Famine? Again?

CHRISTIANITYTODAY.COM -- To my eye Nairobi, Kenya's capital, looks good, leafed out in tropical vegetation. After three years of drought, rains came in May 2006. And the government shows signs of doing its job. The streets are cleaner than they have been in years. Shops and supermarkets are full of food. It's hard to believe that the drought has pushed Kenya into a food emergency. Yet 3.5 million people survive on emergency food aid in Kenya, part of the 6 million people who suffer likewise in the Horn of Africa, a vast region sweeping north from Kenya into Ethiopia and Somalia. You have probably heard about this crisis. And you have probably forgotten. It is easy to forget when this emergency feels like just one more in a never-ending series of African crises. Will we be feeding these people forever? More...

New To The Interwebs?

Hi! If you're new to the information super highway, here are some rules that will help you as you traverse the interweb.

1. If someone sends you an email with a really cool, amazing fact, it's a lie. Visit http://www.snopes.com/
   
   
2. If someone sends you an email asking you to "forward this to 10 friends" don't do it. It's a lie, and your friends will secretly hate you.
   
   
3. Don't download anything. It's got a virus in it.
   
   
4. Don't give your email address to just anybody. (And if you get an e-mail from someone you don't know and it says "click here to unsubscribe" -- don't do it, then they know your address is valid.)
   
   
5. Unless you are a king or prince from some far off land, there is no reason a king or prince from some far off land would be contacting you to transfer his money to your bank account.
   
   
6. If a woman starts chatting with you online, that's really a man. A dirty, dirty man.
   
   
7. That really funny joke or web page you'd like to share with all your new online friends? Don't do it. We already read it 5 years ago. As a new web surfer, you are prohibited from forwarding any jokes or URLs to friends for five years.
   
   
8. Your username is not cute, clever or funny. Or original. That's why Yahoo suggested adding 909653 to the end of it when you signed up.
   
   
9. Anything you put on the interweb will be there forever. Don't put up pictures of yourself drinking beer unless run a beer company.
   
   
10. If a website requires you to enter your name and e-mail address in order to read what it says, you can find it somewhere else without having to give away your private information. Or it's not worth reading.

If you've been using the internet for more than five years, please feel free to submit comments with your own suggestions for new users.

Late to the Party (RSS Feeds)

I'll still admit that I don't "get" Twitter. I don't know what the point of it is, even though I have one.

But, I just finally figured out the point of RSS feeds. Now, I was creating RSS feeds years ago, but they were for Podcasting through iTunes. And I've been pulling down podcasts for my own iPod for awhile. But for other people's blogs? I knew I could put them all on some page for other people to see, or as tickers on my own website or Gmail, but I didn't quite realize their usefulness.

I keep finding more and more blogs of interest to me. And it was starting to get overwhelming. I had to create a to do list to remind me to check out each one regularly.

And then I found Better Gmail, a Firefox/GreaseMonkey script that adds a bunch of cool stuff to Gmail. One of them was a "Feed" link that integrated Google Reader, including showing the number of unread posts.

So now, instead of trying to organize my reading schedule, now I just know nearly instantly when any of the 19 things I'm following has a new post.

Schools Should Teach Better Computer Skills

USEIT.COM -- This is a lot of reading, but I think it's a really good read. More...

Encyclopedia of Life

This is pretty cool. An undertaking to catalog every known species in one place.



Encyclopedia of Life (EOL)

So It's Not Just Us

FEELINGCINGULAR.COM -- So here we were thinking that our Motorola RAZR v3i's where somehow special. Put them near a speaker -- at home, in a conference room, in the car, and a buzzy clicky sound emits from the speaker. Turns out it was just that now we're on GSM and in the past we'd been on Analog (L.A. Cellular/AT&T Wireless), PCS (Sprint) and CDMA (Verizon Wireless). And according to this guy, the phone left by the speaker can actually blow the speaker.

Classic Website

Very clever. When you visit www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com/, that's all you get. It doesn't do anything else.