In Cary, an average household uses between 25,000 and 35,000 gallons of water a year. By fully adopting water-efficient products and practices, you can save approximately 30,000 gallons per year - enough to supply 150 homes with drinking water for an entire year!

You mean these water-efficient practices can not only help me save 100% of the water a single average household uses per year, but that amount of savings will then be enough to supply 150 other homes?!

I, for one, think we should commend those 150 other households for using less than 1% of the average, apparently forgoing bathing, and, by my calculations, only flushing the toilet 4 times a week.

CopyUnique is a utility I wrote to made it easy to copy a set of files into a single folder using sequential numbers as the new filenames. I use this all the time to put a series of ripped audio book MP3s into a folder on my MP3 player. Today's update adds the \m option to move files instead of copy them.

JC LineCount is another utility I wrote that counts the number of lines of source code in a directory tree. Today's update ended up being nearly a complete re-write that added a number of usability improvements. The folder text box now features autocompletion and all settings are remembered between uses, for example. It counts lines faster, too.

I updated both projects to use the 2.0 .NET Framework.

Today, I read that Blockbuster's on-line/store hybrid rental service is hiking prices 10-40%. I guess I really shouldn't be surprised that a company that charged $4.50 or so for two day DVD rentals for years would be sticking it to their customers yet again.

Let's contrast Blockbuster's repeated screw-the-customer behavior with Netflix. I signed up for Netflix maybe 18 months ago. They offer superior service through their excellent recommendation engine and I've never had a rate increase. In fact, six months ago I got an email saying they were lowering my monthly rate. I trust Netflix not to screw me over.

Blockbuster may think their battle with Netflix can be won with features or even prices, but they don't have a chance if their customers can't trust them.

Check out all the cold weather records set in 2007. It might be time to burn your carbon credits to stay warm.

Now Wikipedia has given me some backup as to why you should use serial commas. Here's who mandates usage of serial commas:

• United States Government Printing Office (used by government)
• Chicago Manual of Style (used by scholars)
• The Oxford Style Manual (used by scholars)
• The Council of Scientists Manual (used by scientists)
• American Medial Association Manual of Style (used by doctors)
• Strunk and White's Elements of Style (definitive reference used by many writers)

And here's who says not to use serial commas:

• The Times guidelines (used by Jayson Blair)
• AP Stylebook (used by the lowest common denominator media)
• The Economist guidelines (used by a weekly magazine that takes a month to read)

Who would you rather write like?

South Korean scientists have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene, a procedure which could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, officials said Wednesday.

In a side-effect, the cloned cats glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams.

That's one heck of side-effect! If curing genetic diseases doesn't work out, these guys are going to take the glow in the dark pet market by storm.

Last night, Scott Hurff and I launched a new site for ChannelAdvisor Labs called DSRWatch. This little site makes it easy for eBay sellers to check their Detailed Seller Ratings and get email alerts when there's a change.

We've been amazed by the rapid uptake. In only the past few hours, we've had over 200 eBay sellers sign up to get email alerts. Many times that number have looked up ratings on the web site. Quite a few retailer/eBay focused sites have mentioned DSRWatch and we're already getting lots of great feedback.

On the implementation side of this project, I developed the whole thing with .NET 3.5 and I'm really appreciating that decision. LINQ is the most important addition to this version of .NET and it made it effortless to interface the web site and Windows service with the database. LINQ has easily saved me a thousand lines of code. Thank you Anders, I'm very impressed.

Why don't you head over to www.dsrwatch.com now and see if you can become our 500th subscriber?

This research is particularly interesting for those of us who sit at a computer all day. After storing fat all day, it might be that evening exercise can only re-balance the scales instead of yielding a lot of benefits. Some standing up during the day might allow exercise to have a greater effect since it doesn't have to burn off each day's worth of rapid fat accumulation.

At Microsoft, I actually had a desk with a motor that would move from a sitting position to a standing position. I already loved that desk because it kept my defective hip from hurting; now it turns out it must have also helped me keep off some fat.

As more research like this comes out, more people spend their workdays at computers, the population gets fatter, and health care costs continue to rise, I think we'll see stand-up desks and even treadmill workstations become much more common. Now we need health insurance companies to offer incentives (lower rates or rebates) to companies and individuals that buck the standard desk and chair in favor of a healthier setup.

Utility computing - The web is evolving so quickly that startups can't afford to waste time doing things that don't differentiate them from competitors. Getting servers, configuring routers, and negotiating bandwidth contracts takes time away from actually building an application that can succeed in the market. Platforms like Amazon's EC2 (and S3, etc.) can provide exactly the amount of capacity needed at any moment, enabling startups to control costs and scale rapidly.

Social, social, social - Every tenth word spoken at the conference is "social". With Facebook's API and Google's OpenSocial being big news lately, everyone's talking about building social web apps. Tim O'Reilly stated a community and the content it generates is the barrier to entry that gives Web 2.0 companies a competitive advantage over challengers.

Great conference so far.. except for lunch.

The article is based on research by Jessica Reyes that argues the 1973 peak of lead exposure in the U.S. corresponds to the peak of violent crime in the early 90s. The idea is that people exposed to high levels of lead as children had a high propensity for violent crime during their early adulthood (when criminal activity is statistically greatest). The removal of lead from gasoline and paint following 1973 would then explain the rapid drop in violent crime in the mid-to-late 90s.

The idea that lead in the environment can affect our entire society by making a generation more prone to crime is pretty frightening. If true, it certainly raises questions about what other chemicals are having effects on our society right now. Is the alarming rise in ADHD and autism diagnoses in children caused by some sort of pollution? And what effects will it have on our society as today's children become adults?

By the way, if you're not interested in low level environmental contamination, did you know forensic scientists can determine your age by the amount of radioactive carbon in your tooth enamel? Well, that is unless all your teeth had formed before 1955 when above ground nuclear testing started adding it to the planet's atmosphere.

Fortunately, at least a few researchers are still working on solutions to these real environmental threats. A group from the University of Washington is using genetically modified poplar trees. These trees are able to absorb 91% of the trichloroethylene toxin from contaminated water while regular poplars only remove 3%.

This sort of biological solution has incredible potential. Imagine a day when pollution cleanup could be done simply by planting trees. Trees cost next to nothing to plant, require no maintenance, and can reproduce. Even if they don't decompose the toxins (which some are able to), the first few crops of the trees containing the most contamination could be harvested, ground up, and stored. That's a lot cheaper and less destructive to the local ecology than a superfund cleanup crew bagging 100,000 tons of dirt. Instead of a big hole in the ground, formerly toxic areas become forests.

Since toxin eating trees also remove CO2 from the air, this solution should also make fans of An Inconvenient Truth happy. Cleanup operations could even be subsidized by selling them carbon credits for the trees being planted. How's that for win-win?

James asked, "Just as a devil's advocate thing (more out of curiosity than anything else), we have plenty of Habitat for Humanity efforts around here - why travel so far when you can build for people in the area?"

First, let me preface my answer by saying I've worked with Habitat for Humanity quite a few times and I think it's a fine organization. I think volunteer service needs to be a good fit for each individual if they're going to stick with it; some people will prefer Habitat, others will prefer international mission work, but both are needed. Plus, neither precludes participation in the other so it's certainly possible to support both.

That said, I've gotten this question before and it always struck me as odd until I realized most Americans really cannot imagine poverty as it exists in parts of Mexico. From what I've seen, there's no comparison between the standard of living, available opportunities, and assistance programs available to the poor in the US and to those in Mexico.

A typical home in the area of Reynosa in which I've worked extensively is made of scraps of wood, a dirt floor, and a roof that often leaks like a sieve. Can you imagine trying to sleep when it's cold, you can't stay dry, and your shack's floor has turned to mud? One family I built a house for several years ago had a shack cobbled together around an old mattress. In other words, if you were in the house, you were in the bed. There was a family of four living there.

Some of the "nicer" areas have a half-inch water pipe and spigot in the front yard. The worse areas have a single water spigot shared by dozens of families. In either case, the water is not purified (and it's a myth that Mexicans can drink unpurified water with impunity). Very few have any sort of indoor plumbing.

I know there are exceptions to any rule, but by and large these sorts of living conditions do not exist in the US today, while they are still very common in Mexico. The need and likewise the opportunity for dramatic improvement is much greater there than here. A group working with Faith Ministry can provide shelter and security for a family that has neither in essentially one week. That's a pretty incredible return on a relatively small investment of time and money.

We started the week with nothing more than a foundation and in five days we laid concrete blocks for the walls, poured concrete columns, poured a concrete floor, poured a concrete ring around the top of the walls, and laid the final two rows of block on top of the ring. We also poured foundations for two other houses, laid the first row of block at another house, and poured the concrete roof on yet another house.

That should sound like a lot of work, but if not keep in mind that by "poured concrete" I mean we mixed concrete on the ground with nothing but shovels and moved it in buckets and/or wheelbarrows to where it needed to go. The roof alone required around 15 tons of sand, gravel, and cement. Needless to say, I'm a bit sore today.

When we weren't working, we were likely to be eating. I had the best tacos (we'd probably call them burritos here), gorditas, and tamales I've ever eaten at a taco stand run by some friends there. I knew the food would be good, but I was blown away. Now I'm looking forward to going back just for the food.

The one area that wasn't fun was realizing how rusty my Spanish had gotten. At the beginning of the week, I'd open my mouth and sometimes nothing would come out right away. The gears in my head seemed to slip a bit before engaging the right words and verb conjugations. Now I know how much practice I need to start doing - a lot.

This was my ninth trip to Reynosa and something like my 28th week building houses with Faith Ministry/Ministerio de Fe. Each time, I feel like I gain better perspective on the rest of my life. It's hard not to be affected by seeing how different some people's lives are from our own. The thing that struck me this trip was how relatively small amounts of money and even simple acts of kindness go so far in Reynosa. Perhaps most importantly, as my father-in-law commented, is that giving is met with gratitude. I don't want to be praised for giving less than I can truly afford to give, but an unexpected meal, a thank you, and even a smile makes you want to give more, again and again. One of many reasons I keep going back.

Now that this trial run of putting a group together, traveling to Mexico, and working for a week went off without incident, I'm looking to do it again. Let me know if you, your church, or even your office (forget the ropes course, build a house for some serious team building!) are interested in joining in and having the experience of a lifetime.

Let me mention some things not to do. The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with "but we're going to keep working on the startup," you are in big trouble. Bob's going to grad school, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're moving back to Minnesota, but we're going to keep working on the startup. We're taking on some consulting projects, but we're going to keep working on the startup. You may as well just translate these to "we're giving up on the startup, but we're not willing to admit that to ourselves," because that's what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can't be preceded by "but."

In particular, don't go to graduate school, and don't start other projects. Distraction is fatal to startups. Going to (or back to) school is a huge predictor of death because in addition to the distraction it gives you something to say you're doing. If you're only doing a startup, then if the startup fails, you fail. If you're in grad school and your startup fails, you can say later "Oh yeah, we had this startup on the side when I was in grad school, but it didn't go anywhere."

You can't use euphemisms like "didn't go anywhere" for something that's your only occupation. People won't let you.

One of the most interesting things we've discovered from working on Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars. So if you want to get millions of dollars, put yourself in a position where failure will be public and humiliating.

Want to filter the murders by age, race, and sex? You got it. How about filtering by cause of death? You got that, too. Ok, but what about by day of the week? Piece of cake. Such filtering options yield endless possibilities for data analysis.

I discovered white people seem to be killed most often on Tuesdays while hispanic and black people need to watch their backs on Sundays. You can also filter by your own characteristics and see how likely you are to be murdered in LA. As a white male between 20 and 29, I only have about a one in a million chance of being murdered during my next visit. And if I stay in Anaheim, I'm home free.

• Generally, productivity -- output -- rises rapidly from the start of a career to a peak and then declines gradually until retirement.
• This peak in productivity varies by field, from the late 20s to the early 50s, for reasons that are field-specific.
• Precocity, longevity, and output rate are linked. "Those who are precocious also tend to display longevity, and both precocity and longevity are positively associated with high output rates per age unit." High producers produce highly, systematically, over time.
• The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one's career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity -- taking more swings at the bat -- is much higher payoff than trying to improve one's batting average.
• Intelligence, at least as measured by metrics such as IQ, is largely irrelevant.

The second to last point is particularly relevant to entrepreneurs. You have to try if you want to succeed and if you want to succeed more, try more.

The best part of the discussion is from Markus Frind who started PlentyOfFish (a free dating site). I think he said he gets something like a billion page views a month yet he only has a single web server and no employees. What hip web technology did he use to accomplish this feat? Ruby on Rails? PHP? Nope, good ol' ASP.NET.

This is a good example of why you should avoid pre-paying for anything. Pre-paying usually saves only a little bit of money while taking away your leverage and exposing you to risk of either quality of service changes or them going out of business.

If you think about it, most businesses pushing pre-payment and long-term contracts (almost as bad) are the businesses you probably have the most trouble with. Gyms and cell phone companies come to mind and I'm having trouble with both right now, actually. Even those annoying door-to-door guys selling coupon books for twenty oil changes fit this model. You might have saved some money by that twentieth oil change or two years into a gym membership, but is it worth being locked in for so long? More importantly, does the business have any incentive to keep a customer who pre-paid happy? It's in their interest for you to not even use the service you pre-paid for.