continue to pollute our air. Lets face it: there is money to be made by emitting greenhouse gases, otherwise people wouldn’t be doing it. Historically there has been no money behind protecting the air, and there was no money to be made in making the right choices for the planet. Enter:  carbon credits.

Carbon credits are a concept that came out of the Kyoto Protocol, which is the legally binding agreement to reduce the collective greenhouse emissions of the industrialized nations to 5.2% below 1990 levels, which 184 industrialized countries have ratified (the US is not one of them). Carbon Credits bring money into the saving the environment equation with a cap and trade system. Each country is allowed to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases that they can allot to the gas emitting businesses within their borders. Carbon credits can be bought and sold between both companies and countries. If a company has left over carbon credits, it can sell them to another company that wants to pollute more than its original allotment of carbon credits allow.

Carbon credits can also be created as carbon offsets.  Companies can create carbon offsets by doing environment friendly activities such as reforestation, and creating clean forms of energy such as wind and solar power. These offsets can then be sold to companies who want to pollute more than they have the credits for, or to individuals who can voluntarily purchase offsets to compensate for their personal carbon footprint.

A whole new industry is popping up around this concept of selling carbon offsets. Plant some trees, sell the carbon offsets. The David Suzuki Foundation states that purchasing carbon offsets can help in the battle against climate change, but warns the consumer that not all carbon offsets are create equal. While carbon credits is far from a a perfect system, it does introduce money into the equation, and puts the power of the free market behind doing what is right for the environment. As sad as it might be, it has come down to harnessing our dark inclinations, such as greed and selfishness, to enforce business to do their part for the environment.

What do you think about carbon credits? Will they have the intending effect of stabilizing climate change, or might the system be perverted by greed? Are you considering voluntarily purchasing carbon offsets to compensate for you and your family’s carbon footprint?

Back from a little hiatus on the round ups! I’m no good with enforced schedules, I have to go with the Flow! So, from now on, Round Ups will come exactly when they should, when I’ve been inspired to write one!

Twitter + Blog = Twog

Richard Florida Twogs!

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and Who’s Your City?, is quite an active tweeter. He frequently tweets about stats, facts, and graphs about place, population and societies ever-changing demographics. It’s a little difficult to keep up with all of his nifty tweets, so he is now twogging! Each Wednesday Richard Florida compiles his bests tweets of the week into one, each to swallow blog post.

Johnny B Truant talks about Motivation at IttyBiz

Johnny B. Truant

Johnny B Truant has been super shiny lately, making guest posts all over the web, and even making $10K in 3 months by helping people! Through a hap-hazard retelling of an old tale, Truant tells us where the motivation came from to make it happen. When you have a need or requirement rather than a desire, you have ample motivation!

Top 10 Moments Caught on Google Street View at urlesque

Drunk dude passed out on Google Street View

Google Street View was just released in Canada. All my friends, ok, I’ll admit, and me too, have been spending valuable work time combing through the maps of our usual stomping grounds and a select few have been able to proudly post blurred images of themselves doing usual stuff. urlesque complied some of the whackiest moments found on Google Street View, including public urination, flashes, and even a Web 2.0 marriage proposal!

Stop the TV Tax debate spins out of consumer control at Canadian Cholito

Up here in Canada there is a whole debacle going on over a supposed local TV tax. The Canadian Cholito took it upon himself to discover who the real players are in this charade, and shares with his readers what they need to know.

I missed last week, so these are actually kind of drying out. I’m contemplating moving the round ups to Mondays.

The Problem with Positive Thinking from Seth Godin

Tribes author, Seth Godin, offers an intriguing insight about the role of positive and negative thought in the human experience. If positive thinking increases self confidence, which in turn improves performance, who do intelligent people partake in negative thought? Godin proposes that negative thinking feels good, that it “soothes our pain, or eases our embarrassment… protects us and lowers expectations“. The truth of it being that positive thinking is actually difficult, and requires effort, but it’s worth it.

Woman Refuses To Pay Off Bank Of America Credit Card at The Huffington Post

Ann Minch of Red Bluff, California is taking a stand. After the Bank of America repeatedly raised her interest rate up to a whopping 30%, Minch says she will no longer pay. She has carried a moderate balance on this credit card for years, and has always made at least the minimum payment on time. Following a layoff, she called the creditor to negotiate more reasonable terms, to which she got a big fat “No”. Minch has sinced closed her cheqing and savings accounts with the Bank of America, and, despite the future repercusions on her credit rating, refuses to pay the credit card bill any more, in the name of standing up for what is right! More power to you Ann Minch! My hopes are that more people join you to fight this massive goliath, as it’s a fight worth winning.

Cure all Running Injuries (and Pain) with One Simple Fix….Barefoot Running at Fitness Spotlight

I have seen many endorsements for those crazy Vibram Five Finger ’shoes’ all about the intertubes, and I didn’t get why people were endorsing them, until now.  Mike O’Donnell pulls together a wide range of evidence that running has never been the cause of all those runner’s knees, but it’s actually the running shoes! Being designed to protect our feet from the crewl ground, sneakers have long been making our feet weak, causing us to run incorrectly! I’m going to have to try Vibram Five Fingers out – any excuse to go to MEC really.

Google’s Data Liberation Front

I was completely dependent on Gmail. When they had an outage for a few hours a couple of weeks back I could do nothing except go a little banana sandwich from not being able to access my email: my data! Google has started the Data Liberation Front to empower it’s users with respect to their data that Google manages for them. If you want to know how to get you emails out of gmail, your documents out of Google docs, or your site statistics out of Analytics, this is the place to go to figure out how.