If you’re in Orlando next Tuesday, think about coming down to Devry for our monthly Adogo user group meeting. We have two presentations planned for the day, one on Continuous Integration using Cruise Control presented by Ryan Miller which I’m looking forward to. Ryan and his team are using CI when developing their ColdFusion and Flex projects, so it should be applicable to a large audience. I’ll be showing a how to create an Adobe Air application from start to finish that will integrate with Twitters API and show how to package this application up to install anywhere. Air and Twitter are both easy to get into, so if you’re curious it’ll be a good intro to how to work with both that might clear up a few questions.

If you’re waking up today and reading blog after blog about the environment, it’s probably due to today being Blog Action Day, an experiment where bloggers unite to write about a similar topic today. It’s a great way of both bringing focus to (according to the site) 12 million blog post reads, and bring quite a few people into some new ideas they haven’t heard before.

If you’re looking for one easy and cheap way to make a change in the amount of trash you generate, a compost heap is a good idea. This is something my family did all throughout my youth, but I didn’t keep it up as I left for college, thinking it would be impossible without a yard to do it in. But that’s not the case! Recently there has been a lot of talk about vermicomposting, composting with the aid of earth worms. No monumental scale is needed for this though like some items on amazon, and instead can be done with an old plastic container, a few worms, bedding, water and kitchen scraps for food. Try to make sure it fits the dimensions you’re planning on putting it of course. I’m thinking right under the sink will be a great place for this, and convenient for disposing of kitchen scraps. Just about any food waste can be added to a compost heap, except for a few special cases such as meat, milk and breads which may attract flies. The added bonus is of course you dispose of your trash in a more eco-friendly way and in addition gain very rich soil in the form of worm castings to use elsewhere.

One misconception I had was that any food scraps I threw away would just decompose in a landfill somewhere. This is only partially true. In order to decompose, oxygen is required but not always available in compressed landfills. In The World Without Us (great book by the way) Alan Weisman mentioned that some newspapers from the 1930’s are occasionally pulled from landfills even today due to this. If our food can be recycled easily enough at home it seems like an easy lifestyle change to make with minimal effort. Who’s willing to give it a shot?

Want to read more?
How to Make Your Own Worm Compost System on WikiHow
Compost Guide
Vermicompost at TreeHugger
Worm Composting Guide

Zen Habits has become one of my most looked forward to subscriptions lately. One of the most important things when reading a blog to me is that you either 1) learn something new or 2) have a call to action that hits close to home. Posts always come through with one of those, and usually two — calling for action and showing you how to do it. This month they launched an October Challenge where they put out the idea that if you do something consistently for 30 days it will become a habit.

So what habit am I trying to train? I’d like to consistently work on web projects, rather than just doing short spells on them “when I have time”. We all know that you only have time for something when you make it, so if I can get myself into the habit of making just 30 minutes a day to work on some web project (anything), then a month down the line I’m hoping it’ll be enough to carry on. To start off, I’m working my way through the Agile Development with Rails, doing the examples using Rails 2.0 preview release and the Blueprint CSS Framework for layout. This is probably the set of resources I’ll be using for my next project, assuming things go well here. Either way I’ll certainly get a better handle on both, while having a book at my disposal to fall back on. Dreamhost has Rails and SVN hosting, so at least I’ll have a place to post it as things come along.