Breathing Earth

Thought Provoking

Breathing Earth is a wonderful site showing the earth as births, deaths and emissions of CO2 keep increasing.
If you hover your mouse over a particular country, you get the stats on how often someone dies or is born in that country. For Sweden, the rate of births and deaths is exactly the same, 5.6 minutes.
Ireland roughly has two births to every one. That’s not counting how many immigrants come into the country every day.

Xdrive is back – No thanks

Tech

So I see from CNet News that Xdrive, the online storage company is back and offering 5Gb for free. My advice is to steer well clear of this baby. I had a free account during Xdrive’s first incarnation in 2001 thinking it could be cool to store many of the documents that I need before the era of large usb keys. I went on a round the world trip in early 2002 and in the middle of the trip, I got an email from Xdrive notifying me that they were closing down their service and gave me a short period to retrieve my files. Of course, that wasn’t possible when I was in the middle of my trip so my online files disappeared and I felt quite bitter about it afterwards because I lost access to some important documents. The bottom line is that I now use either my trusty usb stick or my yahoo briefcase account to store anything important where I need to remotely access them.