A bit of paradise in the British Virgin Islands.

Here is the best explanation I’ve seen yet on the current banking crisis. Scary stuff.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Here is a photo taken in about 1930 of Frank and Marietta Ellis of York Beach, Maine, along with their children and grandchildren. Some of the families represented, in addition to the Ellis’s, include those with the surnames Boardman, Hancock, Bridges, and Chase.

My father is among the rather startled looking children. For a key to some of the names that I think I’ve figured out, go to my Flickr page.

From ThisIsIndexed.com.

Kiva is a great organization that allows anyone to be a micro lender for as little as $25.

From CNN.com: Your $25 can start a business, change a life
“This is microfinancing. It allows everyday people to invest as little as $25 to help people in developing countries climb out of poverty. The concept of microfinancing is nothing new. At its essence, it’s making small loans to the working poor. The loans are used to establish or expand small businesses to help families earn more money.”

Frontline has an excellent 15-minute video report that brings the subject to life:

More background information at the Frontline site: http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/uganda601/

Darckr.com displays a Flickr photo stream on a black background, sorted in various ways. For example, these are mine ordered by the Flickr property called “interestingness”:

http://tinyurl.com/5528ew

And these are my photos ordered by date:

http://tinyurl.com/27h3mq

Picasa is a terrific software tool, free and easy to use. It provides an album-like interface for all your digital pictures, and it updates automatically when new photos are added to designated folders (like My Pictures). It also has all the basic image editing tools that you need for 90% of normal image manipulation: cropping, straightening, resizing, and adjusting contrast, brightness, and sharpness. Virtually all of the photos that I have posted on my Flickr site have been processed with Picasa.

One of the great things about Flickr and many other Web 2.0 tools is the ease with which you can create mash-ups. Just one example is Museumr, where you can have have your photo “displayed” in a museum for free.

Another Web 2.0 tool that has changed my online habits is del.icio.us. In the words of Wikipedia:

The website del.icio.us (pronounced as “delicious”) is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site came online in late 2003 and…it is now part of Yahoo!.

A non-hierarchical keyword categorization system is used on del.icio.us where users can tag each of their bookmarks with a number of freely chosen keywords (cf. folksonomy). A combined view of everyone’s bookmarks with a given tag is available.

The biggest advantage for me is that it is available and visible on any internet-connected computer, so I don’t have to worry about synchronizing bookmarks. However, the tagging and social bookmarking features give del.icio.us exceptional utility.

For example, I have included a del.icio.us widget on this page that displays my newest links.

Flickr is not new and is is certainly not unknown. But it remains one of my favorite tools and sites. My photos are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/waynesphotos/. That is, someof my photos are there. At this time, I am way behind in uploading my latest trip pics. But whenever I find some time, I move a few more to the site.

Dozens of great tools have been developed by third parties to expand Flickr’s functionality. For example, Flickr Grab is a thumbnail gallery showing over 200 thumbnails of any given set of Flickr images. A flash-based variation is Flappr where you can search for my photos under user wayne31r.