Getting involved in the environment isn’t exactly a new trend, but it’s been important for quite a few years now at the rate of global warming and many other environmental issues coming up. With this, there’s no surprise that the BP Solar Decathlon has sprouted up. BP has recently partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy and is sponsoring the Solar Decathlon. It’s an annual event where 20 university teams from around the world design, build and operate livable, every-efficient, and completely solar powered homes. It’s a week long competition in the National Mall, located in Washington DC. It’s from October 11th to October 19th.

They’re sponsoring this event as part of their commitment to discovering cost effective and clean energy solutions for everyday living. They’re currently one of the main corporate sponsors, and the only energy company to sponsor the 2007 Solar Decathlon. They’ve been involved since the first competition back in 2002. BP is investing $500 million into the Energy Biosciences Institute in which the company will partner with the University of California Berkeley, the University of Illinois and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to find bioscence solutions to reduce the impact of energy consumption on the environment.

Many people each year are spending quite a bit of money to upgrade their homes. Some of them put in new wiring, others install new piping for their main plumbing needs. What many people don’t do is consider looking into Solar Power. While it’s a bit pricey to install at first, its also more cost effective and you aren’t exhurting unnatural gasses back into the environment that could potentially harm you down the road. If you had an area of 200 square miles covered with solar panels, you could provide all the electricity that the world would ever need. BP’s jointly-owned Nerefco wind farm generates enough zero-carbon energy to power 13,000 average homes. wind can potentially provide around a 10th of the world’s power. That would then cut down dioxide emissions by a billion tons a year.

If you’re interested in learning more about this decathlon and are unable to make it to Washington D.C. then you can gladly check out their blog. BP has created this blog where all of the teams as well as on-site reporters will be posting throughout the competition.

I’m waiting rather patiently for the mail to show up. I hope to see a letter from HSBC in regards to the loan. We’ll have to take the car in to get fixed and then we’re heading up to New York for a few days so I can collect on the loan and visit family. I know my grandparents aren’t doing very well and I just recently found out that my father is having some heart and liver issues that have given me some cause for concern.

I didn’t want to take the route of loans in regards to us moving but sometimes you really have no choice in the matter. It’s a personal loan, because the place kind of is a junker that requires quite a bit of fixing up but this is going to be our starter home so finding cheap loans was just a requirement for us, looking into mortgages wasn’t really even worth it for us. I’m scared, I’ll admit that. I’ll be very far away from family and we’ll really be on our own. We won’t have the outside influence of his mother or my father when it comes to how we do things, or where we happen to do it. It’s going to be our place, our bills, our lives. I know that I can emotionally and financially handle it, it’s just a big step in our relationship.

I know it seems like I’ve been slacking a little bit here. I haven’t blogged as much as I used to in the past, and I didn’t even bother putting up a new template for October, but I do have a reason. I haven’t really had the time to do much lately. I’ve been going through emails, sending out bills, designing sites and I just recently won a bid on GAF for website optimization. I’m doing everything from bulking up keywords to code validation to help on the actual loading time of the page. The site now is coded without any kind of doctype and they’re looking for a new template, and I’ll also be submitting to lord knows how many other directories and paid-blogging sites so that they can get some more incoming links to help with Google rankings. I recommended that they setup some kind of a free directory so that users can submit links to their site and in turn get free backlinks to their own site because of this service. Minus all of the drama over on AGn before I moved to this domain, the PR5 still stands thanks to the backlinks for the directory and any other project I’ve done there over the years. I really do need to get my booty in gear on getting myself up to date on that stuff too. I’m sure there are a lot of pending members for all of the fanlistings but that doesn’t mean that I’ll have enough time to get through them with this upcoming move. There aren’t enough hours in the day anymore.

When you read the headline “Bored with the same old natural bath and body products?”, and you’re anything like me, you’re kind of drawn in to find out more information. So you continue to read and then you see “Looking for a little humor in your daily routine?” followed by “Trying to find the perfect gift for the biker-wanna-be?” you’re sucked in and basically can’t leave. There’s a site online that sells many different biker related health products. If you’re at all interested in the ability to Get in touch with your “Inner Biker” at Big Bad Mama Biker Body Works, then heading over to bikerbodyworks.com would be a great resource for you to bookmark. They have everything from Biker Body Wash to Biker Mojo Mist. There are even fragrances that are named “Beer”, “Herb”, “Weed” and “Born2BWild”.

I looked into the Biker Groove Lube Lotion because that kind of stood out for me. It’s made with rich organic macadamia nut oil, shea butter, extra virgin olive oil and other exotic ingredients. The cool thing about all of their products is it comes in a beer bottle with “Mama” designed on the cover in a tattoo fashion. The flavor that I thought was the most interesting to me was “JailBait”. It’s a wild cherry scent. The description is : “JAILBAIT” – wild cherry, of course. Bail, Bond, and Attorney not included.

Having road hogs in the family, I’ve always been drawn to the biker lifestyle. Now, I’m not sure if I’d ever trust myself to actually own a Harley but I’d like to think I already started most of the lifestyle with the fact that I’m a cigarette smoker who’s filled with tattoos. I’m not going to say that you should go out and invest in a Harley, a good one will run you quite a bit of money, but at least you know you can smell like one by using these products – heh.

For the digital scrapbook lovers, I came across a new program called Morpheus Photo-Morpher.  Using a point system you can morph images together and basically do with it what you please.  None of my images looked that great so taking their professional way of doing things, I published the example templates just so you can get an idea of exactly what this particular program does.

It’s pretty easy to use, and there are step by step directions included for the first-timers.¬† I figured this could be a good resource for digital scrap bookers because there are so many things that you can accomplish and it’ll really make your scrap booking images come to life.¬†¬† I found a digital scrapbook site the other day that was completely flash based, and using this program you can save the morphed image in many different formats – including flash.¬† So yea, if you already know how to do these things in flash this particular program may not spark your interest.¬† But for those of us without that savvy flash ability, this is definitely the route to take.

You aren’t limited to morphing personal images together, by any means.¬† I was thinking of it in regards to template creation for future clients.¬† You can take the images you’ve created and add some funky morphing effects to them so if you want something to morph from say gray to blue and then add some funky text effects without having to boot Animation Shop (for example) then this may be the easy route for you.¬† With the Animation Shop method you have to manually make each frame change.¬† With this program you can morph a certain section to do whatever you please, and that’s just nifty to me heh.