more than just a domain

Fear of Sleep

Some free press…

Ira Glass, host of This American Life said of Birbiglia in a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune: “I feel he’s a big rising star. He’s somebody I feel, like, whenever we have him on the show I just feel, like, wow, he’s gonna be so much more famous than all the rest of us.”

Kiva – Loans that change lives

Something we’re trying that I wanted to share. Kiva let’s you lend to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world – empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty. You also have the option to connect with other lenders and make an impact as a team. We’re in the early stages of this process and will update our progress here.

Mrs. Sokvun Vong has been a silk weaver since she was thirteen years old. Her husband has been a mason for three years. In August 2008, she asked for a loan of $100 to purchase silk materials for her weaving business. Read more.

Update:

Kiva expands to U.S. borrowers
A Kenyan Internet entrepreneur is planning to make her first loan — to an American she’s never met. She’s doing it through the online micro lending Web site Kiva.org, which grew famous serving the developing world and is now expanding to include the working poor in the U.S.

Recognizing that poverty is everywhere, Kiva is starting to offer loans to U.S. borrowers today, a plan that has been in the works for some time. It’s testing the waters to see how the service is used and whether it will help Americans in the midst of a credit crunch find ways to fund small businesses such as beauty salons, nurseries and bakeries.

CEO Matt Flannery mentioned the idea when he talked with me about the evolution of Kiva in a recent interview here. More than 500,000 people have used Kiva to make a total of $76 million in small loans to entrepreneurs featured on the site.

NYC as the East Coast’s Hub of Entrepreneurship

I’ll be attending Entrepreneur Week, organized by the NYC Entrepreneurial Community. NYC ENT was created to strengthen and accelerate the collective entrepreneurial spirit of New York City through a week long series of events. NYC ENT aggregates disparate organizations, institutional investors, universities, and early-stage ventures throughout the City, providing a platform which fosters innovation, growth and ultimately creates jobs.

At the center of the week’s events is a 21 team business plan competition with a full day of customized training developed exclusively for NYC ENT. Selected companies will receive educational workshops throughout the week focusing on topics that are traditionally difficult for entrepreneurs to master. The goal is to coach early-stage companies on the key success factors that allow ideas to launch effectively, so all NYC’s entrepreneurs can learn, found and grow companies, solidifying NYC as the East Coast’s hub of Entrepreneurship.

UCB Theatre Looking For Residents of the East Village, NYC

The Upright Citizens Brigade is exploring an opportunity to open an additional venue in the East Village and we can use your help. If you currently reside in the East Village and would be willing to support the effort please sign the petition linked below.

The Theatre is hoping to move into the Pioneer Theatre at Avenue A and 3rd Street, next to Two Boots Pizza. While we’re still a long way from making this happen the first step is to see if we can get enough support from within the community. To continue offering the same brand of comedy at the same affordable prices we’ll need to get a Beer/Wine license.

If you or anyone you know live within Community Board 3 (the area of NYC from the East River westward to 4th Avenue, and from 14th Street down to the Brooklyn Bridge) and support this effort please take a moment and sign the online petition, or stop by Two Boots this weekend and sign a live petition. If you do not live in the neighborhood, we appreciate your support but it will not be helpful to us for you to sign the petition.

The Barber of Kigali

Integrity Films debuts at Toronto this month with THE BARBER OF KIGALI. The short will screen at Toronto’s National Film Board Cinema on December 20th. The Barber of Kigali is about a Rwandan barber who must decide whether to kill or not to kill his next client, the dreaded Colonel who murdered his father fourteen years ago in the Genocide. CLICK HERE and listen to an interview with Director, James Cohen.

November is American Diabetes Month

You might have noticed more diabetes stories than usual in your local newspaper this month. That’s no surprise: each year, several diabetes organizations promote November as “Diabetes Month” and encourage the media to publicize diabetes.

Among them: the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), at what they call National Diabetes Awareness Month, and the American Diabetes Association (ADA), at American Diabetes Month.

The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International (JDRF) also promotws National Diabetes Awareness Month and has an Online Diabetes Support Team (ODST) made up of JDRF volunteers who are available to offer immediate, one-on-one support.

How to get involved:

Walk to Cure Diabetes

Ride to Cure Diabetes

Pedal for Prevention, stationary bike-a-thon ~ no really!

Autumn Adventures & Picasa3.1 from Google

If you haven’t already settled on a photo management and editor program, consider Picasa from Google. On the PC side, they rolled out a brand-new version of Picasa, with a slew of new tools like effortless web sync, movie editing, and photo-retouching capabilities. On the web, they launched “name tags,” a new feature that automatically helps organize your photo collection based on who’s in each of your pictures.

If you’ve been waiting to try the new photo-collage feature in Picasa, or been curious to see how clustering technology can automatically find similar faces across your photo collection, now’s the time to download Picasa 3.1 or opt in to name tags on Picasa Web Albums.

Having a truly global audience sharing and commenting on photos is one of the things that makes Picasa special. The people and places you’ll spot on our Explore page attest to this, as do the multilingual comments users receive on their most popular public albums. They also launched automatic comment translation on Picasa Web Albums, which harnesses Google Translate to make sure you know that “美麗的落日” means “Beautiful sunset!”

I posted some pictures using the new version of the application. Adventures include three Halloween costumes and some cotton candy.

Sam's First Autumn

GERALD McBOING BOING

WHAM host, Joe Lomonaco writes on his radio blog, “In 1950, Dr. Seuss wrote a book called GERALD McBOING BOING. It was based on an Academy Award winning short subject animated film. It’s the story of a boy who becomes a star on radio because of his unique “talent”. Check out the film for a visual demonstration of what we in the business call Theatre of the Mind.”

My favorite line- “From Public School 7 to Mrs. McCloy, Your little son Gerald is a most hopeless boy. We cannot accept him for we have a little rule – that pupils must not go *BEE* *BAP* in our school!”.

American-Italian Music Hall On-Demand

If you’re looking for good classic Italian Music I recommend you tune into Joe Farda’s radio show the “American-Italian Music Hall.” All shows are presented here as they originally aired on 93.5 FM WVIP and each has a running time of 60-minutes. The broadcast is in English, but the music is always Italian. Italian entertainers such as: Jimmy Roselli, Carlo Buti, Connie Francis, Gigli, Toni Arden, Joe Masielo, Ria Rosa, Pavarotti, Sinatra, Dean Martin, and many more, performing Italian, Neopolitan, or American songs with an Italian flavor. It was the classic recordings of Gigli that got me hooked.

Free Movie Wednesday

I posted this video to highlight the pre movie short film, “The Crimson Permanent Assurance”. Props to hulu.com for posting this up for FREE.

From Wikipedia: The Crimson Permanent Assurance, a lengthy introductory film directed by Terry Gilliam. In a satire on globalization, elderly office clerks rebel against their cold, efficient corporate masters at ‘The Permanent Assurance Company’, commandeer their building and turn it into a pirate ship, raiding financial districts in numerous big cities before falling off the edge of the world. Originally conceived by Gilliam as a 6-minute animated sequence in the middle of the film (at the end of Part V), it was later expanded to a 16-minute live-action piece, to the point where it no longer fit into the framework of the film and became a pre-movie short film in its own right.

Monty Python’s Meaning of Life
The British troupe’s sketches include gluttony, birth control and total insignificance.
Release Date: March 31, 1983

Graham Chapman
John Cleese
Carol Cleveland
Patricia Quinn
Michael Palin
Mark Holmes
Eric Idle
Andrew MacLachlan
Simon Jones
Judy Loe
Valerie Whittington
Terry Jones
Terry Gilliam

Director
John Goldstone