Archive for July, 2005
Tuesday, July 26th, 2005
I subscribe to the RSS feed for the Technorati “Rwanda” search (although I just went to the actual site and remembered what RSS doesn't provide, like the sidebar of current Flickr photos from Rwanda) and it occasionally picks up one of my blog posts, usually (surprise) when I include the ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, July 25th, 2005
I was at a cocktail party the other night and, as inevitably happens, found myself describing the Village Phone program to someone. While the "so what do you do?" question is pretty banal in general, over here it tends to at least make some sense. Big white boys from Wisconsin ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, July 25th, 2005
I first noticed the transporting effect of This American Life a few weeks ago on a Sunday night while making a somewhat less than successful beef biriani. I had been walking around the house making dinner, sitting down to eat, and then finally relaxing and listening to the end of the program. When ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Sunday, July 24th, 2005
My iPod died yesterday. Today, I resuscitated it.
It started acting weird in the truck yesterday, first skipping the occasional song and then, finally, skipping every single song. In other words, there was no music coming out - just dead silence and a lot of songs flashing by on the display. ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, July 22nd, 2005
So this morning I'm following my usual routine of a smoothie and the BBC and one of the first stories broadcast was about the current food crisis in the southern part of Niger. Heard about this? Maybe not... I just ran a search for “Niger“ on the New York Times ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, July 18th, 2005
During his visit to Rwanda in April, my colleague Tim told me that if I spent six months in Africa I was absolutely guaranteed to end up with at least one really really cute kid photo.
He was right.
This was taken during site visits to Village Phone operators in the Umutara province of ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Saturday, July 16th, 2005
The Intercontinental Hotel here in Kigali appears to have gone back to free WiFi. At the very least, I'm now sitting at the downstairs bar, drinking a scotch, sending/receiving email, browsing the web, and all indications are that I'm actually on the Internet. I haven't plugged in a code. Only ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, July 15th, 2005
Just a hair under two years ago I took a quick weekend retreat to the San Juan Islands to ponder my career at Microsoft and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Well, not quite the rest of my life; maybe something on the order of ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, July 15th, 2005
A post yesterday on WorldChanging covers (among other things) a talk about Grameen phone at the TED Global conference. Jamais also remarks on the Grameen Foundation USA's Village Phone replication efforts in Uganda and Rwanda.
I love WorldChanging. The breadth of ideas that pass through on a daily basis is incredible ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, July 15th, 2005
I think that the general idea with Windows Update (as delivered in SP2) is that it can keep your PC "up-to-date" without interrupting the user. It downloads updates in the background and even installs them in the background (when they're big, anyway). This is all good - periodically I'll see ...
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »