Love Avenue Q?  Appreciate Jewish humor?
Watch what happens when the cast of Avenue Q mashes up with the cast of Fiddler on the Roof!

P.S.—I’d like to hat-tip a fellow blogger, but I can’t remember exactly where I first saw this (I just re-found it via a YouTube search).  Much apologies.  Next time, I’ll be more careful about blogtribution.

I’m usually a firm believer that charity—like praying—is best a private affair.  In particular, I have an especially high admiration for generous folks who give anonymously.

With that said, however, I’m going to share with you a business that I just helped fund… and I hope you will join in!

UPDATE: I’m thrilled to note that within 24 hours after I posted the original business profile here, that business was fully funded!  See the comments on this entry for more details.  The profile now shown below is selected randomly (on each page view) by Kiva.

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After evaluating many possible businesses / business people to invest in, I decided to support Ms. Wamaitha in Kenya in her drive to expand her current library and continue her support work fighting HIV/AIDS.  You can learn more about her and her efforts by clicking the photo above, and in the meantime, here’s a relevant snippet:

She is requesting a loan of US $ 2,000. Her budget is: US $ 1,000 to purchase assorted education books, journals and magazines, US $500 to purchase furniture for the reading space, US $ 300 to decorate the library and build shelves and US $ 200 advertise and acquire necessary license. This will increase her income to an average of US $ 100 per week. She plans to utilize the income to keep her children in school and to expand her business further. Jane is hard working and will be able to repay the loan.

You can make a loan for as little as $25… and in about 2 minutes via credit card (it’s done through PayPal, but you don’t need an account with them, just a credit card).  It’s also interesting to note that 100% of loans made through Kiva so far have been repaid in full!

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Unlike with my most recent post, I’m not going to tag anyone.  But I think it’d be a marvelous meme—SEO-blog or otherwise—having this opportunity propagated throughout the blogosphere.  So feel free to reverse-tag me and support Ms. Wamaitha or another worthy businessperson from Kiva, post about your contribution on your blog, and encourage others to do the same.  Let’s see if we can meet her modest business loan need by the end of this year, and—even better—see how many other businesses we can support .

Lastly, props to my friend Huy (yes, the awesome Huy of Orkut fame ) for letting me know about this wonderful site.

I don’t usually participate in bloggy memes, but two folks I like and respect (Aaron Shear and Aaron Pratt) have invited me to take part in a viral “Tell five things about yourself that few people likely know about” thingy.  So I will

1) I’m more introverted than folks suspect.
Though most folks see me as oft-smiling and reasonably social, I actually quite dislike large crowds, and am especially unfond of very large, loud parties.  I’ve gotten better at meeting people and making conversation, but I still much prefer small social gatherings (birthday parties, movie nights with 5-20 people I am comfortable with, long dinners with a handful of friends, and so on).  I also quite value my alone time… to read, think, rest, etc.

A few years back, I had some free sessions with a personal trainer at my gym, and one of the most useful takeaways was this:
Unless you write stuff down, it’s too easy to “fudge the facts” in your mind.  How much pushups are you doing with good form?  What are you eating each day?  We tend to maximize the former, minimize the latter, and that’s not good.

For starters, he made me write down each day *everything* I ate and drank, along with estimated calories associated with each thing I put in my mouth.  Boy, that was a depressing but enlightening shocker!

Well, I decided to go one better and start my own personal health chart (in Excel), daily noting my progress on several fronts (weight, body fat percentage, pushups, etc.).  Alas, after a few months, that kinda fell by the wayside, so I picked it up again a year later.  And, once again, that only lasted a few months. 

I’m trying yet again, and—now that I have the regular routine of a full-time job—I’m hoping it’ll somehow be easier to keep up the list.  For the very curious, I’ve included below exactly what I’m measuring:

I’ve had the good fortune to travel a lot over the last years (mostly for fun, not business, though that’s shifting) and also am blessed with many fun and photogenic friends.

With no further ado, here’s a sample of photos I’ve recently uploaded:

Talented Tjapukais

A sexy swing dancer

Watery wires

Korean combo

Gregarious Greeks

A fab flower

Here’s the entire list of my photo sets on Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thatadamguy/sets/

Enjoy, and comment away!

Okay, I admit it.  I missed the boat and jealously hollered that naming anything Web 2.0 is a bunch of crap.  So more recently I thought, hey, that’s no problem, I’ll just glom onto Web 3.0, the semantic Web.  I mean, look, I have lots of nice Jewish programmer friends, so who am I to be anti-semantic?!

But dammit, then I discovered that Nicholas Carr has already laid claim to Web 3.0!  The bastard!

Never fear, dear BLADAM readers… I have the solution!  I am hereby claiming as my own Web 4.0… with t-shirts and stickers, special edges, an expensive conference, and a network of blogs.

Yes, yes, I hear your skepticism already:  So, Adam-you-total-killjoy-smartass, pray tell us… what exactly is Web 4.0?  Well, I thought you’d never ask!  Allow me to explain this scintillating new Web with crystal clarity.

Lots of folks have noticed that five very cool new features debuted today in Gmail:
1) Enhanced UI, with Reply and other handy features placed at the top of conversations.
2) Notification when new messages have been made in the conversation since you started drafting your reply.
3) Forward an entire conversation (all messages).
4) Send chat messages to your friends using Gmail chat or GTalk even when they’re offline (the messages’ll be held for them).
5) Get Gmail on your mobile phone with a rich app (not just slow Web pages).

[Read more about these new gmail features]

But what I have to share with you is even more deliciously glorious… especially for those of you who are on lots of mailing lists or who have boring (albeit perhaps well-meaning) friends who just won’t shut up.

Okay, BLADAM friends, apologies for two rants in a row (in a sadly otherwise dry AdamBloggingSeason), but… why does T-mobile—an international company—charge so much for international calling, roaming, and texting?

And Cingular—the only other American mobile phone company I know of that supports international roaming—has rates that are even worse, from what I gather.

Anyway, on T-Mobile, the rates for me to call from the U.S. overseas are more than triple what I’d pay via a discount calling card or even AT&T Callvantage.  Calling from overseas to *anywhere* ranges from about $1 to $4 a minute for incoming OR outgoing calls.

But what *really* gets my hide is T-Mobile’s charge for text messages sent to and from my friends in Europe.  15 cents each for me to send a handful of text characters, and 35 cents each to receive the same.  What the heck?!  I know, I know, this voluminous amount of data has to potentially pass through companies that aren’t T-Mobile, but still!  And no, T-Mobile’s varied texting-bundle plans do *not* include international SMSes.

I’ve played with various SMS options online, but haven’t found any to be reliable for either sending or receiving text messages internationally.  Oh lazyweb, anyone know of good options? (other than calling up T-Mobile and telling them they’re provincial jerks for their usurious rates, which, I admit, doesn’t exactly qualify as a good option)

I’ll keep this (relatively) short and sweet:

I already use a fine to-do list software application (MyLifeOrganized), but since I’m aiming to move most of my life online, I thought I’d check out various online to-do apps.  I’ve been *shocked* at how every single app I’ve looked at falls into one of two categories:

1) Slower than a dog.
Sure, ajax is trendy and so [gag] Web2.0, but it sure beats the pants off having the damn screen redraw after every task add and edit!

2) No way to specify a start date.
Okay, this has to be the dumbest omission imaginable.  I mean, come on, I can’t work on [x] until my friend so-and-so arrives in three months.  I’m not going to start planning a birthday present for my sister until two weeks before her birthday.  I’m not going to start testing out music notation software packages until after the 2007 NAMM show.  Why on *earth* would I want all my to-do’s showing up as something to work on before I either want to or can work on them?!

This is particularly discouraging to me, because Remember the Milk is clearly a very slick service with passionate and smart developers and an active community and so on.  So why on earth haven’t they implemented start dates for tasks?  This certainly can’t rank up there as one of the tough technical problems of all times.  I don’t see it posing a significant UI challenge, either.  Nor, I’d imagine, is this something that users would be scratching their heads over ("Start date? Hmm… that’s so confusing and overwhelming.  Whatever could it mean?!")

Grrr.

What if you could build a better world, from the ground up?  What if you could even start “yourself” over… You.v2 or even New You; a different hairstyle, thinner, maybe even a different race or gender?  What if you could escape the hellish aspects of our world whenever and for however long you liked?  Glamorous, confident, rich, powerful, whimsical, witty YOU.  What if you could, indeed, have yourself a Second Life?

You can.  Via the amazingly powerful and immersive Second Life world online, you can build or even just experience your own 3D world… with thousands of other people from around the world in real time.  Music, art, religion, geekery (of course!), and (duh!) sex.  It’s all there, and discovering—even participating in it—is practically as easy as pointing and clicking.  When I first tried out Second Life ("SL") years ago after meeting one of the founders of Linden Labs (Second Life’s creator), I was floored by the fluidity of the experience, just how easy it was to join, get around, meet people, and actually have interesting and entertaining conversations.

But after exploring SL for about ten hours over a long weekend, I grew wary… and have infrequently returned.  I’ve thought quite a bit about SL since then, and have been reluctant to voice my thoughts; as a geek who has indeed made some true friends (and, yes, even met stunningly brilliant and beautiful members of the opposite sex) via online interactions even back in the 80s, I worried that I’d seem hypocritical discussing my dismissal of SL.  However, an essay today by Ted—”Second Life? How ‘bout getting a First Life”—has prompted me to blather on a bit about my thoughts on virtual reality.