More Light! More Light!

I’ve been looking for a simple way to explain what happened to my friends, and I think Statler and Waldorf here nail it.

Sam works for the New York City Store now as Marketing Manager.

There is a book signing tonight at the City Store that I’m going to go to. Eugene de Salignac was the official photographer of NYC bridges for thirty years at the beginning of the 20th century. His work was carefully filed away in the archives and forgotten about. Recently, Michael Lorenzini found 20,000 glass plates of Eugene’s and published them in “New York Rises - The Photographs of Eugene de Salignac“.

I suggested to Sam that she tell the Dead Programmer about the signing and he’s coming! I’m excited - Michael’s writing is some of my favorite - it’s always a pleasure when he updates and I see something new in my feed reader.

GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself
They subscribe to Google’s AdSense program and serve ads.
As the ads earn money, the money is automatically used to buy shares of stock in Google (GOOG).
Anyone who visits the site can become a shareholder in their corporation (GTTP Ltd - Google To The People Company). Therefore we all become shareholders, in effect, of Google.
They calculate that they we will fully own Google in 202 years.
Sweeeeeeet.

This feels distinctly like art to me.

I lend money on prosper.com. It’s a peer to peer lending service.
I just got my first default. Poor old henryjr declared bankruptcy and with it disappeared $93.52 of my money.

Overall, I’m up $263.89 but a couple of other folks are 3+months late on their loans. This is the part where it gets a little scary.

If you like the wallet I posted about in November, good news.

I stumbled across an instructable about how to fold your own Tyvek Wallet.

It’s not as nice, but it’s also not as twenty bucks.

Thought my pals might want to read this entry I found from Bruce Sterling about the Planetary Society’s campaign to fight for the mission and budget of NASA . It was bad enough when this administration removed “to understand and protect the Earth” as a primary goal of NASA. It just gets worse, and because there isn’t a clear bodycount, it isn’t going to be big news.

Go check out that article and then maybe give the planetary society a donation and sign their petition. I’m going to give them $20 and sign the petition. If you email me what you’ve donated, I’ll also match what you’ve donated.

Prosper has revealed their lending API/Tools section . Right now it is just a dump of data from their db, but the api section promises webservices coming soon.

What’s cool about this? Now you should see smart folks like me building tools to analyze and pick through prosper loans, flagging good stuff and dissing bad loans. By opening up the data like this, prosper is letting interested people create tools for themselves and others to get better results for their systems.

This kind of openness will be good for their business as reliability goes up and people can make better informed decisions.