Change the World Wednesday – 30th Jan

The previous week’s challenge got extended. I attacked my kitchen shelves as well.

You’ll notice on the second top shelf all my herbs, etc are in recycled olive jars; and on the next shelf down, stocks are in a used margarine container. On the top shelf there are chillies in olive oil in a recycled olive oil bottle, not easily recognisable but they are there, and boy are they hot (they’ve been in the oil for two years).

The list is no further ahead (last week’s challenge). I can’t think of anything to add.

My new fridge was supposed to arrive today after two more aborted attempts, but arrangements failed… again. The gods don’t like me!

My neighbour had to work late, so the pick-up wasn’t available. We have set Thursday as the day.

I hate depending on other people, it’s no wonder I need so much coffee.

On with this week’s CTWW challenge.

Hmmm, this week’s challenge is a guest post from Kristina Ross.

Your mission is this: digitize your correspondence. So much of what we would have put in the mail ten years ago is now more than doable with our bevy of technological advancements. Of course, you’re probably well aware and already taking full advantage of the ability to get in touch with a text, an e-mail or tweet. But think about where else you could avoid using paper; scanning and sending documents is easier than ever now that e-sign is a veritable resource for signatures, and interactive notes can actually be more effective over the Web with easy access to streaming videos, music and images.

Click the CTWW image for the full challenge.

Well, this one is easy for me. I simply don’t.

I don’t receive mail, I don’t send mail, I don’t scan, I don’t print.

The only time I receive stuff is when my bank in New Zealand send me a new debit card (I don’t use a credit card, credit cards are for fools), and then they send it by courier. That happens once every two years.

Mozilla Thunderbird

All my correspondence is by email. It has been since 1994, the early days of the net when I had my own travel business I made a decision, if a company is not innovative enough to use the internet, they’re not innovative enough to be of service to me. In fact, my refusal to trade with travel product suppliers unless they used the internet led to several switching on to the net. Travel product suppliers have a thing called a ‘wholesale tariff’ which is often a weighty document of up to 100 pages which could take three weeks in the post, or overnight via ftp, and sometimes I wanted that document ‘now’! Faxing docs like this was simply too expensive.

So my endeavours to reduce the postal clutter have been in place, not necessarily for environmental reasons, for many years; and similarly my use of the net for all correspondence.

I used to use Thunderbird as my email client, but lately I have fallen by the way of using cloud-based such as gmail and yahoo. I know from experience that this is bad, because my gmail account was lost when my Google account disappeared, along with all my correspondence, email addresses, etc. I now use gmail only for collecting emails that will be deleted shortly, like notifications of comments and new posts. I should have learned my lesson.

Let that be a lesson for all. The cloud-based systems are all too convenient, until something goes wrong. The fiasco over Mega-Uploads is a fine example where thousands of legitimate businesses lost their documents when the American authorities bullishly closed the site. With cloud-based systems you are not in control.

Off on a tangent a bit, but I think the warning is pertinent if you use them for all your correspondence.

Challenge met.