Now that we’ve got Monty-the-dog, we don’t have space for a big real tree. So we thought we’d create one to hang on the wall. After a week of making, it’s now hanging in the lounge …

If people are interested I’ll post a description of how I made it, including photos along the way. But, as a hint, the main parts are acrylic paint, a 30″x20″ canvas, a string of fairy lights, a cardboard box and half a roll of sellotape. Enjoy!

The roundabout at the bottom of the road had a makeover a few months ago. We didn’t realise that the time, but the up-market Hotel on the Park a few blocks away then kindly decided to sponsor a large Christmas Tree on it. And add lots of bright red lights. It was a most lovely festive surprise. Best wishes to all at the Park for your thoughtfulness.

(You can see where they got the idea and colour scheme from … here’s a shot of the front of the Hotel.)

I’ve just had a great day off: started with full English breakfast with Mike in town, then doing some techy work on the video display system in church, then going to see Jo + John in Birmingham, seeing their new office, and then having lunch at good pub. Their Winter Tale dark ale was sweet and very drinkable. By the time we’d chatted after that we needed a latte/mocha on Harborne High St, before heading home. And the kids cooked for us, as we picked them up from the station.

The only slight disappointment was that we’d run out of time to visit Sharon McSwiney’s studio in Bransford, just off the M5 on the way home. We saw some of her decorative metalwork at the Cheltenham Craft Market on Saturday, and were keen to see more as we want to replace an old painting in the living room. I’ll need another day off …

(This pic is one of her recent creations. Wish I could create like that!)

Reading the Fairtrade Foundation’s newsletter, I noticed

All espresso-based drinks sold in Starbucks in the UK are Ireland are now Fairtrade.

Good news! I can now relax my boycott of Starbucks … though I still will prefer to find independent coffee shops, as the taste is likely to be better. Not that I’m often in a coffee shop other than the one at work.

It also notes that Morrisons’ ground and roast coffee is also all now Fairtrade. Good for them too, but there’s no Morrisons near us.

Looks strange so far, but see more pictures and the fully story at iconeye, and you’ll see its brilliance.

The Times have published their list of the 100 Best Films of the Decade. We watch a lot of films, so here’s a challenge.

First off, we’ve not heard of the top film Hidden (Cache), but between us we reckon we’ve seen about 30 of the rest. There are a number of non-English films, which is good, but we’re not keen on having to read subtitles for long, so that mostly counts them out.

With a bit of thought, I’d have expected to see Michael Clayton, Blood Dimaond, Shrek, March of the Penguins, The Last Samaurai, The Prestige, Wall-E on the list. And, it might not be a film, but the best TV drama from (part of) the decade must be The West Wing.

But this list is a great reminder that we should get round to seeing Lantana (91), In the Loop (81), Monsters, Inc. (71), There will be Blood (63), Syriana (40), Man on Wire (23), United 93 (19) and of course Hidden (Cache) (1) despite it probably having sub-titles.

Funny and pointed: Buy Nothing (read all the way down to get most of the funny stuff).

According to GOOD, where I saw this:

The effort comes from the simple insight that over the holidays we end up getting—and giving—tons of useless stuff. (Thanks, grandma, that Snow White figurine is lovely…) Green Thing even did a survey, which found that 96 percent of people have gotten a useless gift at some point. This stuff, of course, requires earth’s precious resources to make, yet most of it ends up as waste in landfills, junkyards, or a quick-to-be-forgotten box in the basement.

Buy Nothing reflects one of Green Thing’s seven sustainable actions, “stick with what you got“—the idea that our purchases are often the product of advertising and peer pressure, rather than genuine need, as we often forget to appreciate and use what we already own. The campaign features a dozen clever, irreverent testimonials by celebrities—from indie bands like We Are Scientists to actors like Sadie Frost—all vowing to buy Nothing.

From Harder, Wetter, Faster, Stronger: Bad News in Climate Science over at GOOD:

So everything we thought we knew from the IPCC’s (Nobel Prize winning!) Fourth Assessment Report of climate science? Well, it’s all worse. This week, a group of 26 climatologists (including 14 IPCC members) released The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science “to synthesize the most policy-relevant climate science published since the close-off of material for the last IPCC report.” Basically, it tells us all what’s been figured out since the last report went to press. The findings are none too encouraging.

On basically every front, the most severe, most pessimistic scenarios laid out in the Fourth Assessment Report are being realized, or worse. The 13 inch average sea level rise predicted by the IPCC by 2100 has been upped to 33 inches, which is roughly equal to the one meter upper limit laid out in the 2007 report. (The new upper limit is a map-changing two meters.) The Diagnosis also finds that arctic sea ice melt is 40 percent greater than was predicted just a couple years ago.

So what’s the takeaway for Copenhagen? The authors write that “if global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2°C above pre-industrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly.” It’s worth noting that a 2°C rise still condemns the world to some pretty dire impacts, according to the IPCC itself. So we’ve got between five and 10 years max to turn this ship around and avoid the very worst fates of climate change.

Below are some of the report’s key findings:

Surging greenhouse gas emissions: Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40 percent higher than those in 1990. Even if global emission rates are stabilized at present-day levels, just 20 more years of emissions would give a 25 percent probability that warming exceeds 2oC. Even with zero emissions after 2030. Every year of delayed action increase the chances of exceeding 2oC warming.

Recent global temperatures demonstrate human-based warming: Over the past 25 years, temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.190C per decade, in every good agreement with predictions based on greenhouse gas increases. Even over the past ten years, despite a decrease in solar forcing, the trend continues to be one of warming. Natural, short-term fluctuations are occurring as usual but there have been no significant changes in the underlying warming trend.

Acceleration of melting of ice-sheets, glaciers and ice-caps: A wide array of satellite and ice measurements now demonstrate beyond doubt that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate. Melting of glaciers and ice-caps in other parts of the world has also accelerated since 1990.

Rapid Arctic sea-ice decline: Summer-time melting of Arctic sea-ice has accelerated far beyond the expectations of climate models. This area of sea-ice melt during 2007-2009 was about 40 percent greater than the average prediction from IPCC AR4 climate models.

Current sea-level rise underestimates: Satellites show great global average sea-level rise (3.4 mm/yr over the past 15 years) to be 80 percent above past IPCC predictions. This acceleration in sea-level rise is consistent with a doubling in contribution from melting of glaciers, ice caps and the Greenland and West-Antarctic ice-sheets.

Sea-level prediction revised: By 2100, global sea-level is likely to rise at least twice as much as projected by Working Group 1 of the IPCC AR4, for unmitigated emissions it may well exceed 1 meter. The upper limit has been estimated as 2 meters sea-level rise by 2100. Sea-level will continue to rise for centuries after global temperature have been stabilized and several meters of sea level rise must be expected over the next few centuries.

Delay in action risks irreversible damage: Several vulnerable elements in the climate system (e.g. continental ice-sheets. Amazon rainforest, West African monsoon and others) could be pushed towards abrupt or irreversible change if warming continues in a business-as-usual way throughout this century. The risk of transgressing critical thresholds (“tipping points”) increase strongly with ongoing climate change. Thus waiting for higher levels of scientific certainty could mean that some tipping points will be crossed before they are recognized.

The turning point must come soon: If global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2oC above pre-industrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly. To stabilize climate, a decarbonized global society—with near-zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases—need to be reached well within this century. More specifically, the average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink to well under 1 metric ton CO2 by 2050. This is 80 to 90 percent below the per-capita emissions in developed nations in 2000.

This has got to be one of the craziest ideas in the world. Surely my finances are private to me. Why would I want to share anything of my personal finances with anyone else, especially someone I have never met on the Internet? Well this is where things are changing …

Zopa is a nice bank that doesn’t have any of its own capital, but instead connects people together. Its been going a while and people seem to like it. Makes a change from all the negative stuff about banking. Maybe banking could be nice?

I first heard about this form Reid’s post over at The Bureau of Crazy, who it saw it mentioned in the film Us Now, which he urges people to see “if you want to understand what social media is doing to our society.”

So I checked it out, and it all looks good. You name the interest rate that you’re willing to lend at, and then Zopa manage the rest, including checking credit ratings for borrowers, and chasing any defaulters if that happens. We’ve decided to give it a go and lend So now all I need to do is just need to get round to filling in the right forms …

A quick techie note, to help others that would also like the following combination:
using site-specific browsers (so you can have GMail, GCal or GDocs as separate ‘apps’ living in their own windows that don’t get in the way of other browsing)
using Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
wanting to use offline access to GMail, GCal or GDocs

The most popular SSB technology is Fluid, that itself uses WebKit as found in Safari 4. So far, Google haven’t provided a version of Gears (the technology underpinning offline access) that works with Safari 4.

But there is a workaround: use Mozilla’s less mature SSB, Prism, and then hack around with the Gears installer following Westacular’s instructions.

Having finally found the solution to this particular issue, I’ll probably find that Google produce a Fluid-compatible Gears in the next week …