Category: Uncategorized

I have WoW running beautifully under Wine (far better than it does on my laptop). All thanks to The Limitless Power of Community. (I just had to download a few drivers, set up opengl, and override ubuntu’s refusal to let me edit xorg.conf (same as XF86Config). After that, the only challenge was changing WoW’s resolution, but that’s what editing config files is for. This takes me back to my childhood. =)

Yay, screw MS.

It actually installed with almost no problems, It even ran, but painfully slowly. They recommended using opengl instead of direct3d in the WoW config file, but when that happens, WoW can’t locate my 3d acceleration (“World of Warcraft was unable to start up 3D acceleration”). It feels like I’m so close, I don’t want to give up. But I have no idea what to do next. Hmm, check versions of software and possibly post to winehq…

Since I can’t find my old windows CDs and remain resistant to supporting MS, l’m going to try installing WoW via Linux & WINE. Wish me luck.

I went to a green drinks this evening, with my “new” favorite co-worker (also about to leave the agency, not her choice. Sweet monkey jesus, being my friend must be a sure sign of a career about to take a nose dive). It was fun, I was the first one to ask a question. The topic was water issues in chicago, and I asked what I thought was a really straight forward question: How much stormwater does the chicago sewer system handle (answer, 36″ / year), how much water do we pull out of lake michigan (answer 1.5 billion(?) gallons/year) and how much water gets pulled from lake michigan to “flush” the chicago river (answer unknown). They were unable to provide the answers in identical units as well. But it was an overall interesting talk. I didn’t learn much from it, but it was interesting to hear the issues for another time. Much the same information, in less detail, as one of my chicago conservation corps trainings.

Margo and Joan (a couple of neighbors of mine, whom I had met at prior green drinks, but not realized they lived so close). Sweet people. And the first thing they said was “Oh, you wanted to know apples and apples, and they gave you apples and oranges.” I like them. They’re good people. They gave me a ride home (in an SUV). Fun stuff.

I worked out this morning. Then I made up for every calorie burned at breakfast. Typical.

Yeah, I was having trouble keeping up with LJ (I don’t see why, it’s not like I have hundreds of subscriptions…. Oh wait, I do) so adding a regular diet of news hasn’t helped matters. Especially since I stopped reading the news at work. I need to trim my intake again, and having done that in the past, there’s not really any non-painful trimming to be done. Sad.

I just caught up to J K Rawlins. This book is better than some of the preceding ones. Though who could read it and not see the repeated, if not completely unambiguous foreshadowing of Snape’s loyalty, I don’t know.

People ask me from time to time where I’m from. I usually tell them that has a complicated answer, and the typical follow up is “Well, where’s home?” Typically I respond “I don’t have one.”

But in the taxi heading over to chateau d’ and , I had another thought. I have many homes. With that interpretation, it’s literally true that I don’t have *one*, so I wasn’t precisely wrong before. But whether home is where the heart is, or it’s the place where when you have to go there, they have to let you in, I have multiple homes. And that is a vastly more uplifting answer.

I still don’t know what I want to do, which makes the path forward considerably less clear:

There are so many things one can do that are ‘environmental jobs’.

One can work in R&D…
• …on technology, figuring out how to make the next new wizbang gadget that will get you to work, consuming only dung and producing sparkly fresh pixie dust.
• …on ecology, monitoring the state of things as they are. Figuring out the relationships between different organisms and the functioning of ecosystems
• …on policy evaluation, figuring out what the implications of current policy are, and based on some set of criteria, what the optimal outcomes are.

One can work in implementation…

• …policing the behavior of the individuals currently following or not following policy.
• …helping corporations clean up themselves and their reputations.
• …working to educate and inform. Being a cheerleader for sustainability.
• …implementing systems to praise the worthy and/or condemn the unworthy

I think the ones that really appeal to me are policy evaluation and helping corporations clean up their acts and reputations. Additionally, I really want a good reason to keep up on the dung to pixie dust converters. And then there’s the actual activities I want to do a combination of talking to people, dealing with significant analytical challenges, and playing a heavy advisory role.

Sounds like consulting to me. And sounds like some sort of environmental MBA type degree. (there’s an environmental management program like 10 minutes walk from my office, which fills this description pretty nicely. And they offer a part time program as well. Only about $45k to see it all the way through…)