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Friday, 18 November 2005

New Jobs!

For the first time in over a year, I'm proud to report that I'm now gainfully employed. I've got not one, but TWO jobs - both about five minutes walk from my parents' house.

Hopefully, Fiona and I will be able to make enough money over the next two months to pay for our time working in Africa.

I briefly toyed with the idea of trying to get a software development job, but realistically speaking it's just not possible to do much of anything in two months. Granted, I would have made more money, but after the past couple of months I'm really looking for something as low stress and as fun as possible. Besides, the way we have it figured as long as we make around $5,000 over the next couple of months we'll be good to go, and that shouldn't be any problem at all between Fiona and I.

So, without further ado, here are the two gigs I've landed (names changed for obvious reasons):

  1. The Cheese Shop

    The Cheese Shop is a small gourmet shop that specializes in exotic cheeses. What, you may ask, do I know about cheese? Absolutely nothing. That's why I'm working there. Hopefully over the next few weeks I will become an accomplished fromager (sp?) and will be able to impress/bore my liberal, blue-state friends with my knowledge of the finest moldy food products.

    It's a crazy clientele that frequents these gourmet joints. On my first day (yesterday) a woman came in and bought over $30 of fancy goat cheese. She was going to use it to make macaroni and cheese for her kids. As far as I'm concerned, that's a clear sign that you've got far too much money.

  2. Electronics Hut

    I haven't actually started yet, but yesterday I swung by the "Career Fair" to see what was up. It was actually quite remarkable. I expected to be sitting in a room with four or five pimply high school nerds, but that was not the case at all. There were at least 15 people there, and the majority of them were older than myself. A couple of them were gray-haired guys who looked to be in their 50s (at least). And we were all applying for floor jobs. Doesn't say a lot about Bush's so-called "economic recovery".

    It'll be interesting to see how it goes at The Hut. It's a commission-based job, and I've never been a salesman so I think it should be fun. Obviously, I know loads about all the crap they sell so I'm not to worried about it. If there's one thing I can do all day long it's talk about gadgets.

Just yesterday at The Cheese Shop I tried three different kinds of expensive, weird cheeses. I can't remember what the first was, but one was a goat cheese rolled in cumin, coriander and French Truffles. It was tasty, but it smelled like farts. The third was a cheese from Colchester, CT called "Hooligan" that's made from the milk of 36 cows:

" From Cato Corner Farm in Colchester, Connecticut, Hooligan is quite the bully. A "stinky" cheese, this washed-rind Trappist-style cheese is rubbed with buttermilk during aging, giving it an underlying barnyardy pungency, a soft interior, and a gritty rind. Aged for three months in a wooden basket, this raw milk cheese is a fine example of artisan craftsmanship. One of the Great Cheeses of New England!"

Quite the bully, indeed. I don't know if I'd use quite the same words to describe it, but it was definitely pretty good. It'll be interesting to see if my palate gets used to appreciating this stuff.

So there you have it. I think it'll be fun to have a couple of low-key jobs that I can have a laugh at. The best part is that I'll be able to go hang out at these places, and then come home and spend some good family time over the holidays without being stressed out (at all) about work.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 18, 2005 at 08:57 PM in Me | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Monday, 14 November 2005

Jarhead

I saw Jarhead over the weekend. It picks you up, drops you in the middle of the Iraqi desert at the start of the first Iraq War, and then makes you understand what all those kids who enlisted must have felt. All the good stuff and all the bad. The scenes after the Iraqi army lit the oil wells on fire were especially vivid.

An excellent movie. Go see it.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 14, 2005 at 03:44 PM in Film | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Evolution of Cognitive Dissonance

"This is not a pipe." - Renee Magritte, 1929


"I am not a crook." - Richard M. Nixon, 1973


"We do not torture." - George W. Bush, 2005

Posted by flow Frazao on November 14, 2005 at 02:08 PM in Scary Bush | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Kazakhstan vs. Borat

Some mornings I wake up and read headlines that put me right off my morning cake. Other days, I'm greeted by wonderful news like this:

Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry threatened legal action on Monday against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who wins laughs by portraying the central Asian state as a country populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a sport.

Baron Cohen, who portrays a spoof Kazakh television presenter Borat in his "Da Ali G Show", has won fame ridiculing Kazakhstan, the world's ninth largest country yet still little known to many in the West.

Baron Cohen appears to have drawn official Kazakh ire after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards show in Lisbon earlier this month as Borat, who arrived in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle.

Please God, let this go to trial. And let that trial be carried live on C-SPAN. And while I'm at it, please let that live feed pre-empt the impeachment hearings that will be going on at the same time.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 14, 2005 at 01:10 PM in Random News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Friday, 11 November 2005

Microfinancing From The Entrepreneur's Perspective

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, here's a letter by a business owner who was the recipient of a $300 loan from Kiva (which has been repaid in full):

"Dear all my funders,

Greetings from Tororo Uganda in the name of our lord Jesus Christ. I want to thank all of you for the loan money that you gave to me . Your money changed the life of my family together with the community from the area we operate in. My business has gone so high in stock and profit. This is the reason why I have been able to pay back all the loan money that I got from you.

I have been able to do the following with the help of the money that I get as profit our of my business:
1. Pay the school fees for all my children.
2. Im able to buy balance diet food for the family.
3. Im able to buy cloths for my children.
4. We have been able to buy Mattress and blackett to sleep on for the first time ever since we got married . We have been married for the last 12 years.
5. My husband use to beat me a lot with abusive words of despise,but now we are living as king and Queen in our house.
6. We have bought clean cups, saucepans plents for the family.
7. The burden of my husband has been rolled away. The percentage of the growth of our family has gone from 15% to 80%.
8. We can now afford to take our family members for good treatment.
9.I can buy basic family requirements without any problem.

The entire community has benefited from the loan money that you gave to me by eating the very best nutritious and good food that he serve in our hotel. When time comes for you to visit Uganda, we will be able to serve you with very delicious food like Red Lobster etc. Recently, the local government authorities gave us a lincese as one of the best hotels with good hygine and healthy food. This shows that your money has not benefited my family alone but even the community at large. The stock and the profit of our business had gone up by 85%.

I want to thank you for having helped me to come out of poverty and heal my marriage that was about to break because of poverty. You have made me to be a champion out of nobody. Im saying this when tears are rolling down my chicks. I can’t imagine were I have come from and where I have reached now. I beg you to continue supporting the Kiva program such that our poor people can benefit from your soft loan that has already seen me through. Your loan doesen’t support only one person, but the services reaches all the community at large. Such a great help had never reached our people until when Kiva came with the initiative of eradicating poverty in the lives of our people through the soft loan. I will be very grateful for your support to Kiva beneficiaries. May the heavenly god open the flood gates of heaven and bless you abundantly.

Yours In Christ Christine Awora.

It's hard to imagine that $300 dollars can make such an immeasurable difference, isn't it? And there's loads more where this letter came from.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 11, 2005 at 07:12 PM in Kiva/VEF, Microfinancing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Weird Earls

I waste time so you don't have to.

  • Today's productivity killer: Mansion Impossible, a real-estate flipping game that will suck the time right out of your watch.

  • Three and a half minutes of crazy not enough for you? Check out this one hour analysis of why the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks. I recommend wearing a colander instead of the usual tinfoil hat for added strength.

  • A Recursive News photo.

  • The Tao of Programming

    In the beginning was the Tao. The Tao gave birth to Space and Time. Therefore Space and Time are Yin and Yang of programming.

    Programmers that do not comprehend the Tao are always running out of time and space for their programs. Programmers that comprehend the Tao always have enough time and space to accomplish their goals.

    How could it be otherwise?

Posted by flow Frazao on November 11, 2005 at 07:01 PM in Weird Earls | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Thursday, 10 November 2005

The Start of Something Big

It's been a very exciting couple of days. I'm not really sure where to start, so I'll go from the beginning.

As I'm sure anyone affluent enough to be reading this blog knows, we are living in a capitalistic society. "It takes money to make money," or so goes the saying. For example, in order to open a new business in America a budding entrepreneur would need to take out a small business loan at a bank in order to get started (unless he or she is incredibly lucky). Generally, these loans are in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, so banks don't hand them out to just anybody.

In order to get his loan the entrepreneur would generally show up at a bank in a suit and tie and hope that his credit and ideas are both good enough to convince the loan manager to lend him the necessary startup capital. If he has a decent credit history and a viable business plan, then odds are he'd walk away with a loan for enough money to get him on his way. Once he starts making a profit, then he can pay back his loan and begin growing his business and creating wealth.

However, if he has a bad credit history (or worse, none at all) then it's unlikely any bank would take a risk on him. And without that initial seed money, our would-be entrepreneur is out of luck. For better or worse, one of the main determiners of success in this world is one's access to capital on credit.

In the developing world, the model is exactly the same. The only difference is a matter of scale. Instead of small business loans being in the $100,000 range, they can be as low as $100. In third world economies a hundred dollars is enough to buy a few fishing nets or a sewing machine, and that is enough to start a viable business.

The problem arises when a poor entrepreneur walks into a bank. With no credit record and no collateral, banks are simply not set up to deal with issuing loans to the impoverished. Poor people can't get loans, which means they can't start businesses, which means they're stuck in an endless loop of poverty.

This is where the concept of Microfinancing comes in. Over the past 20 years, a model of international aid has arisen to plug the holes in the banks that poor people fall through:

"Microfinance is the provision of a broad range of financial services such as – deposits, loans, payment services, money transfers and insurance products – to the poor and low-income households, for their microenterprises and small businesses, to enable them to raise their income levels and improve their living standards." - UN International Year of Microfinancing FAQ

After having been through countries like Cambodia, I've seen the damage that can be done by too much welfare. For example, the Cambodian government has jailed Cambodians for defusing landmines because the government is afraid that if all the landmines are defused then they'll stop getting foreign aid.

That said, the idea of Microfinancing is a "teach a man to fish" solution, and over the past thirty years it's proven to be very successful:

"Muhammad Yunus, a U.S.-educated professor of economics started a similar experiment [to a program in South America]. Around 1974 during a famine in his native Bangladesh Yunus discovered that very small loans could make a significant difference in a poor person's ability to survive, but that traditional banks were not interested in making tiny loans to poor people, who were considered poor repayment risks. His first loan consisted of $27 from his own pocket which he lent to 42 people including a woman who made bamboo furniture, which she sold to support herself and her family.

In 1976, Yunus founded the Grameen Bank to make loans to poor Bangladeshis. Since then the Grameen Bank has issued more than $5 billion in loans to some 4 million borrowers. To ensure repayment, the bank uses a system of "solidarity groups": small informal groups which apply together for loans and whose members act as co-guarantors of repayment and support one another's efforts at economic self-advancement. As it has grown, the Grameen Bank has also developed other systems of alternate credit that serve the poor. In addition to microcredit, it offers housing loans and well as financing for fisheries and irrigation projects, venture capital, textiles, and other activities, along with other banking services such as savings."

- Wikipedia

Fiona and I had heard about this notion, and we started thinking about what we could do to help implement it. We came up with an idea for a website where we could directly link donors with entrepreneurs. We figured we could post a bit about the person who needed a small start-up loan, and then people could sign up to sponsor them with loans as small as, say, $25. Then over the course of the loan, the donor would be kept updated as to how the entrepreneur was doing. There would be a real connection there and it would be plainly evident how much difference even a small amount of money could make to somebody.

We spent about three days in a frenzy of planning and creative talks. The energy between us has been so high it's staggering.

Then we found out that a couple of people had exactly the same idea as us about a year ago, and their website came out of testing in mid-October. Kiva.org is the first organization to use the internet to bring the power of Microfinancing directly to the donor. Of course, there was a part of me that was disappointed that we didn't get there first, but I suppose I can get over that.

We immediately got in touch with the founders of Kiva, and found out that they're a young married couple (like us) in San Francisco. I offered to help in any way I can (I've been known to write a line of code or two), and I'm eagerly waiting to find out what I can do to help.

After making contact with Kiva, Fiona called Kiva's partner, Village Enterprise Fund to find out more about opportunities with them. Wouldn't you know it, the founder of VEF picked up the phone.

He was on his way out the door to catch a flight to Tanzania, but he was excited to hear about us. He gave us his email address, and after sending our resumes and such, we wound up talking to him this morning over the phone (we actually used Skype, but you get my point).

We spoke to him for about twenty minutes, and came away extremely excited. He said he's already thinking about a couple of different things we could do, and we're going to get in touch again when he gets back to the US on Nov. 20. We're tentatively planning to go to San Francisco in early February to meet with him, but we'll need to find out more over the next few months.

I'm really looking forward to the prospect of being able to employ all the knowledge I've acquired travelling and working over the past 10 years. Looking back I feel like the collective bunch of all my random experiences - from writing web-based software to teaching English classes in Thailand to getting fondled by a Buddhist monk in Southeast Asia - have all led up to this. I feel, for the first time in my life, that I am in a unique position to use a skill set that I alone possess in a way that could positively affect people all over the world.

For more information check out the following links:

Posted by flow Frazao on November 10, 2005 at 11:11 PM in Kiva/VEF, Microfinancing | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Roundup

Posted by flow Frazao on November 10, 2005 at 10:12 PM in Weird Earls | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sunday, 06 November 2005

Cheney Less Popular Than Adultery

As I'm sure you've heard, George Bush's approval rating has dropped to 35%. Dick Cheney's, meanwhile, is at 19%.

Of course, popularity is a relative notion. To put it in context, let's take a look at how the Puppetmaster's approval rating compares to a few other things:

According to previous surveys (scroll down in the link), the Vice-President is two points less popular than cheating on your spouse and seven points behind corporal punishment in schools. He trails the number of Americans who believe alien beings have secretly contacted the U.S. government by 18 points. Similarly, George Bush now trails the number of people who think astrology is scientific by five points.

Of course, there is a certain percentage of people who will believe any crazy-ass thing you can possibly imagine. For example, it would appear that there are around 35% of Americans who seem to believe secret prisons, endless war, and tax cuts for rich people are pretty good ideas.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 6, 2005 at 10:53 PM in Funny Bush | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Back to Life

After a long hiatus, I'm trying to get this site back together again. I did some work today on the user interface, but I'm pretty frustrated by Microsoft's continuing refusal to support W3C standards on CSS (and HTML and Javascript...). If you're reading this in Internet Explorer you've probably noticed by now that this page looks like shit. Sorry, but I just don't have the time right now to implement a separate version for IE users.

Besides, isn't it time for you to switch to a grown-up's web browser?

Posted by flow Frazao on November 6, 2005 at 02:34 AM in TTSU Maintenance | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Friday, 04 November 2005

Grandma, Wilma and a Portuguese Passport

Hey there everybody! Just wanted to let you all know that I'm still alive. Fiona and I have been in Florida for the past two months taking care of my Grandmother. She had a pretty major operation last August and has been recovering and working her way through a tract of chemotherapy. Luckily Fiona and I were in a position such that we could take some (more) time off and go help her through it.

All in all, it was a good time. We spent many hours sitting around talking about all sorts of things, and I learned the kind of stuff that can only be learned by living with somebody, as opposed to visiting. For example, I learned that when you get old and move into a retirement community the most important thing you can do all day is take in your newspaper before 10AM. If you don't you can bet that your neighbors will have worked themselves into a frenzy and will be on the verge of dialing 911 until they see that paper disappear.

Things got a little hairy when Hurricane Wilma hit though. I had returned to Connecticut to take care of some business at the Portuguese Consulate (I'm in the process of becoming a Portuguese citizen) and Fiona and Grandma were down in Florida by themselves. We knew the Hurricane was coming, but when I left it was really no big deal.

Funny how that kind of thing works though - within a day or so of my leaving it became obvious that Wilma was going to be a corker. When it finally hit it knocked out power and phone service to my Grandma's building and for two days the only way I could communicate with them was by sending text messages via the cell phone. It was pretty scary.

Luckily I managed to get them on one of the first flights out of Florida, and now everything's going fine. Grandma's going to be seeing an oncologist in Connecticut for a month or so until she returns to Florida, and now Fiona and I can focus on trying to figure out what we're going to do next.

Hope you're all doing well and you're enjoying autumn as much as I am. It's been a long time since I've seen the foliage this nice in New England and I'm digging every second of it.

Posted by flow Frazao on November 4, 2005 at 05:27 PM in Family | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack