David Brooks on Social Entrepreneurship:

The older do-gooders had a certain policy model: government identifies a problem. Really smart people design a program. A cabinet department in a big building administers it.

But the new do-gooders have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.

Google has tailored some of its offerings specifically for non-profit organizations.

We’ve been using a free audio telephone conference application for about six months.

It is instantconference.com

http://www.instantconference.com/

Features:

• Basic Service is free.
• You are assigned your own conference number which you keep between conferences
• Users dial in using their own long-distance provider to a (605) area code (South Dakota).
• They can also provide a toll-free number for your users; then they charge 7 cents per minute per user.
  Example…today we had a meeting with two connections, that ran for an hour and 45 minutes.. so that would have been 7 x2x105=$14.70. Since we both used our own long distance providers, which typically charge 3-4 cents for domestic long-distance, it may be cheaper to let everyone pay on their own. There is no restriction on long-distance provider.
• Call quality is more than acceptable. It breaks up occasionally.

Recommended.

We use this with a Polycom Soundstation conferencing phone.

Put this up with SightSpeed, and you have video as well.

Computerworld has a discussion of how to downgrade an OEM-installed VISTA Business to Windows XP Professional. Having now tentatively installed Vista Business on two “production” systems, my Macbook under Parallels and on a test machine for Polycom PVX videoconferencing, I was hoping to have to avoid this discussion. Related to Polycom, however, they have issued an update to their PVX application, from 8.0.2 to 8.0.4 ostensibly for Vista Business. I’m not sure if this is necessary for Vista home; we’re trying to find out.

Welcome to Tech for Non-Profits, the unplugged version of Microdesign Consulting. Part lab-notebook, part brain-extension, it is a repository for new and half-baked ideas and projects that we run across as we provide software and database development, network support, and R&D for a growing list of clients in education, health care and non-profit organizations.  

I’ve been following the saga of American Express Platinum Cards over at Ask Mr. Credit Card because I sprung for one last fall.

I just attempted to book flights and hotel for the American Telemedicine Association Conference in Seattle in April ’08, using the AMEX Platinum Travel Service. I was sort of hoping that this was like a real travel agent, like I used to use ten years ago….you give them the dates and preferences, and they come back with some alternatives. I also was hoping that they would be able to advise regarding various Platinum perks. Points of interest…

1. They charge a $39.00 booking fee for airline tickets. This made their quoted ticket prices higher than the online tickets through the Platinum Travel web site.

2. They couldn’t assist with offering any airline upgrades (from coach to business class)….that had to be done through the airline.

3. They couldn’t advise or assist with the Starwood Gold Preferred Hotel Point plan, …anything related to that had to be done at the hotel.

4. Bookings you do yourself through the web site give you double the membership award points that you would get if you book through their agency.

5. Their hotel rates were substantially higher than the rate given through the conference hotel booking agency. Their lowest quote was $259, and the conference agency quoted $198. It will be interesting to see if these are subject to the upgrade via Starwood once I get there.

So, at least on the planning side, I would say the perks from the Platinum card are minimal, when compared to an AMEX Gold card, and the touted “relationships” with other airline and hotel points programs appear to be at arm’s length.

I expected a little more juice. When I first called the Platinum number, I could press 1 for travel, 2 for problems with my credit card statement, and 3 for bookings of private jets and 4 for bookings of yachts. Oh well, I guess it’s back to coach class for moi.

At least I’m not planning to rent a car. The latest outrage is that Dollar Rent-A-Car is screwing people with a “top-off fee” of $2.00 extra if they bring their rental car back with a full tank of gas!

In the “why am I not surprised” dept:

Via slashdot, there is a note that the latest update to Microsoft Office disables a number of older file formats. There is a lengthy workaround published by Microsoft to fix the problem…which you’ll never figure out anyway…since this will probably crop sometime in the next year when you are trying to read somebody’s older Quattro spreadsheet.

Ok, we’ve got several things going on; some things stalled out. Here is a quick update on some recent posts:

Windows 2008 Server Beta
I installed this on my spare office workstation over the weekend, and then chickened out on cutting over because that is the bookkeeper’s workstation with QuickBooks, and the bookkeeper was due that Monday. If there is anything I’ve learned about finance, you don’t want to upset the staff. When its not the financial staff’s machine, that machine is used by the Spousal Unit as their workstation… and the same thing applies.

One thing that was kind of nice is that Win 2008 automatically installs as a dual-boot configuration if it finds another version of Windows on the installation machine. It automatically creates a dual-boot menu, with itself as the default choice, and “Legacy Windows” as an alternative. You can go into the “System” applet in the control panel on Windows XP, and turn that back to Legacy Windows, so that the aforementioned personnel don’t even realize they are using a dual boot machine. Bwaaaahaaaaa!

Apple Macintosh MacBoook
Using a Mac is an enriching experience; a little like learning a foreign language. What’s good?

• The Hardware. The MacBook is hands-down the most elegant laptop around. It looks and is sleek; relatively light weight, and has a 3-4 hour battery life. It includes built-in wireless, and I find myself wandering around the house, or the campus with just the book, unconnected by an umbilical cord. This is the way portable computing should be. Oh sure, I’d like an eight-hour battery life and two pounds..but this is an order of magnitude better than what I’ve had before.
• The built-in camera and microphone. They work great.
• The keyboard. After really suffering with the Dell keyboards with the cursor jumping around like a jumping bean, I can actually type at length on the Mac keyboard. I’m still learning the quirks; the “Apple” key, the weird behavior of the delete key, which I would have called a backspace key, but mechanically, it works well.

As for the Apple software, the core Leopard operating system functions seem to work fine. As for the applications, like iLife and iWork, they really don’t seem that much better or worse than similar Microsoft applications. So if think you’ll change your life by switching, you won’t, or at least I haven’t. What is nice is that I seem to be able to switch back and forth between Windows and the Mac with out a great deal of confusion or downtime. I’ve resisted installing Windows as a dual-boot or virtual machine, partly to force me to work with the Mac applications. I’m waiting for Mac Office 2008 due early next year. I think that will be worth a look.
I don’t mind the glossy MacBook screen, which has gotten decidedly mixed reviews. Of course, I’m still always happy to go back to dual 20″ monitors for programing. And all the grousing about Leopard, the recent update of the Mac OS is blessedly irrelevant, because I never used the earlier versions of the Mac.

Trixbox
Stalled out. This is the IP PBX phone system that I’ve been fooling with for over a year. I bought their “appliance” a couple months ago. I’m thinking about replacing the fan in the Trixbox box with what I hope would be a quieter version. My few tests with internet phone calls have been favorable, and the box appears to stay registered with my VoIP provider VoicePulse. Further work includes installing the Sangoma card to interface with my regular phone line, and I’ve now got two possible remote office connections that I can test for making extensions.