Category Archives: Uncategorized

Kenya


I saw this picture today on GulfNews.com. A young man – about my own age – runs with his daughter – about my daughter’s age – while she looks obviously terrified. I can’t quite imagine what I would do, faced with the situations that have been forced on thousands of moms and dads in the last two weeks in Kenya. I know that I would do anything to protect my daughter. What would I do if someone took my daughter from me and flung her into a burning building, and prevented me from going in after her? I don’t know. It is unthinkable. But a mom had that happen to her just two weeks ago today, in a town that I have always thought of as a sleepy, friendly, quiet country town. How does one live with that reality – either of having it done to your daughter, or of being the one that did it?

With that kind of thing going on in my homeland, it’s really very hard to care who’s winning the US presidential primaries. Ironically, though, these primaries will have a significant impact on Kenya in the very near future. Who’s in the White House, unfortunately, indirectly (and some times very directly) effects what goes on in Africa.

Meanwhile, the 10th Parliament had their first meeting yesterday, and the opposition majority elected an opposition Speaker, which will probably have the effect that the President will either not be able to accomplish anything for the next 5 years, or that he’ll simply ignore the constitution and the laws of the land, and do whatever he choose anyways. Events of the last two weeks seem to suggest which of these options he’ll choose.

Today, there are battles between opposition supporters and police, in which the police are armed with live ammunition and tear gas, and the opposition supporters have signs and large numbers. One death is reported, but one expects the reality is worse. The sun has gone down now, and it’s been raining most of the day, so hopefully things are quiet right now.

It’s very, very hard to get out of the deep sadness that these events are causing me. This isn’t supposed to happen in Kenya. Kenya hosts refugees, it doesn’t produce them. Kenya is peaceful, stable, and friendly. Kenya is Hakuna Matata. Kenya is home. It’s beginning to feel like I’ll never make it back home again.

Back to school

Tomorrow, after being out of school for 14 years, I’m going back to school. Sort of.

I’m going to be taking ENG 352, Creative Writing – Poetry, at my employer. This is one of the benefits of working at a college which I’ve never yet taken advantage of. I keep meaning to, and then getting busy and forgetting.

I’ve often thought that, if I had it to do again, I’d be an English major. So this is, in a small way, my way of doing that. I’m really quite excited about it, although it’s also a little scary, going back to school after so long.

Ushahidi


Ushahidi got mentioned on BoingBoing. They’re mapping where violence has been reported in Kenya.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kibaki is persisting in his insistence that there is in fact no crisis, and therefore no international mediators are needed. So he’s snubbing Kofi Annan, who has offered to come help in any way that he can. I think that, of the two scoundrels, Mr. Kibaki is the greater scoundrel. Even to a cynical outside observer, it appears that Mr. Odinga is actually trying to get together to negotiate a solution. Mr. Kibaki keeps insisting that there’s no problem. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is declaring it the end of belief in any hope for African stability.

Writing a book

I’ve been looking for a decent tool with which to write a book, and haven’t haven’t had much luck.

Pages is nice for laying out stuff, but although it does a Table of Contents nicely, it doesn’t do indexing. I’ve been told that there are templates that do indexing, but I haven’t had any luck in finding them.

Word does indexing, of course, but it’s so amazingly difficult to add an index term that it actively discourages one to do it.

The process, by the way, is:
* Highlight term
* Click on “Insert” -> “Indexes and tables”
* Click “Mark Entry”
* Fill in the term that you wish to appear in the index.
* Click “Mark”
* Click “Close”

Simply having a shortcut key to highlight and mark, or perhaps highlight, right-click, and mark, would greatly increase the effectiveness of this process. If I don’t index while I write, I don’t index.

I could use DocBook, and probably will, but the tools for converting DocBook to anything else are SO geek-centric that I find them profoundly tiresome to use. Having to spend an entire day researching and installing and configuring in order to write content seems excessive.

And of course, I could go back to writing LaTeX. Once I get back into the swing of it, I imagine that it would be the most efficient thing to do. But the output tends to be a little on the sterile side, and it’s hard to do specific layout like image flow, sidebars, and so on – although I’m sure that a dozen people will respond and say, it’s really easy, you just follow this 12-page HowTo. Oy.

Anyways, if someone can simply point me to a Pages template, that would of course be the best of all options.

For the most part, though, it’s frustrating that one either has to be an uber-geek in order to use any of the readily-available book authoring tools, or spend a lot of money on some other tool.

Apache Cookbook 2

In the mail today I received my shipment of Apache Cookbook, 2nd Edition. It’s got a bunch of new recipes, and all the rest of them have been updated for the 2.2 version of the Apache Web Server. You owe it to yourself to go buy a copy now. Go ahead. We’ll wait.

Meanwhile I’d like to share my dedication:

I dedicate this book to the experts on #apache who answer so many of these questions every day, and to their beginners, on their way to becoming experts, who ask them.

A huge thank you goes to all the many people involved in making this book a reality. Tatiana, thank you for your patience and persistent assistance throughout this process.

And, finally, thanks go to my wonderful family. To Sarah, who always looks for my books at the bookstore. To Isaiah, for all his boundless energy and tight hugs. And to my Best Beloved, for helping me discover so much Pointless Beauty.

Ponette

We tried to watch Ponette this evening, but, finally, about 45 minutes in, we turned it off. We simply couldn’t do it. It was just dreadful. It had nothing to recommend it – not plot, or action, or characters. The plot moves like a volkswagen bug in 18 inches of mud. And that’s being generous.

I mention all of this so that, if you’re the person that recommended it to me, you can pretend it was someone else. ‘Cause otherwise, I’m never taking your movie advice again. Ever. Mmkay?

Kenya still in turmoil

Like Ruth, I reached saturation yesterday. I think it happened somewhere between the video of one man hacking at another man with a panga (machete) in Kibera, and the photo of dead children stacked in a morgue.

Although it’s been almost 20 years since I was in Kenya, it’s still home, and I’m filled with a deep sadness at the willful destruction and hatred going on there. I simply can’t get my mind around the kind of hatred that it takes to intentionally hack a 3 year old girl to death. It truly boggles the mind.

Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga, and the members of the ECK, have done an enormous injustice to their people, and a small subset of the people are carrying that injustice into their neighborhoods in a way that will reverberate for generations. It is truly tragic. I have to believe that it’s a tiny subset of the population, because to believe anything else would be monstrous. And certainly to hear people talking about it, everyone there is as horrified as I am at what’s happening. But, clearly, there are still mobs committing these atrocities.

Ruth has said, much more clearly than I could, what it is that I’m feeling. Like her, this is more real to me than news stories of tragedies in places I’ve never heard of, much less been, and I imagine that to most of my readers this is a far-away and somewhat less-than-real place.

So, if I’ve seemed somewhat distracted of late, at least you know why.