Personally, I’m a big fan of eneloop batteries. I believe the batteries Apple uses in their wireless mouse and keyboard are re-branded eneloops.

Here are some new articles of mine that were published in alive magazine. Click on the thumbnails to view them. The first is on whether cell phone towers are safe or not. There is much heated debate surrounding this issue and I got a lot of hate mail for even suggesting we don’t know all there is to know about the technology. The hard truth is that we just don’t have the data spanning a human lifetime to say one way or the other, so lay off haters! My second article is less controversial – should you shave your head when going bald (yes). This was a fun article to write and I got to interview P. Diddy’s barber in Hollywood. Really nice guy. The art guy is an avid surfer so the appearance of Kelly Slater as the bald hunk poster boy is no surprise.

Baby’s nontoxic nursery: Preparing a healthy space for your newborn. What paints should you choose when decorating baby’s new room? Surrounding your new child with noxious fumes is the last thing you want to do.

Lawn warfare: Pesticide and herbicide use in Canada. I interviewed the PR person from the David Suzuki Foundation as well as a professor of biomolecular chemistry to write this one.

Get in the habit: 10 easy ways to shrink your carbon footprint. This one is self explanatory. But did you know the concept for a carbon footprint was derived from those newfangled desktops in the early 90s that stood upright instead of lying flat?

In it for the money: Green initiatives that are good for our ecology economy. This is one of those slightly cynical pieces. The intro comes from a really funny ad for IBM that you can watch here on Youtube. The art department did an awesome job with this one.

The eco dilemma: Why electric cars won’t save the world. Once again, an alternative look at a green deus ex machina (a term, incidentally, that I had originally used in the intro – but my editor wisely replaced this rather academic term with “save the day”).

Selenium and cancer: Good news and bad. A short piece on the links between cancer and an antioxidant called selenium.

Two very short pieces: Cleaning our lakes – about a government restriction of phosphates, and When TVs die – about the switchover from analog to digital and the potential aftermath of discarded TVs in our landfills. 

Local writer and social media consultant Monica Hamburg talks about how to tap into the hidden job market online in her excellent blog post. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Java programmer or a hairdresser – creating an online presence and fostering a network can benefit you. If nothing else, it’s way more fun than cold calling!

Also, technical writers might get a kick out of this photo essay of classic instruction manuals. What I found interesting was what Dan Winters, the photographer who compiled these, had to say: "I actually think that modern manuals are unreadable," Winters says. "Visually speaking, they probably peaked in the ’30s." What rot. Seriously – is this guy part of the MTV generation or something? End-user documentation has never been cleaner and easier to understand. In fact, most help is migrating to interactive web-based apps that even a child would coo at. I understand he’s speaking as a visually-biased photographer – not a writer, but the overly intricate diagrams in his photo essay (as cool as they are in a retro sort of way) hardly represent the peak of information architecture.   

It’s a neat idea, but with so much content out there, it would be impossible for an editorial team to cover it all. Brijit came up with the genius idea of asking anybody to submit these 100-word summaries in exchange for $5.

Now, let’s get this straight. Five buck for a hundred words works out to a paltry five cents a word. Top freelance rates in Canada hover at around a buck a word, and even that is pathetic. Most writers settle for around 50 cents a word, which is still ten times as much as Brijit is offering. I would assume that no serious writer would even consider working for pea…oh wait, I think even peanuts are worth more than that.

The sad thing is that the writing on Brijit is actually quite good. Are there people desperate enough to spend an hour or two reading an article and then capturing the essence of it in a 100 words? It may sound simple, but it takes far longer than you’d think to do it right.

Brijit ups the ante by submitting each requisition to competition – you actually have to compete with three other writers in the hopes that your piece gets chosen. So most times you just end up writing your beautifully crafted cribs note for free. Competition, however, is a great motivator for some people apparently.

Is Brijit turning freelance writing into a cheap mockery? Is it dragging down freelance rates by calling anybody a writer? Can you even stomach reading summaries that you know were written by word slaves?