slamboard

Kiva.org is a brilliant initiative and it has been met with a great deal of enthusiasm and a lot of loan money.

We have invested as much as we really should into Kiva and we have been spreading the word about it since the first moment that we knew about it. I don’t think a short description can really do justice to what Kiva is accomplishing so I will refer you to the NYT article.

Something interesting has been happening in the months since we became Kiva boosters. People that we told about it are now giving our kids gift certificates. This is good, except it makes us sad inside when the kids don’t quite get it. Maybe a lightbulb might come on for them when a loan recipient starts paying back the loan.

I have some first hand experience related to international shipping from when I worked at the Fair Trade Coffee Roastery. Before that it was mostly a mystery to me. I was actually a bit shocked to find out how quickly container ships can cross the North Atlantic. I was a bit frustrated at how long it takes for a truck to get across the USA/Canada border.

When I looked at the landing page for Logistics Group International, I was immediately sold on the advantage of having one group handle all the logistics of the various modes of transportation. It was also interesting to note that rail is making a comeback as a cost efficient mode of transport in North America. I assume that fuel prices are playing a role in that. In the corner of North America where I grew up, they tore up the tracks in the early 80’s. I think that was a bit short sighted.

This large logistics group can offer businesses competitive rates on shipping because the price that they pay to carriers is a special deal based on volume business. Their specialty is heavy haul shipping.

Sorry for the boring title.

As Chine becomes a more open market, there are a lot of infrastructure shortcoming cropping up all over the place. For some reason there is a shipping industry trade magazine in my doctor’s waiting room. In the magazine there is a picture of containers being off loaded onto JUNKS. One 20′ container that is bigger than the deck of each crude metal ship. It looks unsafe and inefficient. I cannot find another picture of this procedure anywhere.

I don’t know why I still manage the supplies for our home office like crisis management. I used to work for a growing company that had a very organized and well stocked office supply locker. I had noticed that it was well organized, but I had never asked who was responsible for its management. These days I decide that I need something like Brother inkjet cartridges when the paper comes out without any letters on it, or when the light starts flashing.

With all the organizational tools available online I should really make some scheduled purchases of office supplies for a site like DataBazaar.com. They are one of the top 5 supply companies in the USA. They provide all three of the major markets B2C, B2B and Wholesale/Export. They have FREE SHIPPING on every order. And they have pretty much everything you need to supply most brands of office equipment.

So if you were organized enough to make orders of the typical supplies so they would arrive before you ran out, you save yourself time and money. Think about gas money for one thing. Plus when you shop online there is no candy at the checkout. I used to think it was weird that bricks and mortar office supply stores had a lot of candy at the front of the store. Then I ended up rushing there for my employer once in the middle of the day. The other people at work got to find out that I thought they were special, but only because I really wanted a sugar fix.

This story is fascinating and bothersome. Employees inside Best Buy retail outlets were pointing their browsers to an alternate website, not the same one that retailers at home were viewing.

So a retailer sees a low price on their PC at home and it lures them into the store and the kiosk attendant shows them a similar looking wepage with higher prices. That sounds evil. Best Buy has convincing excuses that make it sound less evil. I am thinking that a judge is going to be making them hand out a wholle lotta refunds.

I like energy solutions that are purpose specific and practical. Using photovoltaic cells to charge a huge expensive deep cell battery and then using the electric energy to provide some lighting for a retail outlet is a good promotional tool, but a big window provides light directly from the sun.

I use solar power at my house to heat the water for my shower. Using electricity to heat water is very inefficient, especially if you have a system that keeps a tank of water hot all the time for on demand use. We have a windmill beside our house that pumps water into a reservoir to be used for irrigating fields. This is a great system, the need for water is higher when the wind is blowing because the airflow speeds up evaporation.

I have a cousin back in Canada that uses a large windmill to generate electricity. The wind energy where he lives is pretty dependable. He had the thing built for several months before Nova Scotia Power to install the necessary wo way meter and various other flow managing stuff that I don’t completely understand. My cousin was impatient and wanted to see his house all lit up by the wind power. If I remember the story correctly, he singed a few things from an overload. I have to share this cool video of a windmill being constructed.

I have already made a post about the exciting news about a breakthrough in the efforts to make less expensive and more durable panels to convert solar energy into electricity.

Hopefully some auto makers will create models with panels as standard equipment. All the gadgets like GPS and MP3 players could run off the sun. Energy resources information is available at EnergyResourcesNet.com.

Laptops these days has a transformer which can be used with a wide range of voltages. If you live a sheltered life, you may not be aware that residential power supplies around the world vary a lot in voltage. They generally fall between 110 and 250 volts. The shape of outlets vary a great deal. The vary just enough top drive you crazy. There are at least ten different plug configuratons around the World.

I actually have the laptop that I am using right now plugged into an adapter that is plugged into another adapter that is plugged into the outlet. The adapters that we found in bulk at a low price are for ungrounded plugs. Most brands of laptops are grounded.

I was entertained for a short while last week when I discovered a series of online comic strips that take vintage illustrations and then add humorous dialogue. I am not going to include a link because some of the humor goes beyond societal norms. In the man’s defense, I will say that the image warranted the ribauld text.

I didn’t recognize any of the old prints, but they were typical for the turn of the century (1899…..1900, THAT turn of the century).
I was reminded of the exaggerated references to fellatio that had been added to my junior high history book by a previous owner.

Besides being funny, the creator of the web cartoons is sidestepping the issue of copyright by a wide margin. I went even wider with this post, my illustration is from the 1400’s

The Effect of YouTube on Polite Discourse would be the title of my psychology thesis if I actually had to do one. I opted to operate as an amateur psychologist instead. The pay is lousy, but we don’t have to invite Phil McGraw to our annual convention, so it’s a good trade off.

Anyway, I have seen enough evidence, without really wanting to, that the effect of YouTube of traditional television has been a huge increase in people behaving badly. The over the top arguing and insulting is becoming quite transparent as an attempt to go viral on the Internet. If you are on the right celebrity list, you can do it with impunity. Your boss will cluck a bit, but the rating you garner will keep you safe.

So YouTube encourages bad behavior among television personalities. But YouTube celebrities by and large are polite. This is because most of them are speaking directly to the viewer rather than other people. Sometimes there is drama, but it tends to be less heated. YouTube comments are a bottomless pit of vile stupidity, but reading them is optional.

Today somebody asked me about a cool new website that I had mentioned to him 3-4 months ago. We both remembered the conversation. It had been about the guy who launched a somewhat unique photo sharing site. He was very young and his level of success was getting press. It was a BBC inline article that I first noticed. It turns out that he really gained a boost of traffic when Michael Arrington did a post about him.

But we couldn’t remember the name of the site or the name of the guy. I knew the site had some 0’s in the middle part and I was pretty sure it started with a Z. It is surprising how many sites fit that description.

I ended up looking at the Wikipedia article on photo sharing and there it was ZOOMR.