So, Earth Hour has come and gone.  Electricity utilities reported that consumption during the hour in Ontario dropped by 5%.  Ottawa’s power consumption.

In Ottawa, Public Works and Government Services Canada (PWGSC), the government’s landlord, turned off architectural lighting and signage on most government buildings, including the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill and many businesses and individuals participated.  According to Ottawa Hydro, electricity consumption in Ottawa dropped by 4%, a significant drop given that lighting only accounts for about 14% of the electricity used in the city.

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More from the Everybody Votes Channel available on the Nintendo Wii.

Question: How often do you get your hair cut?

National Prediction Accuracy: 47.4% (Interesting… most people guessed wrong.)

Almost twice as many guys as girls go to the barber more frequently than every two months. The last time I visited my barber, we were talking about how much the average visit to the barber costs guys versus how much the average visit to the beauty salon costs women next door. I was shocked to discover that I spend in a year what many women spend in one visit to the stylist at a salon. And I spend significantly less time per visit, too.

WordPress 2.5 was released earlier today so after making backups of things, I checked out the upgrade instructions when using subversion and was happy to find that it basically involved changing to the root of my WordPress installation and then issuing the following command:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/

After watching the files scroll by, I pointed my browser at the upgrade URL, logged in and found everything appeared to be working.  I re-enabled my plugins and everything still seems to be working.

Sweet. 🙂

My congratulations to the WordPress development team for a job well done!

The second annual Earth Hour takes place at 8pm local time tomorrow (March 29th). The idea is that people turn, companies and cities turn off their lights for an hour to help inspire people to take action on climate change. It started in Sydney, Australia last year with something like 2.2 million people and 2100 businesses in Sydney turning off their lights for an hour on March 31st. Since then, it has become a global movement with more than a quarter of a million people and a large number of companies and cities committing to turning off their lights for an hour.

Locally, the City of Ottawa has joined the Earth Hour movement. Personally, I’m going to turn off my lights for the hour.

What are you going to do? If you’re not doing anything, why not?

Since implementing the captcha challenge for comments on my blog about a week ago there hasn’t been a single comment trapped by Akismet.  Normally, there would have been about a hundred comments during that time that I would have had to review to make sure there were no false-positives, so I think it’s safe to say that it’s working.

MIAMI — An eagle ray leaped onto a boat off the Florida Keys Thursday and stabbed a woman with its barb, knocking her to the deck and killing her, a Florida wildlife investigator said.

Talk about freakish accidents. (click here for the full article)

Though I have other things in place to ensure that blog spam doesn’t make it through in the comments, I still have to periodically have to review those that were blocked to ensure they aren’t false positives.  On the things-that-annoy-me-scale, this doesn’t rank very high, but it still registers.  To deal with this, I’ve added a captcha challenge that you have to pass when entering a comment.

Hopefully this doesn’t break anything else.