I’m fairly excited about peer to peer loan ideas emerging. Launched this past Sunday Feb 5th, the basic idea behind Prosper, Inc., at prosper.com, I expect will eventually be huge business. Individuals may share the risk of funding their peers’ loans of up to $25,000, in chunks as low as $50 per person. Of course you may also ask for a loan from your peers and allow them to bid on the ability and rate at which to lend you money. CEO of Prosper is Chris Larson, the cofounder, in 1996, of the successful E-Loan, now owned by the Puerto Rican banking group Popular, Inc.

I’ll be watching the discussion forums to guage initial activity, currently very low. I expect and hope that some mad ideas will be funded well below market interest rates. Best yet, $2,700 for ‘
Wardrobe for work‘, already fully funded at 8% by 11 different lenders. What a fascinating new tool.

See also — writeup on the Prosper launch at TechCrunch, the more established zopa.com ( from London ), individual to small buisness in developing economies at kiva.org, the group fundraising focus at fundable.org, the sourceforge/pgp attempt at Ripple, and the article on free banking at wikipedia.

I installed wordpress 2.0.1! My first upgrade since 1.5, the improvements are immediate. After removing the 15,000+ spam comments which had accumulated, new spam appears to be effectively blocked (~100 in 24 hours) thanks to the newly implemented akismet. Their stats currently claim that 82% of all comments are spam!

As a result, I’ve re-styled and re-enabled all comments on the blog! They should work great and be spam-free … for now!

First signifigant hit from search.msn.com today with “happy tree friends episodes“, all the way back to april 2003. It is getting better, msn (663 pages) : google (959 pages).

gr33ts smurf.to, efnet:#hooked, and the redesign.

Finally started minor editing over at wikipedia, meta, of course.

Reverse link showed up over at 0009.com|here game as well.

Enjoyed playing with a new layout today. This definitely a first draft of an enjoyable custom css for wordpress and beyond. If you insist on the former layout, bookmark herebox.2 and enjoy at will. Now I just need to get my about, 101010, and possibly a few of the older sections up.

I've added a simple addition problem as an attempt to thwart comment spammers. Initial code from jeff barr, mods by agrippa_cash at nuke tibet, final code with additional minor mods, below. You will likely have to edit this code to fix quotes (") and possibly other characters mangled in rendering. It boggles my mind that posting code to the web is such a royal pain in the ass [ edit: It is wordpress's default texturize feature that was causing me trouble with the quotes. Apparently toggled in wp-includes/vars.php or using remove_filter() in myhacks.php . ]

Add to wp-comments.php, wp-comments-popup.php. Modify tabindex fields accordingly:

<input type="hidden" name="factor1" value="<?php srand((double)microtime()*1000); $factor1 = rand(1,9); echo $factor1;?>"/>
<input type="hidden" name="factor2" value="<?php $factor2 = rand(0,9); echo $factor2;?>"/>
<label for="spam"><?php _e("Add 'em up: <b>"); echo $factor1 . " + " . $factor2 ."= ";?></></label>
<input type="text" name="spam" id="spam" value="<?php echo $comment_spam; ?>" tabindex="5">

Add to wp-comments-post.php:

if ($_POST['factor2'] != $_POST['spam'])
die( __('<h1>Sorry, you must correctly answer the problem to post a comment.</h1><h2>Please take off your shoes and try again.</h2>(This is a SPAM elimination measure)'));

All seems to be going well with the recent site move. The initial css layout was the second place finisher by Hadley Wickham over at alex king’s wordpress css style competition. In the meantime, I’m working on my own layout design and content for subsections to be determined. For the readers, don’t miss that you can now subscribe to herebox.org as an RSS feed through any number of utilities and services.

I can’t believe how much comment spam I’ve received in the few short days since relaunching. Many of my posts have more than 20 comments all advertising online poker rooms. I’m not yet sure what the best solution to this will be, but in the meantime — what a pain in the ass.

On my own machine, I’ve been exploring mozilla’s offerings, including firefox and thunderbird, as open source alternatives.

Had a fun halloween in Santa Fe and Madrid down here in New Mexico. My travel to New Mexico was wonderful… Nothing quite like spending two days on the ‘dirty dog‘. Salt Lake City, with Katherine for a day, was a nice stop over to break up the trip. Though, Butte, Montana was the highlight on the bus. One through Seven in the morning stuck at an isolated bus station small enough to hear anything said among the 25 or so travelers. It made for an entertaining, although unusual, conversation with no escape for anyone ;).

I will miss John Peel of Radio 1 fame, who passed away on Tuesday. I am far from alone in respecting him as one of the worlds most influential DJs spanning more genres than I’ll ever know. His absence leaves a hole in my music input I’m not sure where to fill. Thanks for all the tunes, good and bad. Now, about that record collection, looks like I’ll be competing with the British Library.

I’ve decided to switch to wordpress as a cms for herebox.org . It was a tough decision against movabletype, but open source and a solid community have won my support. Blogger has been a great tool, but I feel my needs diverging from its audience. Meanwhile, google’s stock [GOOG] continues to spiral out of control — 196!?

Congrats Will and Diane off to Boston for an eastside adventure. Good luck out there.