When all this first started with Tunisia, I didn’t think there was any way the people could oust their president after some 24 years in power. I’d spent just a couple of weeks there in 2008, and people seemed more or less willing to accept the corruption of a government that was at least more or less secular, invested in education, and allowed a bit more freedom than many other North African and Middle Eastern countries.

I was way wrong about Tunisia, and with Mubarak gone from Egypt, people all over the region have been emboldened to demand more accountability, more transparency and more say over their lives. Some governments will probably manage to placate the protesters with handouts and subsidies, and some will crush them brutally, but before the dust settles, maybe — just maybe — one or two more long-oppressed peoples will manage to send their leaders into the dustbins of history.

The thing to remember is that even small peaceful protests are completely unheard of in many of these countries. The fact that governments that normally have no tolerance for dissent aren’t immediately rolling over them with tanks is a huge step forward in itself. And when tens of thousands of people to crowd the avenues and public squares, that’s huge news.

Here’s a run-down by country:

• Algeria: More than 10,000 people took part in a march in Algiers, and a man tried to set himself on fire to protest against the government’s inability to create jobs. Over the weekend, 2,000-3,000 protesters faced off against some 30,000 police.
• Bahrain: Police are breaking up protests — non-lethally so far — as people take to the streets to demand respect for human rights and greater freedoms.
• Iran: After brutally cracking down on huge anti-government protests following 2009’s stolen election, police are so far using non-lethal weapons to control thousands of Iranians “rallying in support of the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.”
• Iraq: A small Valentine’s Day protest against government corruption follows the death of a man in Mosul who lit himself on fire to draw attention to the government’s continuing inability to create jobs.
• Jordan: Just a few days after mass protests led Jordan’s king to replace his prime minister, crowds are demanding that the new PM be replaced as well.
• Lebanon: As Egyptians took to the streets, thousands of Lebanese people demanded that Hezbollah relinquish its newfound hold on Lebanon’s government.
• Libya: On Feb. 17, Libyans plan to hold a massive unprecedented “Day of Rage” against the 41-year rule of Muammar Gaddafi, Libya’s self-described “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”
• Morocco: Calls for more jobs have been the rallying cry of more Egypt-inspired demonstrations in Morocco, after an unemployed former soldier set himself on fire.
• Palestine: As unrest begins, the Palestinian Authority promised to overhaul his cabinet to try and prevent Gazans from taking ot the streets.
• Saudi Arabia: In one of the region’s — and the world’s — most repressive countries, where public demonstrations are unheard of, tiny protests are starting to take place. The Saudi government appears terrified at the prospect of Egypt-style protests — especially after its strong support for Mubarak turns out to have been lent to the losing side.
• Syria: A mass protest that gained lots of Facebook and Twitter support from Syrians fizzled without ever taking place, but Syrians afraid of incurring their government’s wrath may not be far from taking to the streets.
• Yemen: Protesters are taking to the streets to demand the president’s resignation.

Image via Parlour Magazine.

Or at least, there will be soon.

The City of Boston is working on an app that uses your iPhone’s accelerometer to detect bumps while you’re driving, and its GPS to tell the city where the bumps happened.

According to the Boston Globe, the iPhone is “sensitive enough to identify cracks and divots,” and test runs are helping calibrate the app to filter out bumps from manhole covers, cobblestones and the like.

Here in Montreal, humidity, radical temperature shifts and the 30,000 tons of road salt used each year make for a pothole paradise — to the point where residents have turned some of them into art installations and Flickr galleries.

Story via Slashdot.
Image via The Old Car Dawg.

For a while now, I’ve been convinced that the secret behind Wired’s success is that its editors know their audience: a generation of ADHD technophiles that love cool new things but don’t want to read more than 50 words about them. The mag is chock full of charts, tables and pithy rapid-fire bursts of did-you-know goodness that fit nicely into all the 2-minute breaks in your day — coffee, commercial, bathroom or otherwise.

But every so often, one of its full-length feature stories is interesting enough to make me quit my multitasking and read the thing in one sitting. This time, it’s a piece on a Toronto statistician named Mohan Srivastava, who figured out that by examining the visible numbers on the front of a scratch lottery ticket, you could reliably predict the numbers under the gray latex coating, and pick winning tickets without even getting your fingernails dirty.

Srivastava reported the flaws to the authorities, but not just because he’s such an honest guy:

“I’d have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That’s not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets.”

If your own salary isn’t quite so high, and if you’ve got a lot of spare time on your hands, you might be just a few a calculations and a few thousand scratches away from riches. The Tic-Tac-Toe ticket that Srivastava gamed has since been pulled from stores, but he’s apparently got other ones figured out too — and some of those are still for sale. Best of all, there doesn’t seem to be any law against using publicly visible information to pick winning lottery tickets.

If you’re thinking about quitting your day job to get rich littering your living room with latex scrapings, you probably won’t be the only one. From Wired:

Consider a series of reports by the Massachusetts state auditor. The reports describe a long list of troubling findings, such as the fact that one person cashed in 1,588 winning tickets between 2002 and 2004 for a grand total of $2.84 million. […] A 1999 audit found that another person cashed in 149 tickets worth $237,000, while the top 10 multiple-prize winners had won 842 times for a total of $1.8 million. Since only six out of every 100,000 tickets yield a prize between $1,000 and $5,000, the auditor dryly observed that these “fortunate” players would have needed to buy “hundreds of thousands to millions of tickets.”

Check out the Wired article for DIY lottery-hacking instructions.

I’m not sure it’s humanly possible to listen to this song for more than 60 seconds without doing a little bum-shaking boogie-woogie in your chair.

Five or six years ago, a roomie of mine was heavily into stuff like the Smiths and Stone Roses, and I just couldn’t stand that 80’s sound. A few years later, I’ve come to love the Stone Roses.

Back in 2007, that song in the video up there — Fool’s Gold — was ranked 32nd in NME Magazine’s very subjective list of the top 50 indie rock anthems of all time.

The top ten:

1. Oasis – ‘Live Forever’
2. Nirvana – ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’
3. Pulp – ‘Common People’
4. The Smiths – ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’
5. The Libertines – ‘Don’t Look Back Into The Sun’
6. The Libertines – ‘Time For Heroes’
7. The Smiths – ‘How Soon Is Now?’
8. The Stone Roses – ‘I Am The Resurrection’
9. The Strokes – ‘Last Nite’
10. Arctic Monkeys – ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’

But even with my newfound musical sensibilities, I still can’t bloody stand the Smiths. (Sorry Allison.) Give There is a Light that Never Goes Out a listen and tell me I’m wrong. Blecch…

For a week now, the world has been Googling Egypt like never before. But not in China, where search engines are blocking search terms like “Egypt” and “Cairo,” keeping people in China from staying up to date on Egypt’s mass revolt. Terms related to the protest are also blocked on Sina, a Chinese Twitter clone.

I wonder if China’s worried about Lhasa looking just a little bit like Cairo…

Incidentally, I was pretty astonished to find that Flickering Pictures apparently displays just fine in China (according to WebSitePulse), in spite of plenty of posts like these.

As it was in Tunisia and Iran, Twitter is a major organizing tool for dissidents in Egypt, and it was certainly one of the sites the government was most concerned about when it took the unprecedented step of shutting down all Internet access across the country a few days ago.

Back on Saturday, I posted a couple of workarounds for getting online when the man turns off the Internet. Now a California company called SayNow is plugging a new tool for sending and receiving tweets via telephone. The company says it came up with the idea “over the weekend.”

SayNow — which was bought by Google just days before its announcement — aims to keep Twitter accessible to Egypt’s 80 million residents with a simple long-distance voicemail-to-tweet service that Google says works like this:

It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

Incidentally, if you’re taking bets on which Middle Eastern country might be next to feature massive anti-government demonstrations, maybe Syria should be near the top of your list. Syrians are organizing protests — on Facebook and Twitter, natch –set to start on Feb. 4. And the masses have already taken to the streets in Jordan, where the king has just shuffled his cabinet in an attempt to appease protesters.

Story via Boing Boing
Image via CNet

So it isn’t news anymore that Egypt has followed in Tunisia’s footsteps, in taking to the streets to overthrow a multi-decade dictator. You’ve probably also heard that to prevent protesters from organizing, Egypt has cut off broadband and mobile Internet access to its 80 million residents in the biggest Web blackout the world has seen so far.

But you may not know the tricks that tech-savvy Egyptians are using to get around the ban. The ever-excellent Lifehacker has a few ideas:

Unless the Egyptian government kills all of the phone lines as well, you might remember one means of getting online that broadband has since relegated to obsolescence: dial-up. While there’s no Egyptian ISP that will allow internet access to Egyptian citizens, other countries will, meaning any Egyptian citizen with long-distance calling capabilities can break out their old school 56k modem and dial-up an ISP in another country)

If you ever happen to find yourself in the midst of nationwide protests to overthrow a dictator-for-life, and the government shuts down broadband access, dialing into a foreign ISP might be just the ticket to Internet freedom. But what if the man is also watching international phone calls?

Back in a former life, in a geekier time than I care to remember, I helped run my old high school’s BBS. It was pretty cutting-edge at the time: a private PC connected to a phone line that other computers could call — one at a time — to swap messages, play games, and download teeny tiny files over 14.4kbps connections. When we upgraded to 28.8kbps — and later the same kind of 56k modem that’s likely gathering dust in the computer you’re using right now — the speed boost was a revelation. It was slow as molasses, and picking up a phone in the next room while you were connected would corrupt your transfers, but at the time, it was all we had. And there was no fussing with ISPs and IP addresses — just two computers having a conversation.

Now, the inability to accommodate more than one visitor per phone line at a time is a major limitation, but a series of BBSes might still be a way for opposition leaders to swap information, build a strategy, and agree on times and places for demonstrations. And the archaic tech is being kept alive — ham radio-style — by a network of devoted BBS enthusiasts around the world.

Just a thought…

Some other workarounds, via Lifehacker:

• SailMail, an e-mail service for sailors at sea.
• AccessNow’s Global Proxy Cloud. Seems to be down a lot though.

Wow. Deep breath.

So a whole year has gone by since I last poked around in this dusty little corner of the Web. I’ve missed flickering pictures more and more lately. You get comfortable in a place, get to know the regulars, hang some pretty things up on the walls, and it becomes a kind of home — and like a real home, it’s always home, even if you go away for a while.

We arts-major types like to complain about writer’s block — a maddening inability to make the words come out, especially when there’s something you want desperately to say. Even worse though is the opposite problem: having nothing in the world to say, but spurting a cacophony of words onto the screen just the same — filling up a perfectly good page with “flap and doodle, balder and dash.” For the last year or so, I’ve had a lot to work on, to learn from, to mull over… but not a lot to say. I’m not sure how much that’s changed, but for the first time in a long time, I really feel like writing.

So let’s give this another go. I can’t promise I won’t drop off the face of the Earth again tomorrow, but I’m not planning on it. It’s good to be chatting with you folks again. And it’s good to be here.

Sand animation is the art of storytelling through continuously created and recreated images in sand, and there may be no one better at it than Kseniya Simonova. In the video above, she steals the show on Ukraine’s equivalent of the America’s Got Talent TV show, and has the judges and audience in tears as she tells the story of a peaceful pre-WWII Ukraine, Germany’s ensuing occupation, and the restoration of independence. The medium, sand on a backlit tabletop, is just gorgeous — and made all the more dramatic as she builds into a frenzy of sand and emotion and long black whirling hair. You’ve really got to see it.

Though you wouldn’t know it, Simonova is new to the art, having decided to become an artist after the credit crisis sent her business belly-up. Since her TV victory though, the art world has started to take her seriously, and YouTube’s lower-brow art-lover community has noticed too, as the Guardian reports:

Her war story has over 400,000 views on YouTube [actually more like four million now] and is provoking an interesting debate in the comments section. Jgoo24 notes that “sand is her bitch” and few would argue with this. “Maybe the most magnificent master piece of art of all time” says DevinsDad90, not a man prone to hyperbole. And also “i just jizzed in my pants” (thank you, deaddevil6).

You can watch the full-screen version of her WWII recreation here, or check out some of her other work.

BTW, somebody help me with this — she looks exactly like a celebrity whose name I can’t remember for the life of me. Who’s her famous twin?

Thanks Gen and Craig!

After an impromptu beatboxing lesson from a pro, Paul MacInnes, the Guardian’s slightly disheveled entertainment editor, takes the stage and delivers a valiant if somewhat silly-looking live performance. I gotta say: it’s good to see a reporter who doesn’t take himself too seriously.

“They’ve got a special bit for me in the second half,” he says in the video. “It’s going to involve all my noises.”

Thankfully, it doesn’t.

His tutor, incidentally, is Kevin Fox, the Toronto-born baritone and member of the storied Swingle Singers a cappella octet. Oddly enough, the band was founded way back in 1962 by a hip cat named Ward Swingle, who had to be the only Alabaman in Paris at the time. Swingle and his crew made a name for themselves — and scored five Grammies — doing strangely awesome things like scatting the works of J.S. Bach.

Today’s Swingle Singers make a living selling their sound to big-name TV shows like Sex and the City, The West Wing and Glee. They also put out a CD every year or so, but really — and I’m not trying to be mean here — would you pay £10 or $17 for a cappella versions of Christmas carols and Air on a G String? Maybe I’m just uncultured.

In case you didn’t catch this back in December, an apparently homeless man named “Mustard” recorded a pretty damn fantastic cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” on the sometimes controversial Opie and Anthony show, broadcast on XM Radio and Sirius Satellite.

Little-known fact: “Creep,” now one of Radiohead’s biggest hits, sold just 6,000 copies as a single in the U.K., as local media thought the song was too depressing to broadcast. The band was moving on to other projects when Israeli Army Radio became the first station to give it significant radio play. It took off from there, and Radiohead built a tour around the song, with Tel Aviv the first city they played outside of the U.K.

This has been one of my favourite YouTube videos for ages now — six drummers wait until an elderly couple leaves their apartment to walk the dog, then breaks in and proceeds to turn each of their rooms into a distinct and remarkable musical instrument. Truly odd and wonderful, and I never did figure out what country it was from.

Some other neat videos of people hitting things in a musically pleasing fashion…

• Seven young’uns with a bunch of mikes, a sound board and a Jeep Cherokee that they slap, whack, click and slam to make music: link (Thanks Fatts!)
• Brazilian band with a dedicated rubber-duckie player: link
• Best drummer under ten years old you’ll ever see: link

Before I read this, I didn’t know that octopuses could navigate mazes, solve problems, and even work the lid off a screw-top jar in search of food.

Wikipedia says:

An octopus has a highly complex nervous system, only part of which is localized in its brain. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in the nerve cords of its arms, which have a remarkable amount of autonomy. […] Some octopuses, such as the Mimic Octopus, will move their arms in ways that emulate the movements of other sea creatures.

In laboratory experiments, octopuses can be readily trained to distinguish between different shapes and patterns. They have been reported to practice observational learning, although the validity of these findings is widely contested on a number of grounds. Octopuses have also been observed in what some have described as play: repeatedly releasing bottles or toys into a circular current in their aquariums and then catching them. Octopuses often break out of their aquariums and sometimes into others in search of food. They have even boarded fishing boats and opened holds to eat crabs

The U.K. has even decided that although they lack a spine, octopuses’ extreme cleverness makes them “honorary vertebrates,” which means researchers and pet-owners must follow the same animal cruelty laws for them as they would for mammals and other intelligent backboned critters.

So, with octopuses as bright as they are, it should be no surprise that a British octopus named Louis has grown extremely attached to his Mr. Potato Head toy — so attached that he gets violent when his handlers tried to take it away. Louis has even figured out how to get hidden food out of the toy’s spare parts compartment.

Over the course of my extensive scholarly research for this post, I came across this and asked myself the age-old question: “Is it possible to stumble upon a Wikipedia article on ‘Octopus Wrestling’ without stopping to read it?” Answer: No. Apparently, wrestling matches between divers and octopuses attracted up to 5,000 spectators in the 1960s. Now they watch NASCAR.

Incidentally, and because I know you were all wondering, Wikipedia also says the acceptable plural forms of “octopus” are “‘octopuses,’ ‘octopi,’ or ‘octopodes,’” and that “[c]urrently, ‘octopuses’ is the most common form in the US as well as the UK; ‘octopodes’ is rare, and ‘octopi’ is often objectionable.” It doesn’t say what’s so objectionable about “octopi.”

Thanks, B!
Top image via Apex/Metro
Side image via Wikipedia.

Why does it always have to be “Death to so-and-so”? Is there no middle ground between “Long live Imam Khomeini” and “Death to the dictator”? Why not something a little more constructive, like “Stop beating and killing unarmed protestors for no damn reason”?

With temperatures dipping to a nippy 3°C on National Students’ Day, tens of thousands of Iranians showed that they haven’t forgotten about the June election stolen by incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad — even if the world has.

The Times of London reports:

They waved Iranian flags shorn of the Islamic Republic’s emblem, burnt posters of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, and chanted “Khamenei is a murderer; his rule is illegitimate” — unthinkable before the Ayatollah backed President Ahmadinejad’s dubious election victory in June.

They demanded the release of detained students and taunted members of the Basij volunteer militia who are supposed to monitor their activities. They waved banknotes at them and chanted: “Mercenary agents, get lost!”

Elsewhere in Tehran security forces used teargas, plastic bullets and baton charges to disperse demonstrators and prevent them from reaching the University of Tehran, the epicentre of the unrest. They fired warnings shots in the air, beat anyone caught filming with mobile phones and made numerous arrests. The film clips showed demonstrators clad in facemasks throwing stones, setting fire to rubbish skips and shouting: “Death to the dictator,” and “Don’t be scared, we’re all together.” Some were bloody from beatings.

After six months of brutal repression by soldiers and pro-government gangs, the confiscation of a human rights activist’s Nobel Prize, and likely far more arrests than the Iranian government is admitting to, the protest against the June election results is still going strong.

But the unrest has become about much more than a stolen election, and protestors are now attacking the Ayatollah, Iranian theocracy, and the country’s whole system of government. And there’s more than the future of Iran at stake: if the pro-democracy momentum dies down and Iranians become unwilling to endanger their families and careers by fighting an unjust regime, repressed peoples around the world will get the same strong and dangerous message: that citizens’ movements, no matter how strongly supported by the masses, simply can’t topple well-armed governments that are willing to beat, torture and kill to keep power. For that reason, despots the world over are rooting for the Ayatollah and his allies, and hoping that a crushed rebellion in Iran will make it that much easier to steal an election in Zimbabwe, or keep a Burmese human rights activist under house arrest for another 14 years.

But if Iran’s “Green Revolution” succeeds, and if a dictatorship finally manages to depose its dictators through demonstrations, protests and generally peaceful means, the shock wave will be felt throughout the region and far beyond. Already there have been anti-Ayatollah demonstrations in the authoritarian United Arab Emirates and tightly controlled Malaysia — countries that don’t generally tolerate public protests. If the Ayatollah actually falls, who knows who’ll be next…

Burning corpses generates a lot of heat, and a crematorium in East Sussex plans to convert that energy into usable electricity to reduce its own power costs — essentially turning dead bodies into a renewable energy source.

“A crematorium uses vast amounts of energy,” says Hastings Borough Council amenities manager Peter Mead. “We buy about £25,000 worth of gas a year. Clearly we want to be as energy efficient as we can be.”

That sounds reasonable, and there’s something to be said for efficiency, but I’m not sure how I’d feel about my charred remains powering a desk lamp in a funeral director’s office — though I guess it’s not any worse than being worm food.

Some other novel renewable energy ideas that you may be hearing more about soon:

• A “wind dam” (artists’ conception above) may one day sail over Lake Ladoga in northern Russia. The architect, Laurie Chetwood, says it ” looks like a bird dipping its beak into the water.” I happen to think it looks like a sail on a evil ghostly pirate ship. Chetwood also says the dam is “highly effective at capturing the wind because it replicates the work of a dam and doesn’t let the wind escape in the way it does using traditional propellers.”
• The Netherlands will churn out 36.5 megawatts by burning chicken poo.
• The U.S. Air Force purchased “600,000 gallons of renewable jet fuel made from weeds, algae or rendered fat from animal corpses” in October.
• Researchers in Idaho have created inexpensive photovoltaic plastic sheets with nanoantennas that collect waste energy from factories and power plants as well as the sun. They store energy 24 hours a day — whether the sun is shining or not.
• The sidewalks of tomorrow just might be able to convert the energy from your footsteps into usable electricity to power traffic lights, street lamps, electronic parking meters and more.
• Pacific Gas & Electric, a major player in California’s energy industry, is backing a Canadian-made power plant prototype that will harness the power of the waves to generate enough electricity for 640 homes — apparently a world first. If all goes well, the project will go 50 times bigger.
• A new data farm in a cave beneath a Finnish cathedral will funnel the heat generated by its servers into a network that heats 500 homes.
• A prototype lamppost/compost bin encourages pedestrians dump their half-eaten burgers, banana peels and other food waste into a bin at its base. The lamp is powered by methane produced by the food’s decomposition.

In awesomely unrelated news, a 59-year-old woman named Jesus Christ was summoned for jury duty in Alabama, only to be released for “being disruptive.”

Best line from that story: “Efforts to reach Christ were unsuccessful.”

Story via Xenophilia.
Image via Inhabitat.

A Scottish study is shedding light on ways to safely manipulate hormone levels in men to decrease — or increase — sperm production. The result could finally lead to a long-elusive birth control pill for men, as well as new fertility-enhancing techniques for men with low sperm counts.

From the Times of India:

To make this discovery, Welsh and colleagues performed studies in two groups of mice.

The first group of mice was normal, but the second group of mice was missing a gene from the peritubular myoid cells in the testis. This gene that was missing codes for the androgen hormone receptor, and when missing, sperm production was significantly decreased when compared to the normal group. The result was infertility.

[…] Although the research was conducted in mice, a similar effect is likely to obtain in other mammals, such as humans.

This summer, the Iranian government brutally suppressed citizen unrest following an election that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won in a landslide. The consensus — on the left, on the right, and everywhere in between — is that the election was rigged.

Five months later, the anti-Ahmedinejad protests have become more muted — probably due in part to the hundreds or thousands of protesters who have been killed or arrested. But Iranians are still seething about the stolen election, and the government seems to be worrying about its weakening grip on the Iranian people. Dissidents and reformers are still being arrested and sentenced to death, and last week Iran took the unprecedented step of seizing a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to one of its most famous dissidents: Shirin Ebadi. They also froze her bank account, claiming that she owes some $400,000 in taxes on her Nobel prize money, and according to the Norwegian officials who award the Nobels, have arrested her husband and beaten him badly. Her human rights group says Iran has no tax on awards, and that in any case, Ebadi has already used the prize money to support Iran’s many political prisoners and their families.

Last year, I wrote that my favourite books are usually the ones that make me angry, and that Shirin Ebadi’s Iran Awakening is one of those books. Since losing her job as a judge — women were no longer allowed to fill important posts after the Revolution — Ebadi has fought hard to secure divorce and inheritance rights for Iranian women and children, freedom for political prisoners, and tolerance for religious minorities like Iran’s much-persecuted Baha’i community. In spite of jail time, death threats, constant surveillance and intimidation from the authorities, she has been a vocal and visible champion of basic human rights in a country where those rights are trampled on a daily basis. She’s no fan of the West either, and I can’t say I agree with her defence of Iran’s nuclear program. But for some 20 years she has been a brave, lonely champion of citizens’ rights, pointing out the many flaws of a country that could and should be a model for human rights in a region that sorely needs an example to follow.

Before the Revolution, Iran showed the world that deep-seated faith can co-exist with night clubs, miniskirts and a healthy respect for personal freedom, and if it ever does again, it will be due in large part to Ebadi’s decades-long struggle. But by confiscating the most visible symbol of her work, Iran only shows us that there’s a long way to go yet.

Story via the Daily Beast.
Image via Payvand’s Iran News.

When I started this little site back in February 2008, I swore I’d never write a post like this one — all apologies for an extended lack of new posts, and all promises for more consistent posting in the future. I told myself I was serious about this blogging business, and that no matter how busy I got, I’d never let life get me sidetracked enough that this blog fell by the wayside.

After a year and a half of posting at least a few times a week, life happened anyway, and for the last couple of months I’ve been preoccupied with an unexpectedly busy time at work, wedding plans that have been more complicated than I expected (who knew weddings were complicated?) and a really brutal, possibly swiney cold, to the point where I’ve been exhausted pretty much since September. I’m feeling a little better now, the most pressing wedding planning is done, and while my communications work still shows no signs of slowing down, I think I’m out out of the woods.

I really do love this little piece of Webdom, and it’s always been a great outlet for me, letting me do a kind of writing that my regular job doesn’t have a lot of use for. So here it is then, a promise that I’ll make a real effort to do a more consistent job of this. If you’re still around, I’m glad to have you.

Cheers,
-mark

At least in South Africa.

Frustrated with Telkom, South Africa’s biggest ISP, the cheeky staff at a South African IT company devised a race to see what would be faster: e-mailing a large file from their Pietermaritzburg offices to the city of Durban, 77 km away, or strapping a data stick to a pigeon’s leg and tossing it in the right direction.

The best part, from Reuters:

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

So not only was the pigeon faster — it was 25 times faster. And assuming that the IT company was using

So if you live in South Africa and want to sign up for Telkom’s fastest DSL plan, you should know that your high-speed communications will run you paying 413 rand per month, or about $55 — not including pigeon feed.

Image via Wikipedia.
Story via Asher Vijay.