Google goes green today with an alternate logo to celebrate Earth Day, which the USA started celebrating on April 22, 1970.

Michael Arrington says Twitter is now such a vital part of the technology ecology, that service outages barely matter, and as he says “I need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.”

Wired Magazine looks back to frightful days in World War I, remembering the trench warfare — chemical weapons; poison gas — on this day in 1915.

I’m thankful to be alive on the privileged planet today, and I realize that every breath is a gift. I need the earth more than the earth needs me… I need more oxygen, just like SlashDot needs more electricity to keep the creation/evolution debate going.

Yesterday, WordPress wizard Matt Mullenweg, jazzed up his blog with a new spring theme. I wonder if he designed it that way, or it just evolved by itself.

Zeldman (ALA) published a couple interesting and helpful articles on the Why and How of Ruby on Rails this morning.

Creating new stuff isn’t easy. Meticulous and beautiful designs don’t just happen by accident. Computer programs don’t write themselves. However, some scientists (like Richard Dawkins) theorize that DNA wrote itself. So, if you follow that theory, you can Twine your PC to some random Twitter feeds, go to the beach all afternoon, and when you get back, your new Ruby on Rails program will have written itself. Try explaining that one to your boss. Or better yet, find some VCs who will invest in it. (The only catch is that they might have to wait billions and billions of years for the ROI). That plan might work for you… but for programmers looking for some good advice today, you might want to check out StackOverflow.com (a new advice service for programmers) — from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.

Back to the Planet – After a flaming descent, and a “scary crash landing”, Korean, Russian, and American astronauts are glad to be back on planet earth after a visit to the International Space Station. Yi So-yeon, a nano-technology engineer from Seoul, Korea — spent 11 days in space. Peggy Whitson had been gone for 192 days (and needed help walking), and now Peggy holds the American record for most days lived in outer space — 377 days.

Right on the heels of reading Getting Things Done, a friend told us about FreeCycle.

Using the GTD method, you are encouraged to fill up your trash can every day. The inbox is your friend. The file drawer is your friend. The trash can is your friend. And now the FreeCycle re-cycling network is your friend. You can get lots of FREE stuff from FreeCycle and you can give away all your junk on FreeCycle.
Example: I was cleaning out my sock drawer and found I really had 3 sock drawers and way too many white socks. So I put a listing for 1 dozen pair of white socks (no holes, clean, almost new) – FREE.

My friend Cartrel had an expression for something that is quickly completed: “Boom. Done.” So easy to do, and so quickly completed.  Within minutes — 9 people contacted me who wanted the FREE socks. Boom, somebody picks up the FREE socks off my front porch. They are happy and I am happy. Boom. Done. Freecycle is cool!