Bitterjug’s blog

You know that dance move that guys sometimes do in the middle of a swing out, where the man goes down on his knees one at a time…
No, wait! I’ll tell the whole story from the beginning.

As you know, if you’ve been reading this drivel, Im reading Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle at the moment, currently nearing the end of volume III: The System Of The World. I’m enjoying it hugely and recommend it to anyone who has time to read a 3000 page novel in three volumes. There’s some splendid [...]

Recently I went to the birthday party and not-really-going-away-party-even-though-he-was-leaving-Africa-for-home-that-week of a friend of mine who has worked in Africa on and off for several years since he graduated. He was working in something that I think was called community based environmental management: development speak for getting people to take care of the trees and stuff. [...]

Spoon power! (and that’s nothing to do with the Tick)

Here is a snap I took last thursday in a class I had with our Stage 1 IT students.
OK, I didn’t completely stop teaching students. One of the classes I do take is an additional one for the new students. One afternoon per week for [...]

I had a very nice weekend: Friday was the birthday of a friend in Nairobi, for which there was a fabulous Italian dinner at a posh restaurant in the city, and Saturday was another birthday, this time of Katie the Peace Corps volunteer from up the road in Tala. Katie and I went and stayed [...]

Yesterday, being 7th, was the 16th month-anniversary of my arrival in this land; two thirds of the way through my service. This morning, while running, I got annoyed with uninvited company once again. One child ventured too close to me and I reached out and slapped him upside his head with the back of my [...]

A minibus stormed past me this morning as I was running by the side of the road. It was accompanied by thunderous engine noise and a stormcloud of black diesel exhaust. As it neared my shoulder it let out a terrifying trumpet of motorhorn blowing. I kept running, but only just.
Of course I was expected [...]

A while back I did the second part of CISCO Netork Academy Instructor training together with my colleagues here at HRC. One of the subjects we covered was Frame Relay which is a technology that is often used to send much of our Internet data from one place to another when those places are [...]