My tweets
- Downstairs to catch up on last Sunday's #MadMen I suppose. Maybe Don will continue to grow on me... 2 hrs ago
- Is brand loyalty really just brand ignorance? http://bit.ly/aoGlOq 2 hrs ago
- @amyjmcnair We miss you. in reply to amyjmcnair 2 hrs ago
- @langley Snickerklish restroom? Like the old PC game? As if saying "PC game" signified its own, old genre. It probably does. :) in reply to langley 2 hrs ago
- More updates...
Blog Archives
Blogroll
writings Archive
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The problem with “The Problem With Generation Y and Millennials” – A response to Jason Calacanis
Posted on April 17, 2010 | View CommentsI told myself a while ago that I would pay close attention to what Jason Calacanis said; the guy’s as close to tech as you can get and he’s got his brain in lots of different pies. Now, unfortunately, he occasionally offers opinion in some of the pies that he has no business talking about. By “occasionally”, of course, I mean “always”. That’s not a reason to stop reading him, mind you. The last major example, and there are many, was his rant (read: hissy fit) about the “Middle East” and other geopolitical realities that he understands merely by dint of being the Tesla Roadster’s most high-profile cheerleader.
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Most horrifying thing I’ve ever eaten
Posted on October 16, 2009 | View Comments
I couldn't even bring myself to post a picture
For at least the past two years I have had the habit of creating what I like to call the “oh my god” smoothie. Its name comes from the phrase that usually escapes my lips when I taste what I have created. This is a drink that I make with my Breville IKON blender that I consume after long bike rides or awesome workout sessions. It has two basic ingredients: leaf spinach and beets (which are, sadly, usually canned).
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La Figlia che Piange – T.S. Eliot
Posted on October 2, 2009 | View CommentsO quam te memorem virgo…
STAND on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair. -
Unexpected places and surprise finds
Posted on October 1, 2009 | View Comments
California coastline - like a painting
Jackie and I decided to spend her last two days with me going on an actual vacation. After spending a summer apart (she in Kenya, me in other parts of Kenya, Tanzania, London, Chicago, Denver, etc.), it seemed natural to want to relax. We cruised up to Sonoma for their Vintage Festival, tasted some wines, visited the vineyards, and stayed in a beautiful little place along the Russian River.
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The Denver Dispatch of Doom – Vol. 11 (Kenya Edition)
Posted on July 13, 2009 | View CommentsHello all,
I hope this letter finds you healthy and happy. I’ve eaten a great deal of celery in the past week, a fact for which I have no explanation.
I am back from Africa! In my work with The 1010 Project, I’ve spent a lot of time telling the stories of social entrepreneurs and community-based organizations in Kenya, and it was a real treat to finally meet the people for whom I’ve been advocating; I was connecting names with faces and voices in real life. I’d like to pretend that I wrote most of this Dispatch while I was on the ground, but the truth is that I was too busy with our work there to handle a simple email missive like this.
Read more on The Denver Dispatch of Doom – Vol. 11 (Kenya Edition)…
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From: Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Frank Barry, Guest Post: 4 Keys to Building a Successful Nonprofit Web Site
Posted on July 13, 2009 | View CommentsI especially liked #4, which is one of the things that I’m proud to have helped The 1010 Project with:
4) Make Yourself Easy to Find on the Social Web
Sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube (know about the new nonprofit call to action), LinkedIn and Flickr are becoming exceedingly important to any nonprofits online presence. It’s likely your organization is already using one or more of these social networks to engage with supporters, spread your message or raise money. Chris Brogan likes to call these places “outposts”. Your main website should highlight your presence on these sites so that your readers can connect with you in social ways online – they want to get to know you and they want to see that you are doing creative things in fundraising.
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Kenya Series – Mt. Longonot
Posted on July 6, 2009 | View CommentsA fantastic slide show, complete with funny captions, follows this post.
Our team from The 1010 Project spent a few days visiting with a partner in Western Province, then headed to Lake Naivasha in the Central Highlands of Kenya. Naivasha is big and beautiful – it’s in the bottom of the Great Rift Valley – and the entire area is covered by flower farms. Apparently Kenyan roses have a huge market in Europe. The lake has hippos and monkeys and storks and whatnot, but I wasn’t all that interested in such beasts. My goal was to climb Mt. Longonot, an extinct volcano about 20 kilometers from the lake.
I recruited The 1010 Project’s Development Coordinator Emily Ruppel and we planned the trip. Before long, word had spread that we were going to be awesome. Our team grew. Our buddy Josh came along, as did two people from Northside Christian Church in Houston, Texas. The Houston team was traveling with us for part of the journey, visiting our partners in Nairobi and Vihiga. Aldo and Pastor Dave would be joining us on the climb.We started a bit late on Friday morning because we had some difficulty finding cheap transportation. By about 9:45 am, we were ready to start what by all estimates was a four-hour climb. It’s actually only 630 meters (2000+ feet) from the base to the top of the crater, so we weren’t entirely certain what to expect; I had (unlike most other outdoor things) done scant research on our climb. As it turns out, that 630 meters is fairly strenuous because it’s NEARLY ENTIRELY VERTICAL. There is only one path up the side of this monster volcano, and it is S-T-E-E-P, let me tell you. Further complicating our climb was the omnipresent dust. It’s all super-old volcanic ash and such, so the minute you put your fit in it, you sink two inches. It was like climbing in sand – my legs were getting beaten up.Pastor Dave, a young man in our minds, was still about a decade and a half older than the oldest of us, and as we climbed, he grew increasingly short of breath. After one particularly grueling section, we took a break and he mused that he would likely not be able to reach the summit with us. At that point, we were close enough to where the rim of the crater was within another two or three strong drives. We told Dave that he could definitely make it, and that we weren’t that far from the top. It was like a motivational speech or something.Well, Dave cowboyed up and as we crested the top and stared down into the crater of a MASSIVE EXTINCT VOLCANO IN THE GREAT RIFT VALLEY IN KENYA, Dave collapsed to his knees and let out an “Oh my…” The view was amazing – on the one side we were looking back over the Rift Valley and its endless expansiveness. On the other side, we were looking into a giant crater full of forest. It was amazing. The photos following this post cannot do it justice. Dave thanked us for inspiring him to go those last few hundred feet and we walked around the rim for an hour before heading down. If the climb was tough, the descent was pure awesome. We ran down large sections, kicking up massive dustclouds as we went. In fact, the powder was so fine that we were even able to “dirt ski,” as it were: -
JAMBO – Kenya Living
Posted on June 17, 2009 | View CommentsHello all. I feel strange for not being able to blog this excursion up, but my connections have been a bit slow. Oh well. It’s nice to be able to touch base here.
I’m sure I’ll tweet this when we hit the road again, but if I had two words to describe the Kenyan countryside, they would be: “carelessly verdant.” Seriously, everything is either a strange mass of strange trees or a field of plants. Lots of farmers around here. We drove out to Western Kenya last week, almost to Lake Victoria, and slept under bed nets in an orphanage where one of our partners works.
In case you don’t know, I’m here with The 1010 Project, a Denver-based humanitarian organization that partners with social entrepreneurs in the developing world to break the cycle of poverty. Aside from two organizations that are based in the rural west, we have a number scattered across the slums of Nairobi. I’ll be heading to Korogocho and Kibera and Kayole and Matopeni in the coming days.
It’s amazing here, it really is, and I’m super-glad to be with The 1010 Project. I’m our Fundraising Coordinator, and part of our trip involves me implementing a grant that I wrote a few months back. Our partners are VERY happy to work with us on some specific income-generating projects.
Some highlights: Helped a 4 year old Luhya girl carry a 20-liter jerrycan of water through a cornfield to her home. She smiled. I addressed a crowd of what looked to be 40,000 street children in Matopeni, singing songs and dancing and telling stories. I thanked a baboon for laying the groundwork for the internet and Twitter. Got bit by a mosquito, which means a LOT more here than it does in America (check out previous posts, which I can’t link to now, about my work with the Interfaith Youth Core and Tony Blair Faith Foundation).
I’m likely to spend the first week of July writing a bunch of impassioned posts about these and other things and putting them up, but for now, I just wanted to check in and thank you all for following along with my work. You folks are a big part of the work I do – I see it in the congratulatory tweets as much as I see it in the smiling faces of orphans and entrepreneurs that we work with in Kenya. See you all soon.
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Why I Like Sci-Fi
Posted on May 29, 2009 | View CommentsFound a neat little clip from Babylon 5 (you might remember it from back in the day – “our last, best hope for peace”) while ignoring my final for Modern Islamic Political Theory. I think it’s a great reminder of how diverse and interesting our planet is: -
Graduate School
Posted on May 29, 2009 | View CommentsA few months back, I read (with a somewhat horrified face) and commented on Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist post “Don’t try to dodge the recession with grad school.” It’s a silly post, really, full of lovely little bits of wisdom like “Law school is a factory for depressives” or “Going to grad school is like going into the military.” I usually enjoy Penelope’s stuff, if for nothing else than her honest, self-effacing style. This post was different.My comments were less than supportive. Her gist was that graduate degrees require overinvestment of both money and time. Money, being tight in a recession, is pretty important. Time, according to her, can best be spent at other jobs, even those outside one’s experience or comfort level. We are reminded of people who try something different and in doing “figure out what they always wanted to do but didn’t know they wanted to do but can now do with their whole heart.” She recounts working on a French chicken farm and the non-traditional learning that she did while working in the coop. It helped her along her path.
I stand now at the end of two years of graduate school at a prestigious school and an even more prestigious program. I’m dozens of thousands of dollars in the hole. I couldn’t be happier.
When I completed a year-long resident fellowship after finishing my undergraduate work, I knew that my skillsets were incomplete. I needed to know how to do interesting things. I needed to meet interesting people. Something told me that graduate school would guide me. And it did – I’ve made some outstanding connections, professional and nonprofessional, that will serve me very well in the future. I’ve made friends. I coordinate fundraising and social media for a local humanitarian organization (as it turns out, I have a passion for international development). I can write grants and I know the social web pretty well. I have a job waiting for me in San Jose, CA where I’ll be working to eradicate malaria.
Did I spend two years well? Sure! Could I have done so more cheaply and still found my passion(s)? Certainly! Now I refer back to Penelope’s post and think even less of it. Graduate school shouldn’t be for everybody, but to come out and lambaste it (with plenty of support – check the comments) is shortsighted. I don’t know a single person who’s dodged the recession by furthering their education and networking, and I doubt that I ever will.