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I love outdoor webcams, because they can give you an instant and live view of what the weather and/or a location looks like in places all around the world. Two sites that are great for exploring these live views all around the world are earthcam and cammap.net (though the latter appears to show only US based cams). They are simple services that simply put a database of webcams around the world on top of interactive maps. It’s the kind of site I’ve always wanted to build myself… It’s been done now but that’s ok because I plenty of ideas for other types of web sites left.
As I was browing our local webcams I came across an interesting one though… The Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley has a fixed cam pointed towards the bay of San Francisco, and records a snapshot of the view every minute of every day. Every day they automatically generate a little movie out of that, which you can view online. I’ve embedded the video here too, so what you’re seeing here is what yesterday looked like over here. Depending on what day you look at this video, you may catch some of our fantastic sunsets over the bay, the beautiful fog rolling in or out, or all kinds of other weather patterns moving over the East Bay. For the real weather enthousiast, check out the timelaps movie archive with some of the most stunning days caught on video.

The above image of the view from the East Bay hills is at most a couple of minutes old (unless the camera is down). Click to view yesterday’s timelapse movie.

Ever since I spent a year travelling South East Asia in 1999, I’ve wanted to do something to help people in poor countries. I’ve met so many individuals and small business owners that were just struggling to get by, many of them working 7 days a week for just a few dollars per day. I hope that at one point in my life I’ll be able to travel back to some of these places and do some volunteer work and/or help out a local community financially. I’ve donated to organizations like the Red Cross that do incredible work helping out people in need all over the world. But my latest excitement in the world of good-karma-organizations is Kiva.org. Kiva works with microfinance institutions in many developing countries to allow anyone to make an interest free loan to small business owners. These are not actually donations - as a Kiva user you lend money, in any amount that you’re comfortable with. The borrower will typically use the money to buy additional inventory, make certain repairs or otherwise expand his/her business. The vast majority of loans are paid back over time though, which allows lenders to help out even more people. Bill Clinton has been speaking about this organization and all the recent press about Kiva has resulted in the fact that there are actually more lenders than borrowers at the moment. This is great for Kiva of course… I hope they can set up relationships with more microfinance institutions so we can all help more people in more places. So I am now partially financing the business of a pig farmer in Cambodia, and a door to door sales woman in Peru. Please do go check it out: www.kiva.org.

Today is the public release of the TimeBridge.com service. TimeBridge allows people to schedule meetings with each other, and also share availability information with your contacts, which works both with your Outlook or Google calendar. If you’ve ever tried to set up a meeting with a few people then you know the problem: finding a meeting time that works for everyone can easiliy take more time than the meeting itself. TimeBridge alleviates that pain and will contact all meeting attendees with your proposed meeting times, and (if possible) automatically confirm that time that works for everyone. TechCrunch just wrote up an article on Timebridge, do check it out, or of course go straight to TimeBridge.com and start organizing!

I’ve been doing contract work for TimeBridge since February, when me and my biz partner Tim from BarbaryCodes wrote the very first lines of Ruby on Rails code for their webapp. It’s been a fun project, and the site is very client side heavy so there was a lot of interesting Ajax and Javascript work involved. They’ve been building up an excellent development team of their own and while I’m still involved in troubleshooting and bugfixing, that work may be dwindling down soon. So if you need help with any Rails or J2EE projects, drop me a line, I may be available again soon.