The Sky above us, originally uploaded by Werner Kunz (werkunz1).

[via Location Independent Professionals]

For those in Seattle looking for something to do tonight, check out the private screening of “To Catch A Dollar”

When: Thursday, August 26th, 2010
6:00 pm – Reception with heavy hors d’oeuvres
7:00 pm – Private Screening & Special Guest Speaker
Where: Two Union Square
601 Union Street, 51st Floor
Downtown Seattle
Price: Ticket Levels: $100 | $50 | $25

Please RSVP to Fortunato Vega
(206) 336-1611
fortunato911@gmail.com

[via myKRO.org]

[image via HowStuffWorks]

I’ll be the first to admit I absolutely love my Kindle. But there is a feature that is seriously missing from it — particularly since it has WIFI built in. I want to be able to instantly publish an excerpt, possibly with a few thoughts of my own, to my blog and have that post link to the book with my Amazon affiliate code for those who may want to purchase it. It seems a quick and easy way for Amazon to allow their Kindle Users to spread the word about both Kindle’s and all the great books available on them at the same time.

Or maybe they don’t need ideas like this since the Kindle is currently sold out.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

By the way, thank you to my good friend Andrew Mattie at Diverse Solutions for pushing me to purchase one prior to starting my travels back in May.

I’ve been told a number of times that I know myself very well – and I agree. I know my strengths, weaknesses like the back of my hand, and am constantly thinking about how to improve myself. As a result, I don’t take offense when someone tells me something less than flattering about myself, for instance, that I’m not the greatest public speaker the world’s ever seen — I already know that and am striving to improve it (though I’ll admit I’m getting out of practice on that specific example since I’ve started traveling). Practice, and passion, makes perfect — and I’ll get there. Instead, I know in my heart it’ll make me work that much harder to prove them wrong in the long run. Public speaking is not the only example of a weakness of mine (I wish!), just one that’s easy to highlight. Another one is that, in the business world, it’s not always a good thing to wear your passions on your sleeve – I’ve gotten into trouble a few times for being too open about what I think.

I was just reading Fred Wilson’s post on Aging (by the way, Happy Birthday Fred) and I can tell by his writing he knows himself very well; not everyone is like that unfortunately.

Expressing yourself through writing forces you to get to know yourself better — so I ask, are bloggers/writers more “self aware” than others? Don’t get my wrong, I’m not saying that those who don’t write are not self aware — just that self awareness seems to be a common trait I see in other bloggers I follow. Or maybe I purposely follow those who do have a high level of self awareness, I don’t know. I’m curious of your thoughts on the topic.

From the NYT “Technology Leads more Park Visitors Into Trouble” –

“Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,” said Jackie Skaggs, spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

Come on people – grow a brain. Just because you’re a geek with toys doesn’t mean you are invincible.

From: Dana Dahl
Subject: White Hat SEO

Message Body:
We can increase rankings of your website in search engines. Please reply back for more details.

No thank you.

A 16 year old teenager in Menlo Park is using her birthday as a means to raise awareness & funds for Kiva. She’s been donating to Kiva since she was 11 years old!

I just read the “On long-term travel, snobbery & judgmental blogging” article by Mike Barish. I did find the article a bit more of a personal attack than suits my style — I’ve long followed the motto of attacking ideas, not attacking people. I haven’t read every comment, but this one by Steph at Twenty-Something Travel stuck out to me as a good take away from the whole conversation:

True happiness comes from following your passions and creating a life that incorporates the things you love. There are about a bazillion different paths to that.

I totally agree. There isn’t one right way of life for everyone — as I’ve said before, you’ll know it when you find your passion.

I just wrote up a post on Oh Hey World talking about doing what makes you happy — for those that don’t follow that blog, head over there and check it out.

Why don’t more companies operate this way? The world would certainly be a better place if they did.

[via A VC]

The story of HIV/AIDS in Tanzania, and the struggle of a group of orphans all infected with the virus.

I’m going to Kenya and Ghana knowing full well these are the types of stories I’m going to hear — and I’m looking forward to hearing them.

The photo below is currently Rocky Turner’s facebook profile photo — and I obviously love it since I’m sharing it here. It’s timely, particularly since yesterday I re-read my “If this doesn’t hit you like a rock, I don’t know what will” post from a few years. Reading that post still puts a knot in my stomach every time I read it. Suffice to say, I’m still in the midst of figuring out what my mark will be in this world — but images like this push me a little bit closer each and every day.

Love everything about this video — I agree with Amber that “this is fucking awesome”

[via HeyAmberRae]

I just read (well, skimmed some of it since it’s so long) this article in the New York Times titled “The Web Means the End of Forgetting” as a result of this Tweet by Christine Amorose.

One quote fairly early in the article that’s somewhat scary is this:

It’s often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances — no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you’ve done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

I live a very public life; most of what I do is “out there” and I’m fine with that. Luckily, the worst thing I’ve ever done — which I’m not going to get into — is not the first thing people knows about me. But part of that being the case is because it happened when I was young before the rise of Facebook and a web where everything resides in a permanent state for eternity. But if I did something really bad again, there is a good likelihood it would somehow end up online and very public — likely somewhere in my Facebook status feed as wall posts from friends or acquaintances. It it could spread to my entire network within hours. Maybe the worst thing you’ve done is the first thing people learn about you in future. That sucks, but we all have to be willing to accept the consequences of our mistakes.

I guess the lesson is that we should all never do anything bad again. Of course, I strive to only do good in this world — but mistakes can happen to the best of us. One last thing I will say on this topic — the fact of the matter is that part of what keeps me inline on a day to day basis IS the fact that everything I do (for the most part) is public. I’d be more likely to go off the deep end and do something crazy, horrible, or stupid if everything wasn’t public; I guess that’s both a good thing and a bad thing depending on how you look at it.

I would absolutely LOVE IT if someone would build an application that put all my Facebook status updates since I joined the site in the beginning (2004-ish?) into an audio file I could listen to. The format would be super simple:

“Date, Time, [Facebook status update]”

Repeat thousands and thousands of times.

Maybe really spice it up by adding the comment thread on each status update to the audio file.

I’m guessing Facebook itself is the only company that could actually build this since they have access to all the historical data. If someone – whether it be Facebook or another company — built this, I would absolutely be willing to spend some money for it. Alternatively, I could simply go through the tedious tedious process of reading all my Facebook status updates for the past 6 years — but that would take ages and ages and doesn’t sound like very much fun. Somehow, repeatedly hitting “Older Posts” at the bottom of my profile page and waiting for them to load doesn’t sound like a fun Saturday.

Any takers?

Dad Life from Church on the Move on Vimeo.

I really don’t understand why we’re spending another $59 billion on our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. No amount of money is going to win those wars. The government should just realize what we’ve spent already is a sunk cost that can’t be recovered rather than continuing to throw money at the problem. Why not put that $59 billion towards green energy, poverty alleviation, health care, infrastructure projects in the US, or even paying off some of our massive massive debt?

But that’s just my 2 cents

You can view more awesome technologies here on the Kopernik website.

[via MicrofinanceHub]

In the event you couldn’t tell, I’ve been enjoying traveling. A lot — and I intend to keep it going for awhile with my buddy Dan from high school (he runs Bankvibe.com). Where am I off to next you might wonder?

I’ll be here in Santorini until August 5th when I fly up to London for a few days. After London, it’s on to explore Dublin for a week and then jetting down to Spain sometime between the 16th-19th of August with stop number 1 likely being Valencia for the La Tomatina festival in Bunol (45 minutes outside of Valencia). I just found out the other day that one of my good college friends will be teaching in Madrid for a year so will probably spend a bit of time there and maybe pop over to Barcelona for a bit.

After a month in Spain, my buddy and I are meeting up again (he’ll be in Austria until Sept 20th) and planning to fly down to Kenya for a month long stay. In Kenya, I plan to see Rocky’s orphanage funded by Mothers Fighting for Others and volunteer for a week, spend a bit of time in Nairobi for Kito International, visit Mombasa, and maybe volunteer for a bit for Nuru International. Exact plans are still a little bit in limbo, but coming together slowely but surely. After Kenya, it’s on to Ghana for another month. There, I’m planning to volunteer with Lumana Credit — an organization that is run by my friend Sammie Rayner (a UW grad). To round out our Africa adventures, we’re planning to head down to South Africa for a few weeks and spend some of that time with my former boss David Gibbons!

That puts us near the end of December. After that, we tentatively want to go hang out in Istanbul for a month and then head east to Southeast asia for a few months. But we’ll see what happens as we get closer to the end of our adventures in Africa – it seems every day there is a new country we want to go visit, so plans could change.

If anyone wants to visit any of those places, by all means, let me know! Visitors are certainly welcome anywhere along our journey.

I just read “A new journalism on the horizon” the on BBC News. I’ve certainly changed my news consumption habits — I rarely check news sites like CNN anymore. Instead, I rely on Twitter and Facebook to surface any story that’s worth reading. The only regular & consistent form of news I consume is Fortunate and Time — which I pay for on my Kindle (love my Kindle by the way).

Just thinking out loud, but here is another additional service I’d be willing to pay for:

The ability to pick a story (for example the BP Oil Spill) and receive high quality updates on that particular story via my Kindle. I read most of Time, but not all stories are interesting to me. However, there are some topics that I absolutely want to continue to consume if there was a way to not spend a bunch of time tracking down WHAT I should read relating to them. I’d like to be able to “favorite” a story, and automatically receive related content as it becomes available. I spend a lot of time online, but certainly willing to spend some dollars for someone to filter what I should/shouldn’t read – there’s value in not having to do that myself.

I think this post I wrote back in 2007 is still relevant, and I’m surprised no one has really solved this problem yet. If there is a solution available that I’m not aware of, by all means, let me know!

On a related note – if anyone knows of a blog that covers world events that publishes an article about once a day after sifting through all the news stories and only covers extremely important issues, let me know. I’m tired of wading through article after article on CNN that seems like content just for the sake of generating more page views!