Elemental

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What caught my eye today, January 14th:

• PR Squared: “What I Wish My New Employee Knew” – I particularly like “Barring a huge project or crisis, we don?t want you working that late; it doesn?t impress us, it makes us question your efficiency.” Hear, hear
• The war on hot air – Mysogynist comments re: Ferraris aside, King seems to be a voice of reason in an increasingly hysterical debate. Book duly added to the (ever growing) wishlist…
• WWF – WWF, Abu Dhabi unveil plans for sustainable city – Move over Dongtan, here comes Masdar…
• Hodgepodge of thoughts on individual choices and air travel – No Impact man’s thoughts on air travel and how to see the world once rather than often (a topic close to my heart). The No Impact Man experiment is now over, but the blog continues. Worth poking through the archives while we wait for the book…
• New year, new blog – Matthew’s trying a “new” approach to blogging – shorter and more often. Good stuff.
• RSA – Carbon Limited – Personal Carbon trading – Carbon [Un]limited – The Language of Carbon Trading – Max Boykoff and Linda Rost debate the semantics of carbon trading and personal allowances. First in a series, Max starts with defining 4 contingent factors that shape how media coverage has influenced public engagement on climate change, and vice versa.
• ?Landmark? License Issued for Wave-Energy Project – “The Makah Bay project will consist of 4No. 250kW patented steel wave-energy-conversion ?AquaBuOYs? 3 miles offshore, a direct-current underwater transmission cable to the shore station and a short, 12kV transmission cable connecting with the grid
• CIBSE gets go-ahead for EPC accreditation push – Building – CIBSE’s LCC’s expected to top-up in March to become EPC assessors.

mel starrs News Abu Dhabi, air travel, Linda Rost, Makah Bay, Max Boykoff, media coverage, New Year\'s Day, RSA - Carbon Limited, steel wave-energy-conversion

Back to blogging for the New Year.  A few changes around the site.  I now have an amazon store which can be accessed at the sidebar and here – feel free to shop til you drop.

I also have implemented a del.icio.us plug-in which you might already have noticed.  If you also use del.icio.us, you can tag items for my attention for:melstar73, for instance, books you think I should be selling in the store.

I’ve also switched off intense debate, as I couldn’t get the comments to show in the sidebar, plus no-one else is using it yet. Any comments made on it have been transferred over the old system.

I’m still working on tagging up all the old posts and I have a few more things on my to do list, but things are feeling a lot cleaner and organised.

I’m trying out a blog post a day again, to try to finally clear my backlog, since I’m semi-incommunicado and can’t react to news stories with the speed of, say, Phil, nor am I in a position to put together really well thought out and argued pieces, like for instance, Casey. Come March, things might return to normal…

mel starrs Uncategorized housekeeping del.icio.us, New Year\'s Day

 edit: this is a bit of an experiement yet.  As I managed to update my January posts with new tags and categories today, they got tagged too, as I installed Auto Social.  I’ll turn it off again.  Also, the descriptions are abbreviated – must learn to stick to the delicious word count. So ignore the first 10 items (unless you want last year’s news…)

What caught my eye today, January 2nd:

• They work for you – MP’s answering your questions –
• Leeds best for recycling? –
• Do you know where true south is? –
• Eco-Hobbit house in Wales –
• Intranets – 16 golden rules –
• Housekeeping –
• Learning from BedZed –
• RIBA report on Smart PFI published –
• A new year – a new sustainability checklist… –
• More RSS love… –
• Why The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Ruining Your Business – Interesting piece on how confidence and competence are inversely inter-related. The essence of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge.” Studies have shown that the most incompetent individuals are the
• Engineers without borders UK – We are a student-led charity that focuses on removing barriers to development using engineering. Our programmes provide opportunities for young engineers to learn about technology’s role in development. By taking part in our activities, and with the suppo
• Auto Social Wordpress plugin – This plugin enables you to have your posts submitted automatically to delicio.us.
• Social bookmarks – Social Bookmarks is a WordPress plugin that adds a list of XHTML compliant graphic links at the end of your posts that allow your visitors to easily submit them in a number of different social bookmarking sites (more than 50 sites are supported).
• Absolutely delicious complete tools collection – Awesome list of stuff to do with delicious. I’m hoping to clean up all the broken links and tidy up my tagging by the time I’ve worked my way through the list.
• Postalicious – I’m trying out this plug-in in an effort to publish my del.icio.us feeds on a daily basis. Hopefully it will look pretty and do everything I want it to…

mel starrs News Leeds, New Year\'s Day, United Kingdom, wales

A bit early to be calling it a day for Xmas, but I am currently up to my eyeballs in learning Spanish – I have homework to do and everything!

Normal service will resume in the New Year; expect blogging to begin again on Monday 7th January.  I am endeavouring to clear out all my drafts with another “post a day” exercise for January and possibly February (found some more items lurking in my Gmail, Google Reader and del.icio.us inboxes).  Next year I might even make it back to blogging “real time”.

Feliz Navidad!

mel starrs Uncategorized Christmas, Google, Housekeeping, Merry Xmas, New Year\'s Day

As you can see, if you are not one of my 50 odd subscribers by RSS (at last folks seem to be catching onto the joy of RSS), I’ve changed the look of the blog (again). If you are one of my 50 odd subscribers, thank you and please stop by and have a poke at the new look blog.

I’m much happier with this look. As always, let me know if there’s anything wonky going on (the black text on blue background in my last incarnation was not a good look.

It’s a bit early to be talking of New Year resolutions and the like. However, now I have all the fun of NaBloPoMo behind me, I might just let the blog coast for a wee bit before embarking on a similar exercise come January, in an effort to finally rid myself of all the drafts in the bucket. The problem with writing a post a day is that it tends to generate ever more topics for discussion. So whilst I do some more tinkering, I’ll be thinking hard about BREEAM, BIM, M&A activity, job titles and the future of the workplace.

(edit: I managed to post this as a page instead of a post first go – yikes, too tired to think straight – a blog hiatus may be in order – sorry if things go quiet for a bit, but then any time I’ve threatened that in the past, a flurry of posts ensues.  Hmmm)

(edit#2: in a blinding show of incompetence I’ve converted all my categories to tags.  Whilst this means I have a lovely tag cloud to the side now, I have also made most of my posts ‘uncategorised’.  Yikes.  I’m going to have to go through and do some relabelling.  Bear with me – it may take some time)

mel starrs Uncategorized Housekeeping, New Year\'s Day

::via Green Building Press
The EA (Environment Agency) have published a guide for developers (pdf, 90 pages):

The EA guide concentrates on issues outside the building – from the building envelope to the site boundary. It has more than a passing resemblance to BREEAM with issues broken down in very similar categories.

I would recommend it to those of us who have come to sustainability via the buildings route rather than an environmental engineering route (seems to be the main two camps I have come across in the land of BREEAM).

One question arises as a result of this – are we in danger of getting bogged down by all this guidance or is the cumulative effect a good one? I can think of at least 3 other checklists or guidance documents which cover similar ground. Of course by covering similar issues in slightly different ways, the probability of implementation might increase, as what resonates with one person or team may be alien to another.

Other checklists which might be of interest:

• Constructing Excellence Sustainability Checklists
• OGC (Office of Government Commerce) Procurement Guide 11 Sustainability (pdf, 29 pages)
• TCPA (Town and Country Planning Association) Sustainable Energy by Design (pdf, 52 pages)

Know of any others? Please feel free to leave a comment or email me and I’ll update this list.

mel starrs Uncategorized BREEAM, checklists, EA, Environment Agency, environmental engineering, Green Building Press, New Year\'s Day, Office of Government Commerce, Sustainability, Town and Country Planning Association