Matt Stempeck

Blog

  • A Nonprofit a Day: Getting in the Giving Spirit

    It’s December, and just like retailers, countless nonprofits are counting on the donations from this one month to fund them through most of next year. The economy continues to tank, but hopefully that won’t lead to a major decline in giving. Say what you will about Americans, but we give to charity.

    I don’t usually donate much to nonprofits…I’m usually the “root silently for their success” type. But this year, I somehow raised $4,600 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and then the President-elect smooth-talked further online transactions out of me.

    So now that the floodgates have been opened, I’m going to give to (and feature) 30 cool nonprofits for the next 30 days. I realize those aren’t very exact standards, but they all fit some of these factors:
    -not too well known
    -offer common sense solutions
    -working on unique problems / little overlap

    Nominations are welcome. Preferably some obscure nonprofits that don’t get as much attention.

    We’re already two days behind, so let’s get started!

    Dark Sky Foundation – I read about this one a while ago, but it was also recently featured in a (way too short) National Geographic essay. We city-dwellers like to believe that we’re more advanced than country folk on many issues, but the occasional trip to a dark place with less cellphone service and more intergalactic reception quickly reveals how much of the big picture we’re missing.

    DSF focuses on quick fixes, like streetlights that only project light down, as well as long term education. And as a bonus, less light blocking our stars also means less electricity wasted into space.

    Some of the effects of light pollution:
    -Energy waste, and the air and water pollution caused by energy waste
    -Harm to human health
    -Harm to nocturnal wildlife and ecosystems
    -Reduced safety and security
    -Reduced visibility at night
    -Poor nighttime ambience

    That last one is the least tangible, but in my opinion, potentially the most important. Let’s turn off the opening-night spotlights and reclaim our awe of the universe.

    tycho

  • Picasa 3 released. Only kind of Googley.

    I have the highest respect for Google’s products, their usability, and what they’re trying to do as a company. But I’m starting to see some warning signs that as they mature, offering me free, fast, ridiculously useful tools may not always be their number one priority. With that in mind, here’s my review of Picasa 3 and its online photo sharing companion, Picasa Web Albums. I’m only going to talk about the new features, because overall, Picasa is the best free photo program I’ve ever used.

    Googley:
    -Easy to upload and store full resolution photos to Picasa Web Albums, so that if someday I want to make a print of a friend’s photo, I don’t have to track them down and have them email the high res version, as is the case on Facebook.

    -Slick slideshows, great collage templates, and neutral print providers

    -LOLcat feature lets you easily add text over images

    -magic retouch brush means your friends are about to get prettier

    -Picasa already pretty great

    Un-Googley:

    -Google tries to get you to set Google.com as your default search engine during installation process. They already are my default, but it’s because they provide the best services, not because they pulled Microsoft-like tricks to get me to use their stuff.
    –They killed Hello, an extremely useful but little known photo sharing tool, to encourage a) more uploads to Picasa Web Albums and b) more upgrades to profit-generating hosting plans. Really? The company that revolutionized web mail with a gigabyte of storage is going to nickel and dime me on uploading full resolution photos?

    -the “Download full album” button is excellent and will hopefully spare you the days of going through your parent’s Snapfish albums, right-clicking on each image. But it only works in Internet Explorer on a PC. You have to have Picasa installed, and even then Firefox won’t do the trick. This isn’t very clear in their help files, either.

    -They flat out copied Facebook’s face-tagging. It’s a creepy feature on Facebook, which at least gives you granular privacy controls, but I don’t know how I feel about Google itself storing this info directly.

    -Still no Mac support! Maybe they’re worried about iPhoto, but they shouldn’t be. Picasa’s way better.

    -Picasa Web Albums is the second least inspired name in the Google Universe, trailing only iGoogle.

  • Get Unplugged

    Neat video and related viral campaign by Meetup to get people to escape their many screens and go meet in meatspace. After planning said meeting online for $19 a month, of course.

    And if you’re looking for a Meetup to attend where we’ll at least TALK about computer screens, check out my group: NetSquared DC.

  • Fratelli Boy

    The Fratellis – Chelsea Dagger

    Even besides the catchiness of the song, I like the new Amstel Light commercials, which make Amsterdam look like a super fun and zany place without a single shot of prostitutes or drug lords. Now if only they’d export Amstel Gold!

  • I woke up today / In a very simple way

    Don’t you love when you get into a song and its chorus just happens to coincide with your resolution of the week? This hasn’t happened to me since I discovered Okkervil River’s The President’s Dead right before Gerald Ford passed, but the stars have aligned again.

    One of the few drawbacks of working from home is that the line between work and home gets the ol’ Gaussian blur. My girlfriend identified this before I even started, but it didn’t bother me until recently. It turns out the benefit of not having to commute in the morning is erased by how easy it is to just wander to your computer and fire up the email before properly waking up. You get an early jump, but it’s canceled out by the lack of focus that haunts you throughout the rest of the day.

    So, in the spirit of the Secular Sabbath, I’m going Analog in the AM. From 7-9am I’ll be awake but not using screens. Sorely needed triathlon training or cleaning are two areas I might spend this time on. So if you’re an early riser yourself and see me on Gchat, AIM, Facebook, Gmail, and so on, tell me to shut ‘er down.

    But really the whole point of this post was to play this song a bunch of times.

    Fun Fact: Port O’Brien apparently work in a cannery in Alaska. My friend Dave just started working as a Carnie in Alaska. Less gritty, but still wild.

  • Microsoft just plain gives up

    No, really. Their new ad campaign flat-out admits that the word-of-mouth about Vista is that it’s terrible and slow. They actually show people saying this.

    Microsoft’s clever spin is that these people haven’t really used Vista yet, and would actually love it if it weren’t for everyone they know and trust telling them not to buy it. So they disguise Vista and present it to these newbs as the next version of Windows (which, back in the real world, people are already clamoring for specifically because of how terrible Vista is).

    And lo and behold, these people turn out to really like Vista when they look at it in a focus group setting for a few minutes on what is likely a souped up machine.

    The ad then implies that even though these people couldn’t recognize Windows Vista after it’s been out for A YEAR AND A HALF, you should be swayed by their opinion that it’s “faster” and has “the newest features that I’ve seen“.

    You can watch Microsoft’s valiant effort at the lamest hidden camera ad campaign of all time at http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/.

    Oh, and for what it’s worth, I used and enjoyed Windows for years, and up through XP found it superior to Mac. But Vista is just absolutely terrible. It is bloated, will bring decently fast computers to a crawl, and is completely off the charts when it comes to unneccessary frustration and annoying warnings and bubbles.

    Looking around, it appears I’m not the only one who thinks this is terrible marketing and an affront to basic intelligence. And so the war between huge sums of money and basic truth continues.

  • Rise, clear-eyed and alert

    Al Gore just spoke to a packed Daughters of the American Revolution hall and challenged America to use 100% renewable energy by 2018. It was a good speech (Full speech text here) and it’s an audacious goal.

    Gore argues that a ten year national goal has proven to be the perfect balance of long-term thinking and short-term immediacy. He points to the Marshall Plan, the Interstate Highway System, and of course, the Apollo Project as examples of bold goals that America was able to achieve in a decade or so.

    But there are two rather formidable challenges.

    The first is a combination of extremely powerful vested interests mixed with the legitimately glacial nature of changing our energy infrastructure on such a massive scale.

    The second is that our broken political system allows already-powerful vested interests – we’re talking coal and oil companies here – to run the system. Gore acknowledged this and blamed it for the “baby step policies” that succeed only in not offending special interests, but he fell short of prescribing any political changes that need to happen.

    I’d love to think that a few million people on a grassroots email list could make completely upend our energy sourcing, infrastructure, and consumption habits, but I’m afraid it’s going to take a lot more. That’s why I’m working for publicly funded federal elections. I believe that we need to attack the root of this (and many other problems): an electoral system that lopsidedly favors vested interests.

    So the question is: Can America still be bold? Can we still achieve an ambitious goal if we put ourselves to it? Moving first on this issue is in our own national interest.

    Some fun facts and quotes:

    We send $2 billion every 24 hours to foreign countries for oil.

    One OPEC official noted that “the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones”

    Gore drew the most applause in ridiculing the notion that drilling for more oil and giving more money to oil companies is going to do anything to alleviate our pain at the pump. He said only a dysfunctional system would suggest such a “solution” and that the best way to bring gas prices down would be to stop using gas. The real driver of energy costs is increased energy use by China, India, and others, and this isn’t going to slow regardless of whether we stop funding our own infrastructure with a $0.14 tax.

    Some related Onion fun:

    We’re Investing So Much In Alternative Fuels, Sometimes We Almost Forget To Pump Oil!

    By Tony Hayward
    CEO, BP

    The National Intelligence Council recently addressed Congress to discuss the security threats that need to be considered in the face of global warming. What risks are expected to be aggravated by global warming?

    Military protection fails when sun-drenched artillery far too hot to handle with bare hands

    Invasion might catch America off guard while it’s cooling down in a movie theater

    Glaciers embittered by the rising temperatures may stage revenge “suicide meltings” on innocent civilians

    Frozen Mongol warriors may be defrosted and angry

    Too muggy to tell if terrorists have attacked

    Heatstroke affecting thousands of security officials, allowing millions of 3-ounce gels to enter aircraft unnoticed

    Increased precipitation will allow terrorists to conduct activity more surreptitiously under large umbrellas

    Natural disaster could occur on 9/11, dividing nation’s patriotic sentiment

    Al Gore becoming even more powerful

  • Did Free Slurpees take down Facebook?

    In yet another sign that Facebook has assimilated much of the MySpace demographic, Facebook is down and I’m putting my money on the free Slurpee gift causing traffic spikes. Facebook has had a number of promotional gifts recently, but this one ties in with an ACTUAL FREE SLURPEE, which is apparently enough to take down some pretty powerful server farms.

  • More firehose please

    My half-hearted attempt at an information diet has been thwarted by Nicco’s latest project, News Junk (http://newsjunk.com). It aggregates the day’s political news from a bewildering variety of sources. But what makes it great is that they eschew the Google News approach and rely on humans to choose which stories get posted. That way the same AP release doesn’t show up 95 times. Prepare to be addicted.

    Also, for syndication they’ve got RSS, Twitter, FriendFeed, and you can embed the headlines on your site.

  • Goodbye Hello…we hardly knew ye

    Picasa is Google’s terribly underrated and until recently, completely unknown photo editing software. Which means the number of people who knew about Hello had to number in the hundreds. Hello was a great way to send photos to friends. You could carry on an IM conversation while flipping through photos, and you could even auto-follow your friend’s view so you could be on the same page. They got the full size pictures without any right-clicking or decompressing nonsense, and I’ve never met someone who couldn’t immediately figure out how to use it. My mother (and Kodak) lament that as cool as digital photos are, no one ever prints them, and as a result, the bonding time looking over a photo album has been replaced by hunching over a laptop screen (if that).posies for hello's demise

    Google says they’re discontinuing Hello so they can focus on Picasa and Web Albums. Both are neat, but I’m not sure they’re going to fill the void.

    Maybe this is all so Google can use the blue chip domain name Hello.com for something more worthwhile, especially now that Apple scored me.com.

    Goodbye, Hello.

  • Never clip a coupon again

    Am I the only person under 40 who looked at coupons? As I enter my fifth year as a grocery-shopper, I’ve come to realize that the coupon inserts in the Sunday paper exist primarily as a vehicle to advertise new and/or improved products rather than to save you money. The amount you save with almost any coupon in the insert is less than the amount you save by simply buying the identical store brand version of the product.

    a la bugmenot

    But like everything else, the Internet makes it better. Online coupon codes actually can save you some decent change, or at least get you free shipping. I saved about $100 by Googling ‘Helio coupon codes’ before buying my phone last year. But now you don’t even have to do that.

    Install this Firefox plugin. Then when you go to buy something, it will display a little notice at the top of the page if a coupon is available for that store.

    Or if you can’t figure that out, go to http://retailmenot.com when you’re about to buy something and type the store into their search box.

    If you want to thank me, one-click me some MarioKart.

  • DC Public Pools (and hours)

    When I signed up for this triathlon, I expected fundraising $4,200 to be the biggest challenge. Or learning to swim a mile. And while neither of those were a breeze at a picnic, the most difficult thing has just been getting to a pool that’s a) open b) open for lap swimming and c) ideally, free.

    But I can’t blame my still-mediocre swimming ability on pool access, because I’ve accrued a nice list of pools I can go to depending where in the city I might be that day. Sleeping over the girlfriend’s and want to spend $6 (which includes access to a water slide)? Hit North Bethesda. Feel like taking two trains and a bus to practice with the rest of the Team? Go to Georgetown Lab School (the only one on this map that probably won’t let John Q. Public in). Grabbing coffee in Eastern Market and not afraid to change in front of some real characters? Rumsey Aquatic Center is right around the corner.

    So being the nerd and Google fanboy that I am, I made a map of these pools and their hours. I’ve referred to this constantly since I made it, so maybe it will be handy for you, too.



    Link

    Special Summertime Note: The pool in East Potomac Park (aka Hains Point) is outdoors!