We all know about carbon footprints, and how you should reduce them. How about our Apple footprints? How big is yours, and do you need an offset? How about Google or Microsoft, for that matter? I need an Apple Footprint Calculator, and I need it now!

Recently, my Apple footprint rose, declined, then might be climbing again. Consider…

• 2005: Bought a iPod, to replace my Karma Rio (1X APPLE)
• 2008: Bought an MacBook, to replace my Windows PC (2X APPLE)
• 2008: Bought an iPhone, to replace my Windows Mobile Phone (3x APPLE)
• 2010: MacBook broke, shifted to Windows 7 (2X APPLE)
• 2010: Bought an iPad (3X APPLE)
• 2010: Oh, the new MacBook’s have finally come out … 4X APPLE?

Should we strive to be more balanced, spread our gadget love among multiple companies? Should I move to the Nexus One or the HTC Incredible on Verizon, rather than to the iPhone 4 when that finally arrives. But if the new iPhone finally makes it to Verizon, that’ll be a tough call.

So I want a calculator, if not for fun than for anything else. Not being a programmer, I can’t build it — maybe Gina Trapani can do it. I was joking with her about the entire Apple footprint thing when I saw both her and Anil Dash whip out their Nexus One phones yesterday at the Chirp conference. Both were former iPhone users, so they’re offsetting Apple with a little Google.

What would you calculate? How about for a start:

• Laptop
• Desktop
• Phone
• Netbook/Tablet
• Browser
• MP3 Player
• Email provider
• Search engine

That makes me look like this:

1. Laptop: Microsoft, Windows 7
2. Phone: Apple, iPhone
3. Netbook/Tablet: Apple, iPad
4. Browser: Firefox
5. MP3 Player: Apple, iPod
6. Email provider: Google, Gmail
7. Search engine: Google

I don’t have a desktop, so I’ve left that off. Out of 7 possible points, I have:

• Apple, 3: 43%
• Google, 2: 29%
• Microsoft, 1: 14%
• Firefox, 1: 14%

Clearly, another Apple device would make my footprint far too large! Offset a Macbook by shifting to Android? Maybe buy a Zune as an offset?

Your Halloween pumpkins don’t have the same old boring designs. Get some pumpkin stencils and carving! You can make some amazing stuff, including Star Wars pumpkins or for Twilight fans, Edward and Bella. How about Jay Leno? The Kool Aide guy? A Cylon pumpkin? Some tips and links, below.

Like many, I’ve been carving pumpkins for ages for Halloween. But about 10 years ago, I was transformed into a master pumpkin carver by virtue of living in Britain. There, Halloween wasn’t widely celebrated at the time, and carving pumpkins wasn’t commonly done. When some friends saw my basic Jack-O-Lantern, you know — eyes, nose and a basic toothy grin — they wanted me to teach them my “masterful” skills.

That started an annual pumpkin carving fest. I started bringing back Halloween pumpkin carving tools on trips back to the US. These often where bundled with stencils. I dived into making more complex pumpkins.

Last year, I thought it would be fun to make an Obama pumpkin. It occured to me to search for a carving pattern. I not only found one but also discovered there are stencils for all types of pumpkin designs on the web.

This year, I specifically went looking for some fun patterns and was amazed at what’s out there, for free. Some links are below. But first, some very fast pumpkin carving tips:

1. Scrape out your pumpkin very well. It should feel fairly dry when you’ve done it right. I mean, it’ll be moist — but it won’t be wet.
2. Never, ever, wash the inside of your pumpkin after scraping. It’s like sending an invitation to Mr. Mold
3. Definitely buy some cheap carving tools, which are often sold in local supermarkets. The small knifes are save for kids and adults and really work.
4. Tape your pattern over the top of your pumpkin. If it is too big, use a copier to shrink it down.
5. Use a poking tool to punch along the lines of your pattern, making a little follow-the-dots trail in the pumpkin itself that you’ll cut.
6. When done, keep the pattern to refer to as you cut. It’s very easy to make a mistake and cut where you shouldn’t, so look to your pattern
7. When all else fails, and you’ve made a mistake, a paper clip or toothpick often works as a way to “glue” something you’ve cut back into the right place.

A little note to those who make pumpkin patterns. Promise me you’re actually trying to carve using them. Often they include tiny holes or cuts next to another one that are extremely difficult to actually do.

How about those patterns?

Star Wars Pumpkins: Put a Sith or Darth Vader on your porch with these free Star Wars pumpkin patterns from StarWars.com. The ones I did last night were above. The Stormtrooper, ugh — the entire thing fell apart, patched back up with paper clips. But it was fun to try.

Twilight Pumpkins: If you’re a big Twilight fan, I stumbled across these free Twilight pumpkin stencils from Gather.

Cylon Pumpkins: Sadly, I didn’t find any good Battlestar Galactica stencils. That’s probably because I got distracted by these stories about how to make Cylon pumpkins with red LEDs.

More Pumpkin Patterns: eHow has a nice collection of free simple templates, as does Celebrating Halloween. Check out the vomiting pumpkin that anyone can do. Squidoo has a nice page with links to some templates, examples of tools and tips. Pumpkin Glow has an amazing collection of un-Halloween patterns. Jay Leno pumpkin? The Kool Aid guy? They’ve got them, and for free. If you want to pay, Zombie Pumpkins has what looks to be a nice collection. You can get over 200 for $20.

Postscript: Now you want to see a real master? Look at Noel Dickover’s work here. Yes, that’s a friggin’ Death Star pumpkin! And look at the detail for the Where The Wild Things Are one.

Postscript 2: I’d mentioned earlier about getting pumpkin carving kits. You can find these in many stores, and here are a few options you can get through Amazon (if you do buy via these links, I earn a little bit):

Pumpkin Masters Pumpkin Carving Kit with 12 Patterns & Tools: I bought this exact kit years ago, and all the tools still work — plus you get a nice collection of templates that help you get beyond the basic Jack O’ Lantern.

Pumpkin Masters Carving Party Kit: This is another nice set of stencils that I’ve used, along with a larger collection of tools.

Star Wars Pumpkin Carving Kit: Looking around, I found Star Wars stencils that you can buy, complete with three basic starter tools. The tools don’t look that great to me, though.

Pirates of the Caribbean Pumpkin Carving Kit: As with the Star Wars pack, you get basic tools along with some stencils, these from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. The tools look better than with the Star Wars pack.

Boston Red Sox Pumpkin Carving Kit: No, I’m not a Red Sox fan. Orange County Los Angeles Angels Of Anaheim, actually. But this is just one example of many sports-related templates that are out there. Who knew! SF Giants fans — here are some free ones for you. Texas Rangers, get your free ones here.

Extreme Pumpkins: Diabolical Do-It-Yourself Designs to Amuse Your Friends and Scare Your Neighbors: I found this book, and it intrigued me enough to order it. Looking forward to seeing if it gets me to the next level. There’s also a sequel: Extreme Pumpkins II: Take Back Halloween and Freak Out a Few More Neighbors.

Dremel 7000-PK Battery-Powered Pumpkin Carver: I had no idea such things existed! This is another item that I’m ordering for myself, to see if it saves me time and allows me to do things I can’t with my basic set of tools.

Oh, Ivar. I welcome you back into my life. It’s been too long, my old friend. The smell of your freshly cut pine (are you pine?) once again fills my office nook. Your presence brings me nearly full circle through my life of home furnishing. I thought you were gone, but you return once again, standing ready to hold my books and assorted bits.

As a bachelor, my idea of furniture was a mattress on the ground, a card table and folding chairs for the kitchen and a cast off sofa that had seen far better days. Shelving was easy. Two stolen Carnation milk crates did most of the job, followed by an investment at Builders Emporium (think Home Depot; they closed years ago) in breeze blocks and wood planks to build a make-shift shelf to hold my books.

Ikea came along right when I got married. How could you not love it? It offered furniture at reasonable prices. Having little money, Ikea was perfect as a way to have a real kitchen table, a real bed and yes, real shelves.

I remember endlessly debating the Ivar choices. Did I want those cool corner shelves? Could I afford them? Did I want five shelves or six? And look at all those cool add-ons. A table that can fold out from the shelves. In the end, it was the basic set-up, that ladder-like standard horizontal shelf that forms the core of any Ivar installation.

In Britain, Ivar returned again to my life. In an actual house, I again needed shelving. Ivar still seemed the best of the options, an easy “disposable” way to get things off the floor until I figured out exactly what I wanted to do for a more permanent solution. Budget no longer being an issue, I splurged. I had those lights along the top shelf, to illuminate my storage. Two cabinets — actual doors on them! — to store stationary and other goods. A pull out drawer on the bottom, along with another set of six smaller drawers in a unit.

Eventually, the Ivar was replaced in my office. But the Ivar pieces still hung in there. I used the six-drawer unit on its own, even putting it on rollers that I improvised. The shelves migrated to the garage, as did one of the cabinets. Another cabinet, I gave it short legs so that it could be used on its own. That’s the thing about Ivar. I was like native hunters that used every part of an animal; having slaughtered my Ivar set-up, I still used all of its parts in other ways. Except those damn lights.

The Ivar came with me in the move back to Newport Beach. Shelves went back in the garage, where they continue to serve me well. The six drawer unit until this weekend was tucked under my desk, holding electronics of all types, card readers, USB sticks, extended-life computer batteries and more. But I cleaned out another unit that could easily hold the same stuff, meaning the six drawers could go away. For the first time in years, my office was Ivar free.

But in the clean-out, room along the wall was freed up, perfect for some time of shelf to hold my books, which remains trapped within cardboard boxes. I hear them scream — let us out! Plus, i just like to look at them, my friends acquired over the years from being a kid. Needing a solution of some time, it was time for a trip back to Ikea. I hesitated in considering Ivar, knowing that almost like a child, I’d be gaining a new piece of furniture for life no matter how temporary it seems. But after reviewing all the options, it was that same standard Ivar horizontal shelf from all those years ago that was the best solution.

So I sit back in Newport Beach, the sun coming through the window, warming the wood Ivar shelves across from it, reminding me of those many years ago. I’ve got some space just below the window. Maybe I’ll get some breeze blocks and a plank of wood….

We visited the school our children will be going to when we move to California later this year. How much was lunch, I asked? $2.95 per day. Wow. I’m old. It was like 55 cents when I was a kid. And I can remember skipping lunches often in high school (I think I got $1 per day then) to scrape together some spending money.

I twittered my surprise at the rise in lunch cost and was impressed by the reaction. Everyone wanted to remark! OK, not everyone, but it was a strong response. So I asked people on Twitter to tell me what they paid when they were in school and when that was.

Below, just a fun round-up of what came back.

	matt_mcgowan @dannysullivan $15.34
	StephenPace @dannysullivan $1.50 for a pizza slice, fries, onion rings, and a coke – lunch of champions! This would probably be considered abuse today.
	IamJustinM @dannysullivan $1.50 1995
	TheOtherJeff @dannysullivan $1.95 back in 93-96, but it came with chocolate milk! a
	williamvicary @dannysullivan lol 55 cents! $2.95 would be quite cheap, when i was in school food was like $3.50 at least.
	zaknicola @dannysullivan It was a dollar for the school lunch back in 94
	amyalcin @dannysullivan about $1.35 for my school lunch in 01′. Did you hear about the new concern over school lunches?
	rishil @dannysullivan year was 1999…
	kentjlewis @dannysullivan last lunch I bought was junior year in high school. Burger, fries and a milk ran $1.10 (at Garfield High in Seattle 1990)
	calamier @dannysullivan My last year of school was 2003.
	JRBCS @dannysullivan 2004 $2.35 in 6th grade, I believe
	autohousewife @dannysullivan 1.25 a day in 1994
	feydakin @dannysullivan 1984 $0.85
	rishil @dannysullivan i remember paying 10 pence for chips and 15 pence for a bottle of pop!
	kid_disco @dannysullivan – Healthy sack lunch made by mom, for me… ’98
	calamier @dannysullivan There are actually some really good government programs for that sort of thing, I know some kids get it free…
	BlahGeeTsa @dannysullivan 85 cents
	calamier @dannysullivan I think our lunch was 2.99 but I come from a huge family, so we paid like .10 cents a day.
	KeriMorgret @dannysullivan I paid 90 cents in elementary school. I remember keeping the dime as change.
	CarrieHill @dannysullivan – i think we were $1.50 – i remember getting pissed at mom for giving me quarters all the time
	JenniferLaycock @dannysullivan $1.10 for my lunch from 92-95 in high school.
	JRBCS @dannysullivan It was 65 cents less just 5 years ago…shows you how strong the dollar is, eh?
	Skitzzo @dannysullivan, I think it was like $2.25 when I went… I guess that means I’m still young eh?
	numberneal @dannysullivan except on days that i wanted skip the chicken pot pie, and grab a slice in its stead.
	CarrieHill @dannysullivan – our highschool has a chef that makes salads and burgers to order – it’s cheaper for the kids to go to McD’s – WTF?
	numberneal @dannysullivan it was free, with my free lunch card.
	samiwasnt @dannysullivan look at it positively. With the USD worth what it is today, your 55 cents might actually have been more than todays rate
	zaknicola @dannysullivan it was a buck when I was going to school

Earlier this month, Matt
said he wanted to
see a picture of my much abused dog. Not abused that way! Abused because, well,
I don’t really like dogs and so complain loudly about her to anyone who will
listen and profess to have no love for the animal. "But we know you love her,"
say my boys. I confess. On the odd occasion, I will indeed pet her.

Her name is Daisy:

Getting her to pose was not easy:

In part, that was because she was thinking "Dude, you never pay attention to
me. Why are you now chasing me around, calling out my name and flashing me with
that white light thing."

Daisy understands I have this limited affection, so she often adopts this
very pathetic post to try and make me feel sorry for her:

Look really close at the collar:

Yeah, it says Google. Swag put to good use. Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask — send
your own collars, and I’ll put those on her, as well.

There’s a new blog tag game going around where you have to "tag" five people
and get them to tell 5 things others might not know about them. I got tagged by
multiple people and OK, I’ll bite.

1. I restored all the wooden floors in our old house, the wooden staircase
   and opened up four fireplaces. If I never see a dust mask or sander again (I
   burned through three of them), I’ll be happy.
    
2. I shoot a pretty good game of pool honed by working my way through college
   as a youth leader in a recreation center. Pool tables were a central feature.
   I went from slop to call pocket as a survival mechanism.
    
3. Robert Heinlein is my favorite author, and I wrote him a letter as a kid.
   He sent back a personal reply, one of my favorite possessions.
    
4. My first job was for Carl’s Jr. flipping burgers in a mall. Like
   Fast Times At Ridgemont High,
   only without Phoebe Cates. To this day, I can crack open heads of lettuce in
   ways that will stun anyone who isn’t a fast food professional.
    
5. I think ichthyosaurs are pretty cool and discovered that domain name
   hadn’t been registered several years ago. So, I gabbed it. A few months ago, I
   finally did something with it and started
   The Ichthyosaurs Blog. Ichthyosaurs are dinosaurs that look a lot like
   today’s dolphins. The best news story so far this year was a new species
   discovered, the Ping
   Pong Ichthyosaur, named after fossils that were left under a university
   ping pong table for many years. My blog feed, by the way, as two subscribers
   – me and someone else.
    
6. Bonus fact — because at first I thought I’d blogged everything about
   myself but then came up with six items!
   
   Like Matt McGee, I used to write a traffic column. He did it for the Los
   Angeles Daily News. I did it for the Los Angeles Times’ Orange County Edition.
   Sorry, Google News Archive
   has been absolutely useless in pointing you to any. So was
   Factiva.

Andy pointed to the Blog
Tag Tree and links to many search marketers who have been tagged. I’ve got a
ton of people I’d love to tag, but they’ve either been hit already (central
registration of this game would have helped) or don’t have blogs. ShoeMoney, so
far, probably had the most jaw dropping revelation I’ve seen with

his story of massive weight-loss. I’ll kick it out to the researcher area. I
tag:

• Gary Price
• Tara Calishain  (who is
  a way, so maybe when she gets back and all’s better)
• Avi Rappaport
• Phil Bradley
• Greg Notess

Brian Smith covers the shopping space by blogging as a correspondent for me
and at his own ComparisonEngines.com
site. Many of his readers are merchants, and those merchants have encouraged him
to develop his SingleFeed product. He’s
been doing that, but now he’s looking for a very small investor round of $50
million. Nah. He’s looking to raise $100 to $200,000 for staff, marketing and to
grow the product. Anyone interested, catch him over there or out at
SES Chicago
next week.

As a kid, those Ginsu knife
commercials fascinated me. Think you’re only getting the knife? "But Wait,
There’s More!" And the guy who wrote those words and many other infomercials,
Arthur Schiff, has passed away. Direct Magazine has
more. Rest In Peace.

When I was in Toronto, an important topic came up during dinner. Why can’t mules breed — and what the heck is the difference between mules, donkey, burros and asses?

Mona Elesseily just emailed me to see if I ever got the answer. The perfect excuse to find out.

Hey Google! What’s a mule?

I love that the first answer on Google is to a page at Ask Yahoo, What’s the difference between mules, donkeys, burros, and jackasses? It explains lots, but I also went to Wikipedia for some information, as well. Here’s my breakdown:

• Horse: C’mon, you know what a horse is!
• Donkey & Ass & Burros: Different words to mean the same thing, a horse-like animal with long ears. Yahoo went with “ass” meaning a wild donkey or donkey being a domesticated ass. Wikipedia went with them being the same, but donkey being used more recently since, you know, ass sounds like that thing you sit on.
• Mule: What you get when you mate a female horse (known as a mare) with a male donkey (known as a jack — yes, a jack ass). Mules are almost always sterile, Wikipedia says, because horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62, giving mules 63.OK, so Biology 101 is a long-ways off for me, but I can’t resist asking. So what if they have only 63 chromosomes? Why’s that stopping two mules from having a family? After all, both parents would have the same number of chromosomes.

  More searching leads me to this page, Polyploidy & Hybridization, which explains that while they have the same number, you need even numbers of chromosomes to breed. Remember (like I failed to do), the chromosomes have to split up and match from each parent. They can’t do that in mules.

• Hinny: Hinny? Yeah, hinny. That’s what you get when you cross a male horse (known as a stallion) with a female donkey (known as a mare — don’t you know that only men can be asses?). Apparently, you don’t get many hinnies because it’s easier for cross-breeding to happen when the father has fewer chromosomes than the mother.

Now earlier, I said that mules are almost always sterile. That’s because everything I’m reading uses that caveat. But remember our Bio 101 refresher above, on how you can’t breed if you have an odd number of chromosomes. Shouldn’t that make it “always sterile,” not “almost always?”

I went looking further. Here’s one report of a mule-mule birth. This page tells me:

A VERY few (about 1 in 1 million) mare mules have had foals, but these are VERY, very rare.

Which sounds like some mule managed to do it (good for you, little mule!). But then right after that, it says:

No male mule has ever sired a foal. SO if you cross a mule to a mule – you get nothing!

Which seems to contradict the earlier statement on the page. So I dunno. Adding to my confusion, here’s another statement that sometimes, mules and hinnies can be fertile. And here’s a report that since 1527, the international society of mule birth tracking has counted only 60 reported cases of mules giving birth. OK, there’s no such society, but somehow, somewhere, that BBC article dredged up those stats.

Still need to know more about mules? This page has even more, such as how they sound, colors and how they are used.

The recent daylight savings time shift got me wanting to mention the
The World Clock
Meeting Planner service. It’s a great thing to use if you need to talk with
people in different time zones, plus it’s the closest thing to the ideal clock
I’ve long wanted but feel doesn’t exist.

For nearly twenty years now, I’ve constantly been having to think in
different time zones. When I worked at the Orange County Register and the
Los Angeles Times, my workday started at 9:30am Pacific Time. If I was working on a graphic
involving a national story, that often meant needing to talk with an expert on
the East Coast. As a result, I was three hours "down" on time to reach these
people. I had to keep in mind that if I didn’t reach them by 2pm my time, I
probably wouldn’t hear back, as that’s 5pm back East. I learned to look at the clock and
constantly think of East Coast time throughout the day.

For the past nine years, I’ve been in the UK and needing to talk with search
engines based mostly in California. The plus is that this gives me lots of lead time "ahead" of
any story. But the downside is knowing that 5pm my time is really when people
are first really arriving at work in California and ready to talk or take calls.
As you can imagine, I have a fair number of early evening calls that I do.

I can pretty much do both West Coast and East Coast time in my head when I’m
in the UK. If
someone says "can we talk at 10 Pacific," I know without much thinking that will
be 6pm my time. But it can get tricky when I start dealing with odd times such
as 1pm Pacific, people on
Central or Mountain Time or when I’m dealing with those outside the US and
UK.

Enter The World
Clock Meeting Planner. It’s awesome. Pick up to four places where you might
want to talk with someone, push a button, and you get a chart showing what time
it is throughout the day in those places.

In other words, it will tell you that 12pm London time will be 7am in New York
and 4am in San Francisco — not a good choice if you want to do a conference call
with people in all those places at once. It even uses color coding to help you.
Business hours in each place are green; early business hours are yellow and
non-business hours are red.

What’s a good time? You get all greens for 5pm London, which is Noon in New
York and 9am in San Francisco:

It’s a super handy service, and I only wish I could find a clock that’s
similar to it for my desk, that I could glance at.

Everyone’s seen those "world clocks" that show you the current time in three
or four places on different displays. Those are useless for doing forward
planning, if you want to know what time it will be at some place at a future
moment.

How about something like
this clock, that Boing Boing recently

featured. Again, useless. It’s handy that you can roll it to find out the
time NOW in a particular place. But if you’re on the phone in England with
someone in Los Angeles, and they say "let’s talk again tomorrow at 2pm my time,"
what time will that be for you? Quick, quick! A glance at that clock won’t tell
you. But a glance at my ideal clock below would:

I want a clock with two or three rings of numbers. Inside is the current time
for me. The outside ring could be rotated for a time zone you regularly deal
with, such as Pacific. I can look at any hour in either time zone and know
exactly what the time will be in the other place.

I know, the picture’s ugly. I’m not an artist. But that’s the idea of what I
want, and despite much looking, I’ve never found it.

As long as I’m hoping, how about getting Outlook to let me enter a time based
on when someone’s talking about. So if we agree to a 5pm Pacific meeting, it
would be nice if I could put that in at 5pm Pacific time and have Outlook
automatically convert.

In case you’re wondering, even the new
Google Calendar isn’t this smart. I typed into quick add "meeting at 5:30pm
pacific time today" which nicely added the meeting to my calendar and at 5:30pm
– but 5:30pm GMT (which is in my settings) rather than 5:30pm Pacific.

Even better would be if Outlook wouldn’t shift all my appointments on my
Smartphone if I dare to let the time zone change out of GMT. But that’s a story
for a future post.

One last thing. If you are calling someone in another time zone, do find out
the time before you call. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is as unimpressive as
someone calling me at 11pm at night and starting off saying, "I don’t know what
time it is there but…."

I work at home, but late calls aren’t an issue. I only hear them if I’m up
and working in my office, so they don’t bother me at all if I’ve gone to bed or
I’m not working. What bothers me is that a statement like that shows that
someone hasn’t even bothered to consider whether they might be making a call at
a bad time.

Hopefully, the World Clock Meeting Planner will help some of these people
changing the opening line from "I don’t know what time it is" to instead, "I
know it’s late, but I hope you don’t mind me trying to catch you…."