Well folks it's 4:00pm on a Friday afternoon and the office is eerily silent. Come to find out there is only three of us left from Communications Services in the Office. Dave is at some trainings, Karl is out on vacation, Alex is being artistic somewhere, and the 3 of us from the IT group are slaving away at our jobs. Or are we??? We could be playing games or goofing around. But why would we stay here and do that? This is ludicrous to think about. As for me I've been working away at a new grant system for the Center for Produce Safety who cant wait to give away millions of dollars to willing researchers (don't quote me on the millions of dollars... I'm just a programmer, and don't know all the gory details). Anyways Blaine and I simply...

Tomorrow, the ANR Web Action Team will attend a unit retreat for staff of Communication Services. The theme of the retreat is "green." Not green as in great big piles of money. Green as in taking care of our environment.

We decided to conduct some case studies on how converting to web-based systems impacts the environment. Bryon and Karl came up with solid data for their studies. I pulled some numbers out of a bag for mine.

We then created a flyer with our case studies. Realizing that this was a slightly absurd maneuver, bringing unnecessary handouts to a gathering meant to celebrate being Green, Karl and Alex whipped up an activity sheet for the back of the flyer. This gives the...

It seems the ANR Blogs are making a big splash. With much interest in blogging, I finally had some time to make some finishing touches (for now) on the Blog system which some have been asking about. I've pulled out all the stops and put into the system a nice Archive list and the ability to add tags to posts. Right away I discovered that the "Post Archive" is great for seeing how active a blog may be. For some it is painful to see last updated over a year ago! Ouch! For others it is nice to see a long list of posts each month. For the most Posted to Blog check out, Jeannette Warnert's ANR News Blog. With 200 posts since April 2007. That roughly 15.38 posts a month or one every 2 days! No...

Every year (well, most years) Communication Services has a 'unit retreat'.  This is a day when we all get together, have a nice lunch, and talk about what we did in the past year, as well as what we will do in the future.

This year we have been tasked with ways to make our different sections 'green'.  So the Web Action Team had a quick brainstorming session, and this is what we have come up with:

First, some of Bryon's ideas.  I had to take out a lot of his ideas, because they had to do with scrapping entire projects.  But what remains is pure gold...-ish green.

1) Pedal powered computers. Forget power save mode, just pedal to power your computer.

2) Have stated...