WordPress.com domain mapping is here! yay?

Earlier last week, wordpress.com announced that users can get their own custom domains hosted by wordpress.com. What does this mean? For instance, instead of me having 69mb.wordpress.com I can register a domain through and have it hosted by wordpress.com like 69mb.com or whatever I like for only 1200/- a year.
Yay? The bad news, at least for some of us, is that they only accept payments via paypal and if you do not live in one of these select countries(how did Togo get into this list?) then – drat! I guess I can always get one of my diaspora pals to do this for me(I knew there was a purpose for these guys).

Well, for the time being I can only hope that they do read all the feedback they get, as they claim, and use an all inclusive means of payment in the near future.

On the topic of domains, in the Friday paper, there was a full page ad sponsored by Jambo Telkom about registering .ke domains. Its 5000k a year! For that amount I can get at least five of any other type of domain. Doesn’t KENIC get free net access from KDN? What a rip off!

UPDATE: REGISTERING A .KE DOMAIN IS ACTUALLY 2000/- THE 5000/- ADVERTISED INCLUDES 500MB HOSTING IN THE PACKAGE. THANKS GO TO THE ALPHA QUADRANT  FOR POINTING THIS OUT.
Today’s fortune:

The Great Movie Posters:

SCENES THAT WILL STAGGER YOUR SIGHT!
– DANCING CALLED GO-GO
– MUSIC CALLED JU-JU
– NARCOTICS CALLED BANGI!
– FIRES OF PUBERTY!
SEE the burning of a virgin!
SEE power of witch doctor over women!
SEE pygmies with fantastic Physical Endowments!!!
– Kwaheri (1965)

feed icon that sounds kenyan

A couple of weeks back I decided to get an icon/flag/badge/something for the kenyan blogs I have on my aggregator and this is what I came up with(I’d tried this on the standard feed icon and it just looked wierd). I don’t have mad ‘photoshop-etc’ skills but I am proud of this and hey, what are blogs for if not for sharing?

Hash suggested having it in a zip file in different sizes; now that’s a neat idea. I put the standard 128×128 thru to 16×16 andfor anything else the orginal SVG file is also in the zip.

Do improve on this if you can.
cheers

Kenyancasting

Kenyancast, n: Kenyan flavoured broadcast.

What do you see? What do you think?

Folding shirts

Want to fold a shirt in seconds and with 4 motions?

Is submarine fibre our solution?

We are eagerly awaiting one of three submarine fibre optic cables to land at Mombasa. Statements have been made about how such a cable could bolster Kenya’s development and even bridge the digital divide. In my opinion, the importance of such a system is being over emphasized and even exaggerated.

The fact of the matter is, even if the cable were to land today, mobile calls will remain at 24/-, the number of landlines won’t change, our banks will still refer to checking-your-balance as online banking, it will still be cheaper and more reliable to host your website abroad, .ke sites will still cost 4000/- to register, there is no e-commerce and e-business in Kenya and besides no one accepts/sends money from/to Africa(419 scams). In effect, we will have a really great technology to connect a vacuum to the outside world.

The cheapest net access anyone can get at the moment goes for 3,500/- and for that you get what is by today’s standards, comparable to using horse driven wagons for transport. Why is it that when we talk of the internet access we mean access to the Internet? Statistics show that there are 1.5 million of us and that is no small figure by any standards. Why can’t we first focus on building a vibrant internet for these 1.5m people?

Imagine what would happen if ISPs were to offer two levels of access: National and international with the later referring to Internet access and the former to our own local internet. Further, national access is high speed access while international is the crap we are currently getting. What this would do would be to open a direct channel to our 1.5m which in turn would foster innovation. Alternatives to GMail, Yahoo, eBay, YouTube, Blogger and (heck) anything can be built to take advantage of real national broadband access. The beauty of it is, we won’t have to re-invent the wheel. We would just have to make local versions of already existing applications.

Demand exists. I met some of guys a couple of months back who have biasharas that operate at night. They were really interested in IP cameras and the cheaper Internet rates being offered allowed them to get ‘broadband’ access at home. Their idea was to use the internet and such cameras to check in on their biasharas from time to time. Unfortunately, the speeds being offered cannot support such an application and they gave up on the whole idea. There are numerous such examples even for simpler things like VOIP etc.

If there is one word that can be used to describe development and Kenya, ‘chaos’ nails it. We’re always in a fire-fighting mode because we tend to be reactive in our approach. No one who can make a difference seems to be thinking 10 steps ahead or with 43 years of foresight. I fear that our approach to the submarine cables is just another casualty of this disease.

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Today’s fortune:

To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.