Vancity Bike Share | ChangeEverything.ca

Take it. Ride it. Pass it on.

Welcome to the home of the Vancity Bike Share – a community experiment.

Vancity Bike Share wants to see you to get on a bike, share it with others and spread the word about cycling. It is a chance to try alternative transportation, increase your daily exercise and share with your community.

Changeeverything.ca is your Vancity Bike Share home base. Currently, we are looking for people who want to participate in this experiment. If you’d like to get your hands on one of our bikes, click here.

Launch party:

Come eat some pancakes and watch as the Vancity Bike Share takes its first pedal!

June 27, 2007
7:30am-9:00am (BEST’s Pancake Breakfast)
9:00am – 9:30am (Launch of Vancity’s Bike Share)
200 Granville Street (Granville Square – just west of Waterfront Station)

Work colleagues on their new bikes:

From the Globe and Mail via Random Dude comes Bogota’s urban happiness movement. It’s a long article that packs a punch, here summarized.
Hedonics, aka Happiness Economics

“A city can be friendly to people or it can be friendly to cars, but it can’t be both,” the new mayor announced. He shelved the highway plans and poured the billions saved into parks, schools, libraries, bike routes and the world’s longest “pedestrian freeway.”

He increased gas taxes and prohibited car owners from driving during rush hour more than three times per week. He also handed over prime space on the city’s main arteries to the Transmilenio, a bus rapid-transit system based on that of Curitiba, Brazil.

Bogotans almost impeached their new mayor. Business owners were outraged. Yet by the end of his three-year term, Mr. Peñalosa was immensely popular and his reforms were being lauded for making Bogota remarkably fairer, more tolerable and more efficient.

Moreover, by shifting the budget away from private cars, Mr. Peñalosa was able to boost school enrolment by 30 per cent, build 1,200 parks, revitalize the core of the city and provide running water to hundreds of thousands of poor.

Read it all….

I posted these….

Wanted: Production space for fermented product.

Hello,

I am *not* a baker or a brewer. During drying the air has a sweet/sour smell like fresh bread or beer as organic molasses is used in the production of this food safe item, so an odour friendly space would be ideal.

I don’t need a lot of space, 100 – 200 sq ft with an electric outlet for my drying cabinet.

Prefer locations in Vancouver north of King Edward from Victoria to Burrard but willing to look at all options.

A friend of mine is also looking for non-food related storage/work space in same area and we are willing to share expenses.

Thanks for your help.

Wanted: Brute cabinet shelf unit “Universal angles….”

“Universal angles, individually adjustable on 1.5″ [centers]” The part number is either XB030 or 031. [aluminum or stainless steel].

Today, someone asked me what my vision was with this business. This is how I responded….

I want people who live in cities to be composting with Bokashi

I want people who live in apartments to be composting with Bokashi

I want to collect the Bokashi prepared material that people cannot dispose of and process it at a central location.

I want the compost produced there to be used to grow food.

I want some that food given to the people who provided the compost material to show them that their efforts did make a difference.

This is the way my blog looks in Internet Explorer 6.0:

I get some kind of validation error:

Sorry, I am unable to validate this document because on line 623 it contained one or more bytes that I cannot interpret as utf-8 (in other words, the bytes found are not valid values in the specified Character Encoding). Please check both the content of the file and the character encoding indication. “The error was: utf8 “\xBB” does not map to Unicode”

that I cannot figure out how to fix.

In trying to solve this, I have

1) Disabled all plugins
2) Removed all widgets
3) Written the theme author

That’s why there is a note that says “This blog looks great with Firefox.” in the top right column.

As it appears that many site visitors are using IE, I thought I would attempt to get it fixed.

Suggestions welcome and appreciated.

Al

It looked like it would rain at any moment but never did.

http://www.eatlocal.org/

I have been documenting the construction of the RAV [Canada Line] since January 2007

More here
-30-

Technorati Tags: canadaline, RAV, translink, Vancouver, bc, canada

—– Original Message —–
From: Sue [not her real name]
To: A. A. Pasternak
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2007 8:19 AM
Subject: Re: Bokashi

Hi Al! Thanks so much for getting back to me. I’m interested in composting, and some searching on the internet led me to your website. Bokashi seems like a good option, but I have a couple questions:

Sue: Does the mass of the food waste reduce at all?

Al: No, it pickles. The bokashi acts as a inoculant that ferments the organic matter. When the bucket is full, the food waste at the bottom will look the same as when it went in, but the chemical structure will have changed completely. It is only later, when the fermented kitchen waste is dumped into the ground, which is far more aerobic, where there are many other wild
non-fermenting microbes present, that true composting will begin, and in that role the bokashi will assist primarily in making the composting process more efficient, in producing higher-quality end product, and in reducing levels of pathogenic microbes.

Sue: What if the compost bucket gets contaminated? (like with black mold,etc)

Al: In most cases this would not happen but if it does, you bury the bad batch, wash the bucket well and start again. Usually a bad batch is a result of not adding enough bokashi and/or to much moisture in the organic matter for the friendly microbes to eat fast enough. [Not in original email: A white fuzzy mold is ok]

Sue: Can you make your own Bokashi? How long will it keep?

Al: Yes. If you make it in a small batch you can use it after a month and it will keep 2 – 3 months. If you want to keep it longer [two years], it is best to dry it.

I use Biosa as my bokashi starter. Here is a link to the recipe I use:
http://www.cityfarmer.org/bokashi.html. I can provide you with the starter liquid. You can even use the liquid alone.

Sue: And, most importantly, what do I do with the Bokashi?? That last question is why I called. See, I live in Chicago on the third floor of a walk-up. We have no yard, no balcony. I have the fire escape landing – which i could put a small bucket on, but no room for a compost pile.

Al: Here is a link that shows you how to make a small urban compost bin:

Sue: I do live very close to a public park, however. I guess that’s really my main concern. I live with three other people, and we all cook a lot, producing a lot of food waste. We also cook a lot of meat. However, if we don’t have an obvious place to put the Bokashi, and it doesn’t actually reduce the volume of food, then maybe this isn’t for us? I’m not sure. In fact, I’m not totally sure what the point of Bokashi is, if you just have to compost it anyway…*

Al: Anything to reduce sending food waste to the landfill is a good thing:
http://www.resourcecenterchicago.org/compost.html

Bokashi helps stop the bad smells from normal composting, allows people to do it indoors, stops the fruit flies from coming, speeds up the final composting process and produces a better finished product.

Of course I’d be happy to supply all that you need to start bokashi composting and/or connect you with local [U.S.A] suppliers if you choose to go that route. Keep me informed of what you end up doing in your household.

Regards and be well,

Al

Al Pasternak
604.873.4334

Biosa[tm] Bokashi Composting
++indoor, odour free & more
http://www.greatday.ca
Read my blog

http://www.bokashiman.com

*In my original email, I did not respond to this well enough. When I speak with people who ask the same question, I often suggest that people take their full bokashi bucket compost and dig it into the ground in a park or find a local community garden and put it in the compost bins there. As Sue was already thinking about doing that I did not encourage her, but attempted to address her other concerns.

I want people who live in cities to compost their food waste. Bokashi makes it easier for that to happen but people do not have to buy my product [and save the world] if other options are available.