The Big Easy Comes Back

Ok, ok, I know I've been MIA lately, and I'm sorry. Life, etc.

Today is a day of reflection for people all over the world, and I don't have many original thoughts to add. Besides, some people have already said it better. Instead, I'd like to take a moment to think about something else: the ongoing effort to rebuild New Orleans.

All Day Buffet has compiled a list of 100 great projects currently going on in the Crescent City. The list is broken down by category for easy skimming, and is full of great projects that are revitalizing New Orleans right this very moment. The folks at ADB were shooting for 1,000,000 page views by August 29th, 2008. I have no idea if they made it or not, but wanted to give them a belated boost.

I drove through New Orleans for the first time in my life in September of 2006. Naively, I thought the city would be more or less rebuilt. I was wrong. Sure, the Convention Center was nice and shiny. The French Quarter looked like I expected it to. But once you got outside of the tourist spots, another picture emerged. High water lines were still visible. There was a noticeable stench in the air.

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster on a scale largely unseen in this country. And three years later, with our quick news cycles and our general national complacency, it's easy to forget what happened. But, without even mentioning the parade of hurricanes that has been working its way through the southeastern United States for the past few weeks, I think it is important to stop and reflect upon the lessons we (hopefully) learned.

So, please, take a few minutes out of your day and look at All Day Buffet's list. And if you see a cause that's interesting, or exciting, or just plain cool, give them a hand. It's not hard to get involved.

Book Club: The Umbrella Academy Vol. 1, by Gerrard Way

Awesome. Whatever misgivings I might have had about reading a book by the dude from My Chemical Romance were swept away by the world he created here. The book is full of intriguing characters whose back stories I can't wait to discover and a complex storyline that can only get better from here. I just finished the book and am already excited for the next installment. Cancel the tour, Mr. Way. You have some writing to do.

Book Club: Atmospheric Disturbances, by Rivka Galchen

I wanted to like this book, I really did. If you told me you had a book featuring an identity crisis and an ontological/epistemological/metaphysical mystery, and that much of the action takes place in Argentina, I would assume that book was destined for my own personal pantheon of favorites. But Galchen's characters have no depth; only the narrator (Leo) gets any semblance of a personality, and that is of the annoying, possibly delusional analyst. The settings are white-washed; no matter how many times Leo visits a cafe, you have no idea what it looks like. I have no objection to sparse writing - consider me a fan of Hemingway, McCarthy and so forth - but there is nothing in Galchen's world for the reader to hold on to. As it is the book slides by like so much idle chatter.

Rocking the Interwebs

Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. Flickr. Web 2.0 is full of sites and technologies designed to let people share virtually any part of themselves they choose, their hobbies, their friends, their interests, and their passions. But what about people's charitable interests?

Check out DigiActive, a blog dedicated to helping define the role of technology in philanthropic causes. The site features plenty of causes and calls to action, but also profiles different uses for social media to support causes that matter.

That last idea is what makes DigiActive such an important site. It's one thing to join the facebook group of a cause you care about - heck, even I do that - but who would think to use Twitter to increase attendance at an Austin blood drive?

It's almost trite to say at this point, but the internet provides a tremendous opportunity to reach people. I even still play fantasy sports against friends and family on the other side of the country. So why not use that opportunity to accomplish something bigger? Case in point, Blog Action Day 2008, coming up on October 15:


Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

So there you go. Go forth, minions, and improve the world.

Muchas gracias: The blog over at www.idealist.org

Who has time to volunteer, anway?

It's a busy world out there, no doubt. With jobs, friends, families, and countless other obligations, it's easy for people to feel like they simply don't have time. And charitable activities are one of the first things to fall by the wayside.

Enter Charity Guide, a great resource for good deeds that can be done in fifteen minutes, in a few hours, or even while on vacation. Some of it seems highly unlikely - are we really going to stop human rights abuses by signing up for some mailing lists? - but some of it also looks really cool. I don't think I'm the only one who would enjoy building a school while vacationing in Belize.

Book Club: Fisher's Hornpipe, by Todd McEwen

Soon after splitting his head open on the ice of Walden Pond, William Fisher thinks to himself "I feel like an audience." The question that prompted Fisher's internal reply - "How are you?" - is repeated many times throughout the book, and his answer is an apt one as he loses control of himself and events around him.

McEwen is a phenomenal writer, and his novel is peppered with the sort of phrases that made me wish I had a pen handy to record them for posterity. It seems a minor miracle that I have not crossed paths with this book earlier in its 25 years of existence.

The secondary characters - not that there are more than a handful that merit even their own names - never seem to develop beyond their impact in Fisher's life, almost as if they exist more for narrative convenience than for their own sake. But this probably shouldn't be surprising, considering an early shift from first person perspective to third that makes it clear we are viewing this story through a long lens.

Those hoping for a denouement, or any sort of real resolution, had best look elsewhere. McEwen has the courage here to take a nod from real life and leave Fisher on a beach in Rhode Island, in a sort of Gatsby-esque ending that leaves the reader simultaneous fulfilled and yearning for more.

One Child One Laptop Followup

I first profiled the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project over at my previous site, but I wanted to highlight an interesting development. For the unfamiliar, OLPC is a program started by MIT's Nicholas Negroponte that is attempting to design and distribute a low-cost laptop for children in third-world and otherwise educationally-underdeveloped locations. So far, they have created a device that costs a mere $200, and is in many ways superior to commercially available laptops.

Here's where it gets interesting: An international group of designers and graduate students have stumbled across a TV/computer hybrid that is sold on the streets of India for...Twelve dollars. There's a part of this story though that makes my little geek heart sing: The twelve dollar computer is based on the original, 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and even accepts the original system's cartridges. The people involved with the project are hoping to be able to add internet access and a few other upgrades, while still keeping the final retail price around $15.

Geek factor aside, this project has the potential to vastly increase the access to computers and, by extension, education, for many of the world's less fortunate. Of course, the Nintendo Computer (Ed. note: Feel free to come up with a better nickname) does not make the OLPC program irrelevant, nor does either MIT-sired effort have much to do with the other. To say nothing of the fact that OLPC already has a laptop that they can put into children's hands, more importantly the NES computer requires a television to plug into. So while a NES computer might be a great option for a family in India (where half of all households own a TV), it wouldn't do much good in, say, Africa.

(Ed. note: For some reason, Blogger isn't letting me upload photos. Click here for a collection of photographs from one of the people involved in the project.)