Eschew Obfuscation: Category All About Me

Fiji "Greenwashed" Water

Max Dunn — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:06:00 -0800

Hah – I see that Fiji Water is being sued for greenwashing!

In the Sustainable Design class I took in October 2008 through Stanford Continuing Education, we studied greenwashing, which is to promote a company’s products as environmentally friendly when they are not.

TerraChoice provides a good greenwash metric with their Six Sins of Greenwashing:

The Sin of Hidden Tradeoff – Promoting a single green factor of a product without any attention to other important issues.
The Sin of No Proof – Unsubstantiated claims. For example, claiming a product was not tested on animals, but with no third party certification.
Sin of Vagueness – Poorly defined or overly broad claims, such as “chemical free.”
Sin of Irrelevance – A claim that may be true, but is either unimportant or otherwise irrelevant.
Sin of Fibbing – Claims of certification that are false.
Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils – A claim that may be true, but distracts from greater environmental impacts.

For my greenwashing analysis, I chose to write about Fiji Water. While Fiji Water does have a lot of sustainability programs in place, their business model of shipping water from Fiji in itself is not environmentally friendly at all!

So I was gratified today to see that others share my concern about Fiji Water and that they are actually being sued for greenwashing. The lawsuit claims that Fiji Water’s claim of being carbon negative is not true because they are using a discredited carbon accounting method known as “forward crediting.”

While I didn’t know about this when I wrote my paper, I feel justified to have identified Fiji Water as a greenwasher over 2 years ago!

Rails Conference Picture

Max Dunn — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:23:00 -0800

My friend Will Leinweber just pointed out that on the Rails Conference site this year, there is a picture from last year of my shaggy head! Half of Will is there too on the right, and Wido is partially obscured on the left. What a crack up!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) Cure and Theory

Max Dunn — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:51:00 -0800

I had my first bout of chronic fatigue in 1983. Back then, it was thought to be Ebstein Barr virus and I had to drop out of school for 6 months to get back to the point where I could function. Since then, I have continued battling my chronic fatigue and found something that has allowed me to control it – Vitamin C.

If I take 1000 mg of timed release Vitamin C sometime before going to bed (9 pm seems to work well) and then wake up at 2 am and take another, I can get a good night’s sleep. Otherwise, I usually wake up at 3 or 4 am and can’t go back to sleep for at least 2 hours and then will be exhausted the next day.

Why I post personal stuff

Max Dunn — Wed, 12 Apr 2006 08:11:00 -0700

A lot of people think it is a little weird that I put so much personal stuff in my web site and blog and I can understand their point. However, here are some reasons why I do this.

Winter blues

Max Dunn — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 08:43:00 -0700

Has anyone noticed a significant gap in these postings? During the winter months, I hardly posted anything. I did spend a lot of time using Ruby on Rails to develop the Tri-Cities Baseball web site, but wasn’t able to write much.

I am guessing that there are two causes of this: less sun and less activity.

I am definitely affected by the lack of sun. Even in the summer, when it is cloudy all day, I get depressed. This happened even last summer when we spent a day south of Santa Cruz. Even though the day before I was feeling fine, I got more and more depressed as the day wore on when the sun refused to come out.

Another reason for these winter blues is probably also I don’t exercise much in the winter. I like outdoor sports: mountain biking and surfing especially, but these are hard to do in the winter.

Last year, I was pretty depressed during the winter months too. This was the period where I really wasn’t enjoying my job, and ending up quitting on April 1st.

Now that Spring is trying to make an appearance, I am posting a lot more. This is probably a good indicator that I am feeling better and my right brain is waking up from its slumber and starting to actually work again.

College Experience

Max Dunn — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 07:31:00 -0700

So what is the “college experience”?

This was a topic on this week’s O.C. that got me thinking that maybe some people had a much better experience in college than I did. Without going into too many details, here are some of the highlights of my Berkeley experience:

Christmas Letter 2005

Max Dunn — Mon, 26 Dec 2005 11:35:00 -0800

I haven’t written much in this blog about what our family is up to. So here is a Christmas letter Suzanne wrote to fill in the details.

Dizziness

Max Dunn — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 23:23:00 -0800

I had a weird thing happen today where I started to feel dizzy.

At first, it wasn?��?��?�t a big deal and as long as I didn?��?��?�t move my head too much I could deal with it, so I proceeded to setup my Linux box as my Internet firewall and router. However, this meant that I was not connected to the Internet for a few hours this morning. Then I started to feel dizzier ~~- but you know, getting the Internet connection going is a bigger priority than my health ?��?��??~~ so I kept working on it. ;-)

By the time everything was working, I was feeling really bad and had to lie down. But that didn?��?��?�t help, and I got even worse. But I discovered that it got worse if I lay on my left side, and better if I lay on my right side. So I spent most of the day today dozing in bed on my right side.

My kids have been sick, and my right ear has been buzzing and feeling weird, so I am guessing it is just an ear infection that is causing this and that it will go away in a few days.

Anything Goes Everyday

Max Dunn — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 10:46:00 -0800

We have a tradition in our family that on our birthdays, we can do anything we want (within reason). We call this our “Anything Goes” day.

Maxie likes to spend his birthday playing video games and eating ice cream all day long and Claire likes to spend hers watching TV and eating ice cream all day long.

My birthday was yesterday and it was a little different from that. For breakfast, Suzanne made me eggs benedict and for dinner, flank steak rollups with a nice bottle of wine and chocolate torte for dessert. The kids were on their best behavior and didn’t fight during the day and offered to walk on my back. The day was a little rainy so I wasn’t able to go surfing and I couldn’t reach anyone to go go-carting. So the only special thing I did during the day was to get a massage.

In the afternoon, I started to get a little depressed because I wasn’t doing anything very special for my Anything Goes day.

But then in the evening, I thought about the fact that I was living in a nice, warm house, I had my pick of whatever food I wanted to eat and wine I wanted to drink, I had a wife and kids that loved me and were going out of there way to do whatever I wanted, and we were all healthy and happy.

So I started to realize how incredible it was that nothing particularly out of the ordinary needed to happen on my birthday to make it special, because God has blessed us in so many ways that everyday is very close to my ideal Anything Goes day.

Retirement Stress

Max Dunn — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 10:11:00 -0800

People sometimes ask if it is relaxing being retired. Interestingly, it isn’t.

Some days I work harder now than I did when I had a traditional job. Whether it is re-doing the plumbing in our bathroom, setting up a Linux email server, helping a friend start a business, or developing a registration form for our son’s baseball league using Ruby on Rails, I have been incredibly busy.

What is different is that now I have more control over what I do and when. For instance, if I want to take a nap or bike ride in the middle of the day, I do it. Or if I want to spend time researching open source software, well, I can do that too.

So while being retired hasn’t really been all that relaxing, the big difference is that it has been a lot less stressful.

Wheat Attack

Max Dunn — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 09:23:00 -0800

I accidently ate some wheat at Thanksgiving a week ago, and my body is still under attack from it.

It was really dumb – I looked at the ingredients of the Honey Nut Cheerios and saw just oats so I thought it would be okay so I ate two bowls. Within about an hour, I started feeling bad, like I was getting a cold, just kind of achy. I then read the ingredients list more carefully and saw that “wheat flour” was listed down below. Shoot.

All that day, I continued to feel like I was coming down with something. Just tired and achy. And driving from Salinas up to Healdsburg, my back hurt.

Then, more stupidity. My sister made some Mexican rice, which I assumed would be okay so I ate a lot of it. Then as I was finishing up, I looked more closely and say short, round strands of something. Inquiring about them, I found out it was pasta. Doh!

Interestingly, my hands didn’t hurt like they did the last time I ate wheat. This time it was mainly my back. Also, the gland under my right chin became very tender. And my other system was just feeling achy and bad, but I never had a fever, sore throat, running nose, or any other system that would suggest it was really a viral illness.

So I think this is further proof that I am at least slightly celiac, and when my body encounters wheat, it has an auto-immune response that floods my body with something that lodges in my muscles and joints and causes them to be sore and me to feel achy all over.