What is your deepest fear?

Hehehe… that is a catchy title I have to admit.  Anyway I was looking trying to fill in a contact form on the CIA website.. (don’t ask why I was trying to contact the CIA) and guess what? Their contact form doesn’t work!  I found this very funny because I always complained that Ugandan websites have contact forms that do not work, and here, we have the “top” intelligence gathering institution in USA, with an information gathering tool that doesn’t work.. could it be a conspiracy??!! :)  See the screenshots.

This is probably one of the most irrelevant posts I have made but what the hell!

Before filling inform:

After filling in form: The error message is not only wrong in what happened but even erased my data..

Enough time wasting…

Africa

Land of flowing rivers
Vast lakes
Beautiful hills
Mild quakes

They say
you take
breath away
Literally…
or metaphorically?

You are like a child
“When will you grow up
to face the world?”
Africa..
When will the world
Let you grow up?

- EM -
23h02, 19th August 2009

I was very amused to read a post by one member of a mailing list who was lamenting the corruption in the Ugandan government.  The whole issue started with an article from the Monitor newspaper that talked about the incomplete state of Uganda’s national fibre optic backbone.  Of course this non-completion is related to the fact that the money was allegedly “eaten” by the officials in charge.  However, it has the greater effect that there shall be delays in connecting the national backbone to the recently launched SEACOM undersea cable that connects the East African coastline to Asia, Europe and Southern Africa.

Anyway this gentleman was so incensed by the whole issue that his proposition was that we should hand back the management of Uganda to the British.  I picked a section of the email.

 ”Let us demand our government to hand us back to our colonial masters officially than give away Airport to Arabs, Diary Corporation to Malysians, L.Victoria to the Dutch. Lets do this in an organized way where all of us agree that we can’t do things right here except under supervision by the British Government. I am not pro the Brits, it could be a company like Cisco Systems diversifying its business portfolio. It could be Microsoft. It could be Egypt. It could be the Norwegians. Simply lets put Uganda including its people on auction because of the above.”

I was just reading an article about a new pair of slippers called by the dutch shoe designer Jan Jansen.  I picked out an excerpt

“The soles of the Plakkies are made from used car tyres. In South Africa, car tyres are dumped en masse and illegally incinerated, causing a devastating impact on the environment. Thanks to Plakkies, they can now be recycled. Shoe designer Jan Jansen and students of the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering came up with the design for the hip, socially responsible slipper.”

Full article about plakkies

As I read it I thought to myself… hmm that sounds quite close to what we call lugabire!!!  Unfortunately I have looked around for somewhere with a close up picture of these plakkies in vain.  I also thought I could find a picture of lugabire.. so if anybody has one please post it up!

I just read that the elections of the Ugandan Olympics committee resulted in the ousting of Maj. Gen. Francis Nyangweso who has been the chairman of the committee for the last 28 years.  I am just wondering what somebody is still doing as a chairman after 28 years!  Apparently the new chairman Roger Ddungu has promised reforms to the body.  I sincerely do hope that he makes the necessary changes.  The last I heard, Uganda had more officials than participants at the 2008 Beijing Olympics; that is what 28 years brings for you.  Mr. Ddungu is hopefully going to put in place a comprehensive nation-wide program to improve on the facilitation and training of sports and sports (wo)men and more importantly to build a system that shall run well after his term of office has run out.

I heard a question that I thought was quite interesting.  During a panel discussion at Barcamp Africa, the discussion moderator, Guy Kawasaki, asked that if he wanted to write a $1,000 cheque to support a cause in Africa what should he do.

One of the panelists said he should think of investing it into the stock market; to which he said it would sound crazy to his portfolio manager that he wanted to invest in a stock market in an African country.  Most of the other responses were from people who have been running projects in African countries and were all advocating for their individual projects.  One panelist from Ushahidi said he should invest it in an iPhone to do tests on the Ushahidi applications.

It was an interesting question for me.  One that I have to admit I was stumped at.  First, because I am more and more propelled towards the no-more-aid “movement”, but more importantly because this no-more-aid is not necessarily a really black and white scenario.  So in the meantime while I think about this I shall have to remain “dumb” for the time being.