Go Green 2009

Last evening I stopped by Good Stuff Eatery to try out a burger after networking at an event behind Capitol Hill.  I thought of it as a spruced up Five Guys, where all you get is burgers and fries..  their specialty.

Anyway, I placed my order and waited for it.  A short while later, I got a great cheese burger and receipt that came with a 6 cent charge.

It was labeled “Enviro Charge”.  What’s this about?

So… I asked Top Chef’s Spike Mendelson about it.  He happened to be there.  He said it was less than 1% of the charge and that it covered their use of recycled materials.

My Receipt with an Enviro Charge

The reason he had it on receipt instead of pricing it into the food was that he wanted to make sure that people saw what they were paying for.  He said it was pretty common out west.  And if you were anti… Earth, he’d refund it back.

Pretty common out west?  That was the only part I didn’t like.  Not a bad idea frankly.  A gentle reminder to give a hand in preserving this world, who couldn’t use that?  And less than a percent of the overall costs, it certainly makes sense to me.  Every little bit helps and we want to make sure doing our part.

For 2009, we will finally move our servers to a reputable carbon neutral hosting company and reduce the use of paper by getting rid of paper proposals & invoices out of the business entirely.  We are almost there.  We just have a few clients to convince that paying online is far better for them, and subsequently better the environment, than expecting us to invoice them through snail mail.  I mean really, shuffling paper across the country to do business sounds almost as antiquated as say…  the phone book.   Looking forward to seeing less of this paper stuff in ‘09.

The only question left, is what are you going to do in 2009 to help preserve this planet?  That’s seems like a big question but really it isn’t.  Just start with something small and go from there.  See you in 2009.

Google Chrome

Today on Google’s Blog, it was announced that Google will launch in 100 countries a brand spankin’ new browser and it’s called…
drum roll please…

Google Chrome

Aw yeah!  Aren’t we all excited?  Well for us website designers in DC, well at least this one that is, not so much.

“So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”

Lets translate the subtext – we’re doing this here at Google, because we can.  We own the world’s largest market share in online search services, lets get the last mile going with a spiffy browser.

“We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.”

Well, it is interesting to note that they making all of their code open source.  We’ll see how this plays out.  In the meantime, here’s yet another browser us web guys are going to have to test for… and surely there will be bugs.

Official Google Blog: A fresh take on the browser