Green Taxi

Heading to Tokyo for the week. There is only so much reading and sleeping that can be done on a 10 hour flight. And, I hate relying on United for decent movies. Thus, I resort to my pre-flight selections downloaded to my iPhone.

I am adding a season’s worth of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” to my iPhone. Also going to add “A Serious Man” so that I can catch up on my Oscar nominees.

Anyone have any other favorite movie or TV Shows they have watched off of iTunes recently that I can add to my playlist?

Please check out the redesign we did on Basketball.org. I’d love to hear any feedback anyone has, good or bad.

We moved the site over to the Wordpress Thesis Theme, which we continue to use more and more. Thesis is really an incredible theme and has a massive following and support group. If you have built more than one Wordpress site, I suggest you check out Thesis for any new sites or upgrades.

Besides the theme change and update of the design, we also launched several new content sections and technology additions. They include, but are not limited to:

• Skills Section – This is a growing directory of how to type pages for learning correctly basketball skills that those learning the game can use. For instance, to start off, we released a skills page on How to Shoot a Basketball
• Drills Section – A list of both team and individual drills organized by category (ie. Rebounding Drills) and age (Youth, Middle School, High School)
• Courts finder – We are continuously adding courts to this section, we you can browse or search for local courts to play at.
• Foursquare – We included Foursquare into the individual Courts pages quite heavily. Viewers can see who the “Mayor” is of that court, tips from other users on that court, and also who it presently at the court (who has checked in within the last 3 hours).
• Facebook – Besides the fan box on the side, where our Basketball page continues to grow rapidly, we also removed the Wordpress comments to use Facebook comments instead for blog and other discussion-type articles. It is a great viral tool as any comments left can optionally be pushed to the users Facebook profile as well.
• Youtube and Flickr – We have created groups and playlists within these video and photo sites to feed the individual Courts visual media sections. You can find these within individual Courts pages.
• Gear Section – We used Amazon to embed an affiliate store within the site, providing full access to any basketball related equipment

Lastly, we have started a monthly mailing list for Basketball.org, where we will review the updates done each month, recap top stories, and add in other tidbits of stats, quotes, and coaches tips. This newsletter is highly recommended for the casual basketball fan or player who may not want to follow the blog RSS on a daily basis, but still wants to keep basketball flowing through their blood and inbox.

Please let me know what you think!

600 frames per second in HD. Very cool.

According to the NewScientist, Male hummingbirds impress mates by diving at high speed, then pulling out at 10 Gs, more than fighter pilots can take.

As they speed towards the ground, they travel nearly 400 times their body length each second.

Want to make a few extra bucks by doing less of anything? Yeah, who doesn’t! How about using your lights less or your heater less?

Well, try out MyEmissionsExchange.com (they also have branded themselves as MyEex.com – a smart domain move), and you can earn carbon credits that they will automatically purchase from you and then deposit directly the cash into your Paypal account just for reducing your carbon footprint. The calculations are based on your monthly electric and heating bills and compared to your previous year.

We have seen companies and corporations able to benefit from the carbon credit market for years now, but it has never been easily accessible to individuals. With MyEex.com, we now have access to the carbon credit market (not necessarily to trade, but to benefit from based on reduction) and its economic benefits.

How does the Carbon Credit Market work?

Companies, especially industrial companies, are required to meet certain emission requirements every year. If they use more than their quota they receive government punishment such as to pay a bunch of taxes. If they are not able to reduce their emissions to their required levels, they are allowed to purchase carbon credits from the market – other people who have reduced more than they were required.

How does MyEex.com work?

My Emissions Exchange requires you to enter in your monthly electric and heating bills for the last year to get started. You can either input it manually or send them a copy of your bills. They will then verify those numbers are correct and you’re off and running. Add in your monthly bills each month and as the year goes on and you reduce your energy usage compared to the previous year, you earn money based on the amount of carbon credits you have reduced for the year.

It is very simple and I do not see why anyone would not sign up. I moved mid-2009 and thought it would be tough to find my previous energy bills, but sure enough, logging on to So Cal Gas and Southern California Edison, they both listed my usage from my current and previous apartments.

It took about 10 minutes in total to sign up, dig up my records, and input them. One more source of small, yet fulfilling, income never hurts in this economy!