Mind-Manual

How do you feel about the challenges we face today?

Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund I support recently sent me their newsletter. At the end, there were these wise words:

With all of the challenges facing the world today, there is no room for cynicism. The good news is that the next generation of young people brings extraordinary passion, energy and a powerful mix of idealism and enthusiasm.

The newsletter talks about how the rising cost of oil is causing food prices to rise, and how the rising cost of oil prevents poor farmers in drought-stricken areas drill for water to irrigate their lands, and thus causes them to allocate more money towards food and less to areas such as education. Then it talks about their low-cost drip irrigation solution.

The above bears repeating: With all of the challenges facing the world today, there is no room for cynicism.

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Today’s Awesomeness

First, an announcement:

I’ve decided to offer my technical skills for charity. The two things I’m looking to do now is create websites for charities and website support, and perhaps volunteer around Toronto. These will not be fully custom websites, but wordpress back-end, and you can figure out the design however you like, for a few reasons:

• WordPress is much more than a blog. You don’t even need to use the blog function and just use the excellent and simple page management function.
• The other content management systems I know of like Joomla or Drupal just don’t look as good as easily.
• WordPress is ridiculously easy to edit, for anyone, which means you don’t need a web person just to change an ‘a’ to an ‘e’. High amount of do-it-yourself here.
• I have a limited amount of time for creating these websites, and wordpress is something I’m comfortable with.

You can find a recent example of a website I got together in two days here, remember you can get a ton of themes to make the website look exactly how you want it. Unfortunately, interested parties are going to have to cover the hard costs such as domain registration or website hosting (although I have some connections and may be able to help with that). You have to be a registered charity and I’m limiting it to within Canada for now. So, if you’re interested in an amateur but decent website creator to make you a quick website, please contact me. I’d love to help in whatever way I can.

</annoucement>

Sorry folks, been busy lately so haven’t had time to post much. That will change in the next week, so expect to return to our regularly scheduled programming.

As penance, I offer you soviet era breakdancing video:

Roots of Breakdancing

Almost as cool as Soviet propaganda musicals!

Also check out this site. It’s a webcomic where people send in their dreams and the artist turns them into webcomics. Some of them are bizarre and some of them are amusing. Most of them are interesting, though.

Slow Wave

Here’s a site that offers etymologies (history and roots) of words in the english language. Very interesting. I, of course, went right for the swear words. Cheers!

Online Etymology Dictionary

And here’s a quotation for you:

“Some people like to stare at the finger, instead of looking where the finger is pointing.”

You can also check out this death clock. I had the idea but found out that people have already done it. Even though the date is probably wrong, the seconds countdown is freaky.

I really like comments, so please take a few seconds to leave one. If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!