Kiva.org is a website that allows lenders to connect with those seeking loans to get their fledgling businesses up and running in developing countries. The mission of Kiva is to empower the motivated entrepreneurs in foreign countries as well as helping fellow man. It's mostly humanitarian with a business focus.

Lenders, like you and me, can donate as little as $25 to Kiva to be loaned out to those seeking funds to help grow their businesses. Kiva has field agents overseas to ensure the parties involved are honestly in need of the money, are good for the money and have some for of collateral. The business end is handled by Kiva agents and they seem to be doing their homework when it comes to loaning money - 100% of the money loaned out through Kiva has been repaid with no one defaulting on their loan.

The people seeking the loans benefit from Kiva's generosity by having a 0% interest loan. A huge blessing when you consider local loan sharks might charge as much as 300%! So, for me to part with $25 for a few months is no hard task - especially when I'm almost guaranteed to get the money back into my PayPal account, at which point I can turn around and re-loan the money to another person or wire the money back into my bank account.

If you're interested, check out Kiva.org for more info. There's also this informational video done by PBS' Frontline showing how Kiva works both at home and abroad. Others are talking about Kiva as well, which are all linked from Kiva's press page.

Well, it's official (in my eyes at least) Comcast sucks. Time Warner Houston recently sold their internet operations (aka RoadRunner) to Comcast. In doing so they migrated user email accounts to a @comcast.net address, rather than the long @houston.rr.com. Cool, it's shorter, easier for newbs to remember, etc.

I migrated my family (me, jenn, parents) over to Comcast a few weeks ago, problem is, there's no easy web interface to manager user accounts. There very well could be some awesome, ground breaking webapp to do just this, but Comcast doesn't make it easy to find - not like RoadRunner used to. So now, everyone's converted over, but I can't set/change my parents' email passwd so they're more or less locked out of their email until they (or I) call Comcast. Ok, fine. I can call sometime, no problem. For me it's no problem migrating over. I just changed the MX redirect on my neodux.com email address and the mail is routed appropriately - for a while. You see, Comcast has this thing called a blacklist. Lots of people are unhappy with Comcast's blacklist. If your mail server isn't AOL, MSN or some other commercial service, chances are you'll get blacklisted. Guess what happened to mail from neodux.com?

I called Comcast and was on the phone with 2 different technicians for about 45 minutes (not including hold time) trying to A) convey to them the problem and B) how it's their problem and not my "internet security settings". I even had one technician tell me repeatedly and in a condescending tone that there is absolutely no blacklist and that my emails are bouncing due to my mail server. (No way buddy, not when the header tells me your mail server is rejecting it!)

Long story short: Neodux email is now hosted on Dreamhost who, despite my problems with them in the past, is 110,000% better at not screwing up stuff for no reason. Thanks Dreamhost!

It's been a long time coming and it's almost here. I've been waiting years for Team Fortress 2 to make it's debut. Team Fortress 1 (the Quake mod) was a blast to play. Team Fortress Classic was a mediocre attempt to capture TF1 into a new engine and since then there's been a buzz about TF2 being released one day or another. It's been touted alongside Duke Nukem Forever as "vaporware" - but the release is nigh.

Alot of people don't like the game styling of cell animation, but I think it will make for a great game. So far, most of what we've been given glimpses of are animation shorts - but they're holding me over and whetting my appetite. So here's a few for you to watch too.

Team Fortress 2 : Meet the Heavy Weapon Guy

Team Fortress 2 : Meet the Soldier

Team Fortress 2 : Meet the Engineer

Team Fortress 2 : Meet the Demoman

So there you have it 3 of the handful of classes available to play in TF2. Maybe if you don't know anything about TF2, here's one more video for you.

Grendel sez: Don't forget Portal is in the Orange Box too!
update: Added "Meet the Demoman" link. "Aye!"

Well the wait for me is over, less than a month after getting the emulator running on my home computer - I got my hands on an actual XO laptop!

Last week I officially joined the OLPC developer network and told them I would be trying to get some ham radio software ported to the XO. Because the applications can be resource intensive, especially when dealing with a 433MHz Geode processor, the OLPC dev team saw fit to send me an actual machine to test on. Thanks guys!

As for a review of the machine, it really is an amazing machine. All of my friends here in Longview that have seen it were all equally impressed with its construction, feel and size. (It's very solid, even if it does look like the malformed offspring of an iMac and Fisher Price toy.) If you want to read more about the hardware specs you can check out the OLPC wiki, to read about the software being developed, you can start with the wiki page on Sugar. The screen is really amazing for it's size and cost. The "dark" mode (for use in the sun) is incredibly crisp and clear. I tried out the PDF reader with the screen turned around like a tablet PC in the sun and it was as nice (if not nicer) than reading on a nice LCD indoors.
I'll post a full review of it later as I learn more about the machine both inside and out. I also hope to let a few grade-school kids try it out for a day and get their thoughts.

For now, you can check out a couple other pics I have of it here and here.

And those of you that still haven't a clue what I'm talking about, you can read my other posts on the One Laptop Per Child project.

This one was just too cool to wait. For those of you that know, I'm quite pumped about the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

I've written about it in the past, as I write this I have a couple of links in the shoutbox. The most notable one is that prospect that the XO laptop will be commercially available for Christmas 2007. By who? How much? Nobody knows. I do know that I want one.

The XO Laptop uses a custom-rolled distribution of the GNU/Linux system with an overlay known as Sugar. Although Sugar is specialized for the XO hardware, you can install it over a linux setup, or try out a pre-configured virtual machine image (if you use VMware Player or the like). There's even a walk-thru to get you acquainted with Sugar's interface. It took me all of about a minute to point and click my way around before even looking for a guide.

UneasySilence has the links to the files needed to run an image of Sugar.