Scott Bush

Face­book (FB) recently enabled a pub­lic ver­sion of its users’ pro­file pages to be indexed by Google and other search engines. While this is a good thing in my opin­ion (it could pro­vide more detail in a web search for a par­tic­u­lar per­son), it’s worth review­ing what infor­ma­tion appears on that pub­lic pro­file page. To my knowl­edge, FB didn’t pub­li­cize this much so I’ve writ­ten a short tuto­r­ial here as I know most peo­ple have a FB account and this may be of use.

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There’s an upstairs loft area for seat­ing, but my favorite spot is some­where along the bar run­ning along the edge of the win­dowed wall. Music plays over the speak­ers, but it’s at a very rea­son­able vol­ume so you can still talk with friends or study with­out being both­ered by it. Another rea­son Trabant’s tops on my list? My first time in, Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Jump On It was play­ing. C’mon, great cof­fee and Mix-a-Lot? Perfect!

Eight per­cent. How’s that for a ratio of use­ful con­tent ver­sus other text in an e-mail? Many e-mails I receive have extremely involved sig­na­ture blocks (the con­tent auto­mat­i­cally appended to each mes­sage). When these same mes­sages only con­tain brief state­ments or ques­tions, the “signal-to-noise” ratio becomes very low. The eight per­cent fig­ure I cited is from a mes­sage today con­tain­ing a total of 909 char­ac­ters, only 76 of which weren’t part of that sig­na­ture block. Not all are that extreme (though some are prob­a­bly worse).

What’s the big deal? There is none, really. It’s more of an obser­va­tion of e-mail eti­quette. Cer­tainly, sig­na­tures are use­ful (I use (a tiny) one myself), espe­cially when you receive a for­ward or are added into a con­ver­sa­tion after the fact: they pro­vide con­tact info oth­er­wise not avail­able. But some peo­ple find it nec­es­sary to include a ridicu­lous amount of info: name (plus their full name?!); job title(s); address; phone, cell, fax, alter­nate fax; office hours; links to per­sonal web­sites or blog; a funny or pithy quote, etc. These bits are often wrapped in extrav­a­gant lines and columns of aster­isks, equal signs, or under­scores to “for­mat” every­thing. And that’s not all… don’t for­get the legalese about con­fi­den­tial­ity and intended recip­i­ents. My favorite addi­tion, though, are the admo­ni­tions to “con­sider the envi­ron­ment” before print­ing the received e-mail.

If your sig­na­ture con­tains some of this stuff… con­sider remov­ing it. Why? Most e-mails beget replies, which are in turn replied to, and all the sig­na­ture files snow­ball around small nuggets of actual con­ver­sa­tion until you end up with some 400kb mon­ster mes­sage. It’s a pain to review such mes­sages for those use­ful nuggets to see what hap­pened and when. Am I mak­ing a moun­tain out of a mole­hill? Prob­a­bly, but as some­one who rou­tinely must dig through such mes­sages, it’s worth stat­ing. It’d sure save me (and many oth­ers) some time and exasperation.

Not to men­tion the paper that’d be saved if some­one had to <gasp!> print that con­ver­sa­tion (after care­fully weigh­ing the envi­ron­men­tal impact, of course).

My wife and I just invested a few hun­dred dol­lars that we hope will give great returns… all sum­mer. Not exactly the “long-view” strat­egy for stocks, but it works for food. Specif­i­cally, organically-grown local pro­duce from a farm about ten miles from our house. We invested in community-supported agri­cul­ture, or CSA.

We both recently read Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food, whose suc­cinct tagline is “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I’d say it was eye-opening, but much of what it con­tained was stuff we already knew. In short: stay away from food that’s more a prod­uct of a lab than the earth. Much of the book talked about the ben­e­fits of eat­ing not just more veg­eta­bles, but veg­eta­bles that are grown organ­i­cally and to the extent pos­si­ble, locally. His rea­sons are not just tree-hugging hip­pie ones, either; he explains how giant, com­mer­cial farm­ing has reduced the potency of our pro­duce and why smaller, organic farms pro­vide bet­ter qual­ity food for us.

Lake For­est Park, the town adjoin­ing ours, has a Farmer’s Mar­ket on Sun­day after­noon, and we’ve been to Farmer’s Mar­kets in Edmonds and Everett for years (my dad and uncle sell fuch­sias and plants there) so we’re famil­iar with local pro­duce. Other than fresh-baked pas­tries or ket­tle corn, we’d just not bought much at the mar­kets. Since I’m a veg­e­tar­ian we already eat more veg­gies than most, but after read­ing In Defense of Food, our mind­set has changed. We’re “vot­ing with our dol­lars,” as the say­ing goes by com­mit­ting to 18 weeks’ worth of pro­duce from Grow­ing Wash­ing­ton. They’re a local grow­ing coop­er­a­tive that offers many pro­grams, includ­ing the weekly pro­duce box that we signed up for.

Begin­ning June 15 and run­ning through mid-October, we can chose from among eight dif­fer­ent crops—including eggs from truly free-range chickens—each week. On Sun­day we just stop by the LFP Farmer’s Mar­ket and pick up our box. Sure, it’s a lot of veg­gies but I think hav­ing pre-paid for them will help us eat more pro­duce. And that’s goal, right? (Or we can just share what we can’t get through with friends and family.)

As peo­ple try to get more healthy and as more and more “green” ini­tia­tives gain pop­u­lar­ity, I think we’ll see a rise in CSA (here are some facts on CSA). Yes, right now it is an elit­ist method of obtain­ing food, favored by those who can afford it and are edu­cated enough to know why the extra money is worth it. (A recent study by the Amer­i­can Dietetic Asso­ci­a­tion showed that college-educated women are most likely to enjoy a health­ier diet.) We can hope it will soon “trickle down” to mid­dle– and lower-income fam­i­lies. Diet really is one of those areas where a small invest­ment upfront can yield great sav­ings from bet­ter health.

So if you come by for din­ner this sum­mer, expect to have some good veg­gies and a salad.

For the fifth year in a row, I served as a “Team Leader” for Food Life­line dur­ing the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Let­ter Carrier’s annual food drive. As in years past, I had a lot of fun and enjoyed see­ing so many peo­ple who turned out to vol­un­teer, get­ting a lot of exer­cise mov­ing bags of donated gro­ceries, and being in the sun. Well, maybe I enjoyed that too much: I’ve got a nice sun­burned fore­head now!

In the rough eco­nomic cli­mate, I wasn’t sure what to expect as far as dona­tions. Would there be less food donated because bud­gets are tighter, or would folks give more because they know of the greater need? I shouldn’t have wor­ried; the com­mu­nity ser­viced by the North City Postal Sta­tion were amaz­ingly gen­er­ous! In the past three years I’ve worked the North City Postal Sta­tion, we’ve col­lected approx­i­mately one and a half semi-trailer’s worth of food (a trailer holds 22 totes, which are giant card­board boxes on pal­lets). This year, we filled two trail­ers and had two totes and six postal bins more… roughly 48 totes’ worth. What incred­i­ble generosity!

Ear­lier in the day we weren’t sure, though. The day’s divided into two shifts: 11am — 2:30pm, and 2:30 — 6pm. The first shift was mostly stand­ing around wait­ing for postal vehi­cles to arrive. There weren’t many, which could have meant that they weren’t get­ting filled with food early enough to come by and make a drop-off at the postal sta­tion mid-route. But the sec­ond shift was packed… we had as many as five postal vehi­cles lined up, all laden with food: cans of tuna, boxes of pasta and rice, jars of spaghetti sauce and apple sauce, bags of rice and beans, and bot­tles of sauces and salad dressings.

It was great to see so many return­ing vol­un­teers, some of whose names I actu­ally remem­bered from years past. It’s encour­ag­ing to see peo­ple of all ages, from 16-year-old high school­ers to an elderly lady who could only move a few bags at a time and all ages in between. Ser­vice is still impor­tant to many peo­ple in our com­mu­nity; for that I’m grateful.

The only draw­back to the day was the con­fu­sion at the end of the sec­ond shift when deal­ing with the extra food. Because we’d filled a sec­ond truck trailer and had more, get­ting it back to Food Lifeline’s ware­house was tricky. The dri­vers were all busy with equally-generous sta­tions through­out King County, but even­tu­ally we got every­thing in a third, smaller truck and sent back.

Thank you to everyone—the vol­un­teers at the postal sta­tion, the postal work­ers who brought the food in, the tire­less staff at Food Life­line man­ag­ing the logis­tics of the event (espe­cially Holly deal­ing with me on the two-way!), and the hun­dreds upon hun­dreds of fam­i­lies who donated—who helped to keep hunger at bay for their neighbors.