Friday, January 08, 2010

Kiva.org: Joyce Namwanje

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Namwanje Joyce, 28 years old, is a widow with five children all in school. She owns a retail shop business. She has operated this business for over two years. She is a permanent resident of Baggala zone. She is using the loan to acquire items (drinks, rice, maize flour, beans, bread, soap, salt, sugar, and so forth) in order to expand her business. Her dream is seeing her children finish their education and getting good jobs.

-- from kiva.org

If you don’t know this concept yet, do check it out. My meager $25 have been successfully repaid 4 times, and this is the fifth loan I make with that amount, so in practice I’ve managed to help microfund 5 businesses in a total of $125 with it. Sounds pretty cool to me – I’m sure there’s a lot of you out there with twenty-five bucks to spare, right?

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

road to bucharest III

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

road to bucharest II

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road to Bucharest I

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Friday, December 04, 2009

angel at hell's gate, birkenau

Auschwitz II
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Thursday, December 03, 2009

Krakow castle

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Wednesday, December 02, 2009

wedel, warsaw

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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

tech help, iasi

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

taking a leak

http://wikileaks.org/

now here’s an endless repository of clever raw-materials you can use in many conversations to come, and make yourself look pretty smart and well-informed (or maybe a complete conspiracy freak if you don’t watch yourself').

Today’s favourites:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Suppressed_Madeleine_Foundation_leaflet%2C_2009

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Rosicrucian_%22Ancient_Mystical_Order_Rosae_Crucis%22_Mandami_package%2C_2007

more to come, I’m sure…

Thursday, October 15, 2009

at the mall

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Golega

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Thursday, September 17, 2009

gralheira, red light district

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firewind

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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Space is big. Really big. Here’s a video of almost none of it: The Milky Way.

and there you thought is was a long way down the road to the chemist…

Saturday, September 12, 2009

augmented reality apps #1

apparentely only real-estate is considered reality so far…  but let’s trust evolution to eventually enable this tech to do something actuallly useful. like finding and previewing the best strip joints and coffeeshops.

Friday, September 11, 2009

foz

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Craiova

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Wednesday, September 02, 2009

Current polls for ET candidates

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ntpckr.php

not-so-intelligent design

It just hit me: another reason why Intelligent Design theories are so silly. It’s actually quite obvious: the very notion that life derives from Intelligent Design is self-evidently false: Life on this planet has been designed entirely on a trial-and-error basis, as is made apparent by my deeply flawed life forms present here, that just happened to survive by sheer luck, until the next global catastrophe sets the record straight again and wipes them out forever. In fact, the only hardwired concept common to all life, and that justifies survival on these species (as well as all others), is precisely this permanent search for survival. Need examples? Go watch the ‘March of the Penguins’ flicks and tell me honestly that the Emperor Penguin is a species well fit to this planet. But there are many others living on dire straits. We even have the human example: what’s with the appendix? and the problematic coccix? and not being able to process cellulose in the stomach (considering it’s basic to most vegetables and easily digested by a plethora of bacteria)? No my ignorant god-seeking friends, it’s all been trial and error so far, mutations spawned slowly throughout the generations, struggling to survive. The very fact there’s such immense biodiversity on Earth goes to show there’s nothing intelligent about the Design of life, otherwise, we’d most likely have to have a single, near-perfect life form – that would above all be able do perform oral sex on itself.

Anyway, I’d love to hear thoughts on this – ideally I’d crowdsource a brainstorm here (how geeky right?) but there’s just not enough ppl reading this drivel, so spambots are welcome to comment to – hey! that’s basically the way Nature did it, so maybe it’ll work for me :P