National Geographic’s website is a little busy, but the site for National Geographic Magazine is spot on. Their articles are frequently interactive, with wonderful multimedia supplements, and the site is enjoyable to browse.

I subscribed to one of their many blogs, partially to remind me to go to their site occasionally, and partially to come at the content from an interesting angle, sort of like starting with the ‘makings of’ for a dvd, and then watching the movie.

The blog I chose, Editor’s Pick, selects some recent amazing photography from the magazine and discusses how the photographer took the photos. In the post “If at first you don’t succeed…”, the editor describes the incredible lighting techniques photographer Rob Clark used to capture images of bodies preserved in peat bogs for 1600 years.

Unfortunately the blogs are inept about linking to the original articles the photos were published in. The email to a friend tool is also poor. That said, you can see a slideshow with good descriptions and then click-through to the main article with the navigation on the left in too-small type.

Misty (Lydia’s Elephant friend) is on the right and Dulary (the new girl) is on the left.

Dulary was all alone at the Philadelphia Zoo so they sent her to the Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee where she now has huge amounts of space and lots of friends. She can do whatever she wants now, and Misty gets another companion.

My favorite slide-shows of Dulary:

Dulary making and rolling in a mud hole
Dulary meeting the other girls
Tarra convincing Dulary to leave the trailer upon her arrival

You can read about Dularys Arrival and see all her slide-shows at Dulary’s Diary.

Photographer Tod Seelie captures incredibly dynamic images of underground scenes, such as local rock shows and in this case anarchist biker rallies. Recently, Tod captured some amazing shots of Slaughterama 4, an annual event in Richmond, VA.

Cycle Slaughterama is a bike meet-up where people drink a lot of beer and then do dangerous stunts on bicycles, but more importantly. people bring and show-off and share incredibly creative bicycles. They hack apart and weld together parts of bikes into brilliant human-powered contraptions. It’s about the creativity and the community, in addition to the party and do whatever you want even if it’s really, really stupid.

Another blog gives pretty good description about Cycle Slaughterama and his experience attending it. My Bike Co-op in Oberlin OH did this sort of thing and it was incredibly powerful. I could never relax though because I knew somebody, eventually, was going to crack their head open.

Anyway, you should check out Tod’s pictures. His blog Sucka Pants has some pictures but he posted more Slaughterama 4 photos on his photography website. The BMX roller bike blew me away:

I first came across GeoCaching in a story written by Chris Klimas:

The principle behind geocaching is simple: someone hides a waterproof container somewhere in the great outdoors, and records its latitude and longitude. Then they post the coordinates on the Web and other people go out and find it. In the container is a logbook, which you sign in and write love-letters to the people who hid it, and a collection of… well, gimcracks. Little toys and gewgaws that aren’t worth much, so if someone stumbles upon the geocache accidentally, there isn’t much incentive to loot it. You get to take one of those things, but you must replace it with something else you brought with you.

There’s something beautifully symmetrical about it. GPS threatens to remove one of the most enduring mysteries of the planet Earth: geography. There are no longer any unknown parts of the map, and you can locate yourself exactly. Geocaching continues the cycle: people embed mystery in what’s already known.

I love the concept here. With Google Earth we can have absolute conceptual knowledge of geography, but lack physical comprehension on a human scale. Communication and mapping on the internet facilitate physical experience of a place.

I also love the way this author interacts with GeoCaching. Chris’ story, Going to Ground, documents his GeoCaching adventures. Its not literature, more sort of rambling reflections. When Chris and his father are together there is a sense of shared discovery; the game is just a casual, grown-up father-son diversion. I like that.

You can participate/learn more at geocaching.com. An interesting variation is the trackable items game. Someone caches an object with a special trackable tag; they alert the ecommunity; and then someone else comes along and caches it elsewhere. The object travels around the world, and if one comes into your area you can interact with it yourself and even share your story about your adventures with the object. For example, Prince Fugly, has been all over Sweden and K’s Curious George is racing across California.

I’ve been reading about Barak Obama recently and was stunned by this thought: how cool would it be to elect a president whose vocabulary includes the word ‘assiduously?’

I’m introducing the Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007. This plan would not only place a cap on the number of troops in Iraq and stop the escalation, more importantly, it would begin a phased redeployment of U.S. forces with the goal of removing of all U.S. combat forces from Iraq by March 31st, 2008 - consistent with the expectations of the bipartisan Iraq study group that the President has so assiduously ignored.

- Barak Obama On the Senate Floor, January 30, 2007.

The quote comes from an excellent New York Times comparison of The Presidential Candidates on Iraq

I love how cool things like Katamari Damacy (an exceedingly brilliant and wierd video game) inspire normal people to do silly things. Someone is selling this knitted katamari with magnets in it to pick up random metal objects. Somebody else knits hats that make your head look like the weird characters in Katamari Damacy. Too fun. I want one/both.

(I kind of stole this post from BoingBoing’s Katamari Craft-off. Essentially I filtered and expanded their post, so it’s ok. Cory Doctorow would be proud of my remixing, so that’s enough about that. Other favorites from their Kraft-off are the Electronic Katamari Toys and Playdo reenactment.)

It’s nerve-wracking but totally worthwhile to have people review your resume. Particularly helpful, was getting advice when talking to my references. My references had really good feedback when I checked in with them before applying. Networking is important, of course, but I was pleasantly surprised to find myself really enjoying getting back in touch with employers and hearing their advice.

You can see the progression of my resume from mediocre to (hopefully) good. My first resume listed too much irrelevant information; was hard to read; and didn’t emphasize any of my strengths. My second resume was a step up, but way too verbose. My third resume was even longer and kept the same weak tone. My current resume is more to the point and professional. I’m sure it could still use tweaking, but it’s on the right track now.

Lessons Learned:

1. don’t make any typos
2. don’t list everything you’ve ever done
3. make yourself stand out unless you’re applying to a large corporation
4. tweak your resume for different jobs
5. don’t include contacts in your resume; keep a separate reference page to give to them later
6. be specific about your accomplishments
7. brevity, brevity, brevity; help the reader skim
8. don’t use complete sentences
9. use an affirmative tone, never the passive voice
10. if sending a resume electronically, send it in the expected file type

As for the cover letter, I’ve just tried to sell myself. Here is my cover letter for the Boston Museum of Science.

Good Resources:

• How to respond to a job listing on craigslist
• How to effectively style your resume
• Your Reference Page

I recently came across Kiva.org and am crazy impressed. Through Kiva you can make $25 loans to low-income entrepreneurs in the developing world. Kiva does not operate the microfinance programs itself. Instead, they work as an intermediary with existing microfinance programs in other parts of the world. I was most impressed by their transparency (you can actually see where your money is going) and user interface, but they are also incredibly effective (they have a 100% return rate on loans currently) and self-sustaining (when your loan is paid back you can either reinvest or get your money back.)

Will I get my money back? (from their FAQ)

Your loan is not guaranteed, therefore there is a chance that you will not get your money back… Your Kiva.org loan is a low-risk loan. Microfinance loans worldwide are generating repayment rates of 97% (UNCDF: Basic Facts About Microfinance). To date, Kiva.org’s repayment rate is 100%. If you are still concerned about repayment, minimize your risk by diversifying – loan $25 to a number of businesses rather $100 (or more!) to one business.

About Microcredit (from Wikipedia)

Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to the unemployed, to poor entrepreneurs and to others living in poverty who are not bankable. These individuals lack collateral, steady employment and a verifiable credit history and therefore cannot meet even the most minimal qualifications to gain access to traditional credit. Microcredit is a part of microfinance, which is the provision of financial services to the very poor; apart from loans, it includes savings, microinsurance and other financial innovations.

Ross Lambert has been making some excellent animals inspired by my creature companions. This recent animal ross made is particularly well done I think. All of his animals are really cool combinations of animals, and this one works really seamlessly.

The main character Sinclair, seen on the front cover, lives in The City “a cross between New York and Neverland, seen through a lens of literature and pop culture.” (Quote from an excellent review by Ben Whooler.) The illustration is killer and the characters are compelling. Don’t expect a driving narrative. It’s not a superhero book, it’s not really fantasy, just odd and interesting and beautiful. The author/illustrator Farel Dalrymple has other comics and illustration at his website.

Typewriter + computer keyboard = best keyboard ever.

You can get the directions and an illustrated account of every step for how to make it here.

I have $60,000 in student loans. Paying them off in 15 years costs about $560/month. My total payments will be just over $100,000. Two problems arise when dealing with debt this large. One, how am I going to pay this monthly bill? Two, how will I contribute to my savings over the next 15 years? Here are some lessons I have learned about loans that I wish I had known earlier:

Forbearance = A Loan By Any Other Name

I thought it would be a good idea to forbear my loans for as long as possible so I could get settled and find a decent job. The accumulated interest was worse than I thought. Interest accrued during your forbearance is applied to your principal balance, which raises your monthly payments in the future. My actual forbearance choices were kind of complicated, but for simplicity’s sake let’s assume I got a one-year forbearance and all my loans have a 7% interest rate. The total interest accrued for one year is $4,350. After 15 years of paying off this extra balance on my loan, the total cost of this one-year forbearance will be $7,000. In the long run, I am spending $7,000 to put off paying $6,700 for one year. That sucks. Apparently forbearance is just a loan that pays the interest of your other loan.

Graduated and Interest-Only Plans Also Suck But Are Better Than Forbearance

Citibank and Sallie Mae both offer the option of making smaller payments initially and then larger payments later. This is helpful if you’re desperate, but you are still paying more money to put off paying your student loans. It costs less than Forbearance in the long-run for two reasons. Firstly, the accumulated interest is not added to your total balance so you don’t have to pay interest on your interest. Secondly, the total length of repayment is decreased by the amount of time you are making interest-only payments. With this simplified loan at 7%, paying interest-only (350/month, instead of 540) for the first year of my 15-year repayment would cost $1000 in the long run. (The $4200 payed in interest during the first year is partially offset by the $3200 saved by paying the loan off in 14 years instead of 15 years.) Keep in mind that the payments during the final 14 years would be $20 higher per month (which is already calculated into the $1000) because of the shorter payoff time. Essentially, you’re doing something bad (putting off paying your loans) by promising to do something good later (paying off your loans in a shorter period of time.)

Be Careful of Consolidation Offers 

Consolidation only offers three benefits: it simplifies paying multiple loans into a single loan;  you can potentially lock in a low interest rate (more on that later); and it lets you extend your pay-off time.

This last benefit is of course double-edged. The longer you are paying off your loans, the more you have to pay in the long run. My solution is to make payments as if I were required to pay it off in 15 years, not 30, and hope to pay it off early. It is important to specify that the extra money goes toward reducing your monthly payments and NOT decreasing the length of your payment term. Otherwise if there is an emergency you will not have the option of making significantly lower payments for a while.

Locking in low interest rates is kind of odd. I locked in a fixed rate for my federal loans before they went into repayment, which was excellent because the rate is lower when your loans are being differed while you are in school. My private loans were more complicated and I ended up consolidating later. My first offer was crummy because the fixed rate would have been significantly higher than my current rate. I then checked with another lender (Sallie Mae) and with a cosigner was able to get a fixed rate lower than my current unconsolidated variable rate.

Remixing, mash-ups, collaborative artistry… best book ever. Victionary published an incredible art book called Neighborhood which follows the metamorphosis of a series of stuffed animals as they are passed from artist to artist across the world. The book is covered in felt and is absolutely gorgeous. At $30 from Amazon it comes in as a surprisingly inexpensive art book. My favorite part is the commentary from each artist. Too funny. You can see the progression of the animal below on their website by clicking on the image.