Category: General

My sister sent me this card. Happy holidays!

I tried making chicken curry soup with sedano (= sellerie), chicken filet cut into small chunks, onions, ginger, garlic, curry powder and coconut milk. Tastes very good.

Happy Saturday.

I am installing a Joomla 2.5 template. Finishing off my tax declaration. Listening to the radio. Currently on air: a feature on tea. Random fact: Germany consumes more tea per person than China or India cos there are many people so poor they can’t afford even tea. Africa exports the majority of its tea. Just discovered: dradio.de publishes a playlist of the music it plays.

While cycling this morning – on my way to church – a wasp flew directly into my face and stung me on my lower lip. Somehow I managed to remove the stinger. Luckily I am not allergic. I used my bottle of ice water to cool the sting.

Natural remedies:

• place a slice of onion on the sting
• make a paste of baking soda and water to reduce the itch

Do we need this?

Looks like more and more machines are built to auto-transmit signals back to the manufacturer.

Slow start to a beautiful day. Listening to dradio.de and sipping Chicco d’oro coffee and reading my way thru awesome Twitter people and browsing thru Flickr. 2 laptops, 1 iPod Touch, 1 Blackberry, and 1 Canon digicam all within close distance.

Generation screen.

It’s caturday.

Planning to head to the swimming pool later. Loading my iPod with podcasts. Lack of time will always be an outcome in a capitalist environment. Days like this are pure luxury.

Links to read:
Link 1: Yesterday I stumbled across this HBR blog post on the disciplined pursuit of less. Some interesting questions to think about…

• “What am I deeply passionate about?”
• “What taps my talent?”
• “What meets a significant need in the world?”
• “If I did not have this opportunity, how much would I be willing to sacrifice in order to obtain it?”

Link 2: A trend I have been following for years – the emerging new opportunities in Africa as a result of mobile and web technology – is now being recognized.

“Africa is a lively business opportunity which appeals to many entrepreneurs who are not from the continent itself. ” bit.ly/OQUQiL

— ✁___CollectThisTweet (@nchenga) August 10, 2012

Even in small markets like Malawi, software companies are emerging. Developers such as:

• http://www.p4studio.com/ and http://baobabhealth.org in Lilongwe
• http://www.b4csoftware.com/ in Blantyre

Link 3: Strong passwords are not enough. We need to invest more time in securing our online passwords. See this how-to at Lifehacker and this post by Matt Cutts. More hassle. More work.

And Facebook only allows me to enter one cell phone, automatically removing the cell phone on my other Facebook account; apparently one person = one Facebook account = one cell phone number. I currently have 4 Facebook accounts. But on the upside, I may never need to spend energy on resolving this, cos Facebook may become irrelevant… n’est-ce pas? How one botched IPO can change the outlook of a company, is quite mind-boggling.

Music: My favourite band this summer is Boy. Love their sound.

Buon weekend. And please feel free to leave a comment.

Try this. Try smiling. And before you know it. People smile back. And greet you.

I went photo-walking with other Basel Flickrites.

We walked from Messe-Platz to Depot Basel. My highlight was the garden boxes in front of Basel Depot.

Some of my snapshots:

(more…)

for future reference, a list of useful photo resources:

http://nicoleschnell.ch/post/16935324027/stockbilder-for-free

Searching on Facebook:
I previously posted this link on one of my Facebook accounts. But i couldn’t find it although i knew which timeframe and FB account. Plus if a FB post doesn’t have any likes or comments or shares, it gets demoted. Very one-sided approach. Some of my data is valuable and useful to me in future, that’s why I am posting it in the first place.

according to fzi.uni-freiburg.de/VertebratesMOC”¦ “nchenga” is the Chisena word for Greater Honeyguide, Black-throated Honeyguide en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_H”¦

— sand (@nchenga) June 10, 2012

I made some hummus following this recipe

via Cyberwriter, the Swiss version of “Never give up”

My Gmail tip of the day: copy and paste from another website to Gmail.

Via Lifehacker.

And with this hack, I will not need the spammy ads via Send using Gmail (I hope) (maybe).

via Whiteafrican, I read this blog post

The problem with most social networks is the assumption that your life is linear and that people are interested in accumulating their own personal histories in one single repository.

Useful help on advanced search for Gmail

A couple of days ago, I read a post by Louis Gray highlighting Google + search. And I just read this article on the new linking.

Inspired by +louisgray.com, here are some Google + searches to try out:

Search engine optimization
https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/Search%20engine%20optimization

Gapingvoid
https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/gapingvoid

Search for content on Malawi
https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/malawi

Blantyre, Malawi
https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/blantyre%20malawi

Chiperoni
https://plus.google.com/u/0/s/chiperoni

I have returned from a 3 week visit to Blantyre. It was a very relaxing holiday. I visted family and friends in Malawi’s biggest city.

The weather was beautiful as expected: hot and rainy. Even though the rainy season has started, temperatures soared to 36 degrees and more on several days. Blantyre is located at an altitude of over 1000 m above sea level.

Due to an ongoing fuel shortage, I didn’t travel to other parts of Malawi. We did not manage to fill the tank even once during the 3 weeks that I was there. It was very frustrating to queue for 3 and a half hours only to hear, 5 vehicles away from the pump, that diesel is finished.

The forces of demand and supply set in. Black market prices soared to 100 to 120% of the regular filling station price.

Every day you could see men walking around with yellow containers (called zigubu) in search of liquid gold. Zigubu. From a linguistic point of view, I like the word very much. From a driver’s point of view, zigubu are very frustrating, cos it’s a synonym for hoarding.

I found Fred Bvalani’s Malawi Fuel Watch group on Facebook to be a very useful source of information. Zikomo kwambiri.

Since I left the fuel situation has improved. I hope this will continue.

Internet

Throughout my visit i found TNM’s mobile data service to be reliable. I also like the fact that TNM are advertising their products and services in Chichewa, Malawi’s national language.

I noticed that several friends and contacts are using Blackberry smartphones. I am wondering if this is a RIM strategy?

Easyjet for BLZ!

Both of my flights from JNB to BLZ and back were packed to the max. Since Air Malawi’s grounding, the SAA flight is the only regular airlink. I heard there is a small jet that flies to Lusaka. But that’s about it. Passengers flying to Nairobi need to take a bus to Lilongwe, 400 km away from Blantyre, to reach the Kenya Airways connection. I wonder what the limiting factor is in the business case. Evidently it is not so easy. Once upon a time, Comair was planning to buy Air Malawi. But wouldn’t it be cool if Malawi was accessible by means of a low cost airline similar to Easyjet?

As usual I’ve posted some snapshots on Flickr.

I am back in Switzerland. To my amazement, the weather is very mild this January. So far I haven’t really felt cold, despite my tropical break.

I am making Schoggi-Weggli based on this recipe

In my inbox:

“If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google.”

http://incubator.apache.org/wave/

http://code.google.com/p/walkaround/