Mohammed Sameer's Online Aggregator

Historian Kenneth Vickery is a pinch-speaker today, filling in for George Ayittey. It’s awfully hard to fill Ayittey’s shoes, but Ayittey has been well represented by early speakers, and Vickery has a useful set of stories to tell - historical stories from the continent from the past millenium. He starts with his own story - a young graduate student, hitchhiking from Nairobi to Arusha, and collecting stories from the man kind enough to pick him up and the people he encountered on the trip.

The second session opens with a remarkable piece of film, an excerpt from a stop-motion animation titled, “Only the Hand that Erases Can Write the True Thing”. It’s a haunting and moving piece, but i’s a bit jarring before we move into the rest of the session, which opens as a rebuttal of the first session.

Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda is man of strong opinions. His opinions in 2005 about Museveni’s government were strong enough to put him in jail briefly. He tells us that this is an auspicious time for this meeting, since it parallels the meetings in Germany for the G8 which are discussing “a Marshall plan for aid for Africa”. To call Mwenda skeptical about this idea is to do him an injustice - he’s a firm believer that international aid is a dangerous and largely harmful direction for Africa.

June Arunga tells us in her three minute talk that, as a kid growing up in Kenya, she was fascinated by “cool stuff” from around the world. “All this stuff had a label on it ‘made in X country’ and none of those countries where in Africa. “Why does the cool stuff come from elsewhere?” she wondered. “Why can kids at 16 get cars at graduation in the US, when it’s hard to get a car with a PhD in Kenya?”

I proudly present Gnome Specimen 0.2, your favourite tool for previewing and comparing fonts. It has been a while since the initial Gnome Specimen release happened. Since then, development has slowed down a bit… however, Gnome Specimen is still alive!

User-visible changes in this release:

I put up some photos on flickr.

I’ve only been to TED - the Monterey, CA-based “Technology, Entertainment and Design” conference twice - but I’ve worked out a basic survival strategy for those events. Because I spend the conference blogging in real time - a practice that requires roughly 120% of my brain capacity - I do my best to hide in a hotel room during off hours, sleep as much as possible and generally turn one of the world’s great networking opportunities into a near-solitary practice.