I was playing around with a website called EnergyRace. If you join and go through their questionnaire, they give you a rough estimate of your carbon footprint. Later, you can indicate any changes you have made to you car, home, etc. and they show you ho much you have reduced your footprint. They even give you a little badge you can put on your website with your latest results:

It looks like I still have some improvements to make.

There’s a similar site encouraging and tracking the use of Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFL) called One Billion Bulbs. They provide ratings of various CFLs, and if you create an account, they will show you how much money and carbon you are saving as you switch to CFLs.

After exchanging a few emails, I met up with Nathan at a Starbucks in Oakland. It turns out he’s been looking for someone with experience in developing electronic devices and software. We seems to hit it off. It was interesting to find out we not only both attended the same university for undergrad (Carnegie Mellon), but we both played rugby there as well! What a small world. We’re planning to get together again next week to continue our discussion.