Anyonecanedit.org

I’ve only been praying for this for the last 3 years:

VCU is moving to a cloud computing student e-mail solution. New students will automatically be given access to the new e-mail offering while current students may remain with the Lotus Notes platform or sign up for the new e-mail service. The university is looking at two vendors–Google and Microsoft—and needs input as it moves forward with the selection process.

And they had to go and ruin it with a stupid buzzword. Screw clouds. FWIW: The two options they’re looking at are Google Apps (with GMail & Calendar) and Microsoft Outlook Live.

It would seem that the first wave of stimulus work has hit the streets (quite literally). Am I the only one not thrilled?

I typically avoid being a blog of political commentary, but the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into we’ve been dragged into has reached the last straw. I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what kind of political affiliation you have…60 jobs for 6 months is not any sort of recovery. It’s a temporary bailout for those 60. I would love to see the CNN followup: “The original 60 stimulus workers: 7 months later.” This isn’t recovery. It’s not a stimulus. It doesn’t stimulate anything except the rhetoric that’s been going on for the last 6 months.

Obama and friends can now claim “see, we’re fixing it!” when nothing is being done. It’s nothing more than a feel-good stimulus, and that’s all this massive bailout/stimulus/etc plan has to be. It never actually has to create or fix anything, nor does it have to show any sort of real discernable progress. All it has to do (and all it’s intended to do) is make the average American believe it’s working. As long as people think “it’s getting better,” then the politicians in Washington have secured their re-election. And lets be honest: that’s all they’ve ever cared about. Looking at the new Recovery.gov website, I see a pretty website. I’ve yet to see a single thing of substance (and their timeline noticably lacks a “point you will actually notice a change” milestone).

Washington needs to realize that this sort of thing doesn’t help a damn bit, beyond trying to keep the American public from rising up and setting Washington (and Wall St) on fire. To be honest, that’s starting to seem more and more attractive of an option. That, or mass executions of CEOs. Neither will help the economy, sure, but they’ll definitely make us all feel better about it–and they don’t come with a pricetag of ∞.

[EDIT: A little birdy told me of a very similar post, which is a must-read]

My dear friend Danny Wool was chatting with me this morning, and he mentioned a recent project he’s been involved with regarding the Rwandan Genocide. To get some background knowledge on Kinyarwanda–the local language–he went to the Kinyarwanda Wikipedia to get some basic info. He came across the article on Yesu Kristo (staple article of pretty much all Wikipedias). The following is the current revision (as of this post):

Yesu Kristo on rw.wikipedia.org

What’s wrong with this article (I’ve already found 3 or 4 things)? I just hope one of the ~1-1.5% of the population of Rwanda who’s online gets to it soon. On a side note, I think the ITU’s figures may be a little skewed here. I did read an article about a push for more internet penetration in Rwanda (in the form of thin clients for schools), but I believe the metric here might be “people who can get to a computer (at their local school)” rather than “people who are actively online (and more likely to be maintaining rw.wikipedia).” Who knows. The NYT doesn’t seem to think the project is going well (bottom of first page):

Over all, less than 1 percent of the population is connected to the Internet. Rwandan officials say the company seems more interested in tapping the more lucrative cellphone market than in being an Internet service provider.

Maybe my Android client will be a hit then