I just found out about this cool non-profit site that fronts for microcredit institutions. You can lend $25 to someone, helping to back their microcredit loan. When the money is repaid by the person you get your $25 back to lend to a new person, or to withdraw from the system.

The site works with organizations that specialize in microfinance and who know how to recommend loans that are viable. The current default rate is 0.24%, on 23065 loans. There are currently 147525 lenders like you and me in their system. And if the loan does default, well a charitable donation of $25 is not going to break you, eh?

You don’t make any interest on the money, and the players along the way cover their costs with this interest. So it is more of a refundable charitable contribution than an investment. However, you are directly funding the person, so there is a social benefit.

I am thinking of getting involved in this.

 › cool     2007-11-22 13:16   ...0 comments

One of the things going on on the internet today is anonymous secrets.

It all started with PostSecret which involved people making artistic postcards and mailing them anonymously to a website.

Since then, all kinds of secret sites have popped up, like the ljsecret community on LiveJournal.

Amongst all of these is a site that lets you phone up, leave a message and the message is posted anonymously to the site as an audio file. This might be unremarkable except that the phone end of it is our PhoneValet application.

(The guy is providing an applescript to PhoneValet that is called after the message is left. The script post-processes the audio into MP3 format, then uploads it to his webserver.)

Cool to see a public use of PhoneValet, trivial though it may be.

ETA: The OneDaySecret site is here. Forgot that part. Click on the weird circle shapes to hear the secrets.

 › cool     2006-10-23 15:47   ...0 comments

Attention users of small white computers, and small (or big) gray computers.

A replacement Mac OS X trackpad driver has been released called SideTrack.

This wicked driver allows you to designate an area at the side of your trackpad to run the scroll bar, allows clicking in the corners of the pad to do control-click or anything else you want, and much more.

See a complete review at MacWorld’s MacGems. Look about 2/3 of the way down the page. Below the SlimBatteryMonitor review (4 mice!!)

 › cool     2004-11-24 11:05   ...2 comments

From that same person I sent you a link to before comes an entry referencing a Ph.D. on women and webcams.

 › cool     2004-10-31 22:54   ...1 comment

Here’s a tidbit for all you Mac users out there. RandomWeb will go out on the google image search looking for digital camera pictures to display as a screensaver. It periodically goes out looking for new pics, so you always have a fresh supply of random photos of people you don’t know in places you’ve never been. (Makes me think of that great Twilight Zone episode: ‘Button Button’.)

As an aside, it’s not so much that I can’t figure out why people take out of focus pictures. No. I just can’t figure out why they put them on the internet…

 › cool     2004-10-10 23:23   ...1 comment

It’s funny. Almost everyone I know has passed through some sort of higher education, and like everything else in life it has been (for most of us I presume) a mixed blessing. Deadlines, assignments, marks, degrees. It is a funny business.

Most of us, however, started out with a kind of shining idealism, of what academia’s place is, or ought to be, in society. In theory, the academy (like the Internet) is a place where what matters is contribution, rather than contributor. Truth over fantasy and fancy. And — at the risk of becoming saccharine — light over darkness.

Somewhere along the line we lose sight of this. Being a student is a demanding job… Somewhere amongst the mechanics of our discipline we lose touch with that idealism. Focussed on some sub-problem of some sticky issue being studied by hundreds we feel very distant from those ideals which in retrospect seemed overly romantic.

Some days, though, the fire is there again. Again it feels like academics as a vocation beats all else, by any measure. And it is those days that we must cling to as times get tough, the prospect of progress becomes murky, and politics, the bane of the academy, makes its rounds in the ivory tower.

What has spawned this grandiloquent entry you may ask? Why a post in ladyjaida’s livejournal, a blog of a 17 year old freshman at Columbia (coincidently where our conference was this summer) who is at the glorious beginning.

For some reason, enthusiasm like this is infectious to me. These entries come about very infrequently as I’m scanning around for online reading material. There must be 10 000 entries about girlfriend problems for each gem like Jaida’s, I’ve mentioned this before in a previous entry which also made me happy. I choose to believe that people tend to live the highs and blog the lows… at least we can hope.

 › cool     2004-09-30 00:28   ...1 comment

What do you get when you cross the world’s best search engine with an old-time cab driver, an information kiosk, a cartographer and the yellow pages? Why it’s local.google.ca.

Try typing, for example, coffee and your street address (e.g. 1234 My Street, Ottawa, ON).

 › cool     2004-09-21 18:57   ...0 comments

this is highly amusing. Trust me.

 › cool     2004-08-23 09:10   ...0 comments

This is a pretty cool little program to get content out of pdf files. Haven’t tried it, but the idea is neat.

This is reminiscent of the fantastic Tailor postscript editor.

 › cool     2004-07-13 11:38   ...1 comment

The owners of Cafe Press have a really cool thing going.

Provide them with some graphics, and they’ll produce and sell t-shirts and all kinds of other stuff at a “store” they set up for you on their website.

You design graphics, and set the price of your items (above a base price that covers their costs). They take orders, and ship items, and send you your profits by cheque.

There are no minimums, and if you want to create a “secret” store to order one shirt that you design for yourself, you can!

You can even print a book! 3¢ per page, plus $7 for a “perfect binding” (real book binding). Quantity: 1 book or more!

 › cool     2004-04-20 15:03   ...1 comment

There just seem to be piles of these personality inventories cropping up all over the net these days. Many of these tests are probably knockoffs of the established copyrighted ones, but I’m having fun with them.

Read the Complete Entry

 › cool     2004-04-10 10:00   ...1 comment

I know most of you are groaning to find yet another blog entry about OKCupid, but I had a thought about it this aft, and - well - you’re a captive audience, right?

So, it’s a bit late to be making new year’s resolutions (since Q1 2004 has just expired) but in the spirit of self-improvement I offer the following. Select the trait from your profile - one that you feel is accurate for you - that you’d like to work to change (or at least alter). I put the question to you: which would you change, and why?

Now, I’m not so much interested in what overall personality description you’d most like to be, but rather which of Deliberate, Gentle, Love, Master (in my case) you’d like to change a bit.

In my case, I think I’d like to work on Deliberate vs. Random. I think I can get overly caught up in the process of being Deliberate, and it can affect me actually just living my life and being happy about things. If I was less deliberate then I think I might be better at stopping and smelling the roses, and letting the highs and lows of life have an impact on me.

At present (and some of you have talked to me about this) I think I can over-intellectualize my emotions. This can be a good coping strategy for negative emotions, as squelching the emotional part and dealing with the intellectual fallout rationally keeps me on an even keel. On the other hand, if a good emotion comes up I tend to deal with it the same way: squelch the goodness and intellectualize it. That is too much of an even keel. So… I think that if I were a bit more random, and didn’t think things through quite as much, I could just live it up a bit more.

Of course, that would make me the Loverboy, which sounds a bit racy, but maybe I could use a dose of that, even if not the whole kettle of fish, as it were.

Keen to hear your thoughts about this… and about your profile.

 › cool     2004-04-04 20:19   ...9 comments

Found OKCupid online while surfing a random blog. It’s a bit like a Myers-Briggs personality test crossed with the Purity test crossed with that “what sci-fi character are you” thing that was going around a while back.

I am The Gentleman. A bit boring. But probably not inaccurate.

Ok folks, this is the participatory part of the blog. Everyone reading this is expected to complete the test (make up a screen name and a fake email address when prompted, since you don’t need it to see your results… unless you want to meet fabulous new friends online).

I want to see everyone following up to this entry with a comment as to what type you are…

BTW- Just mailed my paper draft to my prof for comments. Shouldn’t have surfed so many blogs this aft… ah procrastination!

 › cool     2004-03-31 03:47   ...12 comments

I seem to be enjoying trolling around with the “random” links on blog sites — LiveJournal and DiaryLand in particular.

This is a strangely voyeuristic experience, although of course it is not because people are posting entries to their blogs so that others can read them. Many people out there write about their bad days (and many seem to be in high school, so bad days are commonplace for them… newayz).

Some write about good days though… and it’s nice to come across them every so often.

Yes, I am supposed to be writing my paper. Going back to that now.

 › cool     2004-03-30 17:52   ...0 comments

Well, I don’t quite know whether to class this as entertainment, or politics. Flash really is an interesting medium. I think I would have read much less of this if it wasn’t presented as a cool Flash thingy.

Hmm, not sure what I think of this at all, actually!

CUNNILINGUS_IN_NORTH_KOREA

 › cool     2004-03-28 23:26   ...0 comments

Was going to email this directly to Maysie, but thought a few others might be interested. This is a lesbian perspective on participation in a Bris (Jewish ritual circumcision).

Also, the fonts in this blog are great.

 › cool     2004-03-28 22:26   ...1 comment

These comments in from Terry Stewart, a student in our Ph. D. program.

Everyone, do yourself a favour and find 2 hours of time to watch his video testimony available at C-Span. It’s the Sept 11 Commision Hearing, Day 2, Afternoon session.

This is the guy that knows the most about terrorism, period. Served under the last 3 presidents. For Clinton and Bush II, he was the counterterrorism head. Has been pushing to have bin Laden killed since at least 1999. Guided at least three operations that stopped terrorist activity from happening. Fought desprately to get Bush II to take this stuff seriously. And he’s a Republican.

He’s also an incredibly solid speaker, has total command of the facts, thinks brilliantly on his feet, is highly aware of political realities. This guy is exactly what West Wing made me believe people in Washington could be.

And he’s saying some incredibly damning things about the Bush administration, and doesn’t say anything that he doesn’t have solid evidence backing up.

The 2 hours of testimony is quite the insight into what goes on, and how the departments fit together, and how things happen.

Wow.

Mind you, I must say it doesn’t make for very good bedtime material.

Oh, and the funniest comment from the administration on Richard Clarke is that “Well, he wasn’t ? he wasn’t in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff….” (That’s from Dick Cheney speaking on Rush Limbaugh’s show on March 22, 2004). Hmm.. so apparantly the administration kept their chief counterterrorism expert out of the loop on these things? -sigh- Normally when they lie they at least make up something plausible….

 › cool     2004-03-25 09:59   ...0 comments

While looking for material on a crowd dynamics website, I found this document. It is a very powerful recounting of the last minutes in the world trade centre on September 11, 2001. It has been pieced together from survivors and people who were telephoned by loved ones.

Perhaps the most interesting fact about these pieces is that at least one stairway in both towers was intact from top to bottom after the impact. Another interesting aspect of the situation was the communication. There was virtually none provided to the people at the top, of course, but the advice and information that was shared at the top had a big effect on those who left and those who did not.

Of course, many people likely tried to escape down the wrong stairway, or took the right actions, but were physically prevented from exiting. Still, communication and information, and how they develop in these situations is often a key factor in people’s survival.

 › cool     2004-03-07 12:01   ...0 comments

Once you figure this out, you will enjoy it. (Flash required.)

 › cool     2004-02-26 09:03   ...2 comments