Blog Action Day: Repost – 88 simple things you can do to fight poverty

This Blog Action Day I’m caught in the throes of a wicked flu. In lieu of the list I intended to create for myself, I’m linking you to some of the material from the Blog Action Day site, listing 88 simple things you and I can do to fight poverty ourselves.

Take a look. Take today to think about some things you can do to help others.

Make sure you’re tuning in to watch Obama live around the nation

Hey there Obama supporters! I’m glad you’ve tuned into the debates held in Mississippi and Nashville over the past month, but now I’d like to take you a step further and request that you listen to Obama speak on the campaign trail.

He spoke today in Indiana and I’ve never seen him more energized. You could hear the murmurs of the crowd agreeing with him every step of the way during his speech and almost feel the excitement coursing through him as he spoke about what he’ll do in office.

You, too, can see him speak in small towns across America. Visit his Web site to follow the events that will be shown live online. View his blog to see his most recent television ads. Consider donating to help him continue fighting to be our next President.

Fight for Obama so that he can fight for you. Pay him the attention he’d like to pay us.

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What to buy a designer

If you drool over Moleskins, keep on reading! Designers and Creative Types, are you tired of adding Moleskins, Moleskins, Moleskins to your Christmas and Birthday gift wish lists? Why not mix it up with these.

Sure, they’re pseudo-Moleskins…but! They’re a set! They’re a box set, no less! And they have a specific purpose: a place to let loose your creativity each month.

One Year of White Pages, originally picked up by Charles & Marie, is a beautiful and elegant boxed set of unlined notebooks with a black leather finish. Easily distinguished by the number of dots along the right edge, track your progress throughout the year and literally “keep it all together.”

No more notebooks scattered here and there with inspired doodles gone missing for months. Get Things Done with this veritable calendar for the visual artist! Okay, so maybe it’s not really a calendar, but honestly, who doesn’t want these?

Take a peek around the net before buying, as there are several stores that stock these beauties and sometimes you might catch a deal. I think simplicity is one thing we all strive for at times and with such a smack-in-the-face design urging you to incorporate organization into your daily and monthly routine, where could you go wrong?

Announcing Blog Action Day 2008

If you haven’t been following Collis Ta’eed over at FreelanceSwitch or the fella behind Zen Habits, perhaps you’ve seen some of the 2,600+ other blogs announcing the launch of Blog Action Day 2008. “The premise behind Blog Action Day is to get the world’s bloggers to unite to post on one important issue on the same day,” writes Ta’eed. This year the issue in the spotlight is Global Poverty.

Last year’s focus was on the Environment and over 20,000 blogs came together with surprising results. According to Collis, the UN noticed and so did the EU Minister for the environment. Not too shabby, blogosphere.

Want to add your voice to the pot? To participate, visit BlogActionDay.org and register your blog (takes about 2 minutes). Then on October 15, do your part as a blogger or social media junkie and post about anything at all that has to do with Poverty.

The goal of Blog Action Day ‘08 is to raise awareness in hopes of forging a way to eradicate Poverty once and for all. On October 15, join forces with Lifehacker, TechCrunch, Mashable and many more of the Top 100 blogs in the world.

It all starts with a conversation; don’t discount the importance of raising awareness. Check it out at BlogActionDay.org and get yourself on the blogroll.

Woe is me, Muxtape goes down

My post about Muxtape has been getting several hits in the last few days, so I thought it appropriate to note that Muxtape has recently gone offline with this message on its homepage, “Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.”

I found some more information about the situation via Wired’s update about the RIAA and Muxtape, specifically the following:

Michael Robertson’s old My.MP3.com service allowed users to stream the music they owned on CD only to themselves, and the RIAA shut that down. Muxtape, which does not require ownership of a CD in order to upload an MP3, and which allows users to listen to each others’ mixes, could face a harsher reaction. However, it’s conceivable that the RIAA has presented Muxtape with a list of stipulations with which they must comply, such as only allowing one song per artist to be uploaded or, in a extreme case, restricting all songs to 30 second samples.”

We’ve been pumped about Muxtape, and it’s already gained quite a bit of traction with its users, so keep your fingers crossed for them!

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Weekly Link Round-up #2

Here is the second installation of my weekly link round-up. These are some links I’ve found helpful as I looked into buying a house, hunted for vector art to design my girlfriend’s business cards and taught myself a little CSS.

• Poke around on Zillow to get an idea of the real estate for sale where you’d like to live. You can find price comparisons, tax information, street shots (similar to Google Maps) and more
• Check out this site for information about Open House Etiquette
• Go MediaZine is stellar for free vector art of all kinds
• You’ll find a crapload of CSS resources here
• Or look here for some quick one-line CSS code
• If you need a backbone for your site, you can find some free templates here

Working on your website and stumbling on some great CSS resources? Feel free to share them here! Believe me, I need all the pointers I can get!

Are you a Creative thinking of buying a house? This is something you should know!

My girlfriend and I have been renting houses and apartments in the Triad area for over two years now. We’ve always talked about buying a cute little fixer-upper and throwing ourselves into rehabbing it to its 1940s bungalow glory. In September my girlfriend was supposed to be going to England for school, but unexpectedly last month the university canceled the program to international students. With little time to form alternate plans (or apply to other programs), our jobs are coming to and end, our lease will be up and we have had to play things by ear.

In September we will move in with my family outside of Charlotte and piece things back together. We’ve lived in various parts of the same town for 6 years now and I know I’ve started to mourn the loss of familiarity. We’ll be moving away from our home of over half a decade. As we’ve been packing and cleaning and catching folks up on our change of plans, my girlfriend has been re-thinking grad school and the program she’d like to begin. Her focus has shifted and a new program has opened up doors around the country to her; now she can take her time choosing just where she’d like to be (and where we both might like to live for the next half decade!).

This change in perspective has led us back to our dream of buying a little run-down place to polish up for ourselves. With one of us in school and the other hoping to make ends meet as a freelance designer, we’ve spent the past week crunching numbers and aligning our goals with our financials. We’ve walked through a few houses on the market and spent hours poring over Zillow and Craigslist. You may well see us back in the Triad in the next year!

Ultimately, my point is two-fold:

First, if you are a freelancer or creative type, don’t discount your desires to own your own home! Buoyed by this post from Freelance Switch, I went confidently into houses on the market and didn’t second-guess myself.

Second, this is a great time to get into the first-time home buyer game. No matter how much you have been following the housing crisis across the country or how well you manage to sock away savings each month, when you look at the paper or the for-sale listings, you’ll see bright red reduced price stamps everywhere. Foreclosed homes are popping up everywhere and if you do your research (and you must) you can find some absolute steals.

If you are a first-time buyer, you should be aware of a recent tax credit Bush has approved for you as a first-timer. No, really, Bush did something that might give you a boost instead of a headache! This next bit here to explain how this can help you is taken directly from “Give Us a Break: New Tax Credits for Homeowners”:

The new housing reform law did throw in a benefit to those who take the standard deduction. Even taxpayers who take standard deductions will be able to subtract property taxes from their taxable income (up to $1000 for married couples and $500 for others). Add this credit to the $7500 first time homebuyer tax credit and you get at least 8000 reasons to buy this year if you can swing it.

For the less affluent, the fact that the $7500 is a refundable credit is critical. The credit isn’t even available for single taxpayers whose AGI exceeds $95,000 and married couples with an AGI over $170,000. But even people who pay little or no tax benefit from this credit. For example, Joe Paycheck has $2,500 in federal taxes withheld from his salary during 2008. His tax bill for the year is $3,000. Normally, Joe would have to cut the IRS a check for $500 on April 15th. But in 2008 Joe became a first time home buyer. So he’s eligible for a $7,500 tax credit. Instead of paying the IRS $500, Joe gets a check for $7,000 (the $7,500 credit minus the $500 owed). Not bad.

There is a little catch. The credit gets repaid to the IRS over time ($500 per year for 15 years). If the home is sold before then, the unpaid credit would be repaid from the profit of the home sale. If there isn’t enough profit from the home sale, the credit is written off and the IRS doesn’t get repaid. So a first-timer could buy a house, live in it for a couple of years and sell it, and even if there was no profit on the deal the seller would be $6,500 ahead (the $7500 credit less the $1,000 repaid over two years). So there is a sizable upside to the process. If considering a first time home purchase, check with a tax pro for the whole scoop on the new tax credits. Then check with a lender to see if you can afford to become a first time home buyer.”

Crunch your numbers. Check out the market in your area or an area you’ve always loved. Don’t get bogged down in freelancer month to month income, be it sporadic or steady. It’s few and far between the benefits Bush has dug up for the average American, but this is one that could really help you along. Take advantage of it while you can!

For more information on the tax reform law and the $7,500 tax credit look here.

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Yet another election laugh-of-the-day

My friend Melissa recently referred me to this site. A spin-off from the Lolcats phenom, the Polcats take a quippy look at the 2008 election and the presidential “noms”. I was sold after seeing the image above. Check it out!

Homeland Security (DHS): making you wet your pants since 2002

The new DHS policy that will teach you to leave your laptop and gadgets at home when you travel out of the country reads like this:

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing as part of a border search.

And when they say laptop or other electronic device, this includes cell phones, mp3 players and any other electronic storage items. For as long as they want. For no reason. Really.

DHS states that this policy is useful in rooting out terrorists, drug smugglers and other dirty, rotten scoundrels violating US laws. How incredibly obtrusive it would be to have your laptop nabbed by DHS for no particular reason! But what’s more, DHS also asserts that “at any point during a border search, documents and electronic media, or copies thereof, may be detained for further review, either on-site at the place of detention or at an off-site location.” They can actually go through your laptop or cell phone, bit by bit, and make copies of anything they want. Though it does specify that if their search turns up nothing substantial, the agents are required to return the documents/media and destroy all copies, but hello? Does not power beget corruption?

Let’s hope you don’t have any bootleg songs on your iPod, or as Declan McCullagh points out at CNET, you may face felony charges! McCullagh suggests taking steps to encrypt the data you intend to carry across the border, but as Lifehacker commenters argue, won’t that just make you look a bit more suspicious and add some extra time onto your search?

Play it safe when you travel, folks. The agency protecting you has taken over.

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Musings on my favorite Republicans

Ah, there we are. I was having coffee with a friend of mine yesterday when we started talking politics. Her dad, a Republican, had told her he wasn’t going to vote for John McCain, but only because he’s too old. Yes, his only fault: his age.

Launching into a discussion peppered with profanity (and why not?) I ended up mentioning two of McCain’s most popular misogynistic jokes. This morning I found this and sent it along to her.

Oh, we just love them. They’re so folksy!

Read and process, people. Read and process.

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