Thursday, January 22, 2009

It takes a community to make a calendar

I was going to write about the sorry state of community calendars in Windsor - those sad "please submit your event two weeks in advance" calendars that are online but done so in such a way that there is no way to easily add them to a personal online calendar, on the web, on your your pc or mac, or to your cell phone. (I'm looking at *you* CBC Windsor and AM800). Sadly, it appears that there once was a Google driven Community Calendar provided by The City of Windsor but it looks like they've started using something a less functional and pretty.

But after doing some searching around, I was surprised to find a growing number of local calendars on Google Calendar.

So you are going to have to make your own community calendar starting with these:

Buying Local Foods... : Local Food Events :
Arts Council - Windsor & Region (ACWR) :
Detroit River Canadian Cleanup Environmental Events :
Windsor Essex Community Supported Agriculture :

And may I present, The 4-0 Wonderland Calendar as well:

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

E10 - Where to buy ethanol blend gasoline

I am well aware of the problems of using food for fuel but there is still merit in using an ethanol blend of gasoline. After a bit of digging around online, I found a couple sources who work together to provide ethanol gasoline blends produced from Ontario corn: UPI and Sunoco.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Thanks Jennifer 8 - now all I want is to order some Chinese food

Some quick (and thus, error-prone) counts from the Windsor and Area Yellow Pages.

# of McDonald's Restaurants: 10
# of Burger King Restaurants: 11
# of Wendy's : 4
# of KFCs: 7
# of Chinese restaurants: 45

I wanted to do a quick tally of the local restaurant scene after watching Jennifer 8 Lee's TED Talk: Who was General Tso? and other mysteries of American Chinese food. I recommend watching it as its fascinating food history.

(We have our own history with Chinese food as almost every small town in Canada that can support a restaurant has a Chinese restaurant as a result of our own immigration policies.)

Near the end of the talk, Lee makes the case that unlike the centralized uniformity of the fast food franchises, Chinese restaurants ac hived their similarity independently by self-organization. Unlike the Microsofts of the restaurant landscape, Chinese restaurants are like Linux - adapting to local tastes and customs while being both ubiquitous and largely anonymous.

Now I want dim sum something fierce.