Last night this interview with Geoff Davis, President and CEO of Unitus showed up on my iPod. Unitus calls itself a “global microfinance accelerator.” Here’s their pitch:

A $100 loan from a microfinance institution can be all it takes for a hard-working self-employed woman to lift her family out of poverty. Our innovative approach as a microfinance accelerator can bring this economic miracle to millions of the world’s poor.

At Unitus, we bridge the gap between making a donation and making a difference. Please unite with us to create a permanent solution to global poverty.

They’re hiring.

Ever since I “upgraded” the Mac OS X software for my HP 2355 “all in one” printer/scanner, the following HP Software Update message appears every day and random intervals:

Edward Hasbrouck, author of The Practical Nomad, has a useful post about the Northwest and Delta airline bankruptcies. Salient point:

If you haven’t bought tickets yet, don’t buy tickets on an airline that is already bankrupt. A bankruptcy filing is your final warning before an airline could be shut down by the bankruptcy court, leaving ticket holders stranded. A better schedule, a more direct route, or a lower price probably aren’t worth the greater risk that you might not get where you are going at all, or might not get back home.

Read the rest of the post for more details.

This development is of particular importance to Prince Edward Island, as Northwest’s feeder airline, Northwest Airlink, operated by Pinnacle Airlines, is the only airline operating direct flights from Charlottetown to the U.S. Here’s Pinnacle’s stock price.

If for some reason you need email me about something to do with Rolex watches — you want to send me one as a gift, you want me to redesign the Rolex website, you have a Rolex watch stuck in your ear and need help getting it out — please be aware of the email rule added this afternoon:

For some reason the only spam I’m getting these days is Rolex spam. Yes, I know that this rule won’t catch everything, but it will cut it down some. If you want to email me about Rolex watches and want the email to get through, just refer to “a nice watch” instead (“I have a nice watch stuck in my ear…”).

The Complete New Yorker DVD is being released in just six days. There’s now a Flash demo of the interface available.

I ordered my copy back in June. My mind boggles in anticipation of its arrival: there are half a million pages over the 8 DVDs, covering 80 years of the magazine. I momentarily considered the notion of taking 6 months off just to read, but I realized that even with all that time I’d only make a dent in it. Perhaps I should buy a new laptop and have pages projected on the walls of wherever I am so that I can drink it all in by osmosis?

I was curious this morning about this coffee maker, one, it turns out, that belongs to [[Olle]]’s inlaws. As [[Catherine]] is a connoisseur of all things coffee, it’s in my best interests to keep up in the field.

So I called Olle in Copenhagen using Skype, and he walked me through how it works. He added some annotations to the photo, and I added some more of my own. If we’d been set up for it, we should have recorded the call and turned it into a podcast.

I think this was “e-learning” in action.

Yesterday at lunch we were discussing [[Tod Maffin]], the Wizard of Oz behind the worker side of the CBC lockout. I commented that, like Kevin Newman, Evan Solomon, and other boyish broadcasters, Tod sometimes comes off as being, for lack of a better word, “snippy.”

It’s not his fault, and there’s nothing he can do about it, but when you take boyish charm and add “authoritative futurist” content, sometimes it’s hard not to hear “full of himself.” I’ve suffered from this myself by times (although I think I’ve now lost all claims to appearing “boyish”).

In one fell swoop, however, Tod has managed to completely invigorate himself, both professionally and physically. In his How to Wax Your Ass podcast he takes the boyish charm, adds a wry sense of humour and a sprinkling of expletives, leaves aside the authoritative futurist and, well, gets his ass waxed.

I predict that Tod’s ass-waxing podcast will do for his career what Pulp Fiction did for John Travolta. Mark my words.

James Mitchell, an Architectural Engineering Professor from Philadelphia, has a terrific series of images of the Bourges Cathedral (including the panorama I referenced earlier).

We were in Bourges in May, and although we could see various landings at levels up the Cathedral, [[Catherine]] and naively assumed that these weren’t public areas. James reports, however, that all he needed to do was “pay the couple of Euros and climb the tower.” We’ll have to go back now.

The fellows upstairs have their own coding conventions. Who knew? [[Steven Garrity]] ordered the [[Formosa]] Combo yesterday, a stark departure from his usual stuffed bun or sushi; I’m pretty sure this falls outside of the conventions.

National Public Radio in the U.S. has an impressive new array of podcasts, including World Café Shortcuts, which is a stripped down version of the full World Café programme.

Which led me to the Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez episode. These two voices are like smoked salmon and capers: a perfect combination of the mellow and the lively. You can download the abbreviated podcast version of their interview, or listen to a stream from the website. Great music.