Archive for March, 2007
Reuters recent launched a new online Africa page. What I find most exciting about this is Reuters’ decision to include content from blogs on the country pages. So for example if you check out Reuters Kenya page today in addition to all the news stories you will see links to content from blogs as this picture shows (click on the picture to see a larger screen shot of the page):
Check out Ethan’s post and Rachel’s post for some background information and a wider commentary. As Ethan says and I agree, Reuters Africa team “gets it” on the importance of blogs.
Kenyan blogs are now getting featured regularly in the international media while the Kenyan main stream media drags its feet.
The blog posts, as can be seen by the screen shots, come from Global Voices. Yet another reason you should get involved with the Global Voices. The Global Voices sub Saharan editor, Ndesanjo, is looking for bloggers willing to do regular round ups on the Kenyan Blogosphere. Drop him a line at africa AT globalvoicesonline DOT org for more information on the requirements and commitment you’d be expected to make.
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Support the Kenya Blogs Webring International Women’s Day campaign!
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Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 2:26 PM
Cross posted on KenyaUnlimited Admin Team blog
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Celebrated on 8 March, International Women’s Day is the global day connecting all women around the world and inspiring them to achieve their full potential. International Women’s Day celebrates the collective power of women past, present and future.
The latest Kenyan Blogs Webring statistics show that out of nearly 400 blogs, approximately 60% of bloggers are men while 40% women make up the rest. To ensure gender equity, we are working to engender a 50/50 balance between men and women bloggers.
With this in mind, today on International Women’s Day, the Kenyan Blogs Webring is launching a campaign to get more women blogging in the next 7 days. To achieve this we need your help. We would like to ask each and every one of our members to get involved!
How?
We would like you to introduce at least one woman to blogging within the next seven days. If you can introduce more than one, great!
Your involvement should be:
- Commitment for seven days
- Explaining the process of blogging
- Directing them and walking them through blog software such as blogger.com and WordPress.com. (We recommend you sign them up on WordPress.com)
- Helping them to set up a blog
- Helping them to write their first blog post (if they need your help)
- Helping them register with KBW (if they so wish and fulfil the membership criteria) so that they can be read widely.
Please note that it will not be enough to send us a list of e-mails with instructions to ’start blogs for these women’. You will certainly need to ‘make the commitment’ and go through the process with the women.
We at the KBW Admin will available for further assistance or advice on technical aspects and signing on to KBW. We are here to help, as you help women start blogs!
See, the process is simple!
If you have questions or require assistance, please contact us.
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Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 4:15 PM
Update: Ah ha! Maitha has some inside information and an explanation. Click on the link and scroll down to the comments.
I have been trying to help some friends start blogs on WordPress.com for the last few days but the site, WordPress.com, is inaccessible. In addition I have not been able to view any blogs hosted on WordPress.com including, ironically, the KenyaUnlimited Status blog. The strange thing about all this is that there is no chat about it, nothing on Google, on the WordPress support forums. It is like this problem does not exist. As I had attempted to view WordPress.com from many networks around Nairobi I just assumed that nothing underhand could be going on.
But then after reading the comments on this post I thought to myself, what if someone was blocking access to WordPress.com making it impossible for anyone on a Kenyan IP address to view the site? Luckily there are quick ways of checking this.
When I surf to WordPress.com directly by entering http://wordpress.com/ into my browser I get various unavailable errors.
When I surf to WordPress.com using one of the many services that hides IP addresses, such as Anonymous, voila, I can view the site. Anonymous hides your IP address and makes it look like you are surfing from a German IP address.
If you are within Kenya try it for yourself.
Enter this url into your browser which should take you to WordPress.com: http://wordpress.com/
If you can not view the site enter this url which navigates to the same site through anonymous: http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-www.cgi/http://wordpress.com/
It looks like something somewhere is blocking access from Kenyan IP addresses to WordPress.com. It is too early to point fingers and there may be nothing malicious going on but something is wrong somewhere.
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Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 2:43 PM
From The Guardian:
A trial will kick off later this year enabling UK Vodafone customers to send money to people in Kenya. This should appeal particularly to the estimated half million Kenyans living in the UK who between them send home some £78m each year. The service will expand to allow cash transfers to countries in Eastern Europe and Asia such as Poland and India …
In the case of Kenya, recipients will be able to get their money from one of a network of 400 outlets, including the offices of Kenyan mobile network provider Safaricom (an affiliate of Vodafone) and branches of state bank Postbank.
A Safaricom pilot that allows people to send payments by mobile within Kenya has proved hugely popular in a country where few people have bank accounts or plastic money. A global rollout will be targeted mainly at migrant workers, but it should also be useful to Britons sending money abroad, such as parents transferring funds to children on gap year travels.
Vodafone will charge users a fee based on the amount of money they send, expected to be half the cost of the equivalent services from Western Union or Moneygram. For example, sending £50 to Kenya for instant collection now costs £12 at both services while sending £500 sets you back £37 at Western Union and £36 at Moneygram.
Exciting news indeed, perhaps mobile phones not plastic cards will mean we finally have a quick, secure, reliable global payment system.
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Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 1:11 PM
There’s a chicken waiting to cross the road.
A duck runs up to it and says,
“Don’t do it mate, you’ll never hear the end of it.”
Hat tip: Victorious - you guy, you are a muppet for real, banage!
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Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 12:54 PM
Kenyans like to think of ourselves as the elder brothers in the East African community and as such are sometimes reluctant to learn from our immediate “smaller brothers” neighbours. After the Sunday I had I’ve found one area in which Kenya could learn from Uganda.
When I was in Kampala (BDIS) I noticed that many police officers carried a folder filled with a neat pile of paper. I learnt that these sheets of paper are actually tickets for traffic offences. On one side of the form the police officer fills in your details and details of the offence. On the other side of the form is a list of traffic offences and next to each offence the amount, in Ugandan shillings, of the fine for that offence. Once the ticket is issued you have 30 days to go to the bank and pay the fine. If you fail to do so, your car’s road licence and your driving licence will be suspended and not renewed until you have made the payment. Apparently the form also has information on the steps to take if you wish to dispute the ticket.
A couple of things stand out to me:
- The amount of the fine for each offence is printed on the paper. The police officer can not inflate the amount you are meant to be fined as it is there in black and white for both of you to see.
- In any case, the police officer never handles the money. Once the ticket is issued you go to the bank and pay the fine there.
- You have 30 days in which to pay the fine. Giving a full monthly circle is sensible as it allows a reasonable amount of time to raise the money.
Compare that to Kenya.
A simple traffic offence, for example parking obstruction, not having a hazard triangle or talking on your mobile phone while driving, can land you in jail. Yes, jail. You can be arrested, taken to a police station, charged and thrown into jail, with thugs, thieves and murders.
In addition you may not be informed of the option to pay a bond and if you are, the amount to pay may vary considerably depending on which officer you are talking to. That is if there is a senior officer available to sign the bond form in the first place. If there is no such officer available, you wait. If they come after 6pm, you sleep in jail and pay the next day after being dragged to court.
In addition (yes there are many additions) your car may be impounded and not released until you have appeared in court. If you have the misfortune of being arrested on Friday evening, it could take until Monday morning before you appear in court. Three nights in the slammer; for not having standard headlights, for having a faulty seatbelt or for not wearing a seatbelt when one is available. That can not be an efficient or even sensible use of police time and state resources.
I do agree that there are some driving offences for which there are compelling arguments for some jail time; perhaps drink driving or extremely dangerous driving. But dragging a guy to jail on a Sunday because he was parked on the side of the road while be bought vegetables in an area with no formal parking is ridiculous.
The most irritating thing about the whole episode was the txts I kept getting from someone who thinks nothing can possibly be going on that has nothing to do with them! Aiii the world does not rotate on your axis! Even more irritating was that I missed most of AMREF’s 50 years celebration concert which looked sawa sawa.
(Utumishi Kwa Wote (Service to All) is the motto of the Kenyan Police Force.)
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In other much more joyful news, Kenyan Pundit is now Mama Gabriella (aka Baby KP). Congratulations! Check out Kenyan Pundit for a picture of the cute little one.
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Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 11:23 AM
Wewe JKE I blame you! After reading your post I went and faithfully upgraded to WordPress 2.1.1 on Friday and then today I read this:
Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.
Now I’ve just spent around 2 hours upgrading all over again! (I have the slowest FTP in the world. It’s enough to make me switch to Fantastico auto installs!) If WordPress 2.1.3 comes out this week, I will sell my computer and move to Bungoma and farm bananas for the rest of my days bila internet I tell you.
WordPress users, do the necessary with your installations to ensure your blog is secure.
On a slightly related note, is anyone else have problems accessing WordPress.com and blogs hosted on WordPress.com? Haven’t been able to view the site for a couple of days now.
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Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 10:53 AM
Disgruntled employees at Nation Media Group (publishers of Kenya’s widest read newspapers, The Daily Nation and The Sunday Nation, publishers of several other local and regional newspapers, owners of Nation TV and radio stations) have been threatening to blow the lid on what the call the biggest sex scandal to hit Kenya. The promised to reveal all on March the 1st, and so they have. Via a blog.
(If this is what it takes to have the MSM in Kenya embrace blogs, so be it!)
However, while many of their grievances sound legitimate, and lets be clear only one side of the story has been told here, some of the allegations on the blog seem to be just childish mud slinging. For example they “expose” employees they claim to be gay. What has that got to do with anything?
Have a read and decide for yourself.
Thanks to MM who has been forwarding the inside information to me!
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Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 5:05 PM
Last week I had one of those days where everything seemed to happening at once. Vital tasks were piling up; big decisions needed to be made; deadlines were brought forward as projects were rearranged by circumstances out of my control. Payments had to be made, presentations had to be prepared and presented. I was swamped. My response to all this was to do everything faster, speed the process up. My logic being that the more tasks I could fit into an hour the faster everything would return to normal. Rushing around like Speedy Gonzales merged into Road Runner worked for a while, but things fell back and soon I was rushing and swamped. Things were now in danger of getting completely out of hand.
What saved me was I remembered wise words that have been tested through out the ages and are as relevant now in the 21st century as they were when they were first verbalised. Every culture seems to have a version of the following proverb:
Waswahili wanasema “haraka haraka haina baraka”
The English: Haste makes waste
A mind that is fast is sick
A mind that is slow is sound
A mind that is still divine
Meher Baba
All human evil comes from this:
a man’s being unable to still still in a room.
Blaise Pascal
The world today is all about speed. How fast we can complete a task, how fast our computers are, how fast our cars are, the quickest route hapa na pale. To an extent that is fine. Who wants a slow computer after all? But although the world moves at what is sometimes breathtaking speed I am beginning to appreciate that our minds work better when they slow down. When we can retreat into our mind and see things clearly. I always used to think, “Haraka haraka haina baraka” referred to physical tasks, now I am convinced it relates mainly to mental tasks, to the mind. Slow down the mind, our ancestors are telling us, and everything else will fall into place.
Martial art film fans can testify how when the film director wants to highlight a special fighter he slows down the fight when we see it in the eyes of that fighter. While for everyone else the fight is progressing at a terrific speed, for the hero the fight is almost in slow motion (a concept brilliant borrowed/highlighted/stolen by the makers of The Matrix trilogy.)
I had the pleasure of attending a school that had its spiritual base in the Quaker tradition of the Christian faith. Quakers, The Religious Society of Friends to use their proper name, have many good practices. The two most famous ones are probably non violence and silence. Quaker meetings place a lot of emphasis on silence. Be still with your thoughts and listen to your heart, to your mind, to your God.
At the Quaker school I attended assembly everyday would finish with around 5 minutes of silence. In addition, every Wednesday for morning assembly the whole school would sit in silence for around an hour. Imagine that. A whole school from Standard 1 all the way to A-Levels, all the teaching staff, in one hall, sitting in silence, for one hour. If anyone wanted to say anything they could stand up and say it to the whole school without fear. For the first few weeks it felt completely strange. After a few months it felt completely normal and even vital to having a productive week. Most Wednesdays no one would stand up to share. Sometimes a couple of people would share something. Mostly though it was silence. Those silent assemblies are something every school should implement!
Well back to my crazy day. I decided to go home and be still for a couple of hours. It didn’t matter that it was the middle of the day or that there were a million things to do. I knew that instead of speeding up which had been my initial response, I needed to slow down completely. To use today’s terminology when your computer is running many programmes and the virtual memory is working overtime sometimes it is easier AND faster to CRTL-ALT-DEL and start all over again. One step back, two steps forward. I went home, I lay down and when I got up I basically restarted my day. Now if I can do that for a crazy day why can’t I do that for a crazy week, a crazy month, a crazy year? I think I can.
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Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 12:09 PM
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