Editing to be green

Back in high school I was enrolled in a course called Citizenship in Action 30S. I think it was probably the most valuable course in high school in my opinion. It taught me about the issues the world faced and what we could do to maintain a sustainable life for future generations and how to reduce our carbon foot print.

We learned about fair trade products, and issues affecting Canada. I guess, I could say because of this course, I became a little activist. I wrote letters with Amnesty International, signed petitions, and stuck my nose in almost everyone's lifestyle and picked on them to try to change their way to better living. (Trust me, I converted a lot of my friend's families who didn't use a recycling bin to use one)

As many people will know, one of the simplest things to do is to unplug appliances that aren't in use. Decreasing your electricity usage can be a major way to decrease your impact on the environment.

Since almost everything is about going green these days, you've probably heard the term "energy vampire". If you haven't, an energy vampire is an appliance that uses electricity even if it's turned off, as long as it's plugged in.

This is an easy problem to solve, simply unplug things when you're not using them. Or, if you don't even want to go to that much effort, use power bars for everything. But be careful of over plugging appliances (that's a big fire hazard) That's what I do anyway, I just turn off the power bar and viola! It's that easy peasy. You could have a setup where you plug in your TV, DVD player, VCR player (if you still have one) or video game consoles. That's what my dad does. Although, I still find myself unplugging my dad's entertainment system.

Another obvious place to cut down on electricity is your computer or laptop. The one thing you can do is turn it off at night. And when you do leave it on, change your computer settings to put it to sleep, rather than using a screensaver.

There are many ways to decrease your carbon foot print, there's only so much one person can do, but if more people do these simple little things we can all create a wave. We can all create a movement.

I stumbled upon this site called My Plastic-fee Life: Show Us Your Plastic. It's a site where people tally up their plastic waste and review how they can reduce their accumulation of plastic. In the next few days, try to keep track how much plastic and recyclable items you use. It's amazing how much plastic we use everyday from bottled water to chocolate bar wrappers. What changes can we do to help with the environment?

Editing: The Digital Art

Bura's Adoption Agency - Dragonball Z Gaming Screen Sprites

I like to play around with graphics, create banners, and design digital work. As a kid, I would watch my sister draw, and get envious because I couldn't draw the way she did. In fact, I still do. I think it'll always be a sibling rivalry thing. But as a kid,  I would always draw, everyday, everywhere, trying just to be as good as my sister. Eventually, leading me to take an interesting in the arts. When I first encountered the Internet in 2000, my sister and I would see so many beautiful digital paintings created by really young people. We encountered websites like deviantART - a wonderful place to see various art pieces, including photography, designs, patterns, and poetry too.

We started getting into computer art, and photo editing and sometimes little animations. We also created many websites too...which unfortunately got shut down because of GeoCities closed in 2009, no more free web hosting. The golden age of web hosting was gone.

But my sister would be the artist and the HTML (hyper text markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets) writer.  I would help with the little things, editing, making thumbnails, putting galleries and fixing broken links. I think about how much time and effort we put into editing to make the website the way we liked it to be.

We were more self taught, than trained if anything. We started off as kids and eventually grew out of it. It was a fun little project we would work during the summer holidays. In the end, the satisfaction of knowing we created something, and getting Internet surfer's to compliment you on your work was really gratifying.

Below I've included links to some of our *erm* websites. I am a little embarrassed by them but hey, we were kids after all. Plus, it shows the progress we made with HTML editing and CSS.

*Warning: I suggest if you don't like Sailor Moon or Dragonball Z don't click on them.

First site, my sister and I ever made (2002):
Katlynstar's Silver Moon Millennium - This site we used a template, and smushed everything together (N'sync? with a Sailor Moon? Now that's a wtf) we had no clue what we were doing. This site had no focus whatsoever. I was 10 years old when I started this and my sister was 14.

This site soon evolved to this:
Neo Queen Serenity's Palace -  This was our main site, all about Sailor Moon. Our most prized piece of work we did. It received a lot of hits and many Sailor Moon fans (Moonies) loved our content. It has more ads now than how I remember it though. This is only the archival site though so our layout doesn't quite look the way it's suppose to.

We also made this site:
Bura's Adoption Agency - I'd probably say it's the one that's most put together, design-wise. But it's a Dragonball Z sprite site. We screen captured the little characters when we played Legacy of Goku, and Legacy of Goku II on Game Boy Advance on the computer.

Saiyan Princess - 
This site was a site dedicated to girls of DBZ. Probably one of my favorite layouts.

Anyway, that was a recollection of memories, not to mention, it did give me a few laughs. I think if I were to start up site building again, I could do a lot better job of it now than back then. But a lot of editing goes on in web site building. For me, HTML and CSS start looking like math equations if I work on it for too long, then I just want to leave it alone and have a snack.

Editing: A relationship, a person even

As an outsider looking into the window of my parents' relationship, one can say their relationship needs to be edited. Is it the way my ma talks? (more like screams) or the how my pa doesn't let anyone explain their actions? How do we know how to edit or 'fix' a person? What does it mean to fix someone anyway?

I was talking to a co-worker once. He told me if I was looking for a boyfriend (which I wasn't) to find a boy who needs fixing, then fix him up. Of course, I asked "What do you mean?" my co-worker responded "His appearance."

Is that all it is? I think not. It's a lot deeper than that.

I think as a person, we are who we are. We can change the person's surface but we can't change the person. However, we can change the perception of how we choose to see a person. For instance, my ma is annoying, loud, over bearing, extremely nosy, etc. But if I disregard all that and realize that she is just a really over protective mother. It's not so frustrating anymore because you know why. In order to understand other people, you have to understand yourself first.

So really, we are making edits to ourselves. To be better people. To grow. To understand.

Maybe next time in an argument with my ma, instead of getting frustrated or yelling, I should say "You need to edit your way of thinking. I'm not how you think I am."

How I see it, people are like drafts of beautiful work. People are not perfect, people make mistakes and they just make edits to themselves along the way. Isn't that how we learn? We are constantly editing ourselves to become better people.