Another Malawi blog I’d like to share with you:
Dr Khumbo Kalua writes about his studies and work as a Senior Eye Specialist in Blantyre.
Google Book Search on chiperoni:
The climate is tropical and monsoonal with a wet season (November to May) and a dry season (May to November). The dry season is mostly cool but hot and humid prior to the first rain. Maritime influences ameliorate the dry season in the Shire Highlands with periods of light, misty drizzle, locally known as chiperoni.
When I read Scoble’s post on FlickrFan, I felt it sounded a lot like Slickr, a screensaver tool to view Flickr photos, that I’ve been using for a while.
And today while installing the Flickr plugin for Quicksilver I saw this post:
View Your Flickr Pics as Your Screensaver with FlickrFan
with this small addition at the end:
Windows users looking for something similar should check out previously mentioned Slickr.
According to one of the comments I read at Lifehacker you can set up Google Photos Screensaver to do something similar.
It seems FlickrFan is based on RSS feeds and offers some kind of Twitter integration.
Further links:
http://www.flickrfan.org/
Slickr download
Google Photos Screensaver
If you’re a widely-read blogger with a Mac-only view of the world, this is a revolution… 😉
This looks useful:
Upload to Flickr with Quicksilver
The QS plugin page is here.
I still need to try out the new Flickr Uploadr that was released a couple of weeks ago.
I’m playing around with WordPress themes today 😉
Currently displaying is a Mac theme to celebrate this year’s move to a MacBook.
It snowed a little bit today… about half a millimeter.
This Newsweek column on Barack Obama made me wonder how high the chances are that he’ll be elected by mainstream America.
Questions like “Is Obama a Muslim?” are already part of the debate. But apart from his religious affiliation, does he really stand a chance?
Another recurring question is
“Who has the better qualifications to lead the world’s only superpower?”
Besides his formal qualifications, Obama argues that his personal history will help understand foreign affairs.
I agree with the Newsweek columnist that living outside of Europe and North America changes perspectives and helps to see things from different angles. The author lists examples such as Zalmay Khalizad and Henry Kissinger.
Whatever the outcome, it will be interesting to follow Obama’s campaign.
The International Herald Tribune writes:
29. MALAWI
Blame Madonna. Safarigoers tended to overlook Malawi, but that has changed since she began her effort to adopt a 1-year-old boy from this tiny African country that lies within the Great Rift Valley. Next July, the luxury lodge Pumulani (www.pumulani.com) is set to open 10 villas on spectacular Lake Malawi, home to rare cichlids and pied kingfishers.
All listed in the NYT
I saw this search phrase in my blog stats:
was idi amin involved in movie production?
errr…
“The Last King of Scotland” is based on a fictional book by Giles Foden and is a US and UK production with Forest Whitaker in the main role.
See also this Wikipedia page on Idi Amin.
And this IHT article.
I saw the documentary Heimatklänge and liked it very much.
Great images, interesting musicians and original. Category: highly recommended.
I liked the use of Super 8 film sequences.
The musicians are Erika Stucky, Noldi Alder, Christian Zehnder, Sina, Stimmhorn, Huun Huur Tu.
See this page for further links.
Here’s an interview with Erica Stucky.
Other movies filmed by Pio Corradi include Vitus… another fave.
Found this interesting read at Times Online:
A voyage round my father
A daughter follows her father’s footsteps to Mount Mulanje.
Page three of the article includes travel tips.
Malawi is Africa as it once was, so there are no vast luxurious holiday compounds and few sumptuous lodges to insulate you from the masses.
Here are a couple of links on the book “Venture to the Interior” by Laurens van der Post: 1 2
Rant ahead.
I have an old Yahoo email address, where I keep (or better kept) old emails for reference purposes. Mostly for nostalgic reasons. From dotcom times. From 1999 or 2000. None of it mission-critical.
Gone. I logged into Yahoo Mail the other day and was greeted with a smug everything’s deleted message, asking me if I’d like to re-activate my account.
Granted. I only logged in once every six months or less. But they could have sent me a couple of warnings on the alternate email I listed.
It also shows that there isn’t much Yahoo-wide interaction, ‘cos if they would have looked across to Flickr they would have seen that the same ID is still in use.
For me that’s the huge downside of online apps: corporations decide at will what they can do with your content.
It’s happened to me before by smaller companies as well. My old blog disappeared into Nirvana. Cos I didn’t get around to downloading the data fast enough.
I just read Seth Godin’s post on monopolies:
Welcome to a new century. In the new century, we all have the same goal:
1. Establish a direct and positive relationship with the end user.
I feel that tech. companies are using “user generated content” as a way to build their business, but forget that there are real people on the other side.
Keep going down this road. And I’ll move on.
Jahuuuuu.
Apparently the French and German versions of Nutella vary somewhat:
French Nutella is sweeter and tastes more like nuts.
German Nutella includes more cocoa.
The biggest difference is the texture, French nutella is softer than the German kind.
Thanks to Booksprite for sending me the link.
a favorite photoset is:
impressive list:
Office 2.0 tools
A WordPress plugin called Bad Behavior blocked me out of my own blog this morning.
Error 403
We’re sorry, but we could not fulfill your request for /wordpress/wp-admin/index-extra.php?jax=incominglinks on this server.
Your Internet Protocol address is listed on a blacklist of addresses involved in malicious or illegal activity. See the listing below for more details on specific blacklists and removal procedures.
Your technical support key is: xxx
You can use this key to fix this problem yourself.
If you are unable to fix the problem yourself, please contact xxx at gmail.com and be sure to provide the technical support key shown above.
The solution is to to install the latest version of the plugin.
Within the past two days users have found themselves blocked from their own sites while using recent versions of Bad Behavior. A third party blacklist which Bad Behavior queries recently began sending false positives for any IP address queried, causing everyone using Bad Behavior to be blocked. This issue is fixed in Bad Behavior 2.0.11.
It took me a while to find this entry… Googling for the error message itself sent me into various different threads about .htaccess, read/write permissions and prototype.js.
aargh*
Here’s the next marketing book to read:
Interview with Seth Godin about Meatball Sundae
What a name for a book.
*just finished reading “The new Rules of Marketing and PR”
I finished reading David Meerman Scott’s book on: “The new rules of Marketing and PR”.
Here’s a quote which is probably already the most quoted excerpt out of the book:
Big news is great, but don’t wait.
- Have a new take on an old problem? Write a release.
- Serving a unique marketplace? Write a release.
- Have interesting information to share? Write a release.
- CEO speaking at a conference? Write a release.
- Win an award? Write a release.
- Add a product feature? Write a release.
- Win a new customer? Write a release.
- Publish a white paper? Write a release.
- Get out of bed this morning? Okay, maybe not… but you are thinking the right way now!
His main point is that news releases should be written for a wider audience, not just journalists.
And I liked the chapter on avoiding typical industry PR speak (see the The Gobbledygook Manifesto).
I found the book helpful.
Most of all I felt reassured that somebody else has written down lots of the things I discovered on my own by following a hands-on, learning-by-doing, check-out-what-works approach regarding blogs and news releases.
But before I go into further detail, I’ll wait for Mlle. A. and her literary criticism.
Here’s my previous post on this book:
You still have 29 days left to finish up your 2007 New Year’s resolutions. Stop slacking.
The case for blogging, beyond the hype:
If you have something to say, then a blog offers a cheap, easy global medium in which to express yourself. This is as true now as it was three years ago, regardless of what the groovy cats in Silicon Valley may be up to.
Whether you have the time and the talent for it, “i.e. the skill and the will”, is another matter altogether. Also, whether other people will want to read it, is something one has little control over. But in both cases, the same is true for all other media.
That’s a big if.
