November 2005 – Page 2

for your eyes only…

Just the other day I had my mum on the phone and wanted to tell her about this awesome “Je chanterai pour toi” DVD I got when she told me: “yes, my dear, I already read it in your blog.” (ati ?!)

My mum is cool.

(hi mum! :-)

Sooooooooo………………. I figured, even if this blog just represents a tiny fraction of who I am and what I would like to share with YOU out there, I will not hesitate a second to volunteer, to sacrifice myself for your ultimate LMAO experience:

1993 1998

2004 2005

Facing Reality, that is.

1993: that pic is from my Kenyan driving licence (‘over 18’)
1998: that pic is from when yours truly was doing it the corporate world way
2004: that pic is from when I realized that shorter hair is better for working on a sewage treatment plant
2005: that pic is from TODAY!

Where elephants fight, the reeds get hurt.

Kudos to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) for compiling a list of 40 politicians ("list of shame") whose "derogatory speech along ethnic and racial lines" during the referendum campaigns were an incitement to violence.
The way I understand it is that the KNCHR is not only into reproving those politicians, but moreover its a test to see how far the Attorney General takes this matter seriously. And please note: "The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (the Commission) is an independent National Human Rights Institution established by an Act of Parliament."
For me as an external observer, it is nice to see how an independet group really gets to the point and puts the finger into the wound, thereby challenging the whole system. I think in many countries we have a lot of politicians that are way too much involved into the political game(s) and there’s this big gap between the electorate and their elected representatives.
As for Kenya, the referendum issue shows me that there are still a lot of things Kenyans will need to debate upon, a lot of frustration that needs to be discussed. And when I look at my own country – Germany – I see this huge gap between the people from the East and West, North and South and I wonder if things over here could also become as emotional as in Kenya right now. What else does it take for people over here to wake up and start taking part in those discussions? I know how difficult it is to motivate others on such issues but many only complain once its already too late. Maybe there a lot of political decisions that we can not agree with but it might already help to talk about problems and not to ignore them and leave them "to others".

Diversitas: OSC1

I just ran a blog search on Technorati and Google for more information about this interesting conference called DIVERSITAS currently (9-12th Nov.) taking place in Oaxaca, Mexico. Their tagline reads: "FIRST DIVERSITAS Open Science Conference – integrating biodiversity science for human well-being".

Biodiversity? What’s that? Wikipedia says:

Biodiversity is the variety of life: the different plants, animals and micro-organisms, their genes and the ecosystems of which they are a part.

Biological diversity has no single standard definition. (…) The 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro defined biodiversity as "the variability among living organisms from all sources, including, inter alia, terrestrial, marine, and other aquatic ecosystems, and the ecological complexes of which they are part: this includes diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems".

Awww…..okay.

And what about "open science"? What does that stand for? What’s so open on this one? What’s so open on this conference since it takes place in Mexico and the majority of participants still seem to be coming from the USA and Europe? Will there also be ppl live blogging from this event and podcasting debates / panel discussions?
Ati? Not sooooo open?

Is there any website out there that works as a plattform for all those nice and interesting conferences where interested people can just drop in and follow the discussions? There are so many smart people meeting all the time, exchanging ideas and inspiring each other – and yet the majority just can not afford going to all those places. I think there’s a need for that kind of information.

As for Diversitas – a friend of mine is there and just told me that out of 600 participants, about 8 (eight!) come from the African continent….go figure…

Yani, one day ME I :-) will open a shop and call it "Kikuyumoja’s Open Duka" (K.O.D.) to attract customers. I take it that the word "open" is just as sexy as "Debian" is for Nerds, "sustainability" is for environ. activists or "Web 2.0" is for web techies.

Kichango, kuchangizana.

Ouch! I really really tried to avoid worrying about this question – but!, the future german government (read: serikali ya mseto) TONIGHT decided upon the fate of this country: they want to raise the value added tax (V.A.T.) from 16 to 19% (as of January 1st, 2007).

Now, I am NOT an economist like Lady Tembomoja but I guess it doesn’t take much to understand its meaning for this country. MAYBE it was about time for a change, MAYBE Germany with its relatively low 16% was at the bottom of the european VAT scale (ranging from 15% in Cyprus to 25% in Denmark) so change was inevitable, and MAYBE its just one of those taxes that is easily raised and supposed to be fair on everyone’s pocket. On the other hand – who’s going to pay for all this? How am I, a student with no income, supposed to pay even more?

The way I’ve learnt it is that once your pockets are empty (and not just then), you start thinking: where did all my money go? and what will I do about it next time? will I be able to spend it wisely?
What I am trying to get at is: our governments (german, kenyan, any..) are always complaining about the money issue, they always require fresh pesa to come in and yet they try to safe it only at the wrong ends. Think of schools/educational-, health- and family policies, think of the things we as a society want to have and other things we don’t need so urgently and ask yourself if it’s just a question of the pocket or of your priorities.

We all have been witnessing budget speeches, we know this procedure from different institutions/organizations and we know how such things are debatted and often end up in a compromise. I just don’t get it though why they put more emphasis on obtaining even more money instead of rethinking their budget strategies and how to really spend it wisely in future. They DO have money, they’ve already taken it from the people, wasted it and now they are looking for alternative sources. Where’s the government that will really care about its people and needs? What’s on our agenda? How do we want to live as a society? What are our priorities?
And: what will we be able to do about it? How can we point out to them what we really want? Who are "we"? Can we come up with our own blueprint? We, the electorate?

This politics thing seems to be like playing soccer: there are only a few players on the field, but millions of referees. Sorry, it’s just too many whistles blowing at the same time…

safiri salama

There are these two german waZUNGU from Chemnitz, Germany who are planing to take part in the next Plymouth-Banjul Challenge 2006 (PBC 06) – driving their ’92 Toyota Corolla Liftback from Plymouth (UK) through France, Spain, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania to the Gambia.

"… If you have a sense of adventure but relatively little cash, then the Plymouth-Banjul Challenge might be up your street!"

"Unofficially spoken of as ‘The Ultimate Banger Challenge’, another motley collection of cars costing less than £100 will be assembled to drive over 3,000 miles from the South coast of Great Britain to the West coast of Africa."

Yani, MY car is an old (i say OLD!) Volkswagen Golf 2 from 1989 with about the same mileage as this said Toyota Corolla and I think its market value would be something like 100,- EUR (~ 9.000 Kshs). The next big thing to repair will be the clutch (the pressure plate inside) and maybe new shocks, lakini, why shouldn’t I take this car in 2006 and drive it up to…uhhhmm….Kenya?!
Lady Mbuzimoja, Lady Tembo, Mzeecedric – are you in for the challenge?

je chanterai pour toi

It’s one of those things I’ve been dying to tell you about … and now I am here in front of my computer and I don’t know how to start…

Well, I think it took me 10 years to understand the meaning of Kar Kar in Boubacar “Kar Kar” Traoré‘s name. KarKar is said to be a Bam(b)ara expression for someone who “goes in between” (to dribble @playing soccer), as it is explained in the beginning of this very fine DVD I eventually received yesterday. Eventually, because in 2003, I discovered that there’s a new documentary called “je chanterai pour toi” (I sing for you) by Jacques Sarasin about Boubacar Traoré – le grand magicien du blues malienne, this great musician from Mali who happened to be touring the African continent way back in 1995 – sponsored by the Alliance Francaise (~French Cultural Centre). It took them two years to release it as a DVD and so now I am the proud owner of my very first DVD (yes!! :-)). In fact, the man has been in good old Nairobi in 1995 and that’s when & where I got my first tape of this lovely music. I kept on listening to this tape for hours and days and weeks and months and about a year after that, I got my hands on KarKar’s only available CD “sa golo”. That was in the end of 1996. Later on, the passionate collector in me came across the rest of Boubacar’s discography (+ concerts) and so when I first read about this movie, I was very excited. I *needed* it desperately.

Le monde est fait pour qu’on s’aime.

KarKar is a man of faith. He isn’t directly interviewed, instead, his friends talk about him and describe his biography. They tell us about his lovely wife Pierette who has died and to whom he sings his sweetest songs. They tell us about Mali’s independence and Boubacar’s role in it – his tune “Mali twist” which used to be a great hit on Mali’s Radio. And they also show us what Boubcar KarKar Traoré’s music is all about: love.

It takes a lot of love and passion for a man that doesn’t come from a Griot background to compose and sing such fine tunes. Of course those pentatonic tunes do have a strong historical background – or as friend of mine (from Mali) once told me: “KarKar uses those old melodies that are believed to be our national heritage. He has given them a new meaning”. Think of Ayub Ogada from Kenya (playing his nyatiti) and you have the picture.

When I first checked the Internet about anything on “Boubacar Traoré” way back in 1996, there were only a handful (3-5) sites covering his name. And now the inet is full of interesting information and music, so if this has attracted you to listen into some fine sort-of-blues-music from Mali, and in case you’re still unfamiliar with names like Ali Farka Touré, Rokia Traoré or Amadou et Mariam (to name just a few popular), go and get it!

There are some musicians that put a lot of energy into their music, something you feel, something that really touches you the moment you hear it. For me, Boubacar “KarKar” Traoré is one of those magicians…

S.M.A.R.T. status: BAD

attention: NERD CONTENT! :-)

Imagine a hard disk being a piece of land that belongs to a farmer. He has divided it into different partitions called C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L (~partitioning) and wants to use each of those partitions to grow healthy stuff. Before he can grow anything, he needs to plough the whole plot (~formatting) and then one day he decides to use partition C as the site for his new house (~place of the operating system, i.e. WinXP).

The farmer grows lots of healthy fruits and good vegetable and even installs a big wall surrounding his house (~firewall) and to prevent it from thugs (~virii) entering his home and stealing his two vehicles, a colour tv set and other goods worth hours of hard work.

Then just one day, the impossible happens and the land upon which his house was built, descents into the ground because, as further studies later on revealed, there used to be a lake right under the house which was filled up with soil and so the heavy weight of the house caused everything to sink into the soil… This tragedy left the poor farmer with a huge shamba that he couldn’t care for because his tractor was sunk as well. The remainings of his house were declared unfit for further use and he had to use all his savings to buy another tractor in order to harvest the fruits of his remaining land…

There’s this 160 GB Samsung SP1614N (7200rpm/8 MB cache) hard disk drive (HDD) I bought in April 2005. Yesterday evening I tried to switch on my computer and all it did was telling me that a certain Mr. Samsung had gone on a longer vacation. I tried to persuade, I begged this harddisk to come back to work but all it gave me was an absent note, saying: "ntoskrnl.exe" not found. Yeah. No problem, just pull out WinXP CD, recovery mode, type in >>expand X:/i386/ntoskrnl.ex_ C:<< et voilà…. Et nothing! That damn config directory wasn’t even available! Huuu….. hakuna matata, then I will have to reformat everything. Takes time. Takes even more time. Stops at 32%. Ah. Maybe a bad sector. I have to run SPIN RITE 6.0 on it then. SpinRite ran the whole night and when I woke up again, it still showed the same screen where I had left it when I went to bed. Uhhhh. 32%….34%. Ah. MAYBE I can still try to reformat it and hopefully NTFS (Microsoft’s preferred file system) will exclude any bad sectors. And yes, it actually formatted the drive this time, though it took about 2 hours. I then reinstalled WinXP on it and once the computer started again, the hilarious S.M.A.R.T. function (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) eventually realized that something could be wrong with this hdd. Yeah, as if I didn’t know…"S.M.A.R.T. status: Bad – backup and restore. Doooooooooooooooooh!

So I "just" bought a new HDD and recovered the data from all the other – functioning – partitions. Fortunately, no important data was lost (backups, folks, backups!). However, it still bugs me a lot that a new HDD just fails to work right after 7 months in use… Those folks over at Samsung are in for a goooooooooood explanation!

P.S.: I think one day, productivity will be measured by the time span it takes to get a system up & running again.

Balalalalalalaaaaaa

Interesting, I was just reading an article on Sheikh Khalid Balalas struggle while on exile in Europe and was instantly reminded of those days back in the mid 1990s. I happened to live in Frankfurt am Main by that time – that city where he stayed in Germany, I think in a hotel somewhere close to the main station and a german MI5-nini had him under surveillance….
Politics. Facts, unimportant details that pop-up from various parts of my brain, something I will never need to remember. And yet, the visual memories of that time, even of those hectic days in the early 90s (Kamukunji & Co) keep on coming back. So many things have changed in Kenya in the meantime, life has been going on, we’re having 2005 and I am sitting here, reading this other article and thinking to myself: will our children ever ask us about the politics during our heydays and what we were actually doing about it?