Yesterday our wonderful friend Rin held the first of a series of three workshops on how to build a 10 x 10 ft permaculture garden at our house. We already grow some food, so the workshop transformed an area on the side of the garden that wasn’t being used (part of it was still grass) into a lovely new self-contained vegetable garden.

I learned about sheet mulching, no-dig gardening, crop rotations, and much much more. If you want to start growing food, or if you’ve been growing for years and want some new ideas, I can’t recommend Erin’s courses enough if you get a chance – she’s an amazing farmer, growing food for 5 families in a typical front and back-yard house in East Van.

From start to finish (raw materials to planted garden): The 10 x 10 permaculture garden in photos.

(Actually the space we had was 8 x 12, so we adapted the design a little!)

Happy growing…

As the UN climate talks continue in Bali, and many countries continue trying to make progress on international agreements on dealing with climate change, Canada’s conservative government seems to have a different plan – do the bidding of big oil and sabotage all progress at the climate talks, contrary to the wishes of most Canadians. So far has Canada slipped, under the current government, from its former position as bastion of international diplomacy at the Montreal negotiations two years ago, that at the weekend Canada won the “fossil of the day” award, for doing the most to block progress at the negotiations.

It’s time to make some noise, Canada: head on over to avaaz.org and tell Harper to stop blocking the UN climate talks. It only takes a minute.

Once you’ve done that, read on for more contact details. A phone call is worth a thousand emails…

read on

Google recently added Vancouver to Google Transit. This is extremely useful, as Translink‘s own trip planner is so bad as to be almost unusable. However, one of my friends noticed something which I thought was rather amusing…

The system appears to think it is possible to walk on water.

Amazing.

Here’s a small taste of what I’ve been getting up to at the weekends recently. Telemark skiing in the backcountry, staying at cabins without a chair lift in sight. This is still my first season skiing “free heel”, but I think it’s safe to say that I’m hooked.

Oh, and just for the record, no that is not me exclaiming “pow pow baby” in the audio.

As anyone who knows me probably knows already, I use Ubuntu and / or Debian Linux for all of my day to day computing now – and have done for almost three years – everything from word processing to presentations, web development and organising my campaign work on climate change, and it’s getting more user friendly every month.

One thing that’s always been a problem, specifically when working on website development, is the need to test them using Internet Explorer. For a long time I kept an old laptop to hand, running Windows 2000 for those moments when I needed to be 100% sure everything looked flawless in the browser we all love to hate.

Today I came across IEs For Linux and in a few minutes (most of which was download time) had IE 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0 running under wine – something I’ve tried to do before and failed.

The actual program is extremely neat – a set of scripts that configures wine for you, and downloads the necessary Internet Explorer components from Microsoft, setting everything up smoothly with shortcuts on your desktop to each version of Internet Explorer. Until firefox buries IE six feet under and the scourge of web developers is gone for good, this will be very useful.

Oh, and they’re even working on IE 7.