Cleveland Dam, Vancouver

Here on Beyond the Rhetoric, I gather together five blog posts from around the Internet to share every Wednesday. This week’s collection is loosely centered around the topic of feeding your hunger, interpreted a few different ways. If you want to be included in a future speedlink, be sure to follow me on Twitter and send me a message on Tuesday. 🙂

We start out by feeding our curiosity. Darren Barefoot writes about a secret Vancouver gem called Cleveland Dam. Pictured above, the dam divides North and West Vancouver. I’ve never been there myself, but I love being a tourist in my own town. Here’s another spot to add to my list.

What about feeding the web? Ray Ebersole has come up with some cool Google+ recipes, including the ability to put up WordPress blog posts through the relatively new social network. There are also customizations to send Google Calendar alerts to the stream and to send Twitter updates directly to Google+ too.

When it comes to good food, Melody Fury knows a thing or two about feeding that hunger too. She recently went on a carb overload involving ramen, roti, pasta, sushi, breads, and more. It all looks very good and, while a carb overload might not be the healthiest thing in the world, good carbs can be so richly satisfying.

Feeding yourself goes beyond today, but how much money do really need for retirement? That’s a question asked by the folks at Free Money Finance and they find quite the range of responses. You need 75%-135% of your income level to maintain your current standard of living, assuming you retire at all.

And finally, Dragon Blogger has a post about feeding your need to communicate with the masses, describing six pieces of open source software as part of your blogging toolbox. You don’t need to spend the big bucks on corporate software, necessarily, when a lot of this free open source software will do just fine. I use OpenOffice, VLC, and Audacity, myself.