Entries in Life

winterspeak.com:

Traffic accidents are predominantly caused by people being inattentive. Increase the feeling of risk, and you increase the attention.

(emphasis mine)

Do you know any programmers that exhibit these personality traits…?:

Do you know any programmers that exhibit these personality traits…? I’ve been observing an unusual programmer friend of mine for some time now. (Yeah… a “friend”, that’s it….) He has such a strange combination of potential and incompetence that its hard to tell if he is just lazy or [...]

When I first came across _why‘s tweet on PerlBuzz, I thought it was so profound (by which I mean, anti-consumeristic), that I told dvfmama right away.

when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

This is why I would rather listen to my three-year-old belt out show tunes than watching American Idol. This is why I would much rather see my daughter practice standing on her head than watching America’s Got Talent. This is why I can only zone for so long while I idle away hour after hour in solitary web surfing or late night TV watching. This is why I was so happy to give the Ugandan Ministry of Health something that they would use. I hate being a consumer. I fall into the “entertain me” trap more often than I want to confess, but I hate seeing myself there. I hate the thought that my children will be passive participants in culture rather than creative, engaged people. This doesn’t mean that I want them to go out and get a degree in the Humanities. (dvfmama wouldn’t allow it anyway.) So I’m probably already diverging somewhat from what _why originally meant. But who cares? Do not wait for other people. Get out there, do things, be engaged, and tell others about it. (By the way, my co-worker-at-a-distance, Shannon picked up on the Why Create? theme.) But that last bit (“tell others about it”) is a key I’ve been missing for some time. And, for someone who spends 90% of his time working 400 miles away from his co-workers, this is a real shame and, worse, a real impediment to good work. I’m good communicator when I need to be, but till recently, I haven’t been in the habit of communicating regularly with other people that I’m working with. Sure, a lot of this was the physical distance, the lack of face-to-face time — the fact that I abhor teleconferences. But a lot of the problem (and the problem shows up even when I’m working down the hall from people) can be fixed by just sending out a regular email, making sure that everyone who might be concerned knows what I’m doing. Sure, a lot of times it’ll get filed in the bit-bucket, but (and I’ve begun to realize this and put it into practice more since my trip to Uganda) communication isn’t optional, it isn’t overhead; it’s a necessary habit. Of course, it was really helpful that I had this epiphany about communication and started putting it into practice in the past couple of weeks. Today, I met with some IT auditors here in Chapel Hill and told them what my role was in the organization. Before this, I probably would have been much more resentful of the very idea. But for now, at least, I’m feel like I’m on top of the world and I’m happy to tell them what it is I do.

Where have all the real men gone? – Times Online:

As long as men feel marginalised by the women whose favours and approval they seek; as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts; as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honour; and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.

It has been a while since I had any kind of injury from cycling.  Today I made up for some of that lost time. Excited to have my bike back, I went out this morning for the first time to ride.  And I learned an important lesson: after you’ve been off it for a while, it is best to check your gear before expecting to ride like you were before. It rained some last night and the roads were still wet.  On the first good downhill run, I tried to put on the brakes and they didn’t respond the way I expected them to.  Down I went, sliding along the road for a good 10 feet. Apart from a bruised and swollen leg and road rash on various parts of my body, I’m alive.  The same can’t be said for my shorts which were shredded.  I took a few minutes to lay on the side of the road and recover a bit from the shock.  Then I limped back home. I’m just disappointed that I won’t be putting in any miles for a few days.

This week I start working on a project to help gather medical information in villages throughout Rwanda, so the project I’ve been working on for the past couple of months is officially over.  I’ve written my postmortem and had a chance to recuperate from the travel (including the airline losing my baggage in London and a screaming three year old on an eight hour flight — horror stories best only hinted at). But this last project looks as if it was about as successful as I could hope for, so indulge me a few moments while I tell you what we did. While medical information is gathered throughout Uganda, reports are regularly written, and analysis is frequently done, sharing information between health care workers and officials is problematic. Until now, there was only one small central library at the Ministry of Health which held only a single stand-alone PC for accessing and reading electronic documents. To make matters worse, the proprietary software for storing and accessing the electronic documents only accepted PDFs, so anything a doctor wrote in, say, Microsoft Word had to be converted before it could be used in the system. With the help of the Knowledge Management (KM) team at IntraHealth, a few of us on the Informatics team put together a Joomla+KnowledgeTree combination that would allow health care workers and officials to upload any Office document, collaborate around them, and easily access them from any networked computer. My work centered on the integration and initial set up of the software — putting it all together in a way that made the KM people happy. And, frankly, much of that work isn’t any different than what I could be doing in almost any Tech Shop or corporate environment.  And for a while, it was like any software project, full of frustrations and delays.  While KnowledgeTree was an obviously mature piece of software, I found some of its idiosyncrasies irritating and some of its capabilities anemic. The real difference — the real satisfaction — came when I was finally able to sit down with the librarian at the Ministry of Health in Uganda and I heard him say “This is great, it is so much better and easier to than our current system!  And we don’t have convert all our files to PDF first!” It was a relief to hear those words.  Until then, doubt still lingered.  But after that meeting, while there was still a lot of work to be done and a lot of work that I wouldn’t be able to complete, now I knew that we had a successful, even worthwhile, product. Even better, the technical people I worked with and trained as well as the Ministry workers all understood the usefulness and had the same goal in mind: fostering adoption of the new “electronic library” throughout Uganda. Now, back to the work.  Hopefully I’ll have another success story in a few months.

As you walk around many African cities, you’ll hear one word popping up over and over: Mzungu. It means “White Person” and comes from a contraction that means “Person who moves around.” Earlier this week, I bought myself a T-Shirt with “Mzungu” emblazoned on it.  It seems pretty obvious that people don’t realize you understand that when they say the word they’re talking about you.  Wearing the T-Shirt gives them a clue. Tonight, I wore the shirt down to dinner.  Several of the wait staff and the manager of the restaurant made comments about my shirt. “Interesting shirt” “Like it?” “Yeah” One man asked me if I knew what the word meant and how I knew.  We had a lengthy conversation where we talked about culture, movies, and the way people act.  During this, one of other men came up and said “How are you, Mzungu?”  “Fine, thank you.” That was all he wanted to say, but we both got a kick out of it.

  Yesterday, I almost died.  It was well worth the $75. Friday, I took one of the local people we work with up on his offer. When I mentioned I wanted to go raft the Nile, he said he would be happy to take me down there.  I called him to confirm and we arraged to meet at 10 on Saturday morning. When Saturday rolled around, something came up and he couldn’t make it.  Determined not to miss another chance, I found a rafting operator who was willing to pick me up at the hotel, take me rafting, feed me 3 meals and drive me back home.  We were to leave Sunday morning. I woke up and met them bright and early.  We drove around Kampala picking up other people who wanted to go rafting: a couple from Holland, an Italian and his Ugandan girlfriend, and half the crew of a Chinese telecommunications firm.  I started talking to the sales manager for the group.  He told me that China is funding over a billion dollars worth of telecommunications projects in Uganda.  The company he works with is one of the construction firms that bids on projects to build cell towers. As we drove the 80km (50mi) or so from Kampala to Jinja, I was struck by how different the area was than what I saw of Rwanda.  The area I saw looked more developed, more exploited.  In the middle of fields, hulking factories sat belching smoke from their stacks.  Rwanda, by way of contrast, seemed to be filled with only terraced farms. Before we even started down the river, a bad omen popped up.  A chinese woman stepped on a nail and it went straight through her foot.  She hobbled away, but her determination brought her back at lunchtime. So, anyway, we hopped in the raft and sat through 20 or 30 minutes of introduction to how to ride a raft.  The guide made sure we knew how to respond when he told us “Forward”, “Back”, “GET DOWN!” and “HARD FORWARD!”  We all needed it.  It was the first experience riding rapids for all of us — even more amazing was that two people on our raft couldn’t swim!  The guide didn’t seem to have a problem bringing them along even after we practiced what would happen if the raft flipped and they both freaked out. We started just before our first bit of rapids.  Only a Class 3 or so, it was plentwy of fun.  After that We drifted and paddled downstream to where we came upon some rapids that our guide called “Class 5 and half”.  The other side of the Nile at that point was being damned up for a power station and the volume of water over the already-Class 5 rapids was increased.  He gave us a warning and a few pointers and then we went into it. On the first bump, almost everyone went over.  On the second bump, idiot that I was, I thought “I want to go in the water!” and didn’t hang on.  Into the water I went. It was here that I learned why it is important to hold onto the rope that runs around the edge of the raft. I was under the water but knew I was coming up soon, so I didn’t worry too much.  When I came up, I took a breath… But not a deep one.  The water didn’t let me.  I moved into the 2m (6ft) pile of water at that point.  I didn’t have enough air and I was struggling to breath and I was scared.  I saw the light, but air was suddenly very far away and the river was pushing me along.  The river ignored my life jacket’s desire to surface and pushed me along under water forever. When I finally surfaced I tried to get the attention of the crew with Kayaks.  Still struggling to get any air into my lungs I began to panic more and felt very weak. When a kayaker finally came with distance, I grabbed on for dear life. After this experience, when everyone was back in the boat, our guide made a point of telling us to grab the rope with both hands and, more importantly, DON’T LET GO when we he told us “GET DOWN”.  Even when we hit more Class 5 rapids, we had no trouble staying in the boat from then on. We hit more rapids that morning but spent some of the time just drifting in the water, sometimes jumping into the Nile and swimming or floating along side the raft. When we reached our lunch spot, the food hadn’t shown up, so I got to spend some time just floating on my back watching eagles high in the sky or diving beneath the water, all the terror from earlier almost totally forgotten in the beatific surroundings. (Not all was total bliss, though.  I missed the spot to get out of the river and walked through what I thought was some mud.  Turns out that was the spot the local cowherds brought their charges to drink.  And the cows did a bit more than drink in that water.  The local people laughed when they saw a Mzungu with dung from their cows all over his legs.  I found the right place in the water and rinsed off.) After lunch, we hit the water again for more rowing and riding. We saw many a pastoral scene where women and children were washing clothes by the river … a few were even bare-chested, National Geographic style. The wildlife was amazing.  This was the first time I saw a kingfisher in action.  I’ve never seen a bird hover quite so effortlessly. We saw fish eagles, monkeys, egrets and men punting their bike across the river.  Unfortunatly, I wans’t able to capture any of these since my camera isn’t waterproof. The trip over 27km (17mi) of the Nile was amazing (though I’m sure I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much had I died).  It was about the best $75 I’ve ever spent. (Pictures when I get a chance.)

A couple of days ago, I insinuated that someone at the TSA had stolen my camera.  I hereby apologize for disparaging the character of such a fine American institution. Today, I put on my boots for the first time and found my camera.  I had forgotten that I tossed it in my boots when I was hurriedly rearranging my stuff just before going into the airport.

Just before leaving, I dropped my bike off at the shop for a “tune-up”.  One thing that I did ask them to do was put new tires on it since I have 1500 miles on those tires and I’m trying to be a little pro-active. Still, I did fllirt with the idea of packing my bike to Uganda.  I would be the only white cyclist out here.  I did see one black roadie and while there are a fair number of people riding beaters , but Boda Bodas and cars seem to be what most people use for transport (if they aren’t using their own two feet).  And believe me, you can see it in the air. While my next trip to Africa might include some road cycling, I have to improvise this time around for my exercise.  I’m on the 6th floor of the hotel (which makes it the 7th floor since they use European floor numbering).  So I run up and down the stairs several times a day.  Instead of getting a driver to take me back to the hotel (c’mon! I can’t be that posh all the time!) I’ll walk the mile or so back uphill. I doubt I’m burning the 1500 calories/day I was at home, but if I can just remember that I don’t have to eat EVERYTHING I’ll be alright.