I’ve given iTunes a bunch of my money. I get my music from there, I love the 99 cent per track structure, love it all. Last night, however, I downloaded some music from the Amazon MP3 store. The reason? I need DRM free tracks for some of the, uh, “things” that I am “doing.” Amazon has them, iTunes doesn’t. Interesting.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin made the pitch last week (according to Investor’s Business Daily):
The mayor of the hurricane-hit city made an impassioned plea to Congress to pass the Colombia free trade agreement for New Orleans’ sake. He knows how badly his city needs every break it can get, three years after the biggest disaster to ever hit a U.S. metropolitan area.“New Orleans is becoming an even greater international city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina,” Nagin wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last November, “and we are making every effort to capitalize on trade liberalization that will flow from these FTAs (free trade agreements). Our port system is ideally situated to take advantage of the Latin American FTAs.”
The article gives more details. It also contains a nice shot of President Bush, Mayor Nagin, and newly elected Indian-American governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal.
Stuff I’ve seen around the web lately:
• Freshman 15 theory takes a pounding
• When Tech Innovation has a Social Mission: The article is about TechSoup. Harambee is a TechSoup member.
• UrbanFaith.com is coming soon
• Behold Wordpress, Destroyer of CPUs: geeky. informative comment thread. I’m off to install the wp-cache plugin. not that i get that much traffic.
• Many LA Students Frightened and Depressed, Study Finds: This one is a subject of conversation around LA
• Scientists located Super-Mum: biochemical evidence of the awesomeness of mothers: “SCIENCE has finally caught up with what mothers have been saying for years: they are super-women with super-powers thanks to an influx of hormones during pregnancy and labour to enable them to cope with the demands of child rearing.”
• A Columnist’s Parting Advice: “Lesson No. 1: The numbers don’t lie. They can be stir-fried, oven-fried or convection-baked, but in the end they always hold the keys to the kingdom. Lesson No. 5: Risk isn’t a four-letter word. A good rule of thumb is that before you buy, instead of asking how much you can make, first ask how much you can lose. That is what the smart guys do.”
Word is that this initiative is about to take off (link is to the President’s 2008 State of the Union speech, search the page for “pell grants for kids”):
We must also do more to help children when their schools do not measure up. Thanks to the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships you approved, more than 2,600 of the poorest children in our Nation’s Capital have found new hope at a faith-based or other non-public school. Sadly, these schools are disappearing at an alarming rate in many of America’s inner cities. So I will convene a White House summit aimed at strengthening these lifelines of learning. And to open the doors of these schools to more children, I ask you to support a new $300 million program called Pell Grants for Kids. We have seen how Pell Grants help low-income college students realize their full potential. Together, we’ve expanded the size and reach of these grants. Now let us apply that same spirit to help liberate poor children trapped in failing public schools. (Applause.)
UPDATE: This is great: White House Summit on Inner-City Children and Faith-based Schools. I think they are talking about us.
Meet Ryan. In small and large ways, brother is bringing it in to Ayuda Community Center. But you can’t hire him away - he’s committed to Hunting Park.
Sam next to the Harambee F150, this afternoon. Sam will be 8 next month. This day was not promised: August 20, 2004
I thank God for Sam.
Some mischief from the National Review blog:
Democrats on the Economy in 1996:“Our economy is the healthiest it has been in three decades.” (President Bill Clinton, State of the Union Address, January 23, 1996)
Democrats on the Economy in 2008:
“The bottom line is that this administration is the owner of the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover.” (Senator Charles Schumer, Press Release, March 7, 2008)
I was on a one-hour conference call this morning with the CCDA Youth Steering Committee, planning the national conference in October (in Miami! dig it). After that I transitioned immediately into a site visit with the Pasadena Community Foundation. We at Harambee have partnered up with Leadership Pasadena on a solar panels project, namely, installing solar panels on one of our Harambee properties. I did a bunch of stuff before these two meetings, plus we are trying to get a donated vehicle - a Ford Expedition, 8 passengers, yes - in full operation. If I catch these wannabe skaters without high school diplomas walking up the street, I’m going to tackle them and haul them in to the local employment office. Just keepin buys over here.
This is a hot issue in LA and it won’t go away anytime soon:
The black residents are seeking a decision by the council to enact the so-called Jamiel’s Law, named after Jamiel Shaw, a promising and law-abiding 17-year-old high school student allegedly shot by an illegal immigrant, 18th Street Gang member Pedro Espinoza. The noxious Espinoza, who has a massively long rap sheet, was arrested and then released by the LAPD shortly before he allegedly murdered Jamiel.
• Wordpress as a membership directory: Hmm… when I started Urban Onramps - 9 years ago - it was intended as a web directory ala original Yahoo. There may be hope yet…
• An enduring measure of fitness: The Simple Push-up
• U.S. In-Flight Broadband is A-gogo by Spring: The dream is not dead. American Airlines is on board. Dig it.
• Facebook Wordpress theme: All this stuff is just going to mash together one day…
• Goodbye, Book Advances: HarperCollins turns a page in publishing
• $10 from DC to NYC! You can bet I’m using this from now on: BoltBus
• College Isn’t Worth a Million Dollars: So says some guy
She’s got the little bumps on her body, but it’s a mild case. She has had all her vaccinations, so chicken pox has not flared up like it normally does. Nevertheless, we’re keeping her away from other children. She’s at Aunt Shirley’s in West LA right now. I miss her. She’s only three but she’s perceptive and grasps significant concepts, so I’ve always got to stay on my toes.
Here are some pictures of the kids:
(above) It’s Samuel feeding baby Gabrielle on my bed.
(above) Here’s Sam at City of Hope last week. He went for his monthly check up. It’s all good. He’s not only done with chemotherapy (he finished in November), he’s now officially done with Bactrim, too. This was the second hospital visit in a row where he did not scream bloody murder when the nurse drew blood by inserting a needle into his arm. All this time - more than three years - Sam got blood draws via a needle into his chest port. Psychologically, it’s a different thing to get a straight needle into the arm than to get one into his chest port. So I’m glad he’s getting stronger about regular blood draws.
(above) Here’s Micah on stage at my church’s Easter Sunday service. This was during rehearsal.
(above) I was in the backyard the other day, washing down the patio, and Micah wanted to play with the hose. She loves it. She would sit there for an hour if she could, just letting the water run.
(above) Here’s Micah at ballet class. They did a performance that was beyond simplistic, but hey, the kids are 3 and 4. Micah loves ballet, hip hop dance, writing her name on paper, painting, chalk drawing, singing along to Alicia Keys’ “No One” and U2’s “it’s all right, it’s all right” (i.e. Mysterious Ways), and slugging her brother in the back.
I torched this blog earlier today. After upgrading to Wordpress 2.5, it all went kerflooey. I went fishing for a way to find my sql database password, but nothing I tried - control panel, sql web searches, raw file code, calls to hotshot database programmers - helped. In the end, what worked was this: I created a new user, attached that new user to my sql database, used the new user info in the wp-config file, and the blog came roaring back to life. Then I had another problem: I couldn’t get into my admin panel. Went to Wordpress.org, into the forum, searched using my error message as the search parameter, and found someone who said to eliminate ALL WHITE SPACES from the wp-config file. It worked, perfectly. I like trying upgrades and am not too bothered when I encounter a problem, because that problem is an opportunity to learn something new about the interweb.
BBC News: Daily Caffeine “Protects Brain”: Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests
“This is the best evidence yet that caffeine equivalent to one cup of coffee a day can help protect the brain against cholesterol.”
