Daily Archives: December 2, 2005

VTdotNETters – you’ve got the books, now here’s some help reviewing them

dotNET

Over the past nearly 4 years of Vermont.NET, I have given away hundreds of books donated by publishers. Early on, I enabled the VTdotNET website so that the recipients of those books could post reviews of them. Here is our book review page and our software review page. It’s the least we can do in return for receiving the books.

After about a year, I gave up on begging, harrassing and otherwise attempting to get people to review books and even software licenses – sometimes valued in the thousands.

If you have a book that you got from VTdotNET, we would still appreciate your review. It doesn’t have to be your life’s work. Here are some great tips from O’Reilly about writing book reviews.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

G.B.’s big night out

Vermont

G.B. is our cat. He snuck out the door last night at about 11pm as I was letting the dogs back in from their pre-bed pee. And he bolted. I knew he would not come back for hours and hours and I after making a few attempts to lure him back to the house with the sound of tapping a spoon on his beloved cat food bowl, I knew that there was nothing I could do and went to bed with the window cracked so if he came back and meowed, maybe we would hear him.

It’s a scary place for cats around here at night. He is allowed to go out during the day time, but we always feed him at 5 and he does not go back outdoors after that. Our back yard leads into the mountains and who knows what cat-eating critters laying in wait. We know there are coyotes and foxes and occasional bears. Also Fisher Cats (originally brought into Vermont to help wth the porcupine problem) are notorious cat killers.

But luckily for all of us, Rich woke up just before 7am to the sound of G.B. saying “yo! I’m home. It’s f’in cold out here. I’m covered with snow and I want my damned breakfast!” or maybe it was just “meow meow, let me in pleeeeeeeeeeze!”. After he finished his breakfast, he ran up stairs to snuggle under the covers for a while and warm back up.

We will have to be that much more diligent now that he has had the taste of an exciting night out. I sure wonder what he did for those 8 hours.



Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org

Would cheap computers help Africa?

Just Rambling

Last month, I noted an article about HP trying to bring technology into impoverished communities in Africa with the hope that access to information will be a big help. Perhaps in some insulated cases, the benefits will be measurable. However, you may have noticed the many references yesterday (AIDS awareness day) to the fact that South Africa has the highest rate of AIDS in the world. Will people in those AIDS striken AND impoverished communities benefit from access to the internet?

Caterina Fake, on misbehaving.net, points to a counter argument by a woman from a different part of Africa, Cameroon.

Update: Dare Obasanjo, who is from Nigeria and someone who has my utmost respect,  chimes in.  Dare certainly knows more about Africa, as a continent, politically and socially,than most of us who are looking at this issue through our small and distant portholes.

Don’t Forget: www.acehaid.org