Shanti’s Dispatches

Got 4 loans currently being repaid, have given 4 gift certificates, and have 2 more loans in the works, but the full amounts have not been raised yet.

If you’ve ever wanted to be an angel investor, but thought you didn’t have the funds… this is a way to jump in the game on a micro scale!

Oh and if the money is repaid (typical 96%+ repayment rate), you get to reinvest it with other entrepreneurs.

Victor Onyango is 35 years old and a father of four. His wife stays at home and takes care of the two youngest children. The other two children attend junior school and are both in grade eight. Next year they graduate to senior school. Victor owns a retail shop selling consumer goods like bread, milk and soft drinks. The shop is located in the busy center of Nakuru and is frequented by several people each day. The business is going well and makes a good profit. Yet, the leftover income after paying wages to the shop assistants is not sufficient to cater for Victor’s family’s needs.

Nadezhda, whose name means hope in Russian, owns a successful perfume and cosmetics business located in a busy market in Nikopol. She has operated her business for six years. Lively and full of energy, she works hard to make her business a success. By offering a wide selection of products at affordable prices, she has been able to broaden her available customer base and meet the needs of more clients. Nadezhda is requesting a loan for $1200 to allow her to re-supply her inventory and introduce new product lines. Her long term goal is to expand her business by opening additional vending kiosks and hiring staff to help her with sales.

Thanks Abygale for the Kiva gift card!

On this thread, duzytata said:

America, A place where everyone wants you to succeed until you do.

So true!

I’m trading emails back and forth with my Dad as we are supporting each other in some goals going forward. He sent me this gem.

A Zen poet said,

A person who is a master in the art of living makes little distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their mind and their body, their education and their recreation, their love and their religion.

They hardly know which is which and simply pursue their vision of excellence and grace, whatever they do, leaving others to decide whether they are working or playing. To them they are always doing both.

I have three really stange names:

Shanti Ananda Braford

Whenever human intervention is required for various services I sign up for, credit card applications, etc. people have a tendency to want to “correct” my mistaken names.

I just signed up for a new server at hivelocity.net (I needed a new WHM / cPanel box to move some sites to). I specified the server name as “braford.org” or perhaps “server.braford.org”.

When I went to login to my cpanel, I start seeing this name “server.bradley.org”. I’m thinking … they didn’t realy confuse “braford” with “bradley”, did they?

Ok, fine. Honest mistake. But it’s another reason why I *love* automation.

A 100% automated script would never make that kind of mistake, unless you intentionally programmed it to look for strange names (like mine) and attempt to auto-correct them!

HiVelocity.net - Great Support

Just got off of webchat with support from hivelocity.net. They fixed the server.bradley.org thing within minutes, and fixed something else that broke when they changed the hostname.

New article up over at on webapps: What’s Wrong with What Matthew Huntbach Finds Wrong with Ruby.

The title is meant to be catchy. There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion. But when it’s backed up with little other than “because I say so” then you’re just creating FUD and hopping on the anti-hype linkbait bandwagon.

Well, it’s that time of year again. At age 27:

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. dropped out from his job at General Electric to become a full-time writer.

Henry David Thoreau went off for two years to live alone in a cabin at Walden Pond.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.

Memphis millionaire Frederic W. Smith, whose father built the Greyhound bus system, founded Federal Express.

Scottish botanist David Douglas discovered the Douglas fir.

Ernest Hemingway published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises.

Boston dentist William Morton pioneered modern anaesthesiology after learning that inhalation of ether will cause a loss of consciousness.

Jessica Schram trolled MySpace for seven straight hours during work.*

Conceptual artist Piero Manzoni crapped in 90 small cans which were then factory sealed and offered for sale at the price of gold.**

* LOL. Not sure how that slipped in there.

** Double LOL.

OCS Solutions has created an installer for Mephisto (site not resolving as of this writing).

The other elephant in the room (besides Ruby performance) in the RoR community is how painful it can be to deploy Rails apps on a fresh box or shared host. So it’s nice to see some strides made in this dept.

Once you have everything setup, Capistrano is great. But setting up the whole Rails/etc stack on a fresh server is still a big pain.

Someone needs to create a WHM / cPanel combo just for Rails apps!

Google’s a lot like Ruby. Once you get to know how “it” thinks, you can oftentimes guess how it’ll behave.

I had no clue ahead of time that typing that into Google would work, but I was pretty sure it would.