Kayak Trip: T-Minus 14 days

It’s now official. During the wee hours of 13 July 2009, I will set forth on a solo 560KM kayak journey from Toronto to Montreal to raise money for Noah’s Ark home for children in the Philippines. If you would like to support this cause, please pledge an amount of your choosing by either e-mailing me or commenting on this article (you’ll receive an income tax receipt for your donation amount). After I successfully complete the trip I will either collect the money from you or you can choose to send it directly to Noah’s Ark.

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Adventures of the Past, Present and Future

It’s 30 degrees Celsius – the wind is blowing in my face, and bugs are splattered across my goggles as I cruise along the Trans Canada Highway. It’s September 2004 and I’m on a solo motorcycle epic adventure that took me 4,712.5KM on my Yamaha XT 225cc enduro motorcycle to explore 5 provinces in just 9 days.

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NASCAR’s Environment

Photo by James Schwartz / The Urban Country – Jeff Gordon’s long-lost brother

If rush-hour traffic levels are an indicator of economic prosperity, then Detroit is in very poor shape. I traveled through the Motor City on Friday at 5:30PM expecting a flood of cars leaving the city at the end of the work day - but instead there were very few cars traveling – compared to what I’m accustomed to here in Toronto.

Of those few cars that I did see, nearly all were North American brands. I’ve always been amused by Americans expressing their patriotism by exclusively  purchasing  “American-made” automobiles. But I wonder if they know that more than 1.2 million Toyota automobiles were manufactured in the United States in 2005. That’s almost as many automobiles as Chrysler manufactured in the US in the same time period.

I arrived at Michigan International Speedway on that Friday evening to spend the weekend with my brother, father and his longtime friends to attend Sunday’s NASCAR race – a tradition for my father for some 31 years.

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Google’s Commitment to Sustainability

Photo “The Googleplex” courtesy of jpstanley on Flickr 

What do the David Suzuki Foundation and Google Inc. have in common? Not much at first glance, but when you look beyond the surface you’ll see many similarities. 

Since 1990, the David Suzuki Foundation has been using “science and education to promote solutions that conserve nature and help achieve sustainability”. Google Inc. on the other hand is the high tech firm that strives to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Google started out as a Stanford research project in 1996 by two really smart men - Larry Page and Sergey Brin - and now employs over 20,000 full-time employees at its Mountain View, California “Googleplex” campus.

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