Opening

My wife and I enjoy exposing our kids to new and different experiences. Some experiences are simply for the fun of it, while others are focused on learning. Sometimes you get lucky and find one that accomplishes both. This year while on our family vacation, we were lucky enough to have a number of experiences that covered both. Tonight, I'm going to tell you about one of those experiences. While checking into our vacation cabin my daughter came across a flyer for Gem Mountain in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. She and my son got really excited at the thought of being able to mine a huge diamond and strike it rich.

I just attended my first Second Life Online Toastmasters meeting. It was very nice and covered all of the aspects that you would expect a Toastmasters meeting to cover. One exception, it was virtual.

All of the roles covered, tabletopics, joke of the day and two very good speakers. I filled the Evaluator role. The toastmaster hosted a Skype conference call, so we could all talk and the speakers could recieve their applause when they completed their speeches.

Introduction

I’d like for you all to close your eyes and imagine living next to a landfill. 4.6 pounds of new garbage brought in every day for each person that the landfill serves. The smell off rotting fruits and vegetables, and lawn debris. The sound of heavy earth moving equipment and constant traffic in and out of the place. With landfills filling up at an alarming rate and the difficulty in creating new ones, changes must be made.

I’m going to cover how we can reduce our waste by up to 30% by composting. I’ll cover the top 2 reasons for composting and using a composting tumbler.

After hearing my presentation this evening, you will be armed with the knowledge and resources to start you own compost heap.

Body

First off, what is composting?

We have a real and growing problem. Our natural resource dependency for energy and its limited capacity and effect on the environment. Fortunately, we do have options. Some may argue that they are too expensive, that they are too inefficient, or that they are too complex, and they may be right to some extent, so I decided to find out for myself by building an alternative energy device of my own as a learning experiment. I started by doing some research on alternate energy, also knows as Green Energy. There are a number of solutions out there, but the two solutions that I found the most information on covered wind and solar power.

Thank you for the excellent introduction Mr. Toastmaster.

Mr. Toastmaster, Fellow members and guests, I am here to talk about the history of Daboo. The name Daboo is not a new one, it originated back in the forties by a sister that could not pronounce her brother’s name. His name was David. In case anyone was wondering how I still look so young after all of these years, that David was not me. The David I am speaking of was named David Hand, he was a friend of my parents. He started calling me Daboo from the beginning, so naturally, it stuck. I’ve used it as my signature on drawings, and typically associate the name with my projects such as Daboo Project Manager, which is a Task/Phase tracking application that I developed. I like to create things. I do a lot of this at work, but I get my real thrills out of what I create at home in my spare time.

I've opened the site up to allow for visitiors to post questions and comments. All you need to do is create a user account. My hope is that we will all be able to benefit from each others feedback and questions.

I built two solar panels using nothing but the Internet for my research and would like to share my learning experiences as many others have done. One of the most valuable DIY resources I found was "How I Build an Electricity Producing Solar Panel. It was easy. You can do it too.". Most of what I have documented here should look quite familiar if you go to his site. The main difference between others documentation and what I'm providing here, is that mine goes into a lot of detail. My goal here was to document start to finish the dimensions and photograph every step of the way to make it easy to reproduce. I have also included a fairly detailed BOM (Bill of Materials). The most lengthy part of the whole process was waiting for the paint to dry.