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I just looked out the kitchen window, over the top of my neighbor’s house, to see… Angel Island on fire!

(Update: Jeff has posted much better photos over on his site.)

There’s nothing about it on television news at the moment (~9:20pm), nor on sfgate.com or kron4.com.  Yet, several Twitter users are clearly seeing the same thing I’m seeing, as the screenshot of the search shows below.

I’m not sure I’m ready to agree with the claim that Twitter can compete (in some ways) with AP and other news wires, but I can now see its utility in connecting you to others who are sharing a common experience.

I’ve been meaning to post this one for a while: Kiva, an amazing nonprofit that lets anyone loan small amounts of cash to business owners in developing nations, now returns loan repayments to your account as soon as the borrowers make them.  Previously, you had to wait months until the entire loan was repaid before you got your share back.

We are happy to announce that Kiva will now return repayments to lenders as soon as those repayments are received by Kiva. Because of this change, you’ll be able to re-lend funds right away instead of waiting until the end of the loan term.

As a result of this change, $33.32 in Kiva Credit has been released to you and is now available for you to use. You can re-lend these funds, donate or withdraw them.

This is a great move because it means you can get your money back into circulation quickly — ideally by loaning it to another entrepreneur who needs it.  When that entrepreneur starts to pay back the loan, you can apply those payments to yet another loan — and on and on, helping several people in one or more developing countries all with the same base amount of $25, or $50, or $200…

The new design is courtesy an entirely new content management system under the hood.  Also, most of my technology-related posts will be over at returncontrol.com from now on.

For those who are interested, I’m now using WordPress, and like it much better than Movable Type 4, which was a nightmare after the upgrade from version 3.  Will write up more on my experience making the switch later (and post it to returncontrol.)

Some friends are doing some cool stuff this week:

Ben, who runs Virtually Blind and is an expert on legal issues in virtual worlds, has had an op-ed piece about the future of the Internet published in the Wall Street Journal.

Maggie, of Mighty Girl fame and a former colleague at Web Techniques, has launched Mighty Haus a new shopping blog focused on cool stuff for your house. As the tagline says, hooray for stuff!

Jeff, who runs the Digital Camera Resource Page, one of the top digital camera reviews sites, got to play professional sports photographer for a day at the Bank of the West Classic tennis tournament at Stanford. Love the photo of the flying braid.

So what have I been doing with my time now that I’m a fancy-pants “Independent Technology Consultant”? In addition to working for some great startups and nonprofits — and, oh right, that whole procreating thing (which I did in my off hours, I promise) — I’ve teamed up with two sharp partners to build Kinverge, a free family intranet service.

In a nutshell, our goal with Kinverge is to make it super easy to set up a private Web site where your family can share and store family photo albums; set up birthday, anniversary, and other event reminders; post announcements and group messages; create gift lists; …and you get the picture. We built it with the philosophy that photo sharing and blogging and other technologies don’t have to be complicated and just for the tech-savvy. We think using a private family Web site can be easy enough to allow everyone in the family to participate.

We’re still refining the site and adding new features, but if it sounds like something your family might be interested in or you’re just curious, definitely head on over and get yourself set up. It takes all of a minute — and did I mention it’s free? Plus, it’d make me very happy.

(And if you perhaps felt compelled to tell others about it, or post about it on your own blog, I’ll tell everyone you’re the greatest.)

I don’t remember when, but at some point I must have signed up to receive emails from Buy.com. The messages show up a couple times a week and are full of offers for all sorts of tech stuff — hard drives, SD cards, wireless base stations, printers, and the like. But the message I got the other day is, well, a little odd. Here are the top offers:

• Sonic Impact HF1 High Fidelity Earphones
• Gateway M-6308 Notebook
• Kingston 2GB DataTraveler USB 2.0 Flash Drive
• Sonic Impact i-P23 Portable Speakers
• Logitech Cordless Desktop S510
• Trojan Elexa Ultra Sensitive Lubricated Latex Condoms - 24 Pack

So there’s no sign of the kid yet. In the meantime, we continue to prepare. And that means taking care of all the things you just don’t want to have to be dealing with later when you’re at the beck and call of a two-week-old child. But I’ll tell ya, we’re getting down to the bottom of the to-do list, the real dull stuff.

Take, for instance, task #436: Finally setting up a way to regularly back up the files on my laptop. Honestly, I’ve never gotten around to doing this until now, ever, on any computer — despite recommending it to every unfortunate friend, relative, and client who has ever called me in panic with complaints of a crashed hard drive.

I get why they — and I — don’t do what we all know we should: Backing up your hard drive is about as exciting as applying for life insurance. But since we crossed life insurance off the list last week…..

So to all my friends, relatives, and clients, here’s the deal: I’m now backing up my computer with Carbonite. It’s a subscription-based service that automatically and regularly copies your important files to a remote server (run by Carbonite.) If you accidentally delete a file, or your whole hard drive, you can get back the important stuff.

After you install the Carbonite utility, the software automatically does an initial backup of your My Documents folder. This part takes a few days, but it happens in the background while you’re computer’s on so you don’t really notice. After that, the software only sends copies of new or changed files to the server. (You can set which files get backed up and how often.)

The only problem I had with Carbonite is that I noticed my hard drive seemed to be running all the time, even after the initial backup was done. I think that’s because Carbonite was fighting to back up my email files every time I got a new message. My email is already backed up elsewhere, so I ended up removing the “AppData” folder from my backup schedule and that seems to have fixed things.

The whole thing costs $49.95 per year. But here’s a secret: Search for “Carbonite coupon” and you’ll likely find a $10 discount floating around out there.

So there you go — no more reason to panic and call me when you lose all those MP3s you ripped from the CDs you “borrowed” from me. And speaking of ripping MP3s, if the kid doesn’t show up within a few more days, I’ll tell you about boring task #437.

Happy Tax Day, U.S. readers. Today’s utterly-dumb-Web-site anecdote is brought to you by none other than the U.S. Treasury.

If, like many business owners, you have to make quarterly tax payments, you might at some point decide that filling out paper vouchers and mailing them in along with your checks might not be all that convenient. And so you might go looking for a Web site where maybe you can just make your payments online. If so, you would likely find the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System.

Sounds handy, right? Wait ’til you try to set up an account. Here are the steps:

1. Register online for your account.
2. Wait roughly two weeks for a letter via the postal service, supposedly containing further instructions and a PIN number for setting up your account.
3. Receive the letter containing said PIN and attempt to use it to log on to the Web site — and then realize that, in addition to the PIN, you need an “Internet password”.
4. Re-read the letter and realize that you must call a customer service center to receive your Internet password.
5. Call the center and provide the PIN… and a separate 16-digit “enrollment trace number” noted on the PIN letter.
6. Return to the Web site yet again and provide your PIN, and Internet password… and Social Security Number.
7. Make yourself a stiff drink.

It takes fewer steps to launch Russian warheads. Banks, online brokerages, credit card services, and pretty much all other types of financial institution long ago figured out a security model that takes less than 5 minutes to complete — and doesn’t require the triangulation of your Internet, postal, and telephony services. Why can’t the IRS follow suit?

Oh, and keep in mind that if you wait until April 14 before logging on and trying to schedule a payment for the next business day, you’ll get a peculiar error telling you that you have entered an invalid date. That’s right, April 15 — Tax Day — is an invalid date, according to the EFTPS. Why? This “24 hours a day” service doesn’t accept payments after 8PM Eastern on the day before taxes are due. Silly you.

The best part? For sure, it’s the first line of the EFTPS enrollment letter, which states: We have received your enrollment information for EFTPS, the easiest way to pay your federal taxes.

As I stood in line at the local post office this afternoon, muttering under my breath at all the people in front of me — in particular: the guy with the lamp that he decided to wrap only after reaching the counter; the woman with the home business who showed up with three sacks full of badly wrapped t-shirts to ship; and the two aging grandmothers who, separately, wanted the clerk to show them every single stamp design in the catalog — I was reminded yet again of why I hate the post office so much, and why I only go once or twice a year when I have no other choice.

The only good thing about the experience is that it gives me a chance to daydream about how I’d redesign the place to make it more efficient. Here’s my plan:

First, get rid of the one-line-fits-all-needs model. Break it up. When you walk in, you should see several clearly marked areas of the post office. Need stamps? Over here. Need to mail a letter or some documents? Over there. Need to send a package? That counter. Need bubble wrap? The packing table. Don’t know what you need? The info desk. Right away, the wait time is reduced because you don’t have to stand behind every single person in the building.

Next, rely more on self service. You shouldn’t need to stand in line and talk to a clerk just to buy some packing tape. At the packing table, slide your credit card through a slot in a vending machine and pick your own supplies. Likewise, the majority of people don’t need to talk to a clerk to send an international, express, or oversized letter. They just need to know what their mailing options are and how much each costs. How about a scale and a quick way to find out how much postage I need? (And no, I don’t mean leave a scale on a table in the corner like they do now; the “quick way to find out how much postage I need” is critical.)

Finally, use technology. In the scale example above, why not let me set my letter on a kiosk that automatically measures the weight, scans the address, and gives me all my mailing options on a touch screen? Once I select an option and pay, the kiosk prints out a mailing label and I’m on my way. A similar kiosk system would work just fine for stamp buyers who want to see what else is available besides the American flag booklets. Now, your grandmother can flip through the entire catalog on a touch screen. Want to see more stamps with birds? Easy. Like the kittens? Here’s more. What are other grandmas getting? We’ll show you.

Of course, change requires incentive. And a postal service that has a $5.4 billion deficit is not about to invest in an overhaul of its customer service centers — at least, not when it doesn’t have to worry about competition. (It’s the same problem with the DMV.)

Maybe then the biggest change the postal service can make to become more efficient is to open up standard mail delivery to competitors. Isn’t the US long past the point where it needs to nurture the postal communications network? At this point, if a private firm can find a way to get a letter to my relatives’ mailboxes faster and cheaper than USPS can, why not let it?

Is there a reason why computer keyboards still have Caps Lock keys? Is there some powerful lobby of FORTRAN 77 programmers that I don’t know about?

At the least, can we move the Caps Lock key somewhere else — preferably somewhere that’s not prime keyboard real estate? I mean, the right pinky finger’s got the sensible and quite important Enter key. So why does the left pinky get the one that’s only used on accident or else by the crazies who think the best way to warn us all about our impending doom at the hands of aliens is to SHOUT IT ON THE NEAREST MESSAGE BOARD?