Tuesday, 28 February 2006

Stop Direct Marketers

Here are a few tips I've come across to put a stop to the annoying telemarketers/junk mailers/unsolicited credit card offer-ers that make money by pissing people off/wasting paper/exposing you to potential identity theft:

• Stop Telemarketers. Sign up with the National Do Not Call Registry.
• Stop Junk Mail. Register with the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Mail Preference Service. This puts you on ‘do not mail’ list, distributed regularly to all the DMA’s members.
• The DMA counts most of the major bulk mailers among its constituents. Stop Pre-Screened Credit Card Offers. Call (888) 567-8688 or visit optoutprescreen.com.

On a related note, I'm experimenting with Google's AdSense program in order to try to defray some of the costs associated with maintaining this site. If you see some ads around, feel free to click on them and make me a little of that sweet sweet moolah.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 28, 2006 at 03:33 PM in Weird Earls | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saturday, 25 February 2006

Weekend Update

I'm absolutely exhausted, and I've promised myself a day off today. However, it's been a long time since I've written an update so I'll just fire off a few quick thoughts.

Fiona and I have been working pretty hard for the last few weeks. I've been writing a lot of code, which is great because it'd been a long time since I'd done any serious geeking out. I never thought I'd say it, but I really missed programming. We're redoing the entire Kiva site from the ground up, and it's been a lot of fun to just zone out and build cool stuff.

Fi's been working on getting a comprehensive database of every Microfinancing Institution in the galaxy. I think right now she's got an excel spreadsheet with like 5000 MFI's on it or something. If we could get even one percent of them to partner with Kiva we'd be all set.

Yesterday we posted another 17 businesses online, and they're almost all funded already. We didn't send out a notification email this time - we were actually hoping to keep them on the site for a while - but people just come out of the woodwork. I'm not surprised though. This batch of businesses was especially dope. I mean, what's a better investment than a Honduran Cheesemaker? Talk about a sure thing.

Like I said, I've been pretty tired today. I wanted to go for a walk, but Fiona took the keys so I'm stuck inside doing pushups and posting to my blog like a little bitch. I was really hoping to get through the day without doing any computer stuff, but now that I'm looking at the Kiva site I find myself wanting to knock off some code. It's just crazy that I can sit here looking at all these pictures of small business owners all over the world and help them and their families just by writing a bit of PHP.

Now that I'm thinking about it, it's kind of strange. Seeing these barbers and cheesemakers and chokeberry farmers fills me with energy even when I think I'm totally wiped out. It really is inspiring. I've never felt like this about anything else I've ever done, and for the first time in my life I'm really proud of what I'm doing. It's a great feeling.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 25, 2006 at 07:52 PM in Kiva/VEF | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Why People Like You Should Not Go On Live TV

I'm not going to spoil it, but let's just say this is a compelling argument for having an early night if you're about to go on the evening news tomorrow.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 25, 2006 at 07:30 PM in Weird Earls | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Prius is the New Hummer

Via Metafilter:

Meet the Loremo. Up until now high efficiency vehicles have looked a little bizarre, to say the least. Recently the Toyota Prius (in its 2.0 form) brought HE cars more into the mainstream, but the Loremo looks to beat it hands down. Having lightened the car as much as possible -- it weighs a paltry 450kg, less than half a ton -- engineers were able to bring its fuel consumption down to 1.5l/100km, or over 150 mpg. And make it look pretty good. And bring the cost down to less than 11,000 euro. The company says it'll be available in 2009.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 25, 2006 at 07:19 PM in Cool Stuff | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Friday, 17 February 2006

Dump Lieberman

Seriously, we've got to get rid of Joe Lieberman. He's an embarrassment to me and all my fellow Nutmeggers. From yesterday's Hartford Courant:

President Bush threw a romantic Valentine's Day dinner at the White House Tuesday night, and who was on the guest list? None other than his favorite Democratic arm candy, Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Ned Lamont is the guy who's going to break poor Joe's heart by throwing his sorry butt out of Washington DC and away from the loving arms of George W. Bush. Click here to give Ned Lamont some money or some time if you want to avoid seeing scenes like this for another six years:

Posted by flow Frazao on February 17, 2006 at 01:29 PM in America, US News | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Thursday, 16 February 2006

Busy Busy Busy

Sorry about the light posting recently. I've been really busy not shooting people in the face.

Things with Kiva are going great. A few days ago Fiona and I sat down and had a talk with Matt Flannery (Kiva's Founder - read his blog here). Since our overall objective is to end global poverty (we aim high) the question has become a matter of how Fi and I can best affect the changes that need to happen in order to achieve that goal. Originally, we were planning on going to Africa in order to get poor Africans listed on Kiva's site, but we decided that right now the best way we can help Kiva is not by going to Africa but by staying out here a bit longer and working on server-side PHP implentation (for me) and going on a marketing blitz to sign up new Microfinancing organizations (for fiona).

So we've extended our stay in San Francisco for about a month. Luckily for us we've been blessed by a lot of people who have offered to put us up while we're working here. Right now we're staying in Palo Alto with Premal, a really great guy who's committed to pulling some major strings for Kiva. I'm not going to get into details, but if Premal can work some magic then it would truly be a hell of a thing.

Over the past week a lot has happened. I don't have a whole lot of time for proper writing, but here's a quick recap:

We signed up our first new partners on Kiva:

• The Shurush Initiative: Founded in 2003 and incorporated in 2004, The Shurush Initiative is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity organization dedicated to improving the grave economic situation in the West Bank and Gaza through transparent microfinance and proactive employment.
• REDC Bulgaria: This organization currently focuses its efforts in and around Sliven, Bulgaria. However, through their parternship with the US Peace Corps, REDC will be able to lend efficiently to small businesses in 113 locales by leveraging the Peace Corps’ network of 178 volunteers.
• CRESP Senegal: In affiliation with CRESP in Ithaca, New York, the Senegal Ecovillage Network (GENSEN) facilitates this microcredit program for its network of 32 member villages. Committed to developing communities that are environmentally, economically and culturally sustainable, the ecovillages seek to combine the best of the past with appropriate modern technology.
• Prisma Microfinance: Prisma Microfinance, Inc. is a microfinance institution which provides micro-loans internationally, helping to alleviate poverty while providing a return to investors. Microfinance services are targeted to low and moderate income businesses and households including the provision of credit for micro-loans. (Prisma is HUGE, btw).

Instead of being focused in East Africa, now Kiva is funding entrepreneurs on three different continents. Not only is this just plain cool to say, it also means that Kiva is a lot more stable. For example, right now there's an energy crisis in Uganda which is where Kiva was conducting the vast majority of it's lending. This could have jeopardized Kiva's entire "portfolio", but now that our loans are spread out over the globe we're less likely to be affected by regional disasters.

Another amazing thing that happened is that two of Matt's childhood friends found out that they were awarded a $45,000 grant from Microsoft to help Kiva expand in the developing world! Obviously, this is incredible news, and it's opened my eyes up to some similar ideas for Fiona and I. It hadn't really occurred to me that it'd be possible to fund ourselves through grants and whatnot, but now I'm really starting to think about it. I mean, it's great to be here working with Kiva, but it'd be a whole lot better if we could turn this into a sustainable lifestyle. I've got so many ideas for where we could take Kiva that it'd be a shame to walk away from it in a few months without having explored all the options.

The last thing I'm going to mention (and trust me when I say I'm forgetting tons of stuff), is that a few days ago Fiona called the UN Microfinance Summit Campaign to ask them if they could send us their list of Microfinancing organizations and they were like "Oh, Kiva? Yeah, we think you guys are great. We've been sending everybody to your site."

The United Nations. I mean, holy shit.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 16, 2006 at 02:08 PM in Kiva/VEF, Microfinancing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Weird Earls

Get Yer Food On:

• NY Times food critic Frank Bruni has a new blog.
• Consumer Reports: When Buying Organic Pays (and when it doesn't)
• Moronic, but oddly hypnotizing: Cryingwhileeating.com
• A look at the special Valentine's Day dinner that White Castle was offering.
• Washington Post: How to pick a perfect steak.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 16, 2006 at 12:14 PM in Weird Earls | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Wednesday, 15 February 2006

Kiva on NPR and BBC

Kiva's going to be on NPR during a segment in The World (BBC) today. Check here to see program times for your area.

Being an ardent lawbreaker, I'll post the podcast/mp3 here when it becomes available so that you can all listen in and share in the Kiva Delights.

Update: As promised, here's the Kiva segment. How cool is that!!

Posted by flow Frazao on February 15, 2006 at 01:54 PM in Kiva/VEF | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Thursday, 09 February 2006

New Kiva Businesses

It's 5:30 AM and I'm exhausted, but what I can’t believe what I’m seeing and I wanted to tell you guys what’s going on.

Today Kiva formally announced our first four partnerships with real, full-fledged microfinancing institutions. Each one sent us five new entrepreneurs to list on the site, and we finished putting their profiles online about five hours ago. We've got 20 businesses from three different continents - everything from a Bulgarian chokeberry farmer to a Palestinian carpenter to a group of Senegalese women using solar cookers for seafood preparation.

We just finished posting these businesses at midnight and there's about $10,000 that needs to be raised. Matt (Kiva’s founder) said he expected it to take two weeks to get the money together, and I told him he was out of his mind. I predicted that all the businesses on the site would be funded within 24 hours, and it looks like it may be more like 8 hours. I don't even know how people are finding out about it this fast, because we just finished sending out the notification emails a few minutes ago. I mean, Fiona went to bed about four hours ago and she’s going to wake up to find every single new business funded. She’s going to freak out.

I can’t even imagine what the microfinancing organizations and the newly funded entrepreneurs are going to do. They’re going to go ballistic.

This is seriously unbelievable. I’ve actually got the shakes. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone else raising this much money this fast online for a charitable cause. I'm going to go try to get some sleep, but if you want to nab a Kiva business you'd better be quick about it.

By the way, in the time it took me to write this people have loaned $550.

This is gonna be big.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 9, 2006 at 08:17 AM in Kiva/VEF | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Monday, 06 February 2006

Uncle Smoove

I'm an uncle!!

Fiona's sister-in-law Angie had a baby at 2.45 am on 6th Feb (Aussie time)! An 8lb girl named Lili Jasmine. After what seemed like a week of contractions, the little lady finally made her long awaited appearance.

I haven't seen any pictures yet, but hopefully we'll see them sometime soon!

Posted by flow Frazao on February 6, 2006 at 02:30 AM in Family | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Weird Earls - Art Edition

• Stephen Wiltshire - The Tokyo skyline drawn from memory by an autistic/artistic savant.
• Myranda Didovic - In February 1995, this artist/strange person, working in conjunction with nutritionists at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, took a crap that measured 26 feet in length.
• Ben Frost - Ben Frost is a painter, performance artist and illustrator who currently lives in Australia
  

  His work explores themes of alienation, dispossession, and perversity that exists behind the facade of contemporary western society. By subverting mainstream iconography from the advertising, entertainment and political spectrum he creates a visual and conceptual framework that is bold, confronting and often contraversial.

• David Hasselhof - There are no words to describe art of this magnitude.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 6, 2006 at 01:42 AM in Culture, Weird Earls | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Friday, 03 February 2006

First Things First

Yesterday we got our Kiva business cards printed up:

And if that's not enough, today Jessica (Kiva co-founder) is meeting with the President of Tanzania.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 3, 2006 at 03:51 PM in Kiva/VEF | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack

TCOB In Africa

Not much time to get into detail, but here's a preliminary list of things we'll be doing in East Africa:

• Conducting Impact Studies for VEF to determine how grant recipients lives have changed following a VEF grant.
• Finding existing microfinancing organizations to partner with Kiva.
• Evaluating the VEF database interface to see why Country Officers in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda aren't putting information into the DB. I'll be training them on proper use of the interface and hopefully will be able to put together a solution for whatever problem it is that they're encountering.
• Explore the potential for a partnership between VEF and Kiva. Basically, VEF gives grants to the poorest of the poor, and the hope is that many of them have "graduated" to the point where they might be good candidates for Kiva loans.
• Take a look at what, if any, information sharing/collective learning occurs between entrepreneurs.

I know there's more I'm forgetting, and I'm sure we'll come up with more stuff next week, but that's a little sumpin sumpin for now.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 3, 2006 at 03:34 PM in Africa, Kiva/VEF | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

East Village Opera Company

While we're in San Francisco we're staying with our good friends Catie and Greg, and somehow Catie managed to score free tickets to see the East Village Opera Company:

The East Village Opera Company was co-founded by lead singer Tyley Ross and arranger/multi-instrumentalist Peter Kiesewalter. They assembled a full-on rock band, adding two guitars, bass, and drums to Peter’s keyboards, then synched it to a string quartet.

By embracing what Peter Kiesewalter calls “the pomposity of rock and the pomposity of opera” without demeaning or satirizing either form, the East Village Opera Company flies where countless other “classical-crossover” efforts have failed.

“We have a profound love and respect for the opera,” Peter insists. “But it’s so dramatic, so over the top by today’s standards, that it cannot be delivered with a straight face. You need a little bit of irreverence in it.”

“With modern recording technology and a wide variety of musical styles at our disposal, our goal has been to approach these songs the way we feel the composers would were they alive today,” says Tyley Ross.

Check out some samples here.

Posted by flow Frazao on February 3, 2006 at 03:17 PM in Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dinner At Brian's

Wow.

Wow wow wow wow wow.

It's been a big week, and my head is spinning with ideas. I'm not even sure where to start.

Sunday night Fiona and I went to dinner at VEF founder Brian Lehnen's house. We were pretty nervous because we'd only talked to Brian a few times, and we wanted to make a good impression. We also had no idea what to expect. We didn't know who'd be there or anything.

Naturally, we started joking around during the train ride down to San Carlos. Being a veritable connoisseur of awkwardness, I tried to come up with uncomfortable scenarios. I told Fiona that as soon as I saw Brian I'd walk up to him and give him a huge hug - really tight - and not let go for 45 seconds. Just make it really long and weird.

Of course, I didn't do that at all. Brian met us at the train station and there was your usual round of handshaking and whatnot. Then the three of us piled into the car and went to his house.

We walked in the front door into a room full of people. One guy, whom I immediately recognized as the founder of Kiva, yelled "Jeremy! I feel like I know this guy!". Then he came over and gave me a hug! It was really funny and cool, although it wasn't as uncomfortably awkward as I would have liked.

Matt's wife Jessica also bounded over to us and freely dispensed some love. It was a great reception, and it made me feel right at home. I'd felt a real connection with Matt during our phone conversations, and it turned out I was right. These are our people.

Then we started talking with the other people who were there. One of them was a guy who I'm not going to name quite yet who's one of the higher-ups at an extremely large and well-known company. Hopefully Kiva will be partnering with this company, and if this happens it would be huge in both financial terms and in terms of legitimacy. But more on that in time.

The other guy who was there was an unassuming, cool looking guy named Carl. After some prodding by Jessica, Carl told us his story. In the early 90s he was a special-ed teacher for disabled kids. He wanted to try to get them using computers, but there wasn't really any software that was appropriate so he decided to make his own. He went and downloaded this new thing called "Java" that had just been pre-released, and it all snowballed from there. Soon he was getting emails from people asking him questions about the new programming language, and he'd answer them to the best of his ability, the whole time thinking "I wonder when they'll realize that I'm just a teacher". Eventually he wound up sitting at Sun Microsystem's headquarters with James Gosling (the inventor of Java - I've read his books!) who asked him what it would take for Carl to come work for Sun. Carl threw out a number (which he later learned was embarrassingly low) and they hired him on the spot. The rest, as they say, is history.

Fast forward 15 years to find Matt and Carl working together at TiVo. Matt recently quit to concentrate on Kiva full time, and Carl - one of the first Java programmers in the world - has also joined Kiva full time. Except Carl's going balls out and is moving to Africa to work from Tororo, Uganda! He's building a house on a big ranch (with running water and sewage!) for around $5,000. You can follow his adventures online at Carl's Big Adventure.

After a few cocktails, we sat down to dinner and Brian told us all kinds of crazy stories about traveling in Africa and what he's been through for the past twenty years with the Village Enterprise Fund. He's a pretty incredible guy, and I could've listened to him talk all night.

By the time we left Fiona and I were both feeling fantastic about everything. The energy around that dinner table was so strong it almost made my hair stand on end. It was the same feeling I used to have when I was at Number Six before the dot com crash - like you're standing on the edge of a world with endless possibilities where with the right amount of luck, patience and hard work anything can be accomplished.

These are exciting times, my friends!

Posted by flow Frazao on February 3, 2006 at 03:09 PM in America, Kiva/VEF | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack