I'm not an IT person, but I'd suggest, before you go to management, you optimize the department.

You mention that you are taking on projects you don't have a chance to even start. Also you talk about mundane tasks preventing you from working on other projects. You should make sure that, given your current resources, you are working on the right tasks. Start saying no to the least important things. Only take on tasks that you know you can complete. If what you say is true then thats already a big improvement.

Think carefully about this, and discuss it with your manager and other departments before you implement, because you are going to get a lot of pushback. Your approach should be "we want to start focusing on critical work, we don't have the resource to work on your project now". Absolutely, don't use it as a play for more staff or you'll find yourself in trouble.

Only go to management with a request for more staff when you can show a benefit to the company. A list of additional tasks that you could take on and what their impact would be for example.

Try this:

http://www.google.com/doodles/douglas-adams-61st-birthday

Yes, text messaging in Japan is fragmented. Its often impossible to text between carriers and my Japanese carrier offered no capability to send or receive texts overseas.

When the earthquake hit power and phone service became largely unusable pretty quickly (somewhere between Tokyo and the quake). However, I was able to send a facebook post from my Japanese style smartphone that hit a fair number of my friends and family telling them we were OK before everything went down. I rarely used it for day to day stuff since it wasn't all that useable, but for this application is was perfect.

Shinjuku

Not to mention the Yodobashi camera store (more of a complex really) in Shinkjuko will blow your mind.

Yeah, the word is: here maybe 4PM.

Here in Tochigi it was strong, but not frightening. My first time under a table! Lots of stone walls fallen over in my neighborhood.

According to wife, supermarkets are rather bare today.

My neighbour got SMS text messages from the heart of the disaster zone yesterday. Phone calls impossible.

Here in Tochigi just north of Tokyo and south of Fukushima (where the reactors are) the blackouts have been cancelled (or perhaps postponed).

cheers, david

The reason I didn't compare scooters is because thats not what most people take to work. But I might have done well to recommend people consider scooters instead of or along with bicycles.

Its rather interesting that the numbers for bicycles and cars are closer than I had though (except my banana number which is way off). This guy suggests, with numbers to support for USA conditions, that walking and driving are not too far separated for same distance trips.

And that bicycling is about twice as efficient as single passenger car trips in fuel efficient cars.

So riding to work is still a good thing, especially if it doubles as part of your exercise habit. But is nowhere near as good idea as riding somewhere in your recreational time, where time and not distance might be more of a factor. And sharing a car might be more efficient that riding a bike.

Honestly speaking, I still have a slightly hard time believing it. But I don't have a better story. The whole thing does bear a bit more investigation.

cheers,
david

I think its hard to infer that I'm an idiot for simple stating an opinion counter to yours.

I don't know why you suggest riding a bicycle is more environmentally expensive than driving a car. Lets play with the numbers shall we?

A bunch of banana's costs about $2 where I live. Lets assume that the component cost of bananas in terms of fuel is close to 100%. That would mean that to produce those bananas less than $2 of fuel was been spent. Probably much less, but lets keep the number at $2.

Lets assume you drive a fuel efficient vehicle. I'll give you 40 mpg. Lets say that your round trip drive to work is 20 miles. Lets price petrol about $2 a gallon.

Lets also a assume that I eat an extra 2 bananas over my friends who drive to work. I believe it to be less than that. Lets say there are 6 bananas in a bunch. So your driving to work costs:
20 miles / 40 mpg = 1/2 a gallon a day. (plus your car maintenance expenses)

My costs of riding to work:
$2 a bunch * 1/3 of a bunch a day / $2 a gallon = 1/3 of a gallon a day. (plus the cost of maintaining my bicycle.

Now I would contend that you might well drive a more expensive vehicle than that, I eat less than 2 bananas a day to drive my bicycle, the environmental cost of producing a banana is less than 100% of its total cost, there are more than 6 bananas in a bunch of bananas where I live and that the mileage related costs of maintaining a car vs. a bicycle are relevant. I admit I do own a car so I can't claim all the production costs of a car as an advantage. Also I admit that it is possible that the environmental cost of making a banana _could_ be more than 100% of its cost in fuel, but I don't think so. I'm not sure about the cost of fuel, but I think if that is higher (as it is in banana producing nations like Brazil and India) that works to strengthen bicycles advantage too since it would mean using less fuel to make the banana at that price.

But anyway, bicycles are cheaper. Probably much, much cheaper, but even giving you _every_ benefit of the doubt bicycles win.

cheers,
david

PS. Most upsetting of all is you force me to sound like a rabid greeny just to argue a ridiculous contention with you. I'm not, I'm just a person who would like to personally do something about a problem that I judge to be real. On the other hand thank you for forcing me to do the exercise, I thought it might turn out to be many orders of magnitude better, but now I think I can just say riding a bicycle is much better.

What the hell do you think? Muscle energy isn't free energy, it comes from food, and food is anything but green energy.

Are you seriously suggesting that riding a bike to work and driving your car to work have a similar impact on global warming? Or are you just suggesting that leaving the solution to our duck lobbing scientist friends is preferable to doing something yourself?

Driving your car to work does release carbon into the environment that was not there last year. Riding your bike does not. The reduction of carbon in the environment is behind the discussion of carbon capture.

So your idea of saving the world is downscaling the economy and living like Cubans?

No, I do however suggest that our living environment is more important than our economy. If its necessary for me to make some changes to my life in order to reduce global warming then thats OK with me. People repeatedly accept changes to their life to improve the economy.

Your hostility to a proposal to actually make some personal changes is exactly the attitude that I sought to highlight in my previous post. In my post I meant to say that people could take action to help with the situation or they could wait for the scientists and government to solve the problem.

Without dismissing the value of research, I'd say we already know what we can do today with today's available tools to reduce our impact on the warming of the planet.

Stories like this make us feel better that we are doing more to combat global warming. But actually, if we rode our bike to work, bought less stuff and used things that required less power then we'd be making a positive difference.

Or we could wait for researchers and government to come up with a silver bullet. Human interest, feel good articles like this don't make me think this is imminent.

I know opinions like this aren't popular on Slashdot where its more important to find a way to justify upgrading the next gadget. But really, if its no the intelligent, wealthy population of the planet who will lead us to a solution by example, exactly who is it?

cheers,
david