My brother’s non-profit, Operation Broken Silence was in The Commercial Appeal this weekend:
With a study of a popular website offering adult advertisements for “escorts,” a young human rights group in Memphis is calling for action to reduce human trafficking in the local sex industry.
The group, Operation Broken Silence, this week released a report that studied Memphis-area female escort listings for the final three months of 2010 placed on the classified advertisement website backpage.com.
For each area I have a handful of people whom I trust and whom I know I can ask for their help. I know they have an educated and valuable position on the subject, and they meet two very important requirements:
- They shoot me straight 100% of the time. I prefer blunt honesty and genuine feedback. Don’t dance around my feelings. Tell me what you really think and why.
- They want me to succeed. Usually, by the time I’m ready for feedback from someone, I’ve gone about as far I you can go on my own. And that’s when I need someone to cheer me on to cross the finish line.
Wise words.
Editors Note: This post is written by Matthew Hedgepeth, a guy I’ve known for a long time. He graduates in May from the University of Memphis with a MIS degree and a minor in finance. He’s about to get married, and works for me at the Salvation Army. He is far more qualified to talk about money than I am.
When I awoke this morning hearing the news every one else heard about Steve Jobs taking another medical leave of absence I jumped to two different conclusions.
Its like Federico Viticci reached into my mind and wrote what I’ve been thinking all day.
The WSJ, in a look at Apple COO Tim Cook:
Several people who do business with Apple say their dealings with the company during Mr. Jobs’s 2009 leave remained unchanged and that products continue to be developed and released on schedule.
Apple is going to be fine, without Steve Jobs, even in the long term.
If you ever needed more proof that Michael Arrington is off his rocker and that Joshua Topolsky is a real journalist, go read this.
As a computer, my new MacBook Air is everything I could have ever asked for as a writer. Like a bicycle, it’s a perfect machine, imbued with its function to efficiently accelerate thought and motion into speed. In its perfection, though, the new MacBook Air also denounces the way we tend to think about gadgets. Gadgets aren’t extensions of self, they are — at best — an augmentation of self. The difference is important, because the perfect gadget doesn’t make you perfect, and all of the hardware in the world is never going to do the work of making you the person you want to be. In my case, that was to be a writer, but I only became one professionally by accident, and I only became successful at it because otherwise I would have starved. I still don’t write fiction. The MacBook Air might be the perfect device, but it makes me despair that I will always come up short.
Because if this is gonna be a Christian nation that DOESN’T help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition—and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.
I would argue that we aren’t a Christian nation, and that the Church does a really terrible job most of the time when it comes to serving the poor. One thing that makes my job at the Salvation Army so attractive to me is the group’s passion in this very area.
More from Cultured Code on OTA sync:
We have tried many things, from underpowered technologies to over-engineered solutions. The approach we finally settled on is one that strikes the right balance, and in our next article we’ll be sharing more information about what that means.
Some people said we shouldn’t have pursued cloud sync with this level of ambition. But then, that wouldn’t be us. It is not how we developed Things. We know that people are coming to Cultured Code because we take this approach. They like companies that care, companies that try – and that is what we will keep doing.
The Apple TV won’t be replacing my trusty Mac mini at any point in the near future, but it certainly is pretty cool. For $99 you get a tiny little black box that you would be hard pressed to say is anything but worth the money. There are certainly cheaper places to get a lot of the same content, but not a single other place to get as good of an experience and as quickly as you can with the Apple TV.
Being interviewed online via email is an interesting proposition: all the questions are usually rendered before hand, making the interview more of a test or a MadLib than a conversation. It usually feels like you’re talking to a wall. Ideas don’t develop very well, they don’t flow any where. If conversations flow like rivers, this is hanging out in the kid die pool.
I’m currently interviewing several people for an upcoming feature on ForkBombr, and while it is slower, having an actual conversation is just so much better. It is crazy to think anyone would use a standard set of questions in most circumstances.
As Apple introduced newer models in the Mac line, the company continued to discount the Mac Plus, positioning it as the lowest-end Mac until the Macintosh Classic debuted in 1990. The venerable Mac Plus continued to see heavy use in the real world far beyond its astounding 4.5-year production lifespan. No other single Mac model has been produced for that length of time.
The Plus really was a great machine.