Furth and Fortune blog by Will Murray

Deb Shinder, Editor of WXPNews, posed the following question (and my comments follow):

In the early days of automobiles, anyone who could afford one could buy a car and start driving. There was no driver’s education, no written exams, no vision tests, and no state troopers grading your pathetic attempts to parallel park.
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In the 21st century, we live in a much more regulated world. And some are proposing making it more so – by requiring that you be issued some sort of “driver’s license” to get behind the wheel of a computer and venture out onto the Internet.

Tags: cars, computers, driving, governments, identity theft, impersonation, Internet, Internet culture, licenses, logins, Microsoft, Opinions, politics, RFID, smart paper, spyware, virus

Thanks to everyone who posted comments on my social networking profiles wishing me a happy birthday. I love seeing the cute and/or rude things people have posted there. Thanks also to those who sent me private messages. Especially thanks to those who did both. It’s always nice to know that there are people out there who care.

Sorry I haven’t been around online much lately. Partly it’s been work, and partly its been my computer giving me fits. I was tired of how slow it was running, so I uninstalled a bunch of software I never use, and after that, the computer seemed to go into shock or something, and it became so slow and horrible to work on, I reformatted and reinstalled everything from scratch. That’s always a brutal process when you tweak your computer as much as I do, but it’s running very well now, and I’m being much more selective in what I reinstall. Housecleaning, whether it be your actual home or your virtual one, is a good thing. Anyway, now that I have a usable computer again, I should be around more often.

One weird side effect of the change is that GAIM (the new instant messenger I installed) crashes every time I try to add my MSN account to it. So, if you want to IM me, use my yahoo IM address.

Tags: birthdays, comments, contact, thanks

I love chocolate! (Big surprise, right? A lot of people love it.) If you read my blog regularly, you probably know that supporting organizations that save rain forests and ones that promote fair/equitable trade are very important to me. Naturally a company that makes chocolate bars from equitably traded cocoa and donates profits to save the rain forests sounds like a win-win-win idea to me. That’s exactly what Endangered Species Chocolate (chocolatebar.com) does, and my family and I love them!

I was concerned after recently reading the following information:

About 70 percent of the world’s chocolate is grown in west and central Africa. The lead content of cocoa beans is low, but that of manufactured cocoa and chocolate products is among the highest of any food. How so? No one is sure, but several major cocoa bean-producing countries in Africa used leaded gasoline until recently, and a few still do. It seems likely the toxic metal is introduced at some point, probably multiple points, during cocoa bean shipping and processing. Is there enough to worry about? The Dagoba Organic Chocolate company of Ashland, Oregon, thought so or anyway did after a little prodding from the Food and Drug Administration. Though the company wouldn’t divulge test results, it recalled 40,000 pounds of its high-end chocolate products this spring after some were found to exceed FDA standards for lead.

Since Nigeria, the place where Endangered Species Chocolate is grown and produced, is in western central Africa, it would seem like their chocolate might be at considerable risk of lead contamination. That would be heartbreaking to this chocoholic. I wrote to the company (gotta love the Internet!), and I received a very nice response back that I would like to share (only editing out some personal info). It certainly put my fears to rest.

Tags: Africa, candies, chocolate, chocolate bars, cocoa, Dagoba Organic Chocolate, Dominican Republic, Endangered Species Chocolate, equitable trade, fair trade, FDA, Halloween, health, lead, Nigeria, organics, rain forests, USDA