At the end of the last post I mentioned that I might put these posts on hold for until 2021. While posts were on hold, the development was not; at least not until just before Christmas. The bot is actually live and tweeting!!! Please go follow it, it’s called @YTBotbyPS. YouTube Bot by princelySid is where the name comes from.

The problem with coming back to writing is that you’ve forgotten almost everything you did to get to the point you’re now at, development-wise, and you have your editor leave messages like this on the post you started but didn’t finish

To recap, we’re building a bot that given a list of YouTube channels, it’ll tweet out snippets of a newly posted video. Below is the list of planned activities:

1. Get list of my subscriptions from YouTube.
2. Mark channels as music or blog and whether they’re Kenyan.
3. For each channel get a list of recent videos and store that in a database.
4. Take the last video link and download the video.
5. Clip the video to 40s.
6. Tweet that video (title, link to YouTube)
7. Save link to tweet, video in database
8. Check every 30 minutes if there’s a new video, if yes start from 4.

In the previous post we managed to get the data from YouTube and save it into a csv file. I’ve subscribed to over 900 channels; a rather ridiculous number of channels I’ve been told.

To recap, I am building a bot that given a list of YouTube channels it’ll tweet out snippets of the videos when a new one is posted. In the previous post, I had a list of the things we need to do to get there:

1. Get list of my subscriptions from YouTube.
2. Mark channels as music or blog.
3. For each channel get a list of recent videos and store that in a database.
4. Take the last video link and download the video.
5. Clip the video and clip it to 40s.
6. Tweet that video (title, link to Youtube)
7. Save link to tweet, video in database
8. Check every 30 minutes if there’s a new video, if yes start from 4.

Today we’ll be looking at the first one: getting a list of subscriptions from YouTube.

One of my passions in life is finding and consuming great Kenyan content: text, video, audio; doesn’t matter much to me. In a bid to keep abreast with this content, I subscribe to all the Kenyan content I can find on YouTube. However, keeping up with all of this has been difficult.

A combination of algorithmic feeds and an overwhelming amount of content means that I miss out on a lot content. I only have so many hours in a day and I have a full time job.

At the end of the last post I mentioned that I might put these posts on hold for until 2021. While posts were on hold, the development was not; at least not until just before Christmas. The bot is actually live and tweeting!!! Please go follow it, it’s called @YTBotbyPS. YouTube Bot by princelySid is where the name comes from.

The problem with coming back to writing is that you’ve forgotten almost everything you did to get to the point you’re now at, development-wise, and you have your editor leave messages like this on the post you started but didn’t finish

To recap, we’re building a bot that given a list of YouTube channels, it’ll tweet out snippets of a newly posted video. Below is the list of planned activities:

1. Get list of my subscriptions from YouTube.
2. Mark channels as music or blog and whether they’re Kenyan.
3. For each channel get a list of recent videos and store that in a database.
4. Take the last video link and download the video.
5. Clip the video to 40s.
6. Tweet that video (title, link to YouTube)
7. Save link to tweet, video in database
8. Check every 30 minutes if there’s a new video, if yes start from 4.

In the previous post we managed to get the data from YouTube and save it into a csv file. I’ve subscribed to over 900 channels; a rather ridiculous number of channels I’ve been told.

To recap, I am building a bot that given a list of YouTube channels it’ll tweet out snippets of the videos when a new one is posted. In the previous post, I had a list of the things we need to do to get there:

1. Get list of my subscriptions from YouTube.
2. Mark channels as music or blog.
3. For each channel get a list of recent videos and store that in a database.
4. Take the last video link and download the video.
5. Clip the video and clip it to 40s.
6. Tweet that video (title, link to Youtube)
7. Save link to tweet, video in database
8. Check every 30 minutes if there’s a new video, if yes start from 4.

Today we’ll be looking at the first one: getting a list of subscriptions from YouTube.

One of my passions in life is finding and consuming great Kenyan content: text, video, audio; doesn’t matter much to me. In a bid to keep abreast with this content, I subscribe to all the Kenyan content I can find on YouTube. However, keeping up with all of this has been difficult.

A combination of algorithmic feeds and an overwhelming amount of content means that I miss out on a lot content. I only have so many hours in a day and I have a full time job.

One of the things I’ve struggled with while coding in python is decorators. I’ve always known that they could be useful, but didn’t have a solid intuition on their implementation. Every time I thought I had a grasp on decorators, I’d try to use them and fail.

Thus, I am writing this as a guide for myself, but also for the benefit of anyone who might benefit from my understanding. All code for this write up was run in python 3.6.

At the end of the last post I mentioned that I might put these posts on hold for until 2021. While posts were on hold, the development was not; at least not until just before Christmas. The bot is actually live and tweeting!!! Please go follow it, it’s called @YTBotbyPS. YouTube Bot by princelySid is where the name comes from.

The problem with coming back to writing is that you’ve forgotten almost everything you did to get to the point you’re now at, development-wise, and you have your editor leave messages like this on the post you started but didn’t finish

To recap, we’re building a bot that given a list of YouTube channels, it’ll tweet out snippets of a newly posted video. Below is the list of planned activities:

1. Get list of my subscriptions from YouTube.
2. Mark channels as music or blog and whether they’re Kenyan.
3. For each channel get a list of recent videos and store that in a database.
4. Take the last video link and download the video.
5. Clip the video to 40s.
6. Tweet that video (title, link to YouTube)
7. Save link to tweet, video in database
8. Check every 30 minutes if there’s a new video, if yes start from 4.

In the previous post we managed to get the data from YouTube and save it into a csv file. I’ve subscribed to over 900 channels; a rather ridiculous number of channels I’ve been told.

To recap, I am building a bot that given a list of YouTube channels it’ll tweet out snippets of the videos when a new one is posted. In the previous post, I had a list of the things we need to do to get there:

1. Get list of my subscriptions from YouTube.
2. Mark channels as music or blog.
3. For each channel get a list of recent videos and store that in a database.
4. Take the last video link and download the video.
5. Clip the video and clip it to 40s.
6. Tweet that video (title, link to Youtube)
7. Save link to tweet, video in database
8. Check every 30 minutes if there’s a new video, if yes start from 4.

Today we’ll be looking at the first one: getting a list of subscriptions from YouTube.

One of my passions in life is finding and consuming great Kenyan content: text, video, audio; doesn’t matter much to me. In a bid to keep abreast with this content, I subscribe to all the Kenyan content I can find on YouTube. However, keeping up with all of this has been difficult.

A combination of algorithmic feeds and an overwhelming amount of content means that I miss out on a lot content. I only have so many hours in a day and I have a full time job.

So the guidelines I wrote about last week went into effect, with out any real public input that I could see. I’m so mad about it. These rules are bad for the internet. Now these rules are being used to threaten administrators of Whatsapp groups, as if they have any control over what people say in those groups, or should be criminally liable for that content. It’s complete bullshit. This will have an adverse effect on freedom of speech, mark my words

“It works like the brain.” So? Because I’m so into artificial intelligence, I’ll start with a post on it. Here we’re reminded that just because something is described as being like the brain doesn’t mean that it is important or even revolutionary.

But here’s the thing: this “like the brain” label usually isn’t a lie — it’s just not very informative. There are many ways a system can be like the brain, but only a fraction of these will prove important. We know so much that is true about the brain, but the defining issue in theoretical neuroscience today is, simply put, we don’t know what matters when it comes to understanding how the brain computes. The debate is wide open, with plausible guesses about the fundamental unit, ranging from quantum phenomena all the way to regions spanning millimeters of brain tissue.

At the end of the last post I mentioned that I might put these posts on hold for until 2021. While posts were on hold, the development was not; at least not until just before Christmas. The bot is actually live and tweeting!!! Please go follow it, it’s called @YTBotbyPS. YouTube Bot by princelySid is where the name comes from.

The problem with coming back to writing is that you’ve forgotten almost everything you did to get to the point you’re now at, development-wise, and you have your editor leave messages like this on the post you started but didn’t finish

To recap, we’re building a bot that given a list of YouTube channels, it’ll tweet out snippets of a newly posted video. Below is the list of planned activities:

1. Get list of my subscriptions from YouTube.
2. Mark channels as music or blog and whether they’re Kenyan.
3. For each channel get a list of recent videos and store that in a database.
4. Take the last video link and download the video.
5. Clip the video to 40s.
6. Tweet that video (title, link to YouTube)
7. Save link to tweet, video in database
8. Check every 30 minutes if there’s a new video, if yes start from 4.

In the previous post we managed to get the data from YouTube and save it into a csv file. I’ve subscribed to over 900 channels; a rather ridiculous number of channels I’ve been told.

To recap, I am building a bot that given a list of YouTube channels it’ll tweet out snippets of the videos when a new one is posted. In the previous post, I had a list of the things we need to do to get there:

1. Get list of my subscriptions from YouTube.
2. Mark channels as music or blog.
3. For each channel get a list of recent videos and store that in a database.
4. Take the last video link and download the video.
5. Clip the video and clip it to 40s.
6. Tweet that video (title, link to Youtube)
7. Save link to tweet, video in database
8. Check every 30 minutes if there’s a new video, if yes start from 4.

Today we’ll be looking at the first one: getting a list of subscriptions from YouTube.

One of my passions in life is finding and consuming great Kenyan content: text, video, audio; doesn’t matter much to me. In a bid to keep abreast with this content, I subscribe to all the Kenyan content I can find on YouTube. However, keeping up with all of this has been difficult.

A combination of algorithmic feeds and an overwhelming amount of content means that I miss out on a lot content. I only have so many hours in a day and I have a full time job.

This is my tribute to the greatness that is Google; a company I love and want to work for one day because they’re such an integral part of my internet experience. Some I’d like to outline the reasons for my adoration of Google.

The Search Engine

Firstly (and obviously) is the search engine. This is the core part of their business; bringing in over 90% of their revenue despite several efforts to diversify. It has helped me research assignments, blog posts and find cool stuff on the internet. If I want to find something online I ask Google first before anything else and since I’ve been using it as me (meaning logged in) for over 6 years now, it almost always knows what I’m asking for and delivers it first.

In March 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Sodol, one of the world’s top players of the Chinese game Go, by 4-1, marking the end of what was probably the last great board game AI had to conquer.

What makes Go a particularly difficult problem for computers to at least in the traditional (simplistic) approach is that the number of possible combination moves number more than the atoms in the universe. So it’s impossible to brute force it with the entirety of the computing power we have. Thus it was a good problem for finding alternative approaches.

“It works like the brain.” So? Because I’m so into artificial intelligence, I’ll start with a post on it. Here we’re reminded that just because something is described as being like the brain doesn’t mean that it is important or even revolutionary.

But here’s the thing: this “like the brain” label usually isn’t a lie — it’s just not very informative. There are many ways a system can be like the brain, but only a fraction of these will prove important. We know so much that is true about the brain, but the defining issue in theoretical neuroscience today is, simply put, we don’t know what matters when it comes to understanding how the brain computes. The debate is wide open, with plausible guesses about the fundamental unit, ranging from quantum phenomena all the way to regions spanning millimeters of brain tissue.

In March 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Sodol, one of the world’s top players of the Chinese game Go, by 4-1, marking the end of what was probably the last great board game AI had to conquer.

What makes Go a particularly difficult problem for computers to at least in the traditional (simplistic) approach is that the number of possible combination moves number more than the atoms in the universe. So it’s impossible to brute force it with the entirety of the computing power we have. Thus it was a good problem for finding alternative approaches.

In August of 2019, I was invited by my friend Preston Adie of Africa’s Talking to attended a panel discussion called “AI in Kenya” with 3 other smart practitioners in the Kenyan data science space: Babatunde Ekemode of Africa’s Talking, Skyler Spearman of IBM, and Fiona Rasanga of Griffin Insurance.

The discussion was wide, ranging from what we thought the state of data science in Kenya was to what trends we saw. It was interesting, and I hope some video of the conversation comes out.

In August of 2019, I was invited by my friend Preston Adie of Africa’s Talking to attended a panel discussion called “AI in Kenya” with 3 other smart practitioners in the Kenyan data science space: Babatunde Ekemode of Africa’s Talking, Skyler Spearman of IBM, and Fiona Rasanga of Griffin Insurance.

The discussion was wide, ranging from what we thought the state of data science in Kenya was to what trends we saw. It was interesting, and I hope some video of the conversation comes out.

Last year (2016) after the KCSE results were released, my friend Chris Orwa, a data scientist, wrote a blogpost analysing the data on the performance of the past years, looking to see what changed in 2016. It’s a good post and you are encouraged to have a look at it. However, I had one problem with it, the visualisation he used. I  told him that I thought I could do better.

Long time guys. I don’t really have a good excuse for why, because my excuse is laziness.

Anyway, I’m currently working on a personal project that involves uploading video to twitter. I don’t want to go into more details because I might never finish it, and I really don’t want too many people asking what happened.

While I was using it to upload some video, I encountered an error that I couldn’t easily fix:

So the guidelines I wrote about last week went into effect, with out any real public input that I could see. I’m so mad about it. These rules are bad for the internet. Now these rules are being used to threaten administrators of Whatsapp groups, as if they have any control over what people say in those groups, or should be criminally liable for that content. It’s complete bullshit. This will have an adverse effect on freedom of speech, mark my words

I’ve never written to the public editor of the Nation newspaper before but this : “If he is to be believed, Americans on Twitter are smarter than their Kenyan counterparts whose major preoccupation in social media seems to be trading insults, ethnic chauvinism and fake news.” rubbed me the wrong way.

This is an assumption not based on any research and I assume comes from the anecdotal evidence from the editor’s own twitter feed or those of his friends and colleagues. This is wrong.  Twitter, in particular, is definitely a function of who you follow. What you see there is your own choice, mostly.

The Communication Authority of Kenya(CA) & National Cohesion and Integration Commission(NCIC) published guidelines dealing with bulk SMSes and social media[PDF] for public consultation. The entire document is an interesting read and I encourage you to read it yourself; I would love to hear what you think in the comments. For this post, I’ll focus on Part 2 of the document: Guiidlines(sic) with regards to the use of social media for political messaging.

Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to win the USA presidential election, he will be sworn in some time in January. This was a shock for me and the 4 Americans whom I know. Since then, there’s been a rush to explain the win, the forgotten white people, racism, sexism and fake news among others. The fake news thing was propelled by this Buzzfeed post. Later on I read this post giving interesting suggestions on how the platforms can help with combating fake news. This is the comment I left on the post.

In my previous post talking about the KSCE results and the best way to visualise the radical change that the year 2016 was, I began to form a hypothesis that this change (66% got a grade of D+ or worse compared to about 45% in previous years) would led to a relaxing in the entry requirements for students entering university in 2017.

In Kenya, the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) is tasked with determining which university and course students are placed in based on a number called a cutoff point (a combination of overall grade and subjects chosen and how well you performed in those subjects). While students do have the option to enter university as a private student, which entry requirements are set by the university, placement by KUCCPS means that you enter as a government sponsored student which means your school fees will be heavily subsidised by the government. In a country with high poverty rates like ours, it’s no wonder there’s so much pressure on students during KCSE.

Last year (2016) after the KCSE results were released, my friend Chris Orwa, a data scientist, wrote a blogpost analysing the data on the performance of the past years, looking to see what changed in 2016. It’s a good post and you are encouraged to have a look at it. However, I had one problem with it, the visualisation he used. I  told him that I thought I could do better.

Last week, Friday, my lecturer announses that we’ll be having our exam the next week Friday. Being that we’ll only be having two exams for this whole course it coud be considered major!

Anyway he, the lecturer, goes on to talk about cheating and how he can tell when people are cheating but the things he was talking about were for catching amatuers! If he new all the skills my old classmates in high school developed he’d be shocked!! On that note I have to mention that I heard that Nairobi Uni uses CCTV for exams!!! As in WTF!!! Let the children copy,dub,lift and cheat! It doesn’t mean they don’t know…they just forgot on that particular day!

In my previous post talking about the KSCE results and the best way to visualise the radical change that the year 2016 was, I began to form a hypothesis that this change (66% got a grade of D+ or worse compared to about 45% in previous years) would led to a relaxing in the entry requirements for students entering university in 2017.

In Kenya, the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) is tasked with determining which university and course students are placed in based on a number called a cutoff point (a combination of overall grade and subjects chosen and how well you performed in those subjects). While students do have the option to enter university as a private student, which entry requirements are set by the university, placement by KUCCPS means that you enter as a government sponsored student which means your school fees will be heavily subsidised by the government. In a country with high poverty rates like ours, it’s no wonder there’s so much pressure on students during KCSE.

(The following events take place on the day that was the 16th of July 2014)

It’s been another long day and I’ve only just checked into the house at 2100hrs. I’ve been at a work thing since 1600hrs. Before that, I’ve been struggling to have my computer dual boot into Ubuntu. In the end I gave up and plan to try another flavour of Linux. I want to use Linux for my development because it seems more like a programmer’s environment and also because it’s the only major OS I’ve not used for daily stuff.

First, I’d like to apologise to you, my readers, for not updating this blog for so long. I don’t know why but I’ve been extremely lazy to do stuff recently. I have no syke for school or lessons. But still I promised more regular updates and I plan to keep that promise. I have a laptop after all.

Anyway away from that and on to today’s topic: The player’s wife. I have a friend; he’s the player (Kelly*). I have another friend (Dina*), she’s the wife. And why is this spectacular or note-worthy?
Kelly is the type of dude who on a typical weekend could bed 2 different girls and then not call or talk to them ever again. He’s a player and he’s not ever abashed admitting it to anyone who asks him (It’s weird that girls never think to ask questions until his already bedded them). He’s a nice guys to hang around and he’s one of my close friends here in uni.

Hey y’all! I’ve been on a kind of high since the weekend. I finally got off my ass and went for the shopping I should’ve gone for 4 weeks ago meaning I have some food in my room finally. I went shags(the country house) for a day so that I could have a bit of solitude and found my dad there, he gave me some cash:) which for someone my age is better than solitude. Also he gave me something even better than money; my own laptop!!

Its been almost three and a half years since I joined boarding school and one and a half since I left. Its an experience that defined and continues to define my life…
A little background info: When we moved to Kenya from Zambia I joined St.Mary’s Nairobi doing KCPE syllabus(This wasn’t what I’d expected but that is a story for another post). I stayed there for 4 years until form 2 when I changed to Maseno. Why? That’s part of the story for another post already mentioned.
So whats this post about? It’s about all the things I’m greatful to Maseno for. Most of them have to do with adaptation that has became a part of who I am. Things that its taught me and given me.

In my previous post talking about the KSCE results and the best way to visualise the radical change that the year 2016 was, I began to form a hypothesis that this change (66% got a grade of D+ or worse compared to about 45% in previous years) would led to a relaxing in the entry requirements for students entering university in 2017.

In Kenya, the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service (KUCCPS) is tasked with determining which university and course students are placed in based on a number called a cutoff point (a combination of overall grade and subjects chosen and how well you performed in those subjects). While students do have the option to enter university as a private student, which entry requirements are set by the university, placement by KUCCPS means that you enter as a government sponsored student which means your school fees will be heavily subsidised by the government. In a country with high poverty rates like ours, it’s no wonder there’s so much pressure on students during KCSE.

I read this great post on Chao’s blog. I was to leave this as a comment on the post, but it got too long. So I decided to post my thoughts here.

First, I think the word tech is rapidly losing any nuance it has. When you look at Twiga, Eneza and Sendy, while each may be said to be a tech company, what they really are are: an agricultural, education and logistics company. What makes them similiar is that they were built with tech first in mind; it is at their very core. However, every company these days uses tech in some way or another, they can’t afford not to.

(The following events take place on the day that was the 16th of July 2014)

It’s been another long day and I’ve only just checked into the house at 2100hrs. I’ve been at a work thing since 1600hrs. Before that, I’ve been struggling to have my computer dual boot into Ubuntu. In the end I gave up and plan to try another flavour of Linux. I want to use Linux for my development because it seems more like a programmer’s environment and also because it’s the only major OS I’ve not used for daily stuff.

Last year (2016) after the KCSE results were released, my friend Chris Orwa, a data scientist, wrote a blogpost analysing the data on the performance of the past years, looking to see what changed in 2016. It’s a good post and you are encouraged to have a look at it. However, I had one problem with it, the visualisation he used. I  told him that I thought I could do better.

The Communication Authority of Kenya(CA) & National Cohesion and Integration Commission(NCIC) published guidelines dealing with bulk SMSes and social media[PDF] for public consultation. The entire document is an interesting read and I encourage you to read it yourself; I would love to hear what you think in the comments. For this post, I’ll focus on Part 2 of the document: Guiidlines(sic) with regards to the use of social media for political messaging.

Tech blogs in Kenya suck! It’s something I’ve said before in other platforms and fora. I knew it empirically but didn’t have the hard data to back me up. I do now.

Let’s get into why I’m the right person to be talking about this:

• I’ve been reading tech news on an almost daily basis for more than 8 years now
• I’ve been following the local tech scene almost as long.
• I have a degree in Computer Science.
• I’m a part of the ecosystem.
• I have the skills to do this analysis
• I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, almost a year

While it’s entirely possible to analyse more than one blog I decided to do only one as a sample. The blog I choose for this is Kachwanya because:

A lot of musicians in the the country have been complaining about their inability to make money from their art. The reason they give for this, well the one that comes out loudest, is piracy.

I have a different view from that but this is not the time for it.

Recently stakeholders from the music industry released the final version of the music policy document that they hope may become law or inform it in some way or form.

Microsoft made a secret book for Nokia employees before its takeover The coolest way to introduce one company to another is to chuck out a book that shows the history of both companies. The book isn’t just a bunch of words but includes several cool illustrations.

In the months leading up to Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s phone business, the two companies approached Shoreditch-based media company TCOLondon to secretly build a unique book for the nearly 20,000 Nokia employees set to join Microsoft. The 128-page book was edited and illustrated in London before being printed and shipped to employees in more than 90 cities in 53 countries.
It’s a celebration of the rich history that Nokia and Microsoft both share, including etchings of Nokia’s origins in a paper mill in Finland and Microsoft’s roots in New Mexico. Illustrations range from the first-ever GSM call to surgeons using the Kinect sensor for operations.

Half of Kenyans fear torture in custody This is so sad. Like I wrote in my post about the legality of the Somali crack down, it’s entirely too easy to take the government to court over human rights abuses. More than that we have a judiciary that seems happy to smack down both the executive and the legislature and put them in their place, in fact I’d say they’re looking for every opportunity to do so.

So I was just watching news at 9 on NTV, first time in maybe in 2 months or so. I feel that watching it is pointless as most of it is political bullshit and the rest depressing. But today two things caught me First the murder of post graduate student, Mercy Keino, who died in rather mysterious circumstances over the weekend. Was actually going to do a post on it until a second story came along.

The Communication Authority of Kenya(CA) & National Cohesion and Integration Commission(NCIC) published guidelines dealing with bulk SMSes and social media[PDF] for public consultation. The entire document is an interesting read and I encourage you to read it yourself; I would love to hear what you think in the comments. For this post, I’ll focus on Part 2 of the document: Guiidlines(sic) with regards to the use of social media for political messaging.

The Communication Authority of Kenya(CA) & National Cohesion and Integration Commission(NCIC) published guidelines dealing with bulk SMSes and social media[PDF] for public consultation. The entire document is an interesting read and I encourage you to read it yourself; I would love to hear what you think in the comments. For this post, I’ll focus on Part 2 of the document: Guiidlines(sic) with regards to the use of social media for political messaging.

Some time late last year, I’m going to say in November but I’m not certain, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) released 6 documents that would amend the Kenya Information and Communications Act, for public comment. You can find the notice for public comment and the drafts here. These documents were zero drafts, which means they are the first versions of these documents and are not yet even on the path to becoming laws as they are not even in parliament. The amendments would touch on the following issues:

I found this post floating about on my facebook and thought I’d share it with you guys because a lot of what’s said I’ve felt and still feel.

It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn’t know and may not like.You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now.

Happy New Year!! How are y’all doing? This is my first post of the year which should make it special but it really isn’t, mostly because I don’t really have anything useful to say. So instead what follows next is mostly going to be me rambling on about random things.

image:http://www.staceyshipman.com

First of all this is my last semester of school… I’m not really excited, more scared. At the end of these four months I should become a man, which has little to do with my age or level of maturity and more to do with the fact that I’ll be expected to take care of myself. No more handouts from the parents. In fact the only thing I can expect from either of them is a place to sleep and to be fed(and who knows how long the feeding will last?).

The other day I attended a meeting for our school poetry club. I had wanted to see the performances and a friend of mine had said that they were beginning at 9 am. I arrived at 10 because I had spent the night before not in my room.;) Turns out my friend had it wrong, idiot!!!, and this was actually a meeting between the school club and the guest artists that had been invited. Since I was already there I decided to stay.

First I’d like to thank Sgyreju for allowing me to put up her posts on my blog and I’m sure all of you thank her too. She wrote them almost a year ago but the ideas and questions she asks are priceless and I’ll continue to cherish them forever. Second this is an edited conclusion of what has been a very fun week of posts that Sgyreju originally had on her blog. It contain mostly her thoughts interspersed with mine.

Gender is something I have only begun to think about very recently, and I still have work to do in order to understand better where I stand in relation to it. But, even though I have only been exploring my own gender identity for about three months, I had known for a while longer that it is quite a complex matter.

The first thing to know is the difference between sex and gender. While sex is a biological fact, gender is an identity; it is about how one perceives oneself. For a long time, I did not know about gender; this is not a widely known concept in mainstream France (recently, someone I know wrote a survey with a question about “gender”. She told me her professors had said it was the politically correct word to use for questions about biological sex.). I knew about transsexual people, but I only knew about them as “people who feel they were born in the wrong body and need to change their biological sex”. As to myself, my being a girl was just a fact, like my height or my birth date – a fact about me I had no control about, and which meant even less to me than my height or my birthdate do – and I could not imagine it mattering at all.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

Very often, people use the word “relationship” to refer to romantic relationships – just as they use the word “love” to refer to romantic love. It rather annoys me to see those words trapped into one of their specific meanings, especially as this specific meaning is not one I can relate to. So, be warned – in this blog, “relationship” refers to all kinds of relationships, and “love” refers to all kinds of love.

I did not always identify as aromantic.

For a long time, I did believe in the whole romantic myth that one is truly happier with a romantic partner, and I wished for one. I longed for the time when I would finally live those idealized shared moments with my beloved: having breakfast together, taking long walks hand in hand, talking about everything and anything for hours, kiss passionately like in my favorite love scenes in movies…

Sex is a complex matter. It is hard to define – for some people, only genital penetration counts; for others, anything involving someone’s genitals is sex. It also has several meanings: an expression of romantic love, a fun activity, a way to experience pleasure, a way to prove one’s worth… and many more. Some use it as a means of pressure (withholding sex in punishment or offering sex as a reward in order to obtain something), while others plan strategies to obtain it.

I will not lie to you: Questioning one’s identity is scary.

The evening of June 4, 2006, when I finally became aware that I probably was not heterosexual as I had always assumed, and the night that followed were, at the time, the scariest moments of my life. Now, four years later, they have only been pushed to second place by another evening that I do not want to talk about (and anyway, it has nothing to do with asexuality or any of the other matters that I wish to discuss in my Petri Dish).

Since today is the fourth anniversary of the evening during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.

I had a LiveJournal account in which I wrote regularly – and there are entries about that event. The first one was published at 10:18PM that night, which means that the event happened before.

So while I was narrating this story( Catch part one here) to you guys-and girls- I’ve tried to as objective as possible and tell the story as I saw it then, through my eyes, without giving you too much of what I thought of the situation after really thinking about it. So that’s what this post is about.

I don’t know about you but I’ve always been of the opinion that get pregnant at my age-which is rather young, think kid, baby-is stupid. Yes, I’m saying that Q was stupid to get pregnant. I mean think about it in this day and age you only get pregnant if you want to, what with condoms, contraceptives, e-pills and of course abstinence, it’s either that or you’re stupid. I told Q as much.

I needed to out this up quick which is why I’m doing this on a day I already have on post up but I feel the longer I wait the less relevant what I have to say becomes. Also I’m not a political scientist or any sort of expert on revolutions and such matters, these are just my thoughts.

Recently, ever since the Tunisia and then Egypt protests and revolts there’s been a lot of chatter on my time-line(Twitter) about whether such a thing can be repeated in Kenya. Today there was even talk of one  on 28th February. I don’t know where this one came from but there were a lot of tweets tagged with it in the morning.

I read this great post on Chao’s blog. I was to leave this as a comment on the post, but it got too long. So I decided to post my thoughts here.

First, I think the word tech is rapidly losing any nuance it has. When you look at Twiga, Eneza and Sendy, while each may be said to be a tech company, what they really are are: an agricultural, education and logistics company. What makes them similiar is that they were built with tech first in mind; it is at their very core. However, every company these days uses tech in some way or another, they can’t afford not to.

How the Middle Class Lifestyle Became Unaffordable If you want to understand where the economy is headed and why it’s there, you need to read this. Seriously though, I need to move out of the middle class as soon as possible.

Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated? Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend:

Sometime back, I had a conversation with Kirui, who is the lead of Consulting at iHub and therefore my boss, as he was writing a post reviewing Kenyan apps; you can read the posts here and here. In this conversation he lamented the dearth of Kenyan mobile apps. In addition to that he noted that the quality had not been fantastic as apps were not improved upon.

I posited to him, and do so here, that this may be because we as techies in the Kenyan ecosystem have for the longest time made fun of the mobile app craze we had mostly in the years 2010 to 2012. In fact there’s even a name for them, m-vitus (vitus is Kiswahili for things), making fun of the fact that a lot of the mobile apps at the time were named in the mpesa style and prioritized mobile (mPrep and mCollector are a couple of examples taken from past Pivot Easts). As a result, it seems to have become unpopular to build mobile apps, particularly consumer facing ones.

This is my tribute to the greatness that is Google; a company I love and want to work for one day because they’re such an integral part of my internet experience. Some I’d like to outline the reasons for my adoration of Google.

The Search Engine

Firstly (and obviously) is the search engine. This is the core part of their business; bringing in over 90% of their revenue despite several efforts to diversify. It has helped me research assignments, blog posts and find cool stuff on the internet. If I want to find something online I ask Google first before anything else and since I’ve been using it as me (meaning logged in) for over 6 years now, it almost always knows what I’m asking for and delivers it first.

Sometime back, I had a conversation with Kirui, who is the lead of Consulting at iHub and therefore my boss, as he was writing a post reviewing Kenyan apps; you can read the posts here and here. In this conversation he lamented the dearth of Kenyan mobile apps. In addition to that he noted that the quality had not been fantastic as apps were not improved upon.

I posited to him, and do so here, that this may be because we as techies in the Kenyan ecosystem have for the longest time made fun of the mobile app craze we had mostly in the years 2010 to 2012. In fact there’s even a name for them, m-vitus (vitus is Kiswahili for things), making fun of the fact that a lot of the mobile apps at the time were named in the mpesa style and prioritized mobile (mPrep and mCollector are a couple of examples taken from past Pivot Easts). As a result, it seems to have become unpopular to build mobile apps, particularly consumer facing ones.

It’s been a while since I did an app review, probably because I haven’t explored that scene; I should probably look into that or something. Nonetheless, the app I’ll be reviewing today is called Safari Tales and it’s a production of Afrokidz Ltd. It has been made for Africa by Africans inspired by the diverse and rich African Culture. It is currently developed for the Android market for children between the ages of 2 – 9 years. That description has been stolen verbatim from their website :D!

Sometime back, I had a conversation with Kirui, who is the lead of Consulting at iHub and therefore my boss, as he was writing a post reviewing Kenyan apps; you can read the posts here and here. In this conversation he lamented the dearth of Kenyan mobile apps. In addition to that he noted that the quality had not been fantastic as apps were not improved upon.

I posited to him, and do so here, that this may be because we as techies in the Kenyan ecosystem have for the longest time made fun of the mobile app craze we had mostly in the years 2010 to 2012. In fact there’s even a name for them, m-vitus (vitus is Kiswahili for things), making fun of the fact that a lot of the mobile apps at the time were named in the mpesa style and prioritized mobile (mPrep and mCollector are a couple of examples taken from past Pivot Easts). As a result, it seems to have become unpopular to build mobile apps, particularly consumer facing ones.

So I’m seated in the library working on my CV, which I haven’t worked on in 2 years, since the end of second year – the last time I actually applied for an internship. I got the internship but couldn’t go because they got back to me late and needed a commitment of 4 months that I couldn’t do because I was going back to school.

While I was doing the updating, there was so much I had done that went down into simple statements like the one below:

[caption id=“attachment_398” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Tuko Macho Poster [image: http://www.thisisthenest.com/tukomacho/][/caption]

If you haven’t heard of the Nest Collective’s Tuko Macho web series, then it is my extreme pleasure to bring it to your attention. It is a series that centers around a vigilante group that has grown weary of corruption and impunity, and starts kidnapping people and presenting their case to the public. The public then votes on whether the accused is guilty and hence sentenced to death, or innocent (and set free?). No one in the 5 episodes that have aired so far has been voted innocent, so we still don’t know what happens when they are.

Last weekend was one of many happenings (can I say that? Or rather does that make sense to you guys?), but I’d like to talk about what happened on Sunday morning: the Upstart TV auditions.

I was awakened at 8.30am by my cousin, shouting at me to wake up and go for the auditions; I had gone out the night before and gotten thoroughly inebriated so I was hangovered that morning. I probably wouldn’t have woken up if I hadn’t glanced at my phone.

So, I was one of the 55,000 depositors affected by the recent collapse of Chase Bank; well it’s not really collapsed, it’s just under receivership because there are people in Kenya allowed to take unsecured loans of KES 7.8 billion - I wonder what it takes to become one of those people. On Thursday 7th of April, at around 8:30am, this was brought to my attention by a concerned friend, but I choose not to believe it; after all, the governor of the Central Bank of Kenya had on the previous day stated that there was nothing to worry about. Well, that was until I couldn’t access my account via the mobile app or the web! I thought of heading to the ATM in my neighbourhood until I saw pictures of them on Twitter: “Out of Order”!

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“739”] Chase Bank(In Receivership) logo[/caption]

[View the story “So what happened at Chase Bank” on Storify]

Some time back, Safaricom, Kenya’s major carrier, had a promotion in which the main prize was 10 million bob (about 115,000 USD); doesn’t look like much converted into dollars. Nonetheless, I was convinced I’d win. Why? I had a feeling.

That feeling was wrong, obviously, but while I did have it, I wondered exactly what I’d do with such a large amount of money (felt it was large until I converted it into dollars, now it seems like peanuts). I made some basic plans that I now want to share with you guys.

The Kenya United Taxi organisation gave the government 7 days from Tuesday 2nd Feb to remove Uber from Nairobi or they would bring the city to a standstill. This came days after reports began to surface that Uber cars were being attacked by regular taxi drivers in certain areas in the city.The regular taxi drivers claim that Uber is undercharging users and therefore driving them out of business. They also claim that the company is not compliant with government regulations.

The age of streaming is here! In the second week of January, Netflix announced that it had gone, mostly, global. Here in Kenya, the internet, by which I mean Twitter, immediately went wild with people making jokes (Netflix and chill anyone?) and giving opinions on whether it’ll work or not. iAfrikan itself had a post on the matter authored by Arthur Mwai, and it also discussed the topic at length on African Tech Roundup the companion podcast to the site, and an awesome listen, which was hosted by Andile, Tefo and their guest Emeka Okoye.

Some time late last year, I’m going to say in November but I’m not certain, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) released 6 documents that would amend the Kenya Information and Communications Act, for public comment. You can find the notice for public comment and the drafts here. These documents were zero drafts, which means they are the first versions of these documents and are not yet even on the path to becoming laws as they are not even in parliament. The amendments would touch on the following issues:

Once again, I’m back writing something about Safaricom. While most of the country, and the world, concentrates on M-PESA, I’d like to focus on something else, data.

From the figures below, we not only see that data revenues have not only exploded, but according to my back of the envelope calculations, they are set to approach those of M-PESA by the year 2020, and combined, will dwarf voice revenue by almost 100%; that’s less than 5 years from now. 

The Kenya United Taxi organisation gave the government 7 days from Tuesday 2nd Feb to remove Uber from Nairobi or they would bring the city to a standstill. This came days after reports began to surface that Uber cars were being attacked by regular taxi drivers in certain areas in the city.The regular taxi drivers claim that Uber is undercharging users and therefore driving them out of business. They also claim that the company is not compliant with government regulations.

The age of streaming is here! In the second week of January, Netflix announced that it had gone, mostly, global. Here in Kenya, the internet, by which I mean Twitter, immediately went wild with people making jokes (Netflix and chill anyone?) and giving opinions on whether it’ll work or not. iAfrikan itself had a post on the matter authored by Arthur Mwai, and it also discussed the topic at length on African Tech Roundup the companion podcast to the site, and an awesome listen, which was hosted by Andile, Tefo and their guest Emeka Okoye.

Tech blogs in Kenya suck! It’s something I’ve said before in other platforms and fora. I knew it empirically but didn’t have the hard data to back me up. I do now.

Let’s get into why I’m the right person to be talking about this:

• I’ve been reading tech news on an almost daily basis for more than 8 years now
• I’ve been following the local tech scene almost as long.
• I have a degree in Computer Science.
• I’m a part of the ecosystem.
• I have the skills to do this analysis
• I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, almost a year

While it’s entirely possible to analyse more than one blog I decided to do only one as a sample. The blog I choose for this is Kachwanya because:

Hey guys I’m at the ihub for the Barcamp Nairobi and today I’m going to attempt a live blog. It’s lunch time now and there no talks going on now but they begin in 10 mins keep this page open for updates. Catch you in 10 mun

Talking with Andrew from Ujamaa Ventures giving me advice on my application’the one I’ve been developing the last 3 months, hard questions with no answers :D
Now on the talk on Innovation Ecosystem by Tony
We’re trying to shine on our own yet we need to work together
Things we need to do

This is my tribute to the greatness that is Google; a company I love and want to work for one day because they’re such an integral part of my internet experience. Some I’d like to outline the reasons for my adoration of Google.

The Search Engine

Firstly (and obviously) is the search engine. This is the core part of their business; bringing in over 90% of their revenue despite several efforts to diversify. It has helped me research assignments, blog posts and find cool stuff on the internet. If I want to find something online I ask Google first before anything else and since I’ve been using it as me (meaning logged in) for over 6 years now, it almost always knows what I’m asking for and delivers it first.

The Kenya United Taxi organisation gave the government 7 days from Tuesday 2nd Feb to remove Uber from Nairobi or they would bring the city to a standstill. This came days after reports began to surface that Uber cars were being attacked by regular taxi drivers in certain areas in the city.The regular taxi drivers claim that Uber is undercharging users and therefore driving them out of business. They also claim that the company is not compliant with government regulations.

Some time back, Safaricom, Kenya’s major carrier, had a promotion in which the main prize was 10 million bob (about 115,000 USD); doesn’t look like much converted into dollars. Nonetheless, I was convinced I’d win. Why? I had a feeling.

That feeling was wrong, obviously, but while I did have it, I wondered exactly what I’d do with such a large amount of money (felt it was large until I converted it into dollars, now it seems like peanuts). I made some basic plans that I now want to share with you guys.

The age of streaming is here! In the second week of January, Netflix announced that it had gone, mostly, global. Here in Kenya, the internet, by which I mean Twitter, immediately went wild with people making jokes (Netflix and chill anyone?) and giving opinions on whether it’ll work or not. iAfrikan itself had a post on the matter authored by Arthur Mwai, and it also discussed the topic at length on African Tech Roundup the companion podcast to the site, and an awesome listen, which was hosted by Andile, Tefo and their guest Emeka Okoye.

So I recently came across this InfoTaKe.

Users transferring money from Equity Bank’s Equitel Mobile Money platform have been hit by a more than 100% increase in the cost of transferring money from the platform to Safaricom’s M-Pesa. 

The new charges appear to have been implemented at the start of August, just as Equitel officially announced it’s transition from a pilot phase. No official communication on the new charges was relayed to Equitel users.

Once again, I’m back writing something about Safaricom. While most of the country, and the world, concentrates on M-PESA, I’d like to focus on something else, data.

From the figures below, we not only see that data revenues have not only exploded, but according to my back of the envelope calculations, they are set to approach those of M-PESA by the year 2020, and combined, will dwarf voice revenue by almost 100%; that’s less than 5 years from now. 

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about Safaricom’s 4G efforts. Well, not exactly their 4G efforts, but their set top box, ‘creatively’ called theBIGbox (in case it wasn’t clear, that’s sarcasm). In this post, I want to compare their offering to one of their competitors that always comes up every time anyone talks about Internet in Kenya, Zuku.

More often than not, when the two are compared, the better offering seems to be Zuku. But what everyone forgets in these comparisons is that Safaricom doesn’t have to compete with Zuku; at least not yet.

 Safaricom is launching their digital set-top box this Friday, 8th May, dubbed ‘The Box’. When they first announced it I was ultra excited for what it might mean for the current media landscape in Kenya. But before I get into that let’s see what features ‘The Box’ will have: powered by Android, in addition to being a television set top box, it’ll offer video on demand to also provide internet access to users through a 4G SIM and wireless hotspot capabilities and other services like gaming.

This weekend, Safaricom is moving their servers, which were in Germany, to Kenya. They’ve been harping this on their social channels as #mpesacomeshome. From their press release:

Early last year, we announced plans to migrate the M-PESA platform to Kenya. We can now confirm that faster transactions, improved stability and added functionality on M-PESA is a dream coming to life: M-PESA is coming home!
Here is what you will enjoy from the new M-PESA system:

Bob Collymore’s contract is up for renewal in 4 months, and he’s yet to hear from the board, of which he’s a part of, whether he’s coming back. From the Business Daily:

Safaricom chief executive Bob Collymore has not heard from the company’s board of directors about the renewal of his employment contract, which expires in four months’ time. 

Mr Collymore’s contract ends in August, having been extended for two years in 2013. There is a strong expectation it will be renewed again in the absence of any overt succession planning.

I want to try something new guys, I want to try writing about one topic: Safaricom. Why? Because I’m interested in the company, it being the chief tech company in the country and the one with the largest market cap of 640 billion shillings.

This will be in the same vein as John Gruber who primarily writes about Apple as a company: giving insights, thought pieces, and theories on the company. So that’s what I want to try do too. Unlike him, though, I currently don’t have sources in Safaricom of any kind but if I keep at this, maybe, I’ll get some.

Are you audacious? This post is a constant reminder to be so over the top and courageous with my plans.

The product only works on tablets.
The VC: “Aren’t you concerned that tablets skew older, that most young people use phones, and isn’t your business depending on attracting young users?”
The entrepreneur: “Well, eh, uh etc.”
He talked for a long time, but he didn’t have an answer.
It pissed me off because the answer was obvious.
His game is going to be so incredible that it will sell tablets. Kids, adults, everyone is going to have to get one just to run this software.
Now, to pull this off you have to have a PhD in Chutzpah.

Safaricom is Kenya’s biggest company in almost every metric you could care to measure: revenue, profits, tax, users; all of these and more. And yet it’s probably the most complained about company after KPLC. In my family, we’re always complaining about how the network is down, data is down or 3G not working. Complaints about the cost of calls, data, and sending money over Mpesa are voiced every few days. Despite all this we stick with them, and I’m not entirely sure why.

The real reason net neutrality is right Yet another reason for net neutrality and I think one that supersedes them all. Not that the others are wrong but this one is particularly good. I’ve written about my own thoughts on neutrality here.

The ISPs and entertainment companies want to restrict the flow of the Internet for their own purposes. It would make some sense, if they had developed the Internet, but they didn’t. It was paid for by US taxpayers. It was a good investment, as long as it doesn’t get foreclosed on. Funny thing is I don’t remember when we took out a mortgage on the Internet from these guys?

Thigh butt It being a Friday, I think we can start on a light note. The moment I read this definition, someone came to mind :D. Urban dictionary often has hilarious definitions like this and sometimes they bring a smile to your face. Other times it’s disgusting. So it’s a bit of a hit or miss.

The ratio of thigh to butt on a woman; easily viewable by a visible “crease” between the thigh and butt. The thigh to butt ratio is larger based on the length of the crease

French journalist Camille Lepage killed in CAR While the world focuses on Nigeria’s missing girls, Sudan’s descent into civil war, let’s not forget the Central African Republic which has been suffering war for some time now from sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians.

Security in CAR has deteriorated in recent months. Around a quarter of CAR’s 4.6 million population have fled their homes since conflict erupted in March 2013 between mainly Muslim and Christian militias.

How the Middle Class Lifestyle Became Unaffordable If you want to understand where the economy is headed and why it’s there, you need to read this. Seriously though, I need to move out of the middle class as soon as possible.

Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated? Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend:

Some time back, Safaricom, Kenya’s major carrier, had a promotion in which the main prize was 10 million bob (about 115,000 USD); doesn’t look like much converted into dollars. Nonetheless, I was convinced I’d win. Why? I had a feeling.

That feeling was wrong, obviously, but while I did have it, I wondered exactly what I’d do with such a large amount of money (felt it was large until I converted it into dollars, now it seems like peanuts). I made some basic plans that I now want to share with you guys.

Kenya Power is my country’s only power distributor. It has had the monopoly on the distribution and supply of power since independence, I think, when it was known as Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC).

Kenya Power is probably the most complained about company in the country, perhaps along with Safaricom. Power in the country can disappear at any moment for reasons that aren’t clear to anyone, and at times even to Kenya Power themselves when you call their helpline; and Kenyan’s have become so used to the power outages when it rains that in my house when the clouds start darkening take out our paraffin lamps in readiness for dark times (pun intended). Of course if this only happened in the rural areas it would not be such a problem, but it’s something that affects the entire country no matter where you stay.

The age of streaming is here! In the second week of January, Netflix announced that it had gone, mostly, global. Here in Kenya, the internet, by which I mean Twitter, immediately went wild with people making jokes (Netflix and chill anyone?) and giving opinions on whether it’ll work or not. iAfrikan itself had a post on the matter authored by Arthur Mwai, and it also discussed the topic at length on African Tech Roundup the companion podcast to the site, and an awesome listen, which was hosted by Andile, Tefo and their guest Emeka Okoye.

The age of streaming is here! In the second week of January, Netflix announced that it had gone, mostly, global. Here in Kenya, the internet, by which I mean Twitter, immediately went wild with people making jokes (Netflix and chill anyone?) and giving opinions on whether it’ll work or not. iAfrikan itself had a post on the matter authored by Arthur Mwai, and it also discussed the topic at length on African Tech Roundup the companion podcast to the site, and an awesome listen, which was hosted by Andile, Tefo and their guest Emeka Okoye.

 Safaricom is launching their digital set-top box this Friday, 8th May, dubbed ‘The Box’. When they first announced it I was ultra excited for what it might mean for the current media landscape in Kenya. But before I get into that let’s see what features ‘The Box’ will have: powered by Android, in addition to being a television set top box, it’ll offer video on demand to also provide internet access to users through a 4G SIM and wireless hotspot capabilities and other services like gaming.

The age of streaming is here! In the second week of January, Netflix announced that it had gone, mostly, global. Here in Kenya, the internet, by which I mean Twitter, immediately went wild with people making jokes (Netflix and chill anyone?) and giving opinions on whether it’ll work or not. iAfrikan itself had a post on the matter authored by Arthur Mwai, and it also discussed the topic at length on African Tech Roundup the companion podcast to the site, and an awesome listen, which was hosted by Andile, Tefo and their guest Emeka Okoye.

I came across this video on my timeline on twitter and it made me laugh out loud; never mind I was in the library. It was all the more funny because it actually happened to me once when I was receiving an international call from my best friend. Hope it makes you laugh too. Peace!!!

The age of streaming is here! In the second week of January, Netflix announced that it had gone, mostly, global. Here in Kenya, the internet, by which I mean Twitter, immediately went wild with people making jokes (Netflix and chill anyone?) and giving opinions on whether it’ll work or not. iAfrikan itself had a post on the matter authored by Arthur Mwai, and it also discussed the topic at length on African Tech Roundup the companion podcast to the site, and an awesome listen, which was hosted by Andile, Tefo and their guest Emeka Okoye.

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about Safaricom’s 4G efforts. Well, not exactly their 4G efforts, but their set top box, ‘creatively’ called theBIGbox (in case it wasn’t clear, that’s sarcasm). In this post, I want to compare their offering to one of their competitors that always comes up every time anyone talks about Internet in Kenya, Zuku.

More often than not, when the two are compared, the better offering seems to be Zuku. But what everyone forgets in these comparisons is that Safaricom doesn’t have to compete with Zuku; at least not yet.

Some time late last year, I’m going to say in November but I’m not certain, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) released 6 documents that would amend the Kenya Information and Communications Act, for public comment. You can find the notice for public comment and the drafts here. These documents were zero drafts, which means they are the first versions of these documents and are not yet even on the path to becoming laws as they are not even in parliament. The amendments would touch on the following issues:

I’ve been reading the constitution for a series of posts on things I am not an expert in; this is one such post. You guys already know what I think about the police action at Kasarani, however, looking at it from a constitutional angle perhaps it is wrong.

The fourth chapter of our constitution section 24, subsection 5 talks about the rights that the police may limit:

1. Privacy
2. Freedom of Association
3. Assembly, Demonstration, Picketing and Petition
4. Labour Relations
5. Economic and Social Rights
6. Rights of Arrested Persons

Note, these rights can only be limited if parliament passes a law limiting them.

Some time late last year, I’m going to say in November but I’m not certain, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) released 6 documents that would amend the Kenya Information and Communications Act, for public comment. You can find the notice for public comment and the drafts here. These documents were zero drafts, which means they are the first versions of these documents and are not yet even on the path to becoming laws as they are not even in parliament. The amendments would touch on the following issues:

Sometimes I write about my interpretation of the law, bills and policy documents that come from the government and various other stakeholders. I’m not a lawyer and I’ve never studied law but as a citizen of this country I’m allowed to comment on these things. It’s my constitutional right. Consider that the disclaimer.

[caption id=“attachment_307” align=“aligncenter” width=“718”] Image from http://www.michalsons.co.za[/caption]

One of the bills that I’m particularly excited to see passed is the Access to Information Bill(referred to henceforth as A2I which is so much cooler) which just went through it’s 2nd reading in parliament. This bill codifies our constitutional right to access of information found in Article 35 of the Kenyan Constitution. Which states:

So I was just watching news at 9 on NTV, first time in maybe in 2 months or so. I feel that watching it is pointless as most of it is political bullshit and the rest depressing. But today two things caught me First the murder of post graduate student, Mercy Keino, who died in rather mysterious circumstances over the weekend. Was actually going to do a post on it until a second story came along.

Some time late last year, I’m going to say in November but I’m not certain, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) released 6 documents that would amend the Kenya Information and Communications Act, for public comment. You can find the notice for public comment and the drafts here. These documents were zero drafts, which means they are the first versions of these documents and are not yet even on the path to becoming laws as they are not even in parliament. The amendments would touch on the following issues:

First I’d like to thank Sgyreju for allowing me to put up her posts on my blog and I’m sure all of you thank her too. She wrote them almost a year ago but the ideas and questions she asks are priceless and I’ll continue to cherish them forever. Second this is an edited conclusion of what has been a very fun week of posts that Sgyreju originally had on her blog. It contain mostly her thoughts interspersed with mine.

For the second time in as many weekends I found myself in the boot of the car because the ride was already too full in the front. Well the cars were hunchback so it was actually quite comfortable.
This actually besides the point but on the second trip, lying on my back looking at the ssky, admiring the car and skyscrapers rushing by I began to comtemplate something that I’ve thought about on and off for a little bit: I’ve always wanted to experience someone else’s thoughts.

So while I was narrating this story( Catch part one here) to you guys-and girls- I’ve tried to as objective as possible and tell the story as I saw it then, through my eyes, without giving you too much of what I thought of the situation after really thinking about it. So that’s what this post is about.

I don’t know about you but I’ve always been of the opinion that get pregnant at my age-which is rather young, think kid, baby-is stupid. Yes, I’m saying that Q was stupid to get pregnant. I mean think about it in this day and age you only get pregnant if you want to, what with condoms, contraceptives, e-pills and of course abstinence, it’s either that or you’re stupid. I told Q as much.

Sometimes I write about my interpretation of the law, bills and policy documents that come from the government and various other stakeholders. I’m not a lawyer and I’ve never studied law but as a citizen of this country I’m allowed to comment on these things. It’s my constitutional right. Consider that the disclaimer.

[caption id=“attachment_307” align=“aligncenter” width=“718”] Image from http://www.michalsons.co.za[/caption]

One of the bills that I’m particularly excited to see passed is the Access to Information Bill(referred to henceforth as A2I which is so much cooler) which just went through it’s 2nd reading in parliament. This bill codifies our constitutional right to access of information found in Article 35 of the Kenyan Constitution. Which states:

I’ve been reading the constitution for a series of posts on things I am not an expert in; this is one such post. You guys already know what I think about the police action at Kasarani, however, looking at it from a constitutional angle perhaps it is wrong.

The fourth chapter of our constitution section 24, subsection 5 talks about the rights that the police may limit:

1. Privacy
2. Freedom of Association
3. Assembly, Demonstration, Picketing and Petition
4. Labour Relations
5. Economic and Social Rights
6. Rights of Arrested Persons

Note, these rights can only be limited if parliament passes a law limiting them.

Sometimes I write about my interpretation of the law, bills and policy documents that come from the government and various other stakeholders. I’m not a lawyer and I’ve never studied law but as a citizen of this country I’m allowed to comment on these things. It’s my constitutional right. Consider that the disclaimer.

[caption id=“attachment_307” align=“aligncenter” width=“718”] Image from http://www.michalsons.co.za[/caption]

One of the bills that I’m particularly excited to see passed is the Access to Information Bill(referred to henceforth as A2I which is so much cooler) which just went through it’s 2nd reading in parliament. This bill codifies our constitutional right to access of information found in Article 35 of the Kenyan Constitution. Which states:

When I stared this blog I did it for fun! For the fame. To let the world know what I was thinking. But yesterday I just realised that having this blog has enabled me to learn a lot more about human nature! It’s a truly overwhelming feeling to get comments from you, my readers, that force me to think and do research. Thanks to you all I was able to write a post on Homosexuality in pre-colonial Kenya and now again thanks to my last post I’ve learnt about asexuality. But thats not that brought on this post.

Tech blogs in Kenya suck! It’s something I’ve said before in other platforms and fora. I knew it empirically but didn’t have the hard data to back me up. I do now.

Let’s get into why I’m the right person to be talking about this:

• I’ve been reading tech news on an almost daily basis for more than 8 years now
• I’ve been following the local tech scene almost as long.
• I have a degree in Computer Science.
• I’m a part of the ecosystem.
• I have the skills to do this analysis
• I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, almost a year

While it’s entirely possible to analyse more than one blog I decided to do only one as a sample. The blog I choose for this is Kachwanya because:

So I recently came across this InfoTaKe.

Users transferring money from Equity Bank’s Equitel Mobile Money platform have been hit by a more than 100% increase in the cost of transferring money from the platform to Safaricom’s M-Pesa. 

The new charges appear to have been implemented at the start of August, just as Equitel officially announced it’s transition from a pilot phase. No official communication on the new charges was relayed to Equitel users.

Some interesting news lately from the Business Daily:

Airtel Kenya is operating under the licence previously held by Essar, which it bought out last year, as its permit which expired in February is yet to be renewed.

The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) yesterday said it was still considering “a number of issues” before renewing Airtel’s licence.

Why would Airtel not renew their license? I wonder what the CA means by issues? Perhaps they’re considering the imminent sale of Airtel Kenya to Tigo as posited by NairobiTech:

 Safaricom is launching their digital set-top box this Friday, 8th May, dubbed ‘The Box’. When they first announced it I was ultra excited for what it might mean for the current media landscape in Kenya. But before I get into that let’s see what features ‘The Box’ will have: powered by Android, in addition to being a television set top box, it’ll offer video on demand to also provide internet access to users through a 4G SIM and wireless hotspot capabilities and other services like gaming.

A lot of musicians in the the country have been complaining about their inability to make money from their art. The reason they give for this, well the one that comes out loudest, is piracy.

I have a different view from that but this is not the time for it.

Recently stakeholders from the music industry released the final version of the music policy document that they hope may become law or inform it in some way or form.

Too soon to be doing another post? Have you even fully digested the last one? It’s okay you can read both of them! Right? Anyway I’m in my room at about 10.30pm, not really trying to sleep but in bed none the less, phone in my hand and it hits me there’s a lot of noise in the background.

I pause to listen and I hear about 4 different sources of music and sound all seemly competing to overpower the rest.
The dude across from my room is listening to traditional Luyha Christian choir songs, some dude up the hall is booming his favourite rhumba and lingala tracks while his neighbour watches an action movie at max volume. Two doors down from me is some playing what seems to be a Hip hop mix and further down opposite some is listening to reggae/ragga.

A lot of musicians in the the country have been complaining about their inability to make money from their art. The reason they give for this, well the one that comes out loudest, is piracy.

I have a different view from that but this is not the time for it.

Recently stakeholders from the music industry released the final version of the music policy document that they hope may become law or inform it in some way or form.

This weekend, Safaricom is moving their servers, which were in Germany, to Kenya. They’ve been harping this on their social channels as #mpesacomeshome. From their press release:

Early last year, we announced plans to migrate the M-PESA platform to Kenya. We can now confirm that faster transactions, improved stability and added functionality on M-PESA is a dream coming to life: M-PESA is coming home!
Here is what you will enjoy from the new M-PESA system:

This weekend, Safaricom is moving their servers, which were in Germany, to Kenya. They’ve been harping this on their social channels as #mpesacomeshome. From their press release:

Early last year, we announced plans to migrate the M-PESA platform to Kenya. We can now confirm that faster transactions, improved stability and added functionality on M-PESA is a dream coming to life: M-PESA is coming home!
Here is what you will enjoy from the new M-PESA system:

This weekend, Safaricom is moving their servers, which were in Germany, to Kenya. They’ve been harping this on their social channels as #mpesacomeshome. From their press release:

Early last year, we announced plans to migrate the M-PESA platform to Kenya. We can now confirm that faster transactions, improved stability and added functionality on M-PESA is a dream coming to life: M-PESA is coming home!
Here is what you will enjoy from the new M-PESA system:

Bob Collymore’s contract is up for renewal in 4 months, and he’s yet to hear from the board, of which he’s a part of, whether he’s coming back. From the Business Daily:

Safaricom chief executive Bob Collymore has not heard from the company’s board of directors about the renewal of his employment contract, which expires in four months’ time. 

Mr Collymore’s contract ends in August, having been extended for two years in 2013. There is a strong expectation it will be renewed again in the absence of any overt succession planning.

Bob Collymore’s contract is up for renewal in 4 months, and he’s yet to hear from the board, of which he’s a part of, whether he’s coming back. From the Business Daily:

Safaricom chief executive Bob Collymore has not heard from the company’s board of directors about the renewal of his employment contract, which expires in four months’ time. 

Mr Collymore’s contract ends in August, having been extended for two years in 2013. There is a strong expectation it will be renewed again in the absence of any overt succession planning.

I want to try something new guys, I want to try writing about one topic: Safaricom. Why? Because I’m interested in the company, it being the chief tech company in the country and the one with the largest market cap of 640 billion shillings.

This will be in the same vein as John Gruber who primarily writes about Apple as a company: giving insights, thought pieces, and theories on the company. So that’s what I want to try do too. Unlike him, though, I currently don’t have sources in Safaricom of any kind but if I keep at this, maybe, I’ll get some.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter and Instagram would have noticed that I’ve been in Nigeria for the last couple of weeks. I’m here on a work, helping capacity building and providing technical support for a project that is looking to replicate our, iHub’s, Umati methodology for monitoring dangerous speech online.

My friend and editor told me that he was expecting a blog post when I got back but I’ve been thinking about it and it sounds like too much of a chore to try writing a post on a whole month, so I’d rather write a series of shorter posts that capture some of the things I have to say.

When I did the series about Getting to iHub, I mentioned that I may do a post on why it’s such an awesome place to intern. This is that post. This is how I would convince any student in this country to come work for us, the reasons I’d give them. 

1. The Dress Code

The first thing is that you get to come to work dressed in whatever fashion suits you; for me that is jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. I remember when I came for my first day I asked my supervisor, who was dressed in jeans, sneakers and a sweater, whether there was a dress code and he chuckled saying that I was free to come in anything I was comfortable in. Of course I would have noticed if I had been paying more attention to the environment while I was there for the interview, but I was completely focused on not letting my nervousness overcome me. 

So this will be a post just recapping some of the things I’ve said in the last four posts. Think of it as the tl;dr of them

Find and follow companies that inspire you. I’ve been a white member(registered) at the iHub since it’s inception in 2010, I follow them on Twitter, read the email newsletters they send and have their blog listed in my feed. I would never have found out about Umati without all these measures. I do this with other cool companies. 

This will be the penultimate post of the series. I had been called in to interview. I was stoked, but at the same time super apprehensive. I had never done an interview before and wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew that iHub was a cool company and seeing that it was for an internship position I was hoping that I wouldn’t be asked to demonstrate any complex coding.

I did however do a few things to prepare. I first made sure that everything I had mentioned in my cover letter I could demonstrate or explain clearly. Which included the facial recognition project I had done and the methods I used. I googled likely interview questions for interns and made sure that those that applied to me I could answer without hesitation. And finally I read everything I could about iHub research and got to know the people I may be interviewing with.

Now I had my CV and a decent cover letter. So what next? Well what happened next was a series of very fortunate coincidences that would lead me to an interview with iHub research.

The first thing was when Rachel, the old community manager at iHub came to my school with Intel to train students on their Native Development Kit. I won the phone, an Intel YOLO, they were giving away by being the most awesome tweeter (twitterer? Either way follow me on twitter) And I got to have a chat with her as she was leading the team that had come to my school. She had just given me her card.

So yesterday (9.4.14), I put up a post that began to describe how I got an internship opportunity at iHub Research. In this post I’ll be putting up sections of the original cover letter I wrote. I’ve only edited it to remove some sensitive information.

[My name and introduction were here talking about where I’m from and where I live]

I was reading your quarterly report for the end of the last quarter and something that jumped at me as really interesting was the Umati project on monitoring the internets for inflammatory speech that could help spark violence offline. Umati found that online speech did not directly lead to violence offline but did offer useful insight into what issues need to be addressed to head of violence on the ground

I have been working with iHub, under their research arm as a research associate (my own way of saying intern because associate sounds better), for the last month, and since the beginning I’ve been meaning to do a couple of posts on  how exactly I got there and what it takes to get an internship at an organisation like iHub, an organisation I believe hasn’t advertised for internship for the past 3 years.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter and Instagram would have noticed that I’ve been in Nigeria for the last couple of weeks. I’m here on a work, helping capacity building and providing technical support for a project that is looking to replicate our, iHub’s, Umati methodology for monitoring dangerous speech online.

My friend and editor told me that he was expecting a blog post when I got back but I’ve been thinking about it and it sounds like too much of a chore to try writing a post on a whole month, so I’d rather write a series of shorter posts that capture some of the things I have to say.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter and Instagram would have noticed that I’ve been in Nigeria for the last couple of weeks. I’m here on a work, helping capacity building and providing technical support for a project that is looking to replicate our, iHub’s, Umati methodology for monitoring dangerous speech online.

My friend and editor told me that he was expecting a blog post when I got back but I’ve been thinking about it and it sounds like too much of a chore to try writing a post on a whole month, so I’d rather write a series of shorter posts that capture some of the things I have to say.

I have been working with iHub, under their research arm as a research associate (my own way of saying intern because associate sounds better), for the last month, and since the beginning I’ve been meaning to do a couple of posts on  how exactly I got there and what it takes to get an internship at an organisation like iHub, an organisation I believe hasn’t advertised for internship for the past 3 years.

This will be a rant. It’ll be short. I bought shoes from Bata the other week, beautiful black and green shoes, so I could use them for training for the Standard Chartered Marathon; in fact, that’s all they were to be used for, running.

When I was buying them I talked to the sales lady asking her which shoes would be good for running and she showed me the racks that had the Power branded shoes on them. There was a lot of variety and it was difficult to choose so it came down colour really. I liked the blue kicks but the ones in stock just weren’t as sexy as the green and blacks. After I bought them I took a picture of them to show them off.

This will be a rant. It’ll be short. I bought shoes from Bata the other week, beautiful black and green shoes, so I could use them for training for the Standard Chartered Marathon; in fact, that’s all they were to be used for, running.

When I was buying them I talked to the sales lady asking her which shoes would be good for running and she showed me the racks that had the Power branded shoes on them. There was a lot of variety and it was difficult to choose so it came down colour really. I liked the blue kicks but the ones in stock just weren’t as sexy as the green and blacks. After I bought them I took a picture of them to show them off.

This will be a rant. It’ll be short. I bought shoes from Bata the other week, beautiful black and green shoes, so I could use them for training for the Standard Chartered Marathon; in fact, that’s all they were to be used for, running.

When I was buying them I talked to the sales lady asking her which shoes would be good for running and she showed me the racks that had the Power branded shoes on them. There was a lot of variety and it was difficult to choose so it came down colour really. I liked the blue kicks but the ones in stock just weren’t as sexy as the green and blacks. After I bought them I took a picture of them to show them off.

This will be a rant. It’ll be short. I bought shoes from Bata the other week, beautiful black and green shoes, so I could use them for training for the Standard Chartered Marathon; in fact, that’s all they were to be used for, running.

When I was buying them I talked to the sales lady asking her which shoes would be good for running and she showed me the racks that had the Power branded shoes on them. There was a lot of variety and it was difficult to choose so it came down colour really. I liked the blue kicks but the ones in stock just weren’t as sexy as the green and blacks. After I bought them I took a picture of them to show them off.

When I did the series about Getting to iHub, I mentioned that I may do a post on why it’s such an awesome place to intern. This is that post. This is how I would convince any student in this country to come work for us, the reasons I’d give them. 

1. The Dress Code

The first thing is that you get to come to work dressed in whatever fashion suits you; for me that is jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. I remember when I came for my first day I asked my supervisor, who was dressed in jeans, sneakers and a sweater, whether there was a dress code and he chuckled saying that I was free to come in anything I was comfortable in. Of course I would have noticed if I had been paying more attention to the environment while I was there for the interview, but I was completely focused on not letting my nervousness overcome me. 

So this will be a post just recapping some of the things I’ve said in the last four posts. Think of it as the tl;dr of them

Find and follow companies that inspire you. I’ve been a white member(registered) at the iHub since it’s inception in 2010, I follow them on Twitter, read the email newsletters they send and have their blog listed in my feed. I would never have found out about Umati without all these measures. I do this with other cool companies. 

This will be the penultimate post of the series. I had been called in to interview. I was stoked, but at the same time super apprehensive. I had never done an interview before and wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew that iHub was a cool company and seeing that it was for an internship position I was hoping that I wouldn’t be asked to demonstrate any complex coding.

I did however do a few things to prepare. I first made sure that everything I had mentioned in my cover letter I could demonstrate or explain clearly. Which included the facial recognition project I had done and the methods I used. I googled likely interview questions for interns and made sure that those that applied to me I could answer without hesitation. And finally I read everything I could about iHub research and got to know the people I may be interviewing with.

Now I had my CV and a decent cover letter. So what next? Well what happened next was a series of very fortunate coincidences that would lead me to an interview with iHub research.

The first thing was when Rachel, the old community manager at iHub came to my school with Intel to train students on their Native Development Kit. I won the phone, an Intel YOLO, they were giving away by being the most awesome tweeter (twitterer? Either way follow me on twitter) And I got to have a chat with her as she was leading the team that had come to my school. She had just given me her card.

So yesterday (9.4.14), I put up a post that began to describe how I got an internship opportunity at iHub Research. In this post I’ll be putting up sections of the original cover letter I wrote. I’ve only edited it to remove some sensitive information.

[My name and introduction were here talking about where I’m from and where I live]

I was reading your quarterly report for the end of the last quarter and something that jumped at me as really interesting was the Umati project on monitoring the internets for inflammatory speech that could help spark violence offline. Umati found that online speech did not directly lead to violence offline but did offer useful insight into what issues need to be addressed to head of violence on the ground

I have been working with iHub, under their research arm as a research associate (my own way of saying intern because associate sounds better), for the last month, and since the beginning I’ve been meaning to do a couple of posts on  how exactly I got there and what it takes to get an internship at an organisation like iHub, an organisation I believe hasn’t advertised for internship for the past 3 years.

It’s been more than 4 years since my very first post to this blog and we’ve reached another milestone with the post before this: 200 published posts on this blog and counting; it is also approximately the 92nd post published since @TheOkelo started as editor here and it’s been a great 2 and half years.

Therefore, with this post, this milestone, I’ve chosen to dedicate it to my editor, Tony. It’ll be a celebration of him and our friendship and I hope I can really do it justice.

Hey everyone? How we doing? This is just a quick update to let you know that my editor is taking a personal break that will last until the end of next month, August. He said that he needs some “me time” something I completely understand. Editing my work can not be the easiest thing in the world and I appreciate everything he does, pro bono, around here.

I don’t think he’s walking away from his computer but you get the point [image from http://radargaming.net]

This however leaves me in the unfortunate position of having to edit my own work, something I don’t particularly like so I’m contemplating taking a break while he does. That doesn’t mean that I won’t be writing, I’ll just write and not post until he comes back so I can dump it on him! Evil I know but it’s his own fault for getting me used to his awesome skills.

It’s been more than 4 years since my very first post to this blog and we’ve reached another milestone with the post before this: 200 published posts on this blog and counting; it is also approximately the 92nd post published since @TheOkelo started as editor here and it’s been a great 2 and half years.

Therefore, with this post, this milestone, I’ve chosen to dedicate it to my editor, Tony. It’ll be a celebration of him and our friendship and I hope I can really do it justice.

It’s been more than 4 years since my very first post to this blog and we’ve reached another milestone with the post before this: 200 published posts on this blog and counting; it is also approximately the 92nd post published since @TheOkelo started as editor here and it’s been a great 2 and half years.

Therefore, with this post, this milestone, I’ve chosen to dedicate it to my editor, Tony. It’ll be a celebration of him and our friendship and I hope I can really do it justice.

I got slapped on a bus today. I was just there minding my own business, listening to some Lana Del Rey and suddenly something softish smacks me on the side of the face and all I see is this round protrusion sticking out from this guy’s jacket.

I couldn’t believe it. I stared at him as he proceeded sideways down the narrow center aisle of the bus and people tilted their heads to the side to avoid his marshmallowy tummy as it moved past them.

I don’t know what to write today. The thing that’s on my mind is the passing of a friend of mine but I don’t think I’m ready to talk about that yet. So instead I’m going to do a short rant about mikokoteni (push carts) and motor cycles.

[image]

These two classes of vehicles seem to think they don’t need to obey traffic rules. Mikokoteni  routinely go up the wrong side of the road causing all kinds of mayhem traffic-wise and even when they’re going the right way they are often moving so slow they still cause a minor snare up behind. If you’re on foot you’re not spared as because their drivers have no scruples getting on the pavement to avoid traffic. Finally I’ve seen a number of them scratch the side of cars as they try to squeeze through the miniscule spaces or simply because the driver can’t control the massive weight they’re transporting.

I don’t know what to write today. The thing that’s on my mind is the passing of a friend of mine but I don’t think I’m ready to talk about that yet. So instead I’m going to do a short rant about mikokoteni (push carts) and motor cycles.

[image]

These two classes of vehicles seem to think they don’t need to obey traffic rules. Mikokoteni  routinely go up the wrong side of the road causing all kinds of mayhem traffic-wise and even when they’re going the right way they are often moving so slow they still cause a minor snare up behind. If you’re on foot you’re not spared as because their drivers have no scruples getting on the pavement to avoid traffic. Finally I’ve seen a number of them scratch the side of cars as they try to squeeze through the miniscule spaces or simply because the driver can’t control the massive weight they’re transporting.

I don’t know what to write today. The thing that’s on my mind is the passing of a friend of mine but I don’t think I’m ready to talk about that yet. So instead I’m going to do a short rant about mikokoteni (push carts) and motor cycles.

[image]

These two classes of vehicles seem to think they don’t need to obey traffic rules. Mikokoteni  routinely go up the wrong side of the road causing all kinds of mayhem traffic-wise and even when they’re going the right way they are often moving so slow they still cause a minor snare up behind. If you’re on foot you’re not spared as because their drivers have no scruples getting on the pavement to avoid traffic. Finally I’ve seen a number of them scratch the side of cars as they try to squeeze through the miniscule spaces or simply because the driver can’t control the massive weight they’re transporting.

 Back when I was in school, I had a radio show for almost two years. It was one of the most exhilarating activities I engaged in while on campus, right up there with Spoken Heart. It was something I got interested in when one of my friends invited me as a guest on her show, called Universal Vybes, when her guest for that day cancelled. I had a great time. Afterwards, she let me know of just how easy it was to get a show on the station. In fact the head of the station encouraged as many students as possible to apply.

[Image: http://rkaydee.deviantart.com]

I have a rather varied sexual life. I’ve done the experimental, the crazy and the bizarre. I’ve been accused of breaking my friend’s bed (I still call BS on this one, it just came up broken after I used it) and I’ve cockblocked people and been cockblocked. I can’t say I’ve done it all but I’ve done a lot, some of which I think back and just go, “The thirst y’all, the thirst”.

Hey y’all. I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted but I’ve been busy with exams which, between you and me, I think I’ve aced but don’t remind me of this when the results come out next semester saying different. So now it’s the end of the academic year as a fresher and I can tell you for someone just finishing their first year I’ve done it all.

This year, I’ve helped a friend I had sex with have an abortion, made new friends drinking and got my laptop stolen from me. As the semester’s come to an end I’ve found myself falling for one of my friends and I must say things are looking rather promising from me…and her.*knocks on wood*

Ladies and gentlemen last week on Friday, for the first time, I went to one of the locals around school for drinks with a new friend of mine, @joeemgee, at a place call Green Park. Yup, it was awesome up so I want to tell you about it.

We were supposed to meet there at 8, 8.30 but somehow I only got there at 9 and Joe around thirty minutes later. I check in and well to tell you the truth it looked better than expected. Clean and very simple. I saw one of my classmates, a girl, who seemed to be on a double date. Wait can you really have a proper date in a bar? Of course, I planted myself right there while I waited for Joe, I don’t think her date liked it.}:)

So while I was narrating this story( Catch part one here) to you guys-and girls- I’ve tried to as objective as possible and tell the story as I saw it then, through my eyes, without giving you too much of what I thought of the situation after really thinking about it. So that’s what this post is about.

I don’t know about you but I’ve always been of the opinion that get pregnant at my age-which is rather young, think kid, baby-is stupid. Yes, I’m saying that Q was stupid to get pregnant. I mean think about it in this day and age you only get pregnant if you want to, what with condoms, contraceptives, e-pills and of course abstinence, it’s either that or you’re stupid. I told Q as much.

Continuing from here

I don’t like this dude, E. He looks shifty, dodgy. But then again that might have something to do with him knocking up my friend but not so much, I remember I met him when I went Greenpark (local around school), he didn’t seem to like me cutting in the way I did.

He seemed to look rather scared when Q asked that he clears the room of everyone, except me and W. Then she began to talk to E. She told him that she had gone to hospital to get tested, that the results were positive, she was pregnant. And guess what he asked?

Continuing from here

“Hello, R?”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Fine, it’s cdohnio”

“Ahhh, cdohnio how are you? How’s school?”

“I’m cool, school’s fine, listen I have something rather delicate to ask you”

“Ask…”in serious and curious tone.

“First of all you have to promise to keep this secret, you can’t tell anyone, not my mum, not aunty, not your bro….(add several family members here)….no one!”

“Okay, what is it?”suspicion.

“I have a friend, a girl, she gotten herself in a delicate situation and she wandering the price of something. You know Hosithis, right?”

Continued from here

I found out later, that I actually exclaimed, ’Whoops!!’. I can’t remember that. Q then took the results out of my hand to see for her self and after W also took a look he ripped the results into pieces. Dee began cursing how she couldn’t believe it as she fought hard-I could tell-not to cry though tear still leaked from the sides. She collapsed for a few seconds into Q arms and all I could do was rub her back. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that useless, or that confused or maybe lost is word, in my young life. I mean, what could I do? Or rather I didn’t know what I could, should do.
This may be the best place to mention the baby wasn’t mine.

I don’t really know how to start this. I’m scared. A girl I was intimate with is pregnant. Yes pregnant and I’m freaking out for her. Yes my only concern is her. I’m really worried how this will affect her mentally and psychologically. It’s just the first month of year one and already I’m in such a difficult situation. I’ll start at the beginning.

So I have this friend lets call her, Q, we had sex… She was the first on campus. The next week she tells me and some of our friends (we’re kind of a group, small) that she thinks she’s missed her ps. One of us, we’ll call him, W, asked how long it had been and she says 2 weeks. She then goes on to say that she wants us to take her to the clinic so she can get a pregnancy test.

Hey y’all! Starting tomorrow I’ll be dropping a bunch of posts I wanted to put up last year but didn’t have the chance or means to. There are 4 or 5 posts that were actually written as one but would have been too long for one sitting/post in my opinion. So I cut it up. I’ve done it such a way that it provides the most entertainment while still managing to convey what was happening. I hope you like it because I personally think I did a great job on them. Either way your thoughts on them would be much appreciated so stick around. Peace!!

Yesterday I had a security breach on the laptop I use to write the posts I put up for you. No, my posts for you aren’t so important that someone would spend their time trying to hack my laptop trying to steal them as creative secrets(Though to me they are) and anyway the laptop is never connected to any network.

BREACH!!!!

Yeah, a friend of mine found one of the posts I had written for posting some day. The way she found it was kinda suspicious. She asked if she come to my room and use my laptop for 5 minutes. I, at the time clueless, just thought she wanted to use it for programming or something. You see, not many of my classmates have laptops yet despite being computer science students but I suspect next semester most will.

Hey y’all! Yes, I already have another post for you already! I don’t know how long this momentum will maintain but recently I keep finding more and more stuff to write about. Also I really don’t have to much to do in the evenings because well the assignments haven’t really kicked in. So for now I have much to write.

The other weekend my cousin, yes the one featuring in the last post and one before it, invited his girlfriend from home to school,with her sis, who he was trying to hook me up with.

I wrote this a while back but my phone mem-card decided it’s misbehaving and got a virus or bug of some sort and I had to format it. And this post was on it so I had to write it again which I’m sure it’ll not be as awesome as when I first penned it but know I’ll try my best.

So my cuzo came to room about a week ago with what I saw as both shocking and awesome news! The girl he was aiming for, the one I told you about before, had ingia’d box(That’s to say she was really feeling his vybe, hey half my audience is actually from the US). Yup she had been papped!!:-D Of course I was happy and proud because as far as I could tell at the time he was setting pace for all freshas. Most freshas are still keeping to themselves looking as confused and lost as ever.

Too soon to be doing another post? Have you even fully digested the last one? It’s okay you can read both of them! Right? Anyway I’m in my room at about 10.30pm, not really trying to sleep but in bed none the less, phone in my hand and it hits me there’s a lot of noise in the background.

I pause to listen and I hear about 4 different sources of music and sound all seemly competing to overpower the rest.
The dude across from my room is listening to traditional Luyha Christian choir songs, some dude up the hall is booming his favourite rhumba and lingala tracks while his neighbour watches an action movie at max volume. Two doors down from me is some playing what seems to be a Hip hop mix and further down opposite some is listening to reggae/ragga.

Okay ladies and gentlemen! This is the very first post coming direct from my campus!! The first campus-post! Yeah I joined campus, finally, in Maseno! It’s written in two parts, the first were the thing’s written on the first day I arrived in the morning and mostly on the registration line. Everything else was after! This is not conclusive, I’m still organising my thoughts, but it’ll have to do until I can give you something more solid. Hopefully this means a return to more regular blogging for me!*Fingers crossed*

 Back when I was in school, I had a radio show for almost two years. It was one of the most exhilarating activities I engaged in while on campus, right up there with Spoken Heart. It was something I got interested in when one of my friends invited me as a guest on her show, called Universal Vybes, when her guest for that day cancelled. I had a great time. Afterwards, she let me know of just how easy it was to get a show on the station. In fact the head of the station encouraged as many students as possible to apply.

It’s the first day of school for me, I’ve been here every day for a week but this is what I’m counting as my first day in that I’ll be fully settled down. It’s taken almost a week to get a room. Things in school have been, as my dad is sometimes fond of saying, ELEPHANT.

Our VC, in his infinite wisdom accepted to admit 3500 freshmen. He not only admitted them but he also decided to house them on campus never mind that we don’t have nearly enough beds to house them and us the over probably 8000 students who were to join them a week after. Most of the opening week was spent running about campus scrambling for a meagre number of rooms left (according to the lottery that we had there we only under 600 beds left).

I’m back in school now after a 4 month long holiday so I thought this would be the best time to reflect on what I’ve been up to and achieved. Looking back, I feel this has been one of my more productive holidays; of course as at the end of the holiday I don’t think I’ve achieved as much as I should have in that amount of time but for the first time that doesn’t bother me as much as it usually would.

 Back when I was in school, I had a radio show for almost two years. It was one of the most exhilarating activities I engaged in while on campus, right up there with Spoken Heart. It was something I got interested in when one of my friends invited me as a guest on her show, called Universal Vybes, when her guest for that day cancelled. I had a great time. Afterwards, she let me know of just how easy it was to get a show on the station. In fact the head of the station encouraged as many students as possible to apply.

It’s been another long day. I seem to be having quite a few of those this week so I’m thanking God the weekend is here. I can’t tell you what I’ve been up to, because it would be boring to mention, only that I’m really tired. And now instead of getting into bed I’m sitting down to write this.

We held a Fail Faire today at the iHub, I only checked in long enough to hear the story of one person and the place was so very packed but it got me thinking of one of my failures.

It’s been another long day. I seem to be having quite a few of those this week so I’m thanking God the weekend is here. I can’t tell you what I’ve been up to, because it would be boring to mention, only that I’m really tired. And now instead of getting into bed I’m sitting down to write this.

We held a Fail Faire today at the iHub, I only checked in long enough to hear the story of one person and the place was so very packed but it got me thinking of one of my failures.

I found this post floating about on my facebook and thought I’d share it with you guys because a lot of what’s said I’ve felt and still feel.

It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn’t know and may not like.You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now.

Happy New Year!! How are y’all doing? This is my first post of the year which should make it special but it really isn’t, mostly because I don’t really have anything useful to say. So instead what follows next is mostly going to be me rambling on about random things.

image:http://www.staceyshipman.com

First of all this is my last semester of school… I’m not really excited, more scared. At the end of these four months I should become a man, which has little to do with my age or level of maturity and more to do with the fact that I’ll be expected to take care of myself. No more handouts from the parents. In fact the only thing I can expect from either of them is a place to sleep and to be fed(and who knows how long the feeding will last?).

First I’d like to thank Sgyreju for allowing me to put up her posts on my blog and I’m sure all of you thank her too. She wrote them almost a year ago but the ideas and questions she asks are priceless and I’ll continue to cherish them forever. Second this is an edited conclusion of what has been a very fun week of posts that Sgyreju originally had on her blog. It contain mostly her thoughts interspersed with mine.

Gender is something I have only begun to think about very recently, and I still have work to do in order to understand better where I stand in relation to it. But, even though I have only been exploring my own gender identity for about three months, I had known for a while longer that it is quite a complex matter.

The first thing to know is the difference between sex and gender. While sex is a biological fact, gender is an identity; it is about how one perceives oneself. For a long time, I did not know about gender; this is not a widely known concept in mainstream France (recently, someone I know wrote a survey with a question about “gender”. She told me her professors had said it was the politically correct word to use for questions about biological sex.). I knew about transsexual people, but I only knew about them as “people who feel they were born in the wrong body and need to change their biological sex”. As to myself, my being a girl was just a fact, like my height or my birth date – a fact about me I had no control about, and which meant even less to me than my height or my birthdate do – and I could not imagine it mattering at all.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

Very often, people use the word “relationship” to refer to romantic relationships – just as they use the word “love” to refer to romantic love. It rather annoys me to see those words trapped into one of their specific meanings, especially as this specific meaning is not one I can relate to. So, be warned – in this blog, “relationship” refers to all kinds of relationships, and “love” refers to all kinds of love.

I did not always identify as aromantic.

For a long time, I did believe in the whole romantic myth that one is truly happier with a romantic partner, and I wished for one. I longed for the time when I would finally live those idealized shared moments with my beloved: having breakfast together, taking long walks hand in hand, talking about everything and anything for hours, kiss passionately like in my favorite love scenes in movies…

Sex is a complex matter. It is hard to define – for some people, only genital penetration counts; for others, anything involving someone’s genitals is sex. It also has several meanings: an expression of romantic love, a fun activity, a way to experience pleasure, a way to prove one’s worth… and many more. Some use it as a means of pressure (withholding sex in punishment or offering sex as a reward in order to obtain something), while others plan strategies to obtain it.

I will not lie to you: Questioning one’s identity is scary.

The evening of June 4, 2006, when I finally became aware that I probably was not heterosexual as I had always assumed, and the night that followed were, at the time, the scariest moments of my life. Now, four years later, they have only been pushed to second place by another evening that I do not want to talk about (and anyway, it has nothing to do with asexuality or any of the other matters that I wish to discuss in my Petri Dish).

Since today is the fourth anniversary of the evening during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.

I had a LiveJournal account in which I wrote regularly – and there are entries about that event. The first one was published at 10:18PM that night, which means that the event happened before.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I’m commitment-phobic. I couldn’t believe it, it’s something that has been having a subtle effect on all my relationships. I’m calling it subtle because I didn’t notice it but I’m thinking someone else may have.

I’ve always complained of how I don’t have a girlfriend and to realise that I’ve been sub-conscientiously sabotaging my own chances makes me laugh. Anyway so I did some research into it (Google/Wikipedia of course). The description I’ve written below is interspersed with commentary from me with how what I’ve written best describes me and how I’ve seen it in my life. These comments will be in brackets so don’t skip to the end hoping to see what I’m thinking.

For the second time in as many weekends I found myself in the boot of the car because the ride was already too full in the front. Well the cars were hunchback so it was actually quite comfortable.
This actually besides the point but on the second trip, lying on my back looking at the ssky, admiring the car and skyscrapers rushing by I began to comtemplate something that I’ve thought about on and off for a little bit: I’ve always wanted to experience someone else’s thoughts.

This is one of those posts where, I just talk randomly about whatever is on my head, as I have nothing of much significance to talk about. Usually when I a have random stuff to write down it’s about one specific topic but today, I’m going random about random.

Random like the colours in this picture

I was in Kakamega over the weekend visiting my cousin; it was all kinds of awesome, drinking and raeving and hanging out and drinking. While on the rave, I happened to dance with a big mama by big here I mean fat. This girl had big everything; big boobs, big ass, big thighs, big stomach; big everything. While she was grinding on me and I’m starting to get a little feeling in my nether regions, I realized that big women may actually be able to be able a rouse something in me. I didn’t know that, I’ve always found fat girl’s unsexy, this weekend is causing me to re-examine that.

Ladies and gentlemen last week on Friday, for the first time, I went to one of the locals around school for drinks with a new friend of mine, @joeemgee, at a place call Green Park. Yup, it was awesome up so I want to tell you about it.

We were supposed to meet there at 8, 8.30 but somehow I only got there at 9 and Joe around thirty minutes later. I check in and well to tell you the truth it looked better than expected. Clean and very simple. I saw one of my classmates, a girl, who seemed to be on a double date. Wait can you really have a proper date in a bar? Of course, I planted myself right there while I waited for Joe, I don’t think her date liked it.}:)

Today I’m in a sufficiently depressed to post this rather dull post. I wrote it when I was going through a really bad time in my life. I’m feeling right now something similar to what I did then.
Has any of you really contemplated suicide? As in really really thought about it? I have. Sometime I feel it’d be better than all the sadness in the world. Where everyone’s life seems to be going better than yours?

Hey y’all! I’ve been on a kind of high since the weekend. I finally got off my ass and went for the shopping I should’ve gone for 4 weeks ago meaning I have some food in my room finally. I went shags(the country house) for a day so that I could have a bit of solitude and found my dad there, he gave me some cash:) which for someone my age is better than solitude. Also he gave me something even better than money; my own laptop!!

So while I was narrating this story( Catch part one here) to you guys-and girls- I’ve tried to as objective as possible and tell the story as I saw it then, through my eyes, without giving you too much of what I thought of the situation after really thinking about it. So that’s what this post is about.

I don’t know about you but I’ve always been of the opinion that get pregnant at my age-which is rather young, think kid, baby-is stupid. Yes, I’m saying that Q was stupid to get pregnant. I mean think about it in this day and age you only get pregnant if you want to, what with condoms, contraceptives, e-pills and of course abstinence, it’s either that or you’re stupid. I told Q as much.

Continuing from here

I don’t like this dude, E. He looks shifty, dodgy. But then again that might have something to do with him knocking up my friend but not so much, I remember I met him when I went Greenpark (local around school), he didn’t seem to like me cutting in the way I did.

He seemed to look rather scared when Q asked that he clears the room of everyone, except me and W. Then she began to talk to E. She told him that she had gone to hospital to get tested, that the results were positive, she was pregnant. And guess what he asked?

Continuing from here

“Hello, R?”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Fine, it’s cdohnio”

“Ahhh, cdohnio how are you? How’s school?”

“I’m cool, school’s fine, listen I have something rather delicate to ask you”

“Ask…”in serious and curious tone.

“First of all you have to promise to keep this secret, you can’t tell anyone, not my mum, not aunty, not your bro….(add several family members here)….no one!”

“Okay, what is it?”suspicion.

“I have a friend, a girl, she gotten herself in a delicate situation and she wandering the price of something. You know Hosithis, right?”

Continued from here

I found out later, that I actually exclaimed, ’Whoops!!’. I can’t remember that. Q then took the results out of my hand to see for her self and after W also took a look he ripped the results into pieces. Dee began cursing how she couldn’t believe it as she fought hard-I could tell-not to cry though tear still leaked from the sides. She collapsed for a few seconds into Q arms and all I could do was rub her back. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that useless, or that confused or maybe lost is word, in my young life. I mean, what could I do? Or rather I didn’t know what I could, should do.
This may be the best place to mention the baby wasn’t mine.

I don’t really know how to start this. I’m scared. A girl I was intimate with is pregnant. Yes pregnant and I’m freaking out for her. Yes my only concern is her. I’m really worried how this will affect her mentally and psychologically. It’s just the first month of year one and already I’m in such a difficult situation. I’ll start at the beginning.

So I have this friend lets call her, Q, we had sex… She was the first on campus. The next week she tells me and some of our friends (we’re kind of a group, small) that she thinks she’s missed her ps. One of us, we’ll call him, W, asked how long it had been and she says 2 weeks. She then goes on to say that she wants us to take her to the clinic so she can get a pregnancy test.

Hey y’all! Starting tomorrow I’ll be dropping a bunch of posts I wanted to put up last year but didn’t have the chance or means to. There are 4 or 5 posts that were actually written as one but would have been too long for one sitting/post in my opinion. So I cut it up. I’ve done it such a way that it provides the most entertainment while still managing to convey what was happening. I hope you like it because I personally think I did a great job on them. Either way your thoughts on them would be much appreciated so stick around. Peace!!

So this is the like the 4th day of questioning week and so far so good. I’ve been able to post something each day so far. Today we talk about dating and perhaps at the end you’ll help me answer questions I have.

A coffee date

A date is an appointment or engagement, especially a social one with a member of the opposite sex. That’s what my phone dictionary tells me, and I quite agree, anyone with a different interpretation feel free to share it in the comments. It’s a simple enough definition and we can begin with that. NOTE: This will be told from my point of view so it’ll be biased to what might be “the guy” side.

Today I ask questions about God but before i do a little background would be good. My parents divorced some nearly 5 years ago. Since then things haven’t been exactly easy for my mum. She’s always been short on cash and can’t seen to be able to do much. She’s a very strong Christian. My dad has had smooth sail as far as I can tell, very well paying top job and new wife. He has lives quite comfortably. I’ve never seen him in a church or praying in all my life.

Today I’m going to talk about religion. I’m not so sure how long I can write about it so we’ll see how far I go. I’m a Christian and to be more specific Seventh Day Adventist. I go to church on Saturday while most other Christians do this on Sunday.

There probably several hundred devisions of Christianity in the world. We have Catholic, Pentecostal, Baptist, Protestant, Angilcan and our very own home bred, Finger of God church just to mention a few. I personally belive my church is the right one and you probably believe yours is the right one so how can you ever be sure?

I’d been reading a blog(Rainbow Amoeba’s Petri Dish) that had something she called Questioning Week. She had just moved her blog to a new site and was also celebrating the 4th Anniversary since the evening in her own words
“during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.”

I encourage you all to go read the 7 posts she did because in my opinion they’re great pieces that I might even one day feature here.(If she allows that is)

Hey y’all! Yes, I already have another post for you already! I don’t know how long this momentum will maintain but recently I keep finding more and more stuff to write about. Also I really don’t have to much to do in the evenings because well the assignments haven’t really kicked in. So for now I have much to write.

The other weekend my cousin, yes the one featuring in the last post and one before it, invited his girlfriend from home to school,with her sis, who he was trying to hook me up with.

I wrote this a while back but my phone mem-card decided it’s misbehaving and got a virus or bug of some sort and I had to format it. And this post was on it so I had to write it again which I’m sure it’ll not be as awesome as when I first penned it but know I’ll try my best.

So my cuzo came to room about a week ago with what I saw as both shocking and awesome news! The girl he was aiming for, the one I told you about before, had ingia’d box(That’s to say she was really feeling his vybe, hey half my audience is actually from the US). Yup she had been papped!!:-D Of course I was happy and proud because as far as I could tell at the time he was setting pace for all freshas. Most freshas are still keeping to themselves looking as confused and lost as ever.

Too soon to be doing another post? Have you even fully digested the last one? It’s okay you can read both of them! Right? Anyway I’m in my room at about 10.30pm, not really trying to sleep but in bed none the less, phone in my hand and it hits me there’s a lot of noise in the background.

I pause to listen and I hear about 4 different sources of music and sound all seemly competing to overpower the rest.
The dude across from my room is listening to traditional Luyha Christian choir songs, some dude up the hall is booming his favourite rhumba and lingala tracks while his neighbour watches an action movie at max volume. Two doors down from me is some playing what seems to be a Hip hop mix and further down opposite some is listening to reggae/ragga.

Okay ladies and gentlemen! This is the very first post coming direct from my campus!! The first campus-post! Yeah I joined campus, finally, in Maseno! It’s written in two parts, the first were the thing’s written on the first day I arrived in the morning and mostly on the registration line. Everything else was after! This is not conclusive, I’m still organising my thoughts, but it’ll have to do until I can give you something more solid. Hopefully this means a return to more regular blogging for me!*Fingers crossed*

So remember my weird really pissed of post, the one I wouldn’t allow y’all to comment on? And remember I said I wanted to see a psychiatrist but couldn’t seem to get to it? Well at the pressing of one of my dearest friends I finally got round to doing it.

Yeah, some weeks back I went to see one in a very informal type meeting. Her phone kept ringing and I also kept tweeting. My friend was there also I guess for moral support and its was in a public place not I some office where you lie down and talk incessantly about yourself and your feelings.

Hey everyone!! It’s been awhile since I last did a post and I’ve been wondering what to write about. As this blog is about my random thoughts and feelings so I guess I can write about anything I feel about and y’all will have to read about it, won’t you?:) That might sound arrogant but hey I’m right, aren’t I?

Last week I was in Kisumu and its surrounding environs and towns. I travelled on my birthday. I know most people would’ve  waited to celebrate their birthday’s first then travelled but I haven’t really celebrated a birthday in the last 8 or 9 years. Sad, I know, but then again my life has really been a happy one in past years but more on that in another post if I ever get the courage to tell the world about it. So I went to Kisumu, on my birthday. Why?

(The following events take place on the day that was the 16th of July 2014)

It’s been another long day and I’ve only just checked into the house at 2100hrs. I’ve been at a work thing since 1600hrs. Before that, I’ve been struggling to have my computer dual boot into Ubuntu. In the end I gave up and plan to try another flavour of Linux. I want to use Linux for my development because it seems more like a programmer’s environment and also because it’s the only major OS I’ve not used for daily stuff.

(The following events take place on the day that was the 16th of July 2014)

It’s been another long day and I’ve only just checked into the house at 2100hrs. I’ve been at a work thing since 1600hrs. Before that, I’ve been struggling to have my computer dual boot into Ubuntu. In the end I gave up and plan to try another flavour of Linux. I want to use Linux for my development because it seems more like a programmer’s environment and also because it’s the only major OS I’ve not used for daily stuff.

(The following events take place on the day that was the 16th of July 2014)

It’s been another long day and I’ve only just checked into the house at 2100hrs. I’ve been at a work thing since 1600hrs. Before that, I’ve been struggling to have my computer dual boot into Ubuntu. In the end I gave up and plan to try another flavour of Linux. I want to use Linux for my development because it seems more like a programmer’s environment and also because it’s the only major OS I’ve not used for daily stuff.

Once again I’m forced to rush to write this before the day is up. It is now about 9.30pm. I can just imagine Okelo tapping his foot going “Tsk tsk tsk!!!” right now which is actually making me smile. I haven’t seen him in a while and I miss him. I’m comfortable enough in my sexuality to say that.

Today was a good day (Editor’s Note: I guess it should be yesterday now!!!). I overslept. In fact, I would not have woken up when I did, some minutes to 8am, if it wasn’t for the maid coming by to let me know that she was leaving. I threw the blanket off me while cursing my stupidity - deciding to watch 3 movies back to back the night before. They were really good but Transcendence was the obvious stand out, go watch it if you can.

Once again I’m forced to rush to write this before the day is up. It is now about 9.30pm. I can just imagine Okelo tapping his foot going “Tsk tsk tsk!!!” right now which is actually making me smile. I haven’t seen him in a while and I miss him. I’m comfortable enough in my sexuality to say that.

Today was a good day (Editor’s Note: I guess it should be yesterday now!!!). I overslept. In fact, I would not have woken up when I did, some minutes to 8am, if it wasn’t for the maid coming by to let me know that she was leaving. I threw the blanket off me while cursing my stupidity - deciding to watch 3 movies back to back the night before. They were really good but Transcendence was the obvious stand out, go watch it if you can.

Once again I’m forced to rush to write this before the day is up. It is now about 9.30pm. I can just imagine Okelo tapping his foot going “Tsk tsk tsk!!!” right now which is actually making me smile. I haven’t seen him in a while and I miss him. I’m comfortable enough in my sexuality to say that.

Today was a good day (Editor’s Note: I guess it should be yesterday now!!!). I overslept. In fact, I would not have woken up when I did, some minutes to 8am, if it wasn’t for the maid coming by to let me know that she was leaving. I threw the blanket off me while cursing my stupidity - deciding to watch 3 movies back to back the night before. They were really good but Transcendence was the obvious stand out, go watch it if you can.

The problem about setting up challenges and telling certain people about it is that sometimes they hold you accountable to it. Which is really annoying when you forget about doing it first thing in the morning and find yourself at 4 pm rushing to get it done before you’re asked about it.

I had been thinking of trying to do a post every day this week starting today. In the beginning I called it an experiment, but my editor @TheOkelo pointed out that it’s more of a challenge (he has the annoying habit of correcting me) but while I was writing it occurred to me that it can still be considered an experiment because I wonder exactly what the quality of the writing and content will be if I have to write something every single day. I guess we’ll know at the end of the week.

The problem about setting up challenges and telling certain people about it is that sometimes they hold you accountable to it. Which is really annoying when you forget about doing it first thing in the morning and find yourself at 4 pm rushing to get it done before you’re asked about it.

I had been thinking of trying to do a post every day this week starting today. In the beginning I called it an experiment, but my editor @TheOkelo pointed out that it’s more of a challenge (he has the annoying habit of correcting me) but while I was writing it occurred to me that it can still be considered an experiment because I wonder exactly what the quality of the writing and content will be if I have to write something every single day. I guess we’ll know at the end of the week.

The members of my family were blessed with a gift, we all have this innate ability to make judgements about people that usually turn out to be true. We meet you once and form an opinion about you based on that.

Just to give you an example, I met a friend’s boyfriend for the first time and thought there was something “off” about him. Curiously, he had been completely nice and polite to me. I couldn’t see why I felt this way about him, it was a bit of a weird disconnect for me because he hadn’t really done anything to deserve the judgement. Later when I was mentioning this feeling to my mum and sister, who had meet him months before me they mentioned that they had both gotten the same feeling from him.

It’s been a while since I did an app review, probably because I haven’t explored that scene; I should probably look into that or something. Nonetheless, the app I’ll be reviewing today is called Safari Tales and it’s a production of Afrokidz Ltd. It has been made for Africa by Africans inspired by the diverse and rich African Culture. It is currently developed for the Android market for children between the ages of 2 – 9 years. That description has been stolen verbatim from their website :D!

It’s been a while since I did an app review, probably because I haven’t explored that scene; I should probably look into that or something. Nonetheless, the app I’ll be reviewing today is called Safari Tales and it’s a production of Afrokidz Ltd. It has been made for Africa by Africans inspired by the diverse and rich African Culture. It is currently developed for the Android market for children between the ages of 2 – 9 years. That description has been stolen verbatim from their website :D!

So today we have a guest post for the first time in a long time… maybe 3 years (I’m leaving it to my editor to find out how long it has been because I’m making it his job :D [Editor’s Note: Actually it’s 2 years and 29 days sir; we must always be precise!]) Anyway back to the introduction; the person writing today bothered me all week to get this post up - I may lose my life for mentioning that. I’ve known him for the the last 8 years since high school. He was a classmate and quite literally my wingman during those years. He’s annoying, funny, clever and very big. When he’s not pestering me he also blogs at The Spectator. I’d like you all to put your hands together for the writer known as Ron!!!

So today we have a guest post for the first time in a long time… maybe 3 years (I’m leaving it to my editor to find out how long it has been because I’m making it his job :D [Editor’s Note: Actually it’s 2 years and 29 days sir; we must always be precise!]) Anyway back to the introduction; the person writing today bothered me all week to get this post up - I may lose my life for mentioning that. I’ve known him for the the last 8 years since high school. He was a classmate and quite literally my wingman during those years. He’s annoying, funny, clever and very big. When he’s not pestering me he also blogs at The Spectator. I’d like you all to put your hands together for the writer known as Ron!!!

First I’d like to thank Sgyreju for allowing me to put up her posts on my blog and I’m sure all of you thank her too. She wrote them almost a year ago but the ideas and questions she asks are priceless and I’ll continue to cherish them forever. Second this is an edited conclusion of what has been a very fun week of posts that Sgyreju originally had on her blog. It contain mostly her thoughts interspersed with mine.

Gender is something I have only begun to think about very recently, and I still have work to do in order to understand better where I stand in relation to it. But, even though I have only been exploring my own gender identity for about three months, I had known for a while longer that it is quite a complex matter.

The first thing to know is the difference between sex and gender. While sex is a biological fact, gender is an identity; it is about how one perceives oneself. For a long time, I did not know about gender; this is not a widely known concept in mainstream France (recently, someone I know wrote a survey with a question about “gender”. She told me her professors had said it was the politically correct word to use for questions about biological sex.). I knew about transsexual people, but I only knew about them as “people who feel they were born in the wrong body and need to change their biological sex”. As to myself, my being a girl was just a fact, like my height or my birth date – a fact about me I had no control about, and which meant even less to me than my height or my birthdate do – and I could not imagine it mattering at all.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

Very often, people use the word “relationship” to refer to romantic relationships – just as they use the word “love” to refer to romantic love. It rather annoys me to see those words trapped into one of their specific meanings, especially as this specific meaning is not one I can relate to. So, be warned – in this blog, “relationship” refers to all kinds of relationships, and “love” refers to all kinds of love.

I did not always identify as aromantic.

For a long time, I did believe in the whole romantic myth that one is truly happier with a romantic partner, and I wished for one. I longed for the time when I would finally live those idealized shared moments with my beloved: having breakfast together, taking long walks hand in hand, talking about everything and anything for hours, kiss passionately like in my favorite love scenes in movies…

Sex is a complex matter. It is hard to define – for some people, only genital penetration counts; for others, anything involving someone’s genitals is sex. It also has several meanings: an expression of romantic love, a fun activity, a way to experience pleasure, a way to prove one’s worth… and many more. Some use it as a means of pressure (withholding sex in punishment or offering sex as a reward in order to obtain something), while others plan strategies to obtain it.

I will not lie to you: Questioning one’s identity is scary.

The evening of June 4, 2006, when I finally became aware that I probably was not heterosexual as I had always assumed, and the night that followed were, at the time, the scariest moments of my life. Now, four years later, they have only been pushed to second place by another evening that I do not want to talk about (and anyway, it has nothing to do with asexuality or any of the other matters that I wish to discuss in my Petri Dish).

Since today is the fourth anniversary of the evening during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.

I had a LiveJournal account in which I wrote regularly – and there are entries about that event. The first one was published at 10:18PM that night, which means that the event happened before.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. For the next week,every day, starting tomorrow, I’ll be featuring a number of posts that I read a long time ago from Rainbow Amoeba’s Petri Dish . She called it Questioning Week.  They really inspired me, so much so that I started my very own Questioning Week inspired by the series of post I’m going to share with you during the coming week

 So this is another guest post by another firend of mine! Actually the girl I told you about here and here. Yeah Mich, that awesome awesome girl I told you about. Well she wrote this for my a long time ago and I was supposed to put it up back then but I’ve been busy and lazy! So anyway here it is now…

So I’m sure that not many of us know that this is Kid Cudi’s 2nd LP that is to be released later this year. I’m sure someone knows what Man on the Moon means, and I used to at a point, but since I’ve forgotten, pardon the meaning I’ll give it today.
We all know our brains have two sides, just like the moon, a bright side and a dark side. So taking the brain to be a moon, we’d say that there’s a man on my moon right now, and his story is quite like Kid Cudi’s, so its the legend of Mr. Rager.
In the dark side of my brain, Mr. Rager is a guy who’s gone through quite so much in his life, he should be as dark as the universe without stars, but in the bright side, he’s just reflecting sunlight off him to everyone who cares to get warm.
But there’s something about this guy, he’s just sticking on the moon, without any plans of getting down to earth, he’s getting comfortable on the moon, because its like he’s forgotten that even though people will always disappoint him, he’ll run out of oxygen one day….
Now that I’m running out of metaphors… I guess I’ll stop there, because this is not my kinda thing, and I’m not wont to say things just like that…so I shall talk about man on the moon 2…
He’s the guy who constantly runs around the moon, trying to stay in the light, as the moon rotates alot, and he’s always there to brighten up my nights. I’ve gone to the extent of building castles in the air for this guy, hoping that he’ll find it, because he’s trying to get off the moon, and I wouldn’t want him to get hurt on his way to earth. Soon enough, he’ll catch his flight on Cloud Nine, and he’ll become real to me….because he’s just a figment of my imagination. But I’d have him anyday over my first man on the moon…who for now is the only man on the brain.
I don’t know if that will make sense to anyone but me,but everyone should get a copy of The Legend of Mr. Rager, and actually listen to what he has to say, because I think there’s a lot going on beneath his cheesy smile.

This is a short story written by one of my best friends. It’s my very first guest post so I look at it as part of the growth of my blog. You know showing that other people don’t mind their work appearing here and actually might appreciate it being put up. Look out for another guest post soon!! 

Sunsets always brought out the beauty I wanted to see. Every day, the sunset looked different to me. That day, I had been looking at the sunset for a really long time. As the sun continued to set, I saw everything in a new light. It was the most beautiful blend of colors ranging from orange to pink and just the lightest touch of purple. It reminded me of him and what he meant to my life.

So today we have a guest post for the first time in a long time… maybe 3 years (I’m leaving it to my editor to find out how long it has been because I’m making it his job :D [Editor’s Note: Actually it’s 2 years and 29 days sir; we must always be precise!]) Anyway back to the introduction; the person writing today bothered me all week to get this post up - I may lose my life for mentioning that. I’ve known him for the the last 8 years since high school. He was a classmate and quite literally my wingman during those years. He’s annoying, funny, clever and very big. When he’s not pestering me he also blogs at The Spectator. I’d like you all to put your hands together for the writer known as Ron!!!

So this will be a post just recapping some of the things I’ve said in the last four posts. Think of it as the tl;dr of them

Find and follow companies that inspire you. I’ve been a white member(registered) at the iHub since it’s inception in 2010, I follow them on Twitter, read the email newsletters they send and have their blog listed in my feed. I would never have found out about Umati without all these measures. I do this with other cool companies. 

This will be the penultimate post of the series. I had been called in to interview. I was stoked, but at the same time super apprehensive. I had never done an interview before and wasn’t sure what to expect. I knew that iHub was a cool company and seeing that it was for an internship position I was hoping that I wouldn’t be asked to demonstrate any complex coding.

I did however do a few things to prepare. I first made sure that everything I had mentioned in my cover letter I could demonstrate or explain clearly. Which included the facial recognition project I had done and the methods I used. I googled likely interview questions for interns and made sure that those that applied to me I could answer without hesitation. And finally I read everything I could about iHub research and got to know the people I may be interviewing with.

So yesterday (9.4.14), I put up a post that began to describe how I got an internship opportunity at iHub Research. In this post I’ll be putting up sections of the original cover letter I wrote. I’ve only edited it to remove some sensitive information.

[My name and introduction were here talking about where I’m from and where I live]

I was reading your quarterly report for the end of the last quarter and something that jumped at me as really interesting was the Umati project on monitoring the internets for inflammatory speech that could help spark violence offline. Umati found that online speech did not directly lead to violence offline but did offer useful insight into what issues need to be addressed to head of violence on the ground

Once again while walking through town, I got jacked! The second fucking time in a few years. The last time this happened I lost my phone and with it my will to live - just kidding, more like my will to be online. That marked the beginning of my hiatus from the internet for almost 2 years.

It played out almost exactly like the previous incident. I was stopped by a scruffy looking man with bloodshot eyes and the strong smell of spirit on him who held my arm firmly and wouldn’t let me shake him off. He then proceeded to ask me for money, this particular time for weed; I gave him 50bob, but that wasn’t enough. He then informed me that he had bought, or operated with, all the police in that area. He kept making my hand feel the gun he had in his waist band and he had a partner backing him up. When I gave him all I had, thankfully it was only a further 100 bob, it apparently wasn’t enough!!!

Once again while walking through town, I got jacked! The second fucking time in a few years. The last time this happened I lost my phone and with it my will to live - just kidding, more like my will to be online. That marked the beginning of my hiatus from the internet for almost 2 years.

It played out almost exactly like the previous incident. I was stopped by a scruffy looking man with bloodshot eyes and the strong smell of spirit on him who held my arm firmly and wouldn’t let me shake him off. He then proceeded to ask me for money, this particular time for weed; I gave him 50bob, but that wasn’t enough. He then informed me that he had bought, or operated with, all the police in that area. He kept making my hand feel the gun he had in his waist band and he had a partner backing him up. When I gave him all I had, thankfully it was only a further 100 bob, it apparently wasn’t enough!!!

Once again while walking through town, I got jacked! The second fucking time in a few years. The last time this happened I lost my phone and with it my will to live - just kidding, more like my will to be online. That marked the beginning of my hiatus from the internet for almost 2 years.

It played out almost exactly like the previous incident. I was stopped by a scruffy looking man with bloodshot eyes and the strong smell of spirit on him who held my arm firmly and wouldn’t let me shake him off. He then proceeded to ask me for money, this particular time for weed; I gave him 50bob, but that wasn’t enough. He then informed me that he had bought, or operated with, all the police in that area. He kept making my hand feel the gun he had in his waist band and he had a partner backing him up. When I gave him all I had, thankfully it was only a further 100 bob, it apparently wasn’t enough!!!

Once again while walking through town, I got jacked! The second fucking time in a few years. The last time this happened I lost my phone and with it my will to live - just kidding, more like my will to be online. That marked the beginning of my hiatus from the internet for almost 2 years.

It played out almost exactly like the previous incident. I was stopped by a scruffy looking man with bloodshot eyes and the strong smell of spirit on him who held my arm firmly and wouldn’t let me shake him off. He then proceeded to ask me for money, this particular time for weed; I gave him 50bob, but that wasn’t enough. He then informed me that he had bought, or operated with, all the police in that area. He kept making my hand feel the gun he had in his waist band and he had a partner backing him up. When I gave him all I had, thankfully it was only a further 100 bob, it apparently wasn’t enough!!!

Once again while walking through town, I got jacked! The second fucking time in a few years. The last time this happened I lost my phone and with it my will to live - just kidding, more like my will to be online. That marked the beginning of my hiatus from the internet for almost 2 years.

It played out almost exactly like the previous incident. I was stopped by a scruffy looking man with bloodshot eyes and the strong smell of spirit on him who held my arm firmly and wouldn’t let me shake him off. He then proceeded to ask me for money, this particular time for weed; I gave him 50bob, but that wasn’t enough. He then informed me that he had bought, or operated with, all the police in that area. He kept making my hand feel the gun he had in his waist band and he had a partner backing him up. When I gave him all I had, thankfully it was only a further 100 bob, it apparently wasn’t enough!!!

Once again while walking through town, I got jacked! The second fucking time in a few years. The last time this happened I lost my phone and with it my will to live - just kidding, more like my will to be online. That marked the beginning of my hiatus from the internet for almost 2 years.

It played out almost exactly like the previous incident. I was stopped by a scruffy looking man with bloodshot eyes and the strong smell of spirit on him who held my arm firmly and wouldn’t let me shake him off. He then proceeded to ask me for money, this particular time for weed; I gave him 50bob, but that wasn’t enough. He then informed me that he had bought, or operated with, all the police in that area. He kept making my hand feel the gun he had in his waist band and he had a partner backing him up. When I gave him all I had, thankfully it was only a further 100 bob, it apparently wasn’t enough!!!

[image: coachnancylundy.com]

Hey guys; just a small announcement. Last Friday’s #TodaysReads will be the last one of the series. While it was fun putting up such posts everyday and letting you know what I was reading, it was always an experiment just to see what it could become.

So now we’re here, 2 weeks later, and after asking my editor to review the last two weeks and whether he felt it was worthwhile to continue, he got back to me with the single best reason we should discontinue the program: the site was beginning to look like more like the #TodaysReads of Sidney than my private thoughts.(This is why he’s editor and I’m just a writer)

Are you audacious? This post is a constant reminder to be so over the top and courageous with my plans.

The product only works on tablets.
The VC: “Aren’t you concerned that tablets skew older, that most young people use phones, and isn’t your business depending on attracting young users?”
The entrepreneur: “Well, eh, uh etc.”
He talked for a long time, but he didn’t have an answer.
It pissed me off because the answer was obvious.
His game is going to be so incredible that it will sell tablets. Kids, adults, everyone is going to have to get one just to run this software.
Now, to pull this off you have to have a PhD in Chutzpah.

“It works like the brain.” So? Because I’m so into artificial intelligence, I’ll start with a post on it. Here we’re reminded that just because something is described as being like the brain doesn’t mean that it is important or even revolutionary.

But here’s the thing: this “like the brain” label usually isn’t a lie — it’s just not very informative. There are many ways a system can be like the brain, but only a fraction of these will prove important. We know so much that is true about the brain, but the defining issue in theoretical neuroscience today is, simply put, we don’t know what matters when it comes to understanding how the brain computes. The debate is wide open, with plausible guesses about the fundamental unit, ranging from quantum phenomena all the way to regions spanning millimeters of brain tissue.

COMPLIANT MOA ROLLS OUT CASHLESS PAYMENT “1963 TRAVEL CARD” With the new rules requiring public service vehicles to have cashless systems, Compliant decided to have first mover advantage and launch their own card. Given that Equity has generally failed with it’s Beba card, one has to wonder if they’ll be able to hack it. Finally, no bus company covers the whole of Nairobi, so will that mean we’ll have to carry dozens of cards?

Rubik’s cube invention: 40 years old and never meant to be a toy I have only ever solved one of these once in my life. My editor has a system that usually allows him to work one out in minutes. I hate him so much :D. Yesterday was the toy’s 40th birthday. It joins only a handful of other toys that’ve made it that far such as Lego and Barbie.

The real reason net neutrality is right Yet another reason for net neutrality and I think one that supersedes them all. Not that the others are wrong but this one is particularly good. I’ve written about my own thoughts on neutrality here.

The ISPs and entertainment companies want to restrict the flow of the Internet for their own purposes. It would make some sense, if they had developed the Internet, but they didn’t. It was paid for by US taxpayers. It was a good investment, as long as it doesn’t get foreclosed on. Funny thing is I don’t remember when we took out a mortgage on the Internet from these guys?

Thigh butt It being a Friday, I think we can start on a light note. The moment I read this definition, someone came to mind :D. Urban dictionary often has hilarious definitions like this and sometimes they bring a smile to your face. Other times it’s disgusting. So it’s a bit of a hit or miss.

The ratio of thigh to butt on a woman; easily viewable by a visible “crease” between the thigh and butt. The thigh to butt ratio is larger based on the length of the crease

Microsoft made a secret book for Nokia employees before its takeover The coolest way to introduce one company to another is to chuck out a book that shows the history of both companies. The book isn’t just a bunch of words but includes several cool illustrations.

In the months leading up to Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s phone business, the two companies approached Shoreditch-based media company TCOLondon to secretly build a unique book for the nearly 20,000 Nokia employees set to join Microsoft. The 128-page book was edited and illustrated in London before being printed and shipped to employees in more than 90 cities in 53 countries.
It’s a celebration of the rich history that Nokia and Microsoft both share, including etchings of Nokia’s origins in a paper mill in Finland and Microsoft’s roots in New Mexico. Illustrations range from the first-ever GSM call to surgeons using the Kinect sensor for operations.

French journalist Camille Lepage killed in CAR While the world focuses on Nigeria’s missing girls, Sudan’s descent into civil war, let’s not forget the Central African Republic which has been suffering war for some time now from sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians.

Security in CAR has deteriorated in recent months. Around a quarter of CAR’s 4.6 million population have fled their homes since conflict erupted in March 2013 between mainly Muslim and Christian militias.

Half of Kenyans fear torture in custody This is so sad. Like I wrote in my post about the legality of the Somali crack down, it’s entirely too easy to take the government to court over human rights abuses. More than that we have a judiciary that seems happy to smack down both the executive and the legislature and put them in their place, in fact I’d say they’re looking for every opportunity to do so.

How the Middle Class Lifestyle Became Unaffordable If you want to understand where the economy is headed and why it’s there, you need to read this. Seriously though, I need to move out of the middle class as soon as possible.

Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated? Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend:

They’ve offered me a nice job, these rabbits This story features an old high school friend of mine whose made a business out of rearing rabbits. Just goes to show there are so many ways to make a living out here, not just getting a job.

His mother, a nurse, offered him Sh20,000. He raised Sh15,000 from friends.
Today, Rume’s venture has multiplied tenfold. He owns more than 100 bunnies and reckons he has made close to Sh200,000 since he started. “I sell the animals to farmers and there are people who come to buy them from here.”

Today my mom will die Today is mother’s day and I thought I’d share this story that’s just a reminder to love your mother while you can. Also, you could read this post I wrote for my mother on her birthday.

If your mother is alive, you don’t know just how lucky you are. Go see her on Mother’s Day and tell her you appreciate her. Yes, even if you’re gangsta. Especially if you are gangsta. You have the time now, but you don’t have it forever. So go ahead and tell her. It will burn her heart with love.

Increasing CO2 may threaten human nutrition If you needed even more reason to do something about global warming. This is something I’ve always been passionate about especially since watchinh the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” - if you haven’t watched do so this weekend and then come back and thank me.

According to the UN, wheat, rice, and maize—a mere three out of the Earth’s 50,000+ edible plants—provide 60 percent of the world’s plant-derived food energy. In the developing world, they provide up to 70-80 percent of the energy in a person’s daily diet. These crops are key providers of micronutrients like zinc and iron, which they draw up from the soil.
As we continue to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, however, we may be less able to rely on these crops. A meta-analysis indicates that grains and legumes grown at elevated CO2 levels have lower concentrations of zinc and iron, and some crops also have reduced protein levels.

Sudan: Hate Radio in South Sudan, Long After Rwanda Said “Never Again” Today we start with South Sudan which has been rapidly descending into civil war. This piece which comes to us from allAfrica is written by a Rwandan, Sunny Ntayombya, comparing the hate speech that’s happening in that country to what happened in his and hopes that the world doesn’t just sit back and watch the blood bath. I’ve been watching this situation for weeks and have repeatedly said that it’s time the Kenyan army went in and controlled the situation for the good of everyone, particularly us *cough* oil *cough*:-D.

So I want to try something new that may or may not work. Everyday when I wake up the first thing I do is check my news feed for cool things that I usually share with my followers on twitter and more recently, so that people who consistently read the links I post can find them, I’ve been tagging them with #todaysreads. Now I want to bring a few of those links here to the blog.
I’m doing this because on twitter, with a 140 character limit, doesn’t provide enough space to leave a comment on why you think someone should read this or any thoughts on the link. I’ll be able to do this on the blog quite easily, though it may not always happen. I think I’ll limit the number of links to about 6. Now lets begin:

Are you audacious? This post is a constant reminder to be so over the top and courageous with my plans.

The product only works on tablets.
The VC: “Aren’t you concerned that tablets skew older, that most young people use phones, and isn’t your business depending on attracting young users?”
The entrepreneur: “Well, eh, uh etc.”
He talked for a long time, but he didn’t have an answer.
It pissed me off because the answer was obvious.
His game is going to be so incredible that it will sell tablets. Kids, adults, everyone is going to have to get one just to run this software.
Now, to pull this off you have to have a PhD in Chutzpah.

“It works like the brain.” So? Because I’m so into artificial intelligence, I’ll start with a post on it. Here we’re reminded that just because something is described as being like the brain doesn’t mean that it is important or even revolutionary.

But here’s the thing: this “like the brain” label usually isn’t a lie — it’s just not very informative. There are many ways a system can be like the brain, but only a fraction of these will prove important. We know so much that is true about the brain, but the defining issue in theoretical neuroscience today is, simply put, we don’t know what matters when it comes to understanding how the brain computes. The debate is wide open, with plausible guesses about the fundamental unit, ranging from quantum phenomena all the way to regions spanning millimeters of brain tissue.

COMPLIANT MOA ROLLS OUT CASHLESS PAYMENT “1963 TRAVEL CARD” With the new rules requiring public service vehicles to have cashless systems, Compliant decided to have first mover advantage and launch their own card. Given that Equity has generally failed with it’s Beba card, one has to wonder if they’ll be able to hack it. Finally, no bus company covers the whole of Nairobi, so will that mean we’ll have to carry dozens of cards?

COMPLIANT MOA ROLLS OUT CASHLESS PAYMENT “1963 TRAVEL CARD” With the new rules requiring public service vehicles to have cashless systems, Compliant decided to have first mover advantage and launch their own card. Given that Equity has generally failed with it’s Beba card, one has to wonder if they’ll be able to hack it. Finally, no bus company covers the whole of Nairobi, so will that mean we’ll have to carry dozens of cards?

COMPLIANT MOA ROLLS OUT CASHLESS PAYMENT “1963 TRAVEL CARD” With the new rules requiring public service vehicles to have cashless systems, Compliant decided to have first mover advantage and launch their own card. Given that Equity has generally failed with it’s Beba card, one has to wonder if they’ll be able to hack it. Finally, no bus company covers the whole of Nairobi, so will that mean we’ll have to carry dozens of cards?

Microsoft made a secret book for Nokia employees before its takeover The coolest way to introduce one company to another is to chuck out a book that shows the history of both companies. The book isn’t just a bunch of words but includes several cool illustrations.

In the months leading up to Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s phone business, the two companies approached Shoreditch-based media company TCOLondon to secretly build a unique book for the nearly 20,000 Nokia employees set to join Microsoft. The 128-page book was edited and illustrated in London before being printed and shipped to employees in more than 90 cities in 53 countries.
It’s a celebration of the rich history that Nokia and Microsoft both share, including etchings of Nokia’s origins in a paper mill in Finland and Microsoft’s roots in New Mexico. Illustrations range from the first-ever GSM call to surgeons using the Kinect sensor for operations.

“It works like the brain.” So? Because I’m so into artificial intelligence, I’ll start with a post on it. Here we’re reminded that just because something is described as being like the brain doesn’t mean that it is important or even revolutionary.

But here’s the thing: this “like the brain” label usually isn’t a lie — it’s just not very informative. There are many ways a system can be like the brain, but only a fraction of these will prove important. We know so much that is true about the brain, but the defining issue in theoretical neuroscience today is, simply put, we don’t know what matters when it comes to understanding how the brain computes. The debate is wide open, with plausible guesses about the fundamental unit, ranging from quantum phenomena all the way to regions spanning millimeters of brain tissue.

Rubik’s cube invention: 40 years old and never meant to be a toy I have only ever solved one of these once in my life. My editor has a system that usually allows him to work one out in minutes. I hate him so much :D. Yesterday was the toy’s 40th birthday. It joins only a handful of other toys that’ve made it that far such as Lego and Barbie.

Safaricom is Kenya’s biggest company in almost every metric you could care to measure: revenue, profits, tax, users; all of these and more. And yet it’s probably the most complained about company after KPLC. In my family, we’re always complaining about how the network is down, data is down or 3G not working. Complaints about the cost of calls, data, and sending money over Mpesa are voiced every few days. Despite all this we stick with them, and I’m not entirely sure why.

Rubik’s cube invention: 40 years old and never meant to be a toy I have only ever solved one of these once in my life. My editor has a system that usually allows him to work one out in minutes. I hate him so much :D. Yesterday was the toy’s 40th birthday. It joins only a handful of other toys that’ve made it that far such as Lego and Barbie.

Safaricom is Kenya’s biggest company in almost every metric you could care to measure: revenue, profits, tax, users; all of these and more. And yet it’s probably the most complained about company after KPLC. In my family, we’re always complaining about how the network is down, data is down or 3G not working. Complaints about the cost of calls, data, and sending money over Mpesa are voiced every few days. Despite all this we stick with them, and I’m not entirely sure why.

Safaricom is Kenya’s biggest company in almost every metric you could care to measure: revenue, profits, tax, users; all of these and more. And yet it’s probably the most complained about company after KPLC. In my family, we’re always complaining about how the network is down, data is down or 3G not working. Complaints about the cost of calls, data, and sending money over Mpesa are voiced every few days. Despite all this we stick with them, and I’m not entirely sure why.

Rubik’s cube invention: 40 years old and never meant to be a toy I have only ever solved one of these once in my life. My editor has a system that usually allows him to work one out in minutes. I hate him so much :D. Yesterday was the toy’s 40th birthday. It joins only a handful of other toys that’ve made it that far such as Lego and Barbie.

The real reason net neutrality is right Yet another reason for net neutrality and I think one that supersedes them all. Not that the others are wrong but this one is particularly good. I’ve written about my own thoughts on neutrality here.

The ISPs and entertainment companies want to restrict the flow of the Internet for their own purposes. It would make some sense, if they had developed the Internet, but they didn’t. It was paid for by US taxpayers. It was a good investment, as long as it doesn’t get foreclosed on. Funny thing is I don’t remember when we took out a mortgage on the Internet from these guys?

The real reason net neutrality is right Yet another reason for net neutrality and I think one that supersedes them all. Not that the others are wrong but this one is particularly good. I’ve written about my own thoughts on neutrality here.

The ISPs and entertainment companies want to restrict the flow of the Internet for their own purposes. It would make some sense, if they had developed the Internet, but they didn’t. It was paid for by US taxpayers. It was a good investment, as long as it doesn’t get foreclosed on. Funny thing is I don’t remember when we took out a mortgage on the Internet from these guys?

Thigh butt It being a Friday, I think we can start on a light note. The moment I read this definition, someone came to mind :D. Urban dictionary often has hilarious definitions like this and sometimes they bring a smile to your face. Other times it’s disgusting. So it’s a bit of a hit or miss.

The ratio of thigh to butt on a woman; easily viewable by a visible “crease” between the thigh and butt. The thigh to butt ratio is larger based on the length of the crease

Microsoft made a secret book for Nokia employees before its takeover The coolest way to introduce one company to another is to chuck out a book that shows the history of both companies. The book isn’t just a bunch of words but includes several cool illustrations.

In the months leading up to Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s phone business, the two companies approached Shoreditch-based media company TCOLondon to secretly build a unique book for the nearly 20,000 Nokia employees set to join Microsoft. The 128-page book was edited and illustrated in London before being printed and shipped to employees in more than 90 cities in 53 countries.
It’s a celebration of the rich history that Nokia and Microsoft both share, including etchings of Nokia’s origins in a paper mill in Finland and Microsoft’s roots in New Mexico. Illustrations range from the first-ever GSM call to surgeons using the Kinect sensor for operations.

Some time back, Safaricom, Kenya’s major carrier, had a promotion in which the main prize was 10 million bob (about 115,000 USD); doesn’t look like much converted into dollars. Nonetheless, I was convinced I’d win. Why? I had a feeling.

That feeling was wrong, obviously, but while I did have it, I wondered exactly what I’d do with such a large amount of money (felt it was large until I converted it into dollars, now it seems like peanuts). I made some basic plans that I now want to share with you guys.

Thigh butt It being a Friday, I think we can start on a light note. The moment I read this definition, someone came to mind :D. Urban dictionary often has hilarious definitions like this and sometimes they bring a smile to your face. Other times it’s disgusting. So it’s a bit of a hit or miss.

The ratio of thigh to butt on a woman; easily viewable by a visible “crease” between the thigh and butt. The thigh to butt ratio is larger based on the length of the crease

Thigh butt It being a Friday, I think we can start on a light note. The moment I read this definition, someone came to mind :D. Urban dictionary often has hilarious definitions like this and sometimes they bring a smile to your face. Other times it’s disgusting. So it’s a bit of a hit or miss.

The ratio of thigh to butt on a woman; easily viewable by a visible “crease” between the thigh and butt. The thigh to butt ratio is larger based on the length of the crease

French journalist Camille Lepage killed in CAR While the world focuses on Nigeria’s missing girls, Sudan’s descent into civil war, let’s not forget the Central African Republic which has been suffering war for some time now from sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians.

Security in CAR has deteriorated in recent months. Around a quarter of CAR’s 4.6 million population have fled their homes since conflict erupted in March 2013 between mainly Muslim and Christian militias.

French journalist Camille Lepage killed in CAR While the world focuses on Nigeria’s missing girls, Sudan’s descent into civil war, let’s not forget the Central African Republic which has been suffering war for some time now from sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians.

Security in CAR has deteriorated in recent months. Around a quarter of CAR’s 4.6 million population have fled their homes since conflict erupted in March 2013 between mainly Muslim and Christian militias.

[image: theblaze.com]

There are few things I’m particularly passionate about when it comes to technology, law and regulation: net neutrality, copyright and intellectual property. Today I’ll be taking about net neutrality.

So what is net neutrality?

Net neutrality is a principle that ensures Internet Service providers may not discriminate between different kinds of content and applications online, or simply, all internet traffic is to be treated equally.

Why do I think this is important?

Half of Kenyans fear torture in custody This is so sad. Like I wrote in my post about the legality of the Somali crack down, it’s entirely too easy to take the government to court over human rights abuses. More than that we have a judiciary that seems happy to smack down both the executive and the legislature and put them in their place, in fact I’d say they’re looking for every opportunity to do so.

Half of Kenyans fear torture in custody This is so sad. Like I wrote in my post about the legality of the Somali crack down, it’s entirely too easy to take the government to court over human rights abuses. More than that we have a judiciary that seems happy to smack down both the executive and the legislature and put them in their place, in fact I’d say they’re looking for every opportunity to do so.

[image: theblaze.com]

There are few things I’m particularly passionate about when it comes to technology, law and regulation: net neutrality, copyright and intellectual property. Today I’ll be taking about net neutrality.

So what is net neutrality?

Net neutrality is a principle that ensures Internet Service providers may not discriminate between different kinds of content and applications online, or simply, all internet traffic is to be treated equally.

Why do I think this is important?

Half of Kenyans fear torture in custody This is so sad. Like I wrote in my post about the legality of the Somali crack down, it’s entirely too easy to take the government to court over human rights abuses. More than that we have a judiciary that seems happy to smack down both the executive and the legislature and put them in their place, in fact I’d say they’re looking for every opportunity to do so.

Half of Kenyans fear torture in custody This is so sad. Like I wrote in my post about the legality of the Somali crack down, it’s entirely too easy to take the government to court over human rights abuses. More than that we have a judiciary that seems happy to smack down both the executive and the legislature and put them in their place, in fact I’d say they’re looking for every opportunity to do so.

How the Middle Class Lifestyle Became Unaffordable If you want to understand where the economy is headed and why it’s there, you need to read this. Seriously though, I need to move out of the middle class as soon as possible.

Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated? Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend:

How the Middle Class Lifestyle Became Unaffordable If you want to understand where the economy is headed and why it’s there, you need to read this. Seriously though, I need to move out of the middle class as soon as possible.

Why have the costs of a middle class lifestyle soared while income has stagnated? Though it is tempting to finger one ideologically convenient cause or another, there are four structural causes to this long-term trend:

They’ve offered me a nice job, these rabbits This story features an old high school friend of mine whose made a business out of rearing rabbits. Just goes to show there are so many ways to make a living out here, not just getting a job.

His mother, a nurse, offered him Sh20,000. He raised Sh15,000 from friends.
Today, Rume’s venture has multiplied tenfold. He owns more than 100 bunnies and reckons he has made close to Sh200,000 since he started. “I sell the animals to farmers and there are people who come to buy them from here.”

They’ve offered me a nice job, these rabbits This story features an old high school friend of mine whose made a business out of rearing rabbits. Just goes to show there are so many ways to make a living out here, not just getting a job.

His mother, a nurse, offered him Sh20,000. He raised Sh15,000 from friends.
Today, Rume’s venture has multiplied tenfold. He owns more than 100 bunnies and reckons he has made close to Sh200,000 since he started. “I sell the animals to farmers and there are people who come to buy them from here.”

Today my mom will die Today is mother’s day and I thought I’d share this story that’s just a reminder to love your mother while you can. Also, you could read this post I wrote for my mother on her birthday.

If your mother is alive, you don’t know just how lucky you are. Go see her on Mother’s Day and tell her you appreciate her. Yes, even if you’re gangsta. Especially if you are gangsta. You have the time now, but you don’t have it forever. So go ahead and tell her. It will burn her heart with love.

Increasing CO2 may threaten human nutrition If you needed even more reason to do something about global warming. This is something I’ve always been passionate about especially since watchinh the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” - if you haven’t watched do so this weekend and then come back and thank me.

According to the UN, wheat, rice, and maize—a mere three out of the Earth’s 50,000+ edible plants—provide 60 percent of the world’s plant-derived food energy. In the developing world, they provide up to 70-80 percent of the energy in a person’s daily diet. These crops are key providers of micronutrients like zinc and iron, which they draw up from the soil.
As we continue to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, however, we may be less able to rely on these crops. A meta-analysis indicates that grains and legumes grown at elevated CO2 levels have lower concentrations of zinc and iron, and some crops also have reduced protein levels.

I’ve recently completed my undergraduate studies in campus and apparently it seems I’ve done it just in time. The government is planning to review the university fees for all government sponsored students in public universities, which I was. The fee, which was about KES 26000, has not been changed in almost 20 years, since 1995. This review was planned to be implemented in the beginning of the next semester.

The review would see the fee doubling and would also differentiate fees based on the course someone was taking which would see people who were taking science paying more than liberal arts.

I’ve recently completed my undergraduate studies in campus and apparently it seems I’ve done it just in time. The government is planning to review the university fees for all government sponsored students in public universities, which I was. The fee, which was about KES 26000, has not been changed in almost 20 years, since 1995. This review was planned to be implemented in the beginning of the next semester.

The review would see the fee doubling and would also differentiate fees based on the course someone was taking which would see people who were taking science paying more than liberal arts.

Increasing CO2 may threaten human nutrition If you needed even more reason to do something about global warming. This is something I’ve always been passionate about especially since watchinh the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” - if you haven’t watched do so this weekend and then come back and thank me.

According to the UN, wheat, rice, and maize—a mere three out of the Earth’s 50,000+ edible plants—provide 60 percent of the world’s plant-derived food energy. In the developing world, they provide up to 70-80 percent of the energy in a person’s daily diet. These crops are key providers of micronutrients like zinc and iron, which they draw up from the soil.
As we continue to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, however, we may be less able to rely on these crops. A meta-analysis indicates that grains and legumes grown at elevated CO2 levels have lower concentrations of zinc and iron, and some crops also have reduced protein levels.

Increasing CO2 may threaten human nutrition If you needed even more reason to do something about global warming. This is something I’ve always been passionate about especially since watchinh the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” - if you haven’t watched do so this weekend and then come back and thank me.

According to the UN, wheat, rice, and maize—a mere three out of the Earth’s 50,000+ edible plants—provide 60 percent of the world’s plant-derived food energy. In the developing world, they provide up to 70-80 percent of the energy in a person’s daily diet. These crops are key providers of micronutrients like zinc and iron, which they draw up from the soil.
As we continue to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, however, we may be less able to rely on these crops. A meta-analysis indicates that grains and legumes grown at elevated CO2 levels have lower concentrations of zinc and iron, and some crops also have reduced protein levels.

Sudan: Hate Radio in South Sudan, Long After Rwanda Said “Never Again” Today we start with South Sudan which has been rapidly descending into civil war. This piece which comes to us from allAfrica is written by a Rwandan, Sunny Ntayombya, comparing the hate speech that’s happening in that country to what happened in his and hopes that the world doesn’t just sit back and watch the blood bath. I’ve been watching this situation for weeks and have repeatedly said that it’s time the Kenyan army went in and controlled the situation for the good of everyone, particularly us *cough* oil *cough*:-D.

So I want to try something new that may or may not work. Everyday when I wake up the first thing I do is check my news feed for cool things that I usually share with my followers on twitter and more recently, so that people who consistently read the links I post can find them, I’ve been tagging them with #todaysreads. Now I want to bring a few of those links here to the blog.
I’m doing this because on twitter, with a 140 character limit, doesn’t provide enough space to leave a comment on why you think someone should read this or any thoughts on the link. I’ll be able to do this on the blog quite easily, though it may not always happen. I think I’ll limit the number of links to about 6. Now lets begin:

So I want to try something new that may or may not work. Everyday when I wake up the first thing I do is check my news feed for cool things that I usually share with my followers on twitter and more recently, so that people who consistently read the links I post can find them, I’ve been tagging them with #todaysreads. Now I want to bring a few of those links here to the blog.
I’m doing this because on twitter, with a 140 character limit, doesn’t provide enough space to leave a comment on why you think someone should read this or any thoughts on the link. I’ll be able to do this on the blog quite easily, though it may not always happen. I think I’ll limit the number of links to about 6. Now lets begin:

I’ve been reading the constitution for a series of posts on things I am not an expert in; this is one such post. You guys already know what I think about the police action at Kasarani, however, looking at it from a constitutional angle perhaps it is wrong.

The fourth chapter of our constitution section 24, subsection 5 talks about the rights that the police may limit:

1. Privacy
2. Freedom of Association
3. Assembly, Demonstration, Picketing and Petition
4. Labour Relations
5. Economic and Social Rights
6. Rights of Arrested Persons

Note, these rights can only be limited if parliament passes a law limiting them.

Over the last year or more, Kenya has been dealing with a series of terrorist attacks said to be the work of the Al Shabaab, an Al Qaida linked group based out of Somalia. The attacks had almost reached a fortnight frequency, like clockwork, on weekends. While in the past they’ve mostly used grenades in their attacks, which usually just take out one or two people, they’ve more recently changed tactic to have gunmen walk into public areas and shoot anything that moves. This has been more devastating with higher casualties, the most high profile incident being when 4 gunmen attacked Westgate mall.

I’ve been reading the constitution for a series of posts on things I am not an expert in; this is one such post. You guys already know what I think about the police action at Kasarani, however, looking at it from a constitutional angle perhaps it is wrong.

The fourth chapter of our constitution section 24, subsection 5 talks about the rights that the police may limit:

1. Privacy
2. Freedom of Association
3. Assembly, Demonstration, Picketing and Petition
4. Labour Relations
5. Economic and Social Rights
6. Rights of Arrested Persons

Note, these rights can only be limited if parliament passes a law limiting them.

Over the last year or more, Kenya has been dealing with a series of terrorist attacks said to be the work of the Al Shabaab, an Al Qaida linked group based out of Somalia. The attacks had almost reached a fortnight frequency, like clockwork, on weekends. While in the past they’ve mostly used grenades in their attacks, which usually just take out one or two people, they’ve more recently changed tactic to have gunmen walk into public areas and shoot anything that moves. This has been more devastating with higher casualties, the most high profile incident being when 4 gunmen attacked Westgate mall.

Over the last year or more, Kenya has been dealing with a series of terrorist attacks said to be the work of the Al Shabaab, an Al Qaida linked group based out of Somalia. The attacks had almost reached a fortnight frequency, like clockwork, on weekends. While in the past they’ve mostly used grenades in their attacks, which usually just take out one or two people, they’ve more recently changed tactic to have gunmen walk into public areas and shoot anything that moves. This has been more devastating with higher casualties, the most high profile incident being when 4 gunmen attacked Westgate mall.

Over the last year or more, Kenya has been dealing with a series of terrorist attacks said to be the work of the Al Shabaab, an Al Qaida linked group based out of Somalia. The attacks had almost reached a fortnight frequency, like clockwork, on weekends. While in the past they’ve mostly used grenades in their attacks, which usually just take out one or two people, they’ve more recently changed tactic to have gunmen walk into public areas and shoot anything that moves. This has been more devastating with higher casualties, the most high profile incident being when 4 gunmen attacked Westgate mall.

Over the last year or more, Kenya has been dealing with a series of terrorist attacks said to be the work of the Al Shabaab, an Al Qaida linked group based out of Somalia. The attacks had almost reached a fortnight frequency, like clockwork, on weekends. While in the past they’ve mostly used grenades in their attacks, which usually just take out one or two people, they’ve more recently changed tactic to have gunmen walk into public areas and shoot anything that moves. This has been more devastating with higher casualties, the most high profile incident being when 4 gunmen attacked Westgate mall.

Over the last year or more, Kenya has been dealing with a series of terrorist attacks said to be the work of the Al Shabaab, an Al Qaida linked group based out of Somalia. The attacks had almost reached a fortnight frequency, like clockwork, on weekends. While in the past they’ve mostly used grenades in their attacks, which usually just take out one or two people, they’ve more recently changed tactic to have gunmen walk into public areas and shoot anything that moves. This has been more devastating with higher casualties, the most high profile incident being when 4 gunmen attacked Westgate mall.

[image: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com]

So I logged in to Facebook last week and found my sister had written a birthday note for our mum.

A Note of Gratitude to Mama

I cannot thank God enough for having you in my life. Never have I seen anyone still love and tolerate me even when you felt like roasting me for dinner :-P

You have taught me all the lessons I now know that have kept me as a daughter you take pride in and I stand confident before God and men with gratitude to you. I take pride and confidence in the greatest lesson of all: God, since He is the foundation and fortress behind who I am and upon whom I stand.

[image: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com]

So I logged in to Facebook last week and found my sister had written a birthday note for our mum.

A Note of Gratitude to Mama

I cannot thank God enough for having you in my life. Never have I seen anyone still love and tolerate me even when you felt like roasting me for dinner :-P

You have taught me all the lessons I now know that have kept me as a daughter you take pride in and I stand confident before God and men with gratitude to you. I take pride and confidence in the greatest lesson of all: God, since He is the foundation and fortress behind who I am and upon whom I stand.

[image: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com]

So I logged in to Facebook last week and found my sister had written a birthday note for our mum.

A Note of Gratitude to Mama

I cannot thank God enough for having you in my life. Never have I seen anyone still love and tolerate me even when you felt like roasting me for dinner :-P

You have taught me all the lessons I now know that have kept me as a daughter you take pride in and I stand confident before God and men with gratitude to you. I take pride and confidence in the greatest lesson of all: God, since He is the foundation and fortress behind who I am and upon whom I stand.

Recently, two of my friends: one my best friend and the other a very good friend of mine from school; have fallen in love. Before we get more into that, let’s go a little into these two gentlemen.

My friend in school is what I would call every girls nightmare! In the morning or at night, he seems to be the stuff of their dreams. What I mean by this is that he always has a different girl in his bed at night and in the morning he kicks them out in some of the most remorseless ways I’ve ever seen. He once kicked a girl out by clapping his hands and telling her it was time for her to get lost. Anyway over our holiday he’s suddenly become a gooey eyed romantic. His face lights up when he talks about her and the smile he gets when he sees a message from her is actually a joy to behold. This is the very first girl he’s actually called his girlfriend, ever. And I’ve been there for many of his “girlfriends”.

I did not always identify as aromantic.

For a long time, I did believe in the whole romantic myth that one is truly happier with a romantic partner, and I wished for one. I longed for the time when I would finally live those idealized shared moments with my beloved: having breakfast together, taking long walks hand in hand, talking about everything and anything for hours, kiss passionately like in my favorite love scenes in movies…

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I’m commitment-phobic. I couldn’t believe it, it’s something that has been having a subtle effect on all my relationships. I’m calling it subtle because I didn’t notice it but I’m thinking someone else may have.

I’ve always complained of how I don’t have a girlfriend and to realise that I’ve been sub-conscientiously sabotaging my own chances makes me laugh. Anyway so I did some research into it (Google/Wikipedia of course). The description I’ve written below is interspersed with commentary from me with how what I’ve written best describes me and how I’ve seen it in my life. These comments will be in brackets so don’t skip to the end hoping to see what I’m thinking.

This post is inspired by some tweets I saw in my timeline by shee_wanjiku. She was complain that one of her friends, a dude, didn’t understand that she just wanted a platonic relationship and not anything else. She was saying that dudes need to realize that just because a chic is nice to them it doesn’t mean she wants to jump your bones. There’s also I heard somewhere on TV “There’s no way a dude and a chic can be just friends” a dude told his date. I thought I talk about these things but in relation with what I’ve experienced myself.
I’ve said severally here that I’m someone who really enjoys the company of girls infact I can as far as saying that I have more girl than boy friends. I’m not entirely sure why that is. I’m by far more selective of my guy friends. I think it’s an ego thing I get from the company of girls.

This is one of those posts where, I just talk randomly about whatever is on my head, as I have nothing of much significance to talk about. Usually when I a have random stuff to write down it’s about one specific topic but today, I’m going random about random.

Random like the colours in this picture

I was in Kakamega over the weekend visiting my cousin; it was all kinds of awesome, drinking and raeving and hanging out and drinking. While on the rave, I happened to dance with a big mama by big here I mean fat. This girl had big everything; big boobs, big ass, big thighs, big stomach; big everything. While she was grinding on me and I’m starting to get a little feeling in my nether regions, I realized that big women may actually be able to be able a rouse something in me. I didn’t know that, I’ve always found fat girl’s unsexy, this weekend is causing me to re-examine that.

I promised I’d do a post a day and I’m trying to do my best to do so. Today we actually start the very first topic of my questioning week, love. This seemly complex thing that we all seek after in one way or another.

My dictionary describes love as an intense feeling of deep affection or a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone. But when ever most of use use it we’re talking about out boyfriends or girlfriends and the second description. Even then its not a word we use casually.

[image: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com]

So I logged in to Facebook last week and found my sister had written a birthday note for our mum.

A Note of Gratitude to Mama

I cannot thank God enough for having you in my life. Never have I seen anyone still love and tolerate me even when you felt like roasting me for dinner :-P

You have taught me all the lessons I now know that have kept me as a daughter you take pride in and I stand confident before God and men with gratitude to you. I take pride and confidence in the greatest lesson of all: God, since He is the foundation and fortress behind who I am and upon whom I stand.

[image: http://kids.nationalgeographic.com]

So I logged in to Facebook last week and found my sister had written a birthday note for our mum.

A Note of Gratitude to Mama

I cannot thank God enough for having you in my life. Never have I seen anyone still love and tolerate me even when you felt like roasting me for dinner :-P

You have taught me all the lessons I now know that have kept me as a daughter you take pride in and I stand confident before God and men with gratitude to you. I take pride and confidence in the greatest lesson of all: God, since He is the foundation and fortress behind who I am and upon whom I stand.

I don’t know what made me ask my mum this question; I was probably about 10 years old at the time. Perhaps I had watched a particularly sad movie where the choice was given, or maybe my friends had regaled me with stories in that vein, or I was in a “what-if” mood.

I was sitting on the couch when I asked my mum, “What if we were all kidnapped,” I was talking of my sister, brother and I - we were only three back then - and I severely doubt these were my exact words but you get the gist, “and you could only save one of us, who would you save?”

[image: http://blog.weemss.com/]

Every time before an event I’m organising goes down, I get this sick apprehensive feeling in my chest, a tightening that makes my heart speed up just a tad as if my heart had less space in which to operate and had to compensate just to get the same amount of blood flowing.

The thing with an event in which you’re charging people entrance for is whether it’ll be worth it for the people who are attending. I’m one of those people who believes in making their own fun, but I recognise that it’s not that way for a lot of people. Then need a crowd of people having fun for them to get into the mood and loosen up. They’re the type of people who agitate their friends to leave clubs and parties simply because they look empty, never mind they just came in with a bunch of their own friends and the music is kicking. I call them dampeners.

[image: http://intrigue.ie/]

I am someone who holds very strong opinions on many subjects, but with even those strong opinions I’m still willing to hear the other side of the argument and consider it in light of my own views. But there’s one topic that I come down very hard on and won’t even consider the views of anyone else no matter what they say or who they are; that is getting pregnant in university.

[image: http://intrigue.ie/]

I am someone who holds very strong opinions on many subjects, but with even those strong opinions I’m still willing to hear the other side of the argument and consider it in light of my own views. But there’s one topic that I come down very hard on and won’t even consider the views of anyone else no matter what they say or who they are; that is getting pregnant in university.

[image: http://intrigue.ie/]

I am someone who holds very strong opinions on many subjects, but with even those strong opinions I’m still willing to hear the other side of the argument and consider it in light of my own views. But there’s one topic that I come down very hard on and won’t even consider the views of anyone else no matter what they say or who they are; that is getting pregnant in university.

[image: http://intrigue.ie/]

I am someone who holds very strong opinions on many subjects, but with even those strong opinions I’m still willing to hear the other side of the argument and consider it in light of my own views. But there’s one topic that I come down very hard on and won’t even consider the views of anyone else no matter what they say or who they are; that is getting pregnant in university.

I found this post floating about on my facebook and thought I’d share it with you guys because a lot of what’s said I’ve felt and still feel.

It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn’t know and may not like.You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now.

I found this post floating about on my facebook and thought I’d share it with you guys because a lot of what’s said I’ve felt and still feel.

It is when you stop going along with the crowd and start realizing that there are many things about yourself that you didn’t know and may not like.You start feeling insecure and wonder where you will be in a year or two, but then get scared because you barely know where you are now.

Hey guys!! People have been complaining about how difficult it is to comment on the standard Blogger template for a long while so from today we’ll be using Disqus comments which should make it much easier for anyone to comment. Let me know what you think of it by commenting or by e-mail. Peace!!!

So I was randomly checking out my analytics-something I do to make sure at least one person has checked what I’ve written- and noticed among the reports the search engine Keyword traffic the most hilarious thing. Some one googled “I’m in Kenya, I want a girlfriend” and landed on my blog.

This got my thinking about what this person was thinking when googling this and the post he may have landed at. I decided to do a whole post on the Keywords that had landed people on my blog.

Today I’m in a sufficiently depressed to post this rather dull post. I wrote it when I was going through a really bad time in my life. I’m feeling right now something similar to what I did then.
Has any of you really contemplated suicide? As in really really thought about it? I have. Sometime I feel it’d be better than all the sadness in the world. Where everyone’s life seems to be going better than yours?

I needed to out this up quick which is why I’m doing this on a day I already have on post up but I feel the longer I wait the less relevant what I have to say becomes. Also I’m not a political scientist or any sort of expert on revolutions and such matters, these are just my thoughts.

Recently, ever since the Tunisia and then Egypt protests and revolts there’s been a lot of chatter on my time-line(Twitter) about whether such a thing can be repeated in Kenya. Today there was even talk of one  on 28th February. I don’t know where this one came from but there were a lot of tweets tagged with it in the morning.

So remember my weird really pissed of post, the one I wouldn’t allow y’all to comment on? And remember I said I wanted to see a psychiatrist but couldn’t seem to get to it? Well at the pressing of one of my dearest friends I finally got round to doing it.

Yeah, some weeks back I went to see one in a very informal type meeting. Her phone kept ringing and I also kept tweeting. My friend was there also I guess for moral support and its was in a public place not I some office where you lie down and talk incessantly about yourself and your feelings.

[image: http://intrigue.ie/]

I am someone who holds very strong opinions on many subjects, but with even those strong opinions I’m still willing to hear the other side of the argument and consider it in light of my own views. But there’s one topic that I come down very hard on and won’t even consider the views of anyone else no matter what they say or who they are; that is getting pregnant in university.

[image: http://intrigue.ie/]

I am someone who holds very strong opinions on many subjects, but with even those strong opinions I’m still willing to hear the other side of the argument and consider it in light of my own views. But there’s one topic that I come down very hard on and won’t even consider the views of anyone else no matter what they say or who they are; that is getting pregnant in university.

[Image: http://rkaydee.deviantart.com]

I have a rather varied sexual life. I’ve done the experimental, the crazy and the bizarre. I’ve been accused of breaking my friend’s bed (I still call BS on this one, it just came up broken after I used it) and I’ve cockblocked people and been cockblocked. I can’t say I’ve done it all but I’ve done a lot, some of which I think back and just go, “The thirst y’all, the thirst”.

Sex is a complex matter. It is hard to define – for some people, only genital penetration counts; for others, anything involving someone’s genitals is sex. It also has several meanings: an expression of romantic love, a fun activity, a way to experience pleasure, a way to prove one’s worth… and many more. Some use it as a means of pressure (withholding sex in punishment or offering sex as a reward in order to obtain something), while others plan strategies to obtain it.

So I’m seated in the library working on my CV, which I haven’t worked on in 2 years, since the end of second year – the last time I actually applied for an internship. I got the internship but couldn’t go because they got back to me late and needed a commitment of 4 months that I couldn’t do because I was going back to school.

While I was doing the updating, there was so much I had done that went down into simple statements like the one below:

So I’m seated in the library working on my CV, which I haven’t worked on in 2 years, since the end of second year – the last time I actually applied for an internship. I got the internship but couldn’t go because they got back to me late and needed a commitment of 4 months that I couldn’t do because I was going back to school.

While I was doing the updating, there was so much I had done that went down into simple statements like the one below:

So I’m seated in the library working on my CV, which I haven’t worked on in 2 years, since the end of second year – the last time I actually applied for an internship. I got the internship but couldn’t go because they got back to me late and needed a commitment of 4 months that I couldn’t do because I was going back to school.

While I was doing the updating, there was so much I had done that went down into simple statements like the one below:

I came across this video on my timeline on twitter and it made me laugh out loud; never mind I was in the library. It was all the more funny because it actually happened to me once when I was receiving an international call from my best friend. Hope it makes you laugh too. Peace!!!

I came across this video on my timeline on twitter and it made me laugh out loud; never mind I was in the library. It was all the more funny because it actually happened to me once when I was receiving an international call from my best friend. Hope it makes you laugh too. Peace!!!

Hey guys!! Since I don’t have a phone that can tweet, I’m stuck using my computer to keep up with stuff online. So instead of sharing to twitter, I’ll share here:) Found this today while in class and burst out laughing because it’s actually happened. Hope it brightens your day. Peace!!!

image from http://roflzone.com

One last one before I leave the lab… This is so funny and creative. Peace!!

image from http://9gag.com

I came across this video on my timeline on twitter and it made me laugh out loud; never mind I was in the library. It was all the more funny because it actually happened to me once when I was receiving an international call from my best friend. Hope it makes you laugh too. Peace!!!

[image from www.revphil2011.wordpress.com]

I’ve been meaning to do this post for a while now, ever since I changed my online moniker to princelySid. This post is mostly for my French fan and friend, Sgyreju, because she asked.

I had gone for dinner with my church group; it was somewhere we could all socialise that was a little free and we could all dress up for the evening. I sat at a table with 5 other people: 4 were friends of mine but one I didn’t know so I felt it would be good to get to know a little about her, you can never know too many people or have enough friends.

[image from www.revphil2011.wordpress.com]

I’ve been meaning to do this post for a while now, ever since I changed my online moniker to princelySid. This post is mostly for my French fan and friend, Sgyreju, because she asked.

I had gone for dinner with my church group; it was somewhere we could all socialise that was a little free and we could all dress up for the evening. I sat at a table with 5 other people: 4 were friends of mine but one I didn’t know so I felt it would be good to get to know a little about her, you can never know too many people or have enough friends.

[image from www.elephantjournal.com]

Spoken HeArt is a creative and performing arts club in Maseno University that was started in 2010 by a spoken word artist called Pink Poet and a few other artists, rappers, singers and the like. Pink wanted a place where artists from around our university could come together and perform. That way you’d be able to improve your art and gain confidence from the comments and critiques of other artists.

[image from www.elephantjournal.com]

Spoken HeArt is a creative and performing arts club in Maseno University that was started in 2010 by a spoken word artist called Pink Poet and a few other artists, rappers, singers and the like. Pink wanted a place where artists from around our university could come together and perform. That way you’d be able to improve your art and gain confidence from the comments and critiques of other artists.

[image from www.elephantjournal.com]

Spoken HeArt is a creative and performing arts club in Maseno University that was started in 2010 by a spoken word artist called Pink Poet and a few other artists, rappers, singers and the like. Pink wanted a place where artists from around our university could come together and perform. That way you’d be able to improve your art and gain confidence from the comments and critiques of other artists.

Hey guys!! Since I don’t have a phone that can tweet, I’m stuck using my computer to keep up with stuff online. So instead of sharing to twitter, I’ll share here:) Found this today while in class and burst out laughing because it’s actually happened. Hope it brightens your day. Peace!!!

image from http://roflzone.com

One last one before I leave the lab… This is so funny and creative. Peace!!

image from http://9gag.com

Hey guys!! Since I don’t have a phone that can tweet, I’m stuck using my computer to keep up with stuff online. So instead of sharing to twitter, I’ll share here:) Found this today while in class and burst out laughing because it’s actually happened. Hope it brightens your day. Peace!!!

image from http://roflzone.com

One last one before I leave the lab… This is so funny and creative. Peace!!

image from http://9gag.com

Last weekend was one of many happenings (can I say that? Or rather does that make sense to you guys?), but I’d like to talk about what happened on Sunday morning: the Upstart TV auditions.

I was awakened at 8.30am by my cousin, shouting at me to wake up and go for the auditions; I had gone out the night before and gotten thoroughly inebriated so I was hangovered that morning. I probably wouldn’t have woken up if I hadn’t glanced at my phone.

Last weekend was one of many happenings (can I say that? Or rather does that make sense to you guys?), but I’d like to talk about what happened on Sunday morning: the Upstart TV auditions.

I was awakened at 8.30am by my cousin, shouting at me to wake up and go for the auditions; I had gone out the night before and gotten thoroughly inebriated so I was hangovered that morning. I probably wouldn’t have woken up if I hadn’t glanced at my phone.

Last weekend was one of many happenings (can I say that? Or rather does that make sense to you guys?), but I’d like to talk about what happened on Sunday morning: the Upstart TV auditions.

I was awakened at 8.30am by my cousin, shouting at me to wake up and go for the auditions; I had gone out the night before and gotten thoroughly inebriated so I was hangovered that morning. I probably wouldn’t have woken up if I hadn’t glanced at my phone.

Last weekend was one of many happenings (can I say that? Or rather does that make sense to you guys?), but I’d like to talk about what happened on Sunday morning: the Upstart TV auditions.

I was awakened at 8.30am by my cousin, shouting at me to wake up and go for the auditions; I had gone out the night before and gotten thoroughly inebriated so I was hangovered that morning. I probably wouldn’t have woken up if I hadn’t glanced at my phone.

Hey guys! If you’ve been reading this blog from the beginning, you know that I’ve contemplated suicide before. I was going through a difficult time in my life: depression and anger, and felt that there just may be one way out.

Obviously I didn’t do it. There were many reasons why but the main one was my baby sister. Contemplating suicide changes your view on life, you’re never quite the same again.

[image from www.planetminecraft.com]

A few months ago I took a break from school to go home and see my mother, brother and sisters. It was just a couple of days, but by the end of it I came to the uncomfortable realisation that my baby sister was growing up. I don’t like it one bit.

I had gone out, and came back late, lat/e here being past my baby sister’s bed time. I walked in and found her sleeping on the couch, in her pyjamas. She had refused to go to sleep without seeing me first and had fallen asleep waiting. She looked so cute.

[image from www.planetminecraft.com]

A few months ago I took a break from school to go home and see my mother, brother and sisters. It was just a couple of days, but by the end of it I came to the uncomfortable realisation that my baby sister was growing up. I don’t like it one bit.

I had gone out, and came back late, lat/e here being past my baby sister’s bed time. I walked in and found her sleeping on the couch, in her pyjamas. She had refused to go to sleep without seeing me first and had fallen asleep waiting. She looked so cute.

It’s the first day of school for me, I’ve been here every day for a week but this is what I’m counting as my first day in that I’ll be fully settled down. It’s taken almost a week to get a room. Things in school have been, as my dad is sometimes fond of saying, ELEPHANT.

Our VC, in his infinite wisdom accepted to admit 3500 freshmen. He not only admitted them but he also decided to house them on campus never mind that we don’t have nearly enough beds to house them and us the over probably 8000 students who were to join them a week after. Most of the opening week was spent running about campus scrambling for a meagre number of rooms left (according to the lottery that we had there we only under 600 beds left).

It’s the first day of school for me, I’ve been here every day for a week but this is what I’m counting as my first day in that I’ll be fully settled down. It’s taken almost a week to get a room. Things in school have been, as my dad is sometimes fond of saying, ELEPHANT.

Our VC, in his infinite wisdom accepted to admit 3500 freshmen. He not only admitted them but he also decided to house them on campus never mind that we don’t have nearly enough beds to house them and us the over probably 8000 students who were to join them a week after. Most of the opening week was spent running about campus scrambling for a meagre number of rooms left (according to the lottery that we had there we only under 600 beds left).

I’m back in school now after a 4 month long holiday so I thought this would be the best time to reflect on what I’ve been up to and achieved. Looking back, I feel this has been one of my more productive holidays; of course as at the end of the holiday I don’t think I’ve achieved as much as I should have in that amount of time but for the first time that doesn’t bother me as much as it usually would.

I’m back in school now after a 4 month long holiday so I thought this would be the best time to reflect on what I’ve been up to and achieved. Looking back, I feel this has been one of my more productive holidays; of course as at the end of the holiday I don’t think I’ve achieved as much as I should have in that amount of time but for the first time that doesn’t bother me as much as it usually would.

Hey guys I’m at the ihub for the Barcamp Nairobi and today I’m going to attempt a live blog. It’s lunch time now and there no talks going on now but they begin in 10 mins keep this page open for updates. Catch you in 10 mun

Talking with Andrew from Ujamaa Ventures giving me advice on my application’the one I’ve been developing the last 3 months, hard questions with no answers :D
Now on the talk on Innovation Ecosystem by Tony
We’re trying to shine on our own yet we need to work together
Things we need to do

Hey guys I’m at the ihub for the Barcamp Nairobi and today I’m going to attempt a live blog. It’s lunch time now and there no talks going on now but they begin in 10 mins keep this page open for updates. Catch you in 10 mun

Talking with Andrew from Ujamaa Ventures giving me advice on my application’the one I’ve been developing the last 3 months, hard questions with no answers :D
Now on the talk on Innovation Ecosystem by Tony
We’re trying to shine on our own yet we need to work together
Things we need to do

Some time back, Safaricom, Kenya’s major carrier, had a promotion in which the main prize was 10 million bob (about 115,000 USD); doesn’t look like much converted into dollars. Nonetheless, I was convinced I’d win. Why? I had a feeling.

That feeling was wrong, obviously, but while I did have it, I wondered exactly what I’d do with such a large amount of money (felt it was large until I converted it into dollars, now it seems like peanuts). I made some basic plans that I now want to share with you guys.

The other day I heard of a new app called HelloFood. If you’ve read this blog much, you’d know that food is one of my favourite things in the world (up there with sleep and computers) so I decided to check it out. That I’m writing about an app and an app that is built for Kenya is something I consider yet another milestone in my blogging career.

HelloFood is a service that allows you to order food from a variety of restaurants for delivery. They have apps for android and iPhone and for those who don’t use any of those platforms, like me, they have a webapp that you can use, it requires your phone browser be able to run javascript which most smartphone browsers do.

The other day I heard of a new app called HelloFood. If you’ve read this blog much, you’d know that food is one of my favourite things in the world (up there with sleep and computers) so I decided to check it out. That I’m writing about an app and an app that is built for Kenya is something I consider yet another milestone in my blogging career.

HelloFood is a service that allows you to order food from a variety of restaurants for delivery. They have apps for android and iPhone and for those who don’t use any of those platforms, like me, they have a webapp that you can use, it requires your phone browser be able to run javascript which most smartphone browsers do.

The other day I heard of a new app called HelloFood. If you’ve read this blog much, you’d know that food is one of my favourite things in the world (up there with sleep and computers) so I decided to check it out. That I’m writing about an app and an app that is built for Kenya is something I consider yet another milestone in my blogging career.

HelloFood is a service that allows you to order food from a variety of restaurants for delivery. They have apps for android and iPhone and for those who don’t use any of those platforms, like me, they have a webapp that you can use, it requires your phone browser be able to run javascript which most smartphone browsers do.

I’m blank today, but I saw this and laughed, hope it brings some joy for you too.

Seen on http://dilbert.com

I’m blank today, but I saw this and laughed, hope it brings some joy for you too.

Seen on http://dilbert.com

I’m blank today, but I saw this and laughed, hope it brings some joy for you too.

Seen on http://dilbert.com

I’m blank today, but I saw this and laughed, hope it brings some joy for you too.

Seen on http://dilbert.com

For today, this won’t be a lengthy post. I attended my aunt’s funeral yesterday; she died a week ago and was only 3 years older than me. I was one of the pallbearers, the first time I’ve done that or really touched a coffin.

What struck me about it was that she was so young, 25, she had barely lived her life. This got me thinking of all the things that I postpone thinking that I’ll have time later, but that’s not necessarily true. I could fall sick and be dead in a couple of weeks like her. I need to make better use of my time spend it with loved ones and not postpone such things until later.

Kenya Power is my country’s only power distributor. It has had the monopoly on the distribution and supply of power since independence, I think, when it was known as Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC).

Kenya Power is probably the most complained about company in the country, perhaps along with Safaricom. Power in the country can disappear at any moment for reasons that aren’t clear to anyone, and at times even to Kenya Power themselves when you call their helpline; and Kenyan’s have become so used to the power outages when it rains that in my house when the clouds start darkening take out our paraffin lamps in readiness for dark times (pun intended). Of course if this only happened in the rural areas it would not be such a problem, but it’s something that affects the entire country no matter where you stay.

Kenya Power is my country’s only power distributor. It has had the monopoly on the distribution and supply of power since independence, I think, when it was known as Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC).

Kenya Power is probably the most complained about company in the country, perhaps along with Safaricom. Power in the country can disappear at any moment for reasons that aren’t clear to anyone, and at times even to Kenya Power themselves when you call their helpline; and Kenyan’s have become so used to the power outages when it rains that in my house when the clouds start darkening take out our paraffin lamps in readiness for dark times (pun intended). Of course if this only happened in the rural areas it would not be such a problem, but it’s something that affects the entire country no matter where you stay.

Kenya Power is my country’s only power distributor. It has had the monopoly on the distribution and supply of power since independence, I think, when it was known as Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC).

Kenya Power is probably the most complained about company in the country, perhaps along with Safaricom. Power in the country can disappear at any moment for reasons that aren’t clear to anyone, and at times even to Kenya Power themselves when you call their helpline; and Kenyan’s have become so used to the power outages when it rains that in my house when the clouds start darkening take out our paraffin lamps in readiness for dark times (pun intended). Of course if this only happened in the rural areas it would not be such a problem, but it’s something that affects the entire country no matter where you stay.

My personal faith has undergone several metamorphoses in my somewhat short life, which I’ve covered here before. In about the first 10 years of my life, if you asked me what my faith was I would’ve told you that I was Anglican. I didn’t really believe in that particular creed per se but it was the church I prayed at because my mother went there. When my mum changed belief to Seventh Day Adventist, I changed with her. I recognized the truth in their doctrine and beliefs but I refused to be baptized because that would mean that I believed, and I didn’t. I recognized that I didn’t have enough faith in God to do so, if I had gotten baptized at that time it would have been just to please my mum.

My personal faith has undergone several metamorphoses in my somewhat short life, which I’ve covered here before. In about the first 10 years of my life, if you asked me what my faith was I would’ve told you that I was Anglican. I didn’t really believe in that particular creed per se but it was the church I prayed at because my mother went there. When my mum changed belief to Seventh Day Adventist, I changed with her. I recognized the truth in their doctrine and beliefs but I refused to be baptized because that would mean that I believed, and I didn’t. I recognized that I didn’t have enough faith in God to do so, if I had gotten baptized at that time it would have been just to please my mum.

Today I ask questions about God but before i do a little background would be good. My parents divorced some nearly 5 years ago. Since then things haven’t been exactly easy for my mum. She’s always been short on cash and can’t seen to be able to do much. She’s a very strong Christian. My dad has had smooth sail as far as I can tell, very well paying top job and new wife. He has lives quite comfortably. I’ve never seen him in a church or praying in all my life.

I have read a lot of books in my life so far, more than most people will read in their lives. It’s something I’m quite proud of, and I also love doing it. Books allow you to visit worlds unseen, experience the lives of other people, and learn from their experience and wisdom without ever having to leave your couch. They are the window to people’s souls and a reflection of their conscience.

I have read a lot of books in my life so far, more than most people will read in their lives. It’s something I’m quite proud of, and I also love doing it. Books allow you to visit worlds unseen, experience the lives of other people, and learn from their experience and wisdom without ever having to leave your couch. They are the window to people’s souls and a reflection of their conscience.

I have read a lot of books in my life so far, more than most people will read in their lives. It’s something I’m quite proud of, and I also love doing it. Books allow you to visit worlds unseen, experience the lives of other people, and learn from their experience and wisdom without ever having to leave your couch. They are the window to people’s souls and a reflection of their conscience.

I have read a lot of books in my life so far, more than most people will read in their lives. It’s something I’m quite proud of, and I also love doing it. Books allow you to visit worlds unseen, experience the lives of other people, and learn from their experience and wisdom without ever having to leave your couch. They are the window to people’s souls and a reflection of their conscience.

Have you ever taken a conscious notice of the way you walk? It is the opinion of one of my friends that I walk in a manner that suggests I own the world, while another tells me I walk as if I were surveying my domain.

The manner in which I choose to walk is very specific: eyes to the horizon, shoulders back, and my back in an upright position. I like to think that I give off the vibe that everyone should make way for me. I also walk kind of slowly; never in a rush to get anywhere.

Have you ever taken a conscious notice of the way you walk? It is the opinion of one of my friends that I walk in a manner that suggests I own the world, while another tells me I walk as if I were surveying my domain.

The manner in which I choose to walk is very specific: eyes to the horizon, shoulders back, and my back in an upright position. I like to think that I give off the vibe that everyone should make way for me. I also walk kind of slowly; never in a rush to get anywhere.

This is my tribute to the greatness that is Google; a company I love and want to work for one day because they’re such an integral part of my internet experience. Some I’d like to outline the reasons for my adoration of Google.

The Search Engine

Firstly (and obviously) is the search engine. This is the core part of their business; bringing in over 90% of their revenue despite several efforts to diversify. It has helped me research assignments, blog posts and find cool stuff on the internet. If I want to find something online I ask Google first before anything else and since I’ve been using it as me (meaning logged in) for over 6 years now, it almost always knows what I’m asking for and delivers it first.

This is my tribute to the greatness that is Google; a company I love and want to work for one day because they’re such an integral part of my internet experience. Some I’d like to outline the reasons for my adoration of Google.

The Search Engine

Firstly (and obviously) is the search engine. This is the core part of their business; bringing in over 90% of their revenue despite several efforts to diversify. It has helped me research assignments, blog posts and find cool stuff on the internet. If I want to find something online I ask Google first before anything else and since I’ve been using it as me (meaning logged in) for over 6 years now, it almost always knows what I’m asking for and delivers it first.

This is my tribute to the greatness that is Google; a company I love and want to work for one day because they’re such an integral part of my internet experience. Some I’d like to outline the reasons for my adoration of Google.

The Search Engine

Firstly (and obviously) is the search engine. This is the core part of their business; bringing in over 90% of their revenue despite several efforts to diversify. It has helped me research assignments, blog posts and find cool stuff on the internet. If I want to find something online I ask Google first before anything else and since I’ve been using it as me (meaning logged in) for over 6 years now, it almost always knows what I’m asking for and delivers it first.

I don’t know what made me ask my mum this question; I was probably about 10 years old at the time. Perhaps I had watched a particularly sad movie where the choice was given, or maybe my friends had regaled me with stories in that vein, or I was in a “what-if” mood.

I was sitting on the couch when I asked my mum, “What if we were all kidnapped,” I was talking of my sister, brother and I - we were only three back then - and I severely doubt these were my exact words but you get the gist, “and you could only save one of us, who would you save?”

I don’t know what made me ask my mum this question; I was probably about 10 years old at the time. Perhaps I had watched a particularly sad movie where the choice was given, or maybe my friends had regaled me with stories in that vein, or I was in a “what-if” mood.

I was sitting on the couch when I asked my mum, “What if we were all kidnapped,” I was talking of my sister, brother and I - we were only three back then - and I severely doubt these were my exact words but you get the gist, “and you could only save one of us, who would you save?”

Recently, two of my friends: one my best friend and the other a very good friend of mine from school; have fallen in love. Before we get more into that, let’s go a little into these two gentlemen.

My friend in school is what I would call every girls nightmare! In the morning or at night, he seems to be the stuff of their dreams. What I mean by this is that he always has a different girl in his bed at night and in the morning he kicks them out in some of the most remorseless ways I’ve ever seen. He once kicked a girl out by clapping his hands and telling her it was time for her to get lost. Anyway over our holiday he’s suddenly become a gooey eyed romantic. His face lights up when he talks about her and the smile he gets when he sees a message from her is actually a joy to behold. This is the very first girl he’s actually called his girlfriend, ever. And I’ve been there for many of his “girlfriends”.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

Very often, people use the word “relationship” to refer to romantic relationships – just as they use the word “love” to refer to romantic love. It rather annoys me to see those words trapped into one of their specific meanings, especially as this specific meaning is not one I can relate to. So, be warned – in this blog, “relationship” refers to all kinds of relationships, and “love” refers to all kinds of love.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I’m commitment-phobic. I couldn’t believe it, it’s something that has been having a subtle effect on all my relationships. I’m calling it subtle because I didn’t notice it but I’m thinking someone else may have.

I’ve always complained of how I don’t have a girlfriend and to realise that I’ve been sub-conscientiously sabotaging my own chances makes me laugh. Anyway so I did some research into it (Google/Wikipedia of course). The description I’ve written below is interspersed with commentary from me with how what I’ve written best describes me and how I’ve seen it in my life. These comments will be in brackets so don’t skip to the end hoping to see what I’m thinking.

This post is inspired by some tweets I saw in my timeline by shee_wanjiku. She was complain that one of her friends, a dude, didn’t understand that she just wanted a platonic relationship and not anything else. She was saying that dudes need to realize that just because a chic is nice to them it doesn’t mean she wants to jump your bones. There’s also I heard somewhere on TV “There’s no way a dude and a chic can be just friends” a dude told his date. I thought I talk about these things but in relation with what I’ve experienced myself.
I’ve said severally here that I’m someone who really enjoys the company of girls infact I can as far as saying that I have more girl than boy friends. I’m not entirely sure why that is. I’m by far more selective of my guy friends. I think it’s an ego thing I get from the company of girls.

“Sidney, why do you think a girl would fall bad boys?” she asked me as I escorted her back to her room at midnight. I won’t go immediately into what I told her or how that conversation went but I feel that question is the perfect way to begin this topic. It’ll make sense in a minute.

I was having an argument with one of my friends a couple of weeks back that started with her complaining of her ex-boyfriend. She was complaining of how he forgot her birthday. Apparently on her birthday he had to go to Kisumu to see his mum who was feeling unwell. Her problem with this is that he didn’t think to even call her to wish her happy birthday. He didn’t get a gift or anything and when she called him the next day he said, “I didn’t call because you expected me to”. This wasn’t the only thing he’s done wrong but I don’t really want to go into all that. The reason I’m mentioning all this is to point to what women want.

So yeah I need your advice but for I get into that let me show you a bit of an SMS chat I was having with a friend of mine:
Lilly: Hey you, now can you break the ice, I hate being anxious, it makes me miss me moments in bed
Me: Which moments in bed are these? Can I join you and see? :)
Lilly: My moments. I have a thing with my bed and we don’t need company.
Me: I don’t think it’ll b too hard for me to get in between you.

First, I’d like to apologise to you, my readers, for not updating this blog for so long. I don’t know why but I’ve been extremely lazy to do stuff recently. I have no syke for school or lessons. But still I promised more regular updates and I plan to keep that promise. I have a laptop after all.

Anyway away from that and on to today’s topic: The player’s wife. I have a friend; he’s the player (Kelly*). I have another friend (Dina*), she’s the wife. And why is this spectacular or note-worthy?
Kelly is the type of dude who on a typical weekend could bed 2 different girls and then not call or talk to them ever again. He’s a player and he’s not ever abashed admitting it to anyone who asks him (It’s weird that girls never think to ask questions until his already bedded them). He’s a nice guys to hang around and he’s one of my close friends here in uni.

And aromantic too! I really do! Life would be so so much simpler like that, atleast for me! I could be friends with anyone without becoming confused with destructive feelings and my pride bruised. If you don’t know much about asexuality you might wanna read this post here or google it. (I’d prefer you read it here thoughJ). Now let me go on.

I’m great with people and make friends easily. Most of these are of the female variety and I don’t mind that one bit. I’m friendly, charismatic and charming. And I believe I’m quite handsome (my mum tells me this too and she never lies). I have the gift to draw people to me. I like being the center of attention.

Hey y’all! Yes, I already have another post for you already! I don’t know how long this momentum will maintain but recently I keep finding more and more stuff to write about. Also I really don’t have to much to do in the evenings because well the assignments haven’t really kicked in. So for now I have much to write.

The other weekend my cousin, yes the one featuring in the last post and one before it, invited his girlfriend from home to school,with her sis, who he was trying to hook me up with.

I wrote this a while back but my phone mem-card decided it’s misbehaving and got a virus or bug of some sort and I had to format it. And this post was on it so I had to write it again which I’m sure it’ll not be as awesome as when I first penned it but know I’ll try my best.

So my cuzo came to room about a week ago with what I saw as both shocking and awesome news! The girl he was aiming for, the one I told you about before, had ingia’d box(That’s to say she was really feeling his vybe, hey half my audience is actually from the US). Yup she had been papped!!:-D Of course I was happy and proud because as far as I could tell at the time he was setting pace for all freshas. Most freshas are still keeping to themselves looking as confused and lost as ever.

The other day I attended a meeting for our school poetry club. I had wanted to see the performances and a friend of mine had said that they were beginning at 9 am. I arrived at 10 because I had spent the night before not in my room.;) Turns out my friend had it wrong, idiot!!!, and this was actually a meeting between the school club and the guest artists that had been invited. Since I was already there I decided to stay.

Hey guys!! People have been complaining about how difficult it is to comment on the standard Blogger template for a long while so from today we’ll be using Disqus comments which should make it much easier for anyone to comment. Let me know what you think of it by commenting or by e-mail. Peace!!!

So I was randomly checking out my analytics-something I do to make sure at least one person has checked what I’ve written- and noticed among the reports the search engine Keyword traffic the most hilarious thing. Some one googled “I’m in Kenya, I want a girlfriend” and landed on my blog.

This got my thinking about what this person was thinking when googling this and the post he may have landed at. I decided to do a whole post on the Keywords that had landed people on my blog.

First I’d like to thank Sgyreju for allowing me to put up her posts on my blog and I’m sure all of you thank her too. She wrote them almost a year ago but the ideas and questions she asks are priceless and I’ll continue to cherish them forever. Second this is an edited conclusion of what has been a very fun week of posts that Sgyreju originally had on her blog. It contain mostly her thoughts interspersed with mine.

Gender is something I have only begun to think about very recently, and I still have work to do in order to understand better where I stand in relation to it. But, even though I have only been exploring my own gender identity for about three months, I had known for a while longer that it is quite a complex matter.

The first thing to know is the difference between sex and gender. While sex is a biological fact, gender is an identity; it is about how one perceives oneself. For a long time, I did not know about gender; this is not a widely known concept in mainstream France (recently, someone I know wrote a survey with a question about “gender”. She told me her professors had said it was the politically correct word to use for questions about biological sex.). I knew about transsexual people, but I only knew about them as “people who feel they were born in the wrong body and need to change their biological sex”. As to myself, my being a girl was just a fact, like my height or my birth date – a fact about me I had no control about, and which meant even less to me than my height or my birthdate do – and I could not imagine it mattering at all.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

Very often, people use the word “relationship” to refer to romantic relationships – just as they use the word “love” to refer to romantic love. It rather annoys me to see those words trapped into one of their specific meanings, especially as this specific meaning is not one I can relate to. So, be warned – in this blog, “relationship” refers to all kinds of relationships, and “love” refers to all kinds of love.

I did not always identify as aromantic.

For a long time, I did believe in the whole romantic myth that one is truly happier with a romantic partner, and I wished for one. I longed for the time when I would finally live those idealized shared moments with my beloved: having breakfast together, taking long walks hand in hand, talking about everything and anything for hours, kiss passionately like in my favorite love scenes in movies…

I will not lie to you: Questioning one’s identity is scary.

The evening of June 4, 2006, when I finally became aware that I probably was not heterosexual as I had always assumed, and the night that followed were, at the time, the scariest moments of my life. Now, four years later, they have only been pushed to second place by another evening that I do not want to talk about (and anyway, it has nothing to do with asexuality or any of the other matters that I wish to discuss in my Petri Dish).

Since today is the fourth anniversary of the evening during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.

I had a LiveJournal account in which I wrote regularly – and there are entries about that event. The first one was published at 10:18PM that night, which means that the event happened before.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. For the next week,every day, starting tomorrow, I’ll be featuring a number of posts that I read a long time ago from Rainbow Amoeba’s Petri Dish . She called it Questioning Week.  They really inspired me, so much so that I started my very own Questioning Week inspired by the series of post I’m going to share with you during the coming week

…the Storymoja Monthly Blog Posts Expo. Yeah I was nominated along with a host of other more talented writers such as Savvy Kenya. Yeah someone considered my writing to be at the same level of Savvy!! Yeah I’m feeling rather good about myself right now. You can read about the nomination here, doesn’t seem like there’s any prize to be won though.

Here’s what was said about the nominees

"…today, all I wish to celebrate like we have every month on the Storymoja Writers’ Community, is the diversity of writing and the creativity of forming that can be found on the Kenyan blogosphere.

It’s been so long since I’ve updated this blog, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The psych to do anything has been at nil recently. I can’t seen to find the psych to do much other than look at what other people are doing. I check into twitter only to watch the tweet stream not to contribute.

I went for Bake happy hour quite sometime back and was inspired to statrt blogging by seeing all those bloggers gather. I didn’t really keep that promise to myself did I? Perhaps I should make a resolution to start doing so. You can read all about Bake here on Savvy’s blog.

Hey y’all! Starting tomorrow I’ll be dropping a bunch of posts I wanted to put up last year but didn’t have the chance or means to. There are 4 or 5 posts that were actually written as one but would have been too long for one sitting/post in my opinion. So I cut it up. I’ve done it such a way that it provides the most entertainment while still managing to convey what was happening. I hope you like it because I personally think I did a great job on them. Either way your thoughts on them would be much appreciated so stick around. Peace!!

Hey guys! Did you miss me? I missed you. Really I have. This should technically be a new years message but it’s already so late in the month there’s barely any point of talking about it except perhaps to say" I hope you new year has gone well so far. How are the resolutions coming along long? I mean are you still sticking to them?"
I personally don’t do new year resolutions. I think it’s because I’ve usually have made my long term decisions long before the new year checks in. And also because I’m awesome. I mean why wait for new years to take a look at your life and make decisions about it? Anyway before I go rambling on for too long without saying much of value. I just wanted to do this post to let yáll know that I should be posting more regularly now.

So I couldn’t do a whole week of posts. I’m sorry but I ran out of things to question, I don’t know why. Maybe I have nothing else to question or I just haven’t figured out what else I’m questioning in my life yet but when I do you’ll be some of the first to know.

So this is the official end of questioning week. I like to think I tried my best and I really  hope you’ve enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. So what was your favourite post? Let me know? Until next time, peace!!!

Yesterday I had a security breach on the laptop I use to write the posts I put up for you. No, my posts for you aren’t so important that someone would spend their time trying to hack my laptop trying to steal them as creative secrets(Though to me they are) and anyway the laptop is never connected to any network.

BREACH!!!!

Yeah, a friend of mine found one of the posts I had written for posting some day. The way she found it was kinda suspicious. She asked if she come to my room and use my laptop for 5 minutes. I, at the time clueless, just thought she wanted to use it for programming or something. You see, not many of my classmates have laptops yet despite being computer science students but I suspect next semester most will.

@eGichomo recently launched his Kenya Blog Contest asking people to vote for their favourite Kenyan blog. Voting is currently on going and as of the time of writing this post this blog was leading with 33 votes. Thanks guys! However polls will close on 30th of this month after which the winner will be announced. There are three categories:
Art Award: Recognition and appreciation of poetry. Creativity, choice of words, originality and show of talent.
Beauty Award: Best layout, design, cool features, attractiveness and finest integration of themes and magnificence.
Action Award: Pursuit of ingenuity. Most interactive and frequent in content update.

This is continuation from yesterday’s post, I told you I’ve been busy and there’s much to write about.

On Friday I was at work reading the paper, Nation, when I came across the an article on asexuality. Usually I don’t read the zuqka, mostly I peruse, prefer the Pulse by far, but asexuality was something I had actually talked about on my blog not so recently so I decided to read what they had to say about it.

The other day I attended a meeting for our school poetry club. I had wanted to see the performances and a friend of mine had said that they were beginning at 9 am. I arrived at 10 because I had spent the night before not in my room.;) Turns out my friend had it wrong, idiot!!!, and this was actually a meeting between the school club and the guest artists that had been invited. Since I was already there I decided to stay.

I wrote this for someone I love and care for very much but shit wasn’t isn’t working. It was written back when I was in high school(which wasn’t that long ago) so anyway here it is:

I don’t know what to say
Though my love grows day by day
I feel as if you keep pushing me away
And i wander if you want to stay

My emotions are getting strained
My heart is get pained
Am getting drained
And am feeling constrained

The other day I attended a meeting for our school poetry club. I had wanted to see the performances and a friend of mine had said that they were beginning at 9 am. I arrived at 10 because I had spent the night before not in my room.;) Turns out my friend had it wrong, idiot!!!, and this was actually a meeting between the school club and the guest artists that had been invited. Since I was already there I decided to stay.

The other day I attended a meeting for our school poetry club. I had wanted to see the performances and a friend of mine had said that they were beginning at 9 am. I arrived at 10 because I had spent the night before not in my room.;) Turns out my friend had it wrong, idiot!!!, and this was actually a meeting between the school club and the guest artists that had been invited. Since I was already there I decided to stay.

Today I’m in a sufficiently depressed to post this rather dull post. I wrote it when I was going through a really bad time in my life. I’m feeling right now something similar to what I did then.
Has any of you really contemplated suicide? As in really really thought about it? I have. Sometime I feel it’d be better than all the sadness in the world. Where everyone’s life seems to be going better than yours?

I needed to out this up quick which is why I’m doing this on a day I already have on post up but I feel the longer I wait the less relevant what I have to say becomes. Also I’m not a political scientist or any sort of expert on revolutions and such matters, these are just my thoughts.

Recently, ever since the Tunisia and then Egypt protests and revolts there’s been a lot of chatter on my time-line(Twitter) about whether such a thing can be repeated in Kenya. Today there was even talk of one  on 28th February. I don’t know where this one came from but there were a lot of tweets tagged with it in the morning.

Okay it’s been a while that I’ve done a post on fashion so today I’m taking the time out of very empty schedule to bless you all with my knowledge. Before we go on, I have no idea why my fashion posts never get any comments even though I’m usually telling you guys the truth as I see it. And I’m always right.:) So know on to the rant.

POINTLESS

Big ass handbags. Yes I’ve talked about them before and I’m going to do so again. I don’t really like them. I don’t see the point of someone carrying around a handbag bigger than my bagpack. What is y’all carry in there? As in when I leave the house all I have on me is a wallet and my phone but y’all chuck with a massive hand bag filled with nothing and that time I ask you whether you sleep over somewhere(or planning to be chips’d, apparently they’re also called chip funga bags. You might wanna read @savvykenya’s post for an explanation) and you say no. SO WHAT THE FUCK YOU NEED A BAG THAT BIG FOR!!

This is a brief continuation from yesterday’s post on yu. After all that BS with the internet and customer care they went and made sure they did everything and I do mean everything to completely lose me as a customer!!! Yesterday I was angry now I’m fucking livid!!

On my way to the Goethe Institute, where the film DAWA was showing (More on this in a bit), my credit finished! I was like wow! That was 150bob in one day! I was already looking forward to getting home and changing the accursed line! I went a got myself some credit and loaded it in.

I’m so very angry!!! Let me explain why. Today I’m to twitter and @Mwirigi tweet that Yu(cellular network here in Kenya) data had now increased to sh10/mb. I was naawwwww!!!! Really? Why would they do that!? So I called customer care to find out if things had changed and was informed by a very nice lady that nothing had changed and things were still at sh3/mb. So I heaved a sigh of relief and went about my business.

So today Safaricom announced it full year results today. Apparently  Safaricom had turnover up 19.1% to Sh83.96b, subscribers up 18.2% to 15.79m ; dividend up 100% to Sh8b at 20cents a share and a profit of over sh20b. But along with that announcement that the Information PS  Ndemo annouces that the THE KENYA INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS (FAIR COMPETITION AND EQUALITY OF TREATMENT) REGULATIONS, 2010 been suspended to be reviewed! Nkt!!

Now I’m sure that most of you(Kenyans that is) have heard if not read about the aforementioned regulations. They mostly protect the smaller operators from bullying from the dominant player(Safaricom). It mostly(actually only, I think) deals with interconnection rates. So that means when Safaricom decides to raise interconnection rates they have to prove that they’re doing it because their costs to do so have gone up. It also states that “A licensee shall maintain accounting separation techniques to be focused on the separation of revenues, costs and capital employed into categories in order to ensure that there is no discrimination between internal and external pricing in all services provided by the licensee."(Taken verbatim from the regulations)

Am not sure how to start this but I realise that by writing this I’ve already began…Its been four days…four days of a really bad mood. I’m not sure why but of the last four days I’ve realised that I’ve been very angry for most of the time lets look at the days one at a time.

Day 1: My baby sis, J, wakes me up to tell me that she’s been left by her school bus so I immediately wake up wondering what could’ve gone wrong this morning! So I walk out into the sitting room and right there taking care of her stupid kid is H, the stepmother! Stupid woman how does Joyce skip the “adult”(using this extremely loosely) in the house and come wake me up!! NKT!! And she didn’t even seem concerned!! so anyway I immediately take J to school but seriously how is it that am the one taking all this responsibility of a parent when there are two adults in the house??? They’re just fair weather parents.Dad with his bullshit “bonding” sessions.He’s never there when J is crying or sad or angry.He’s even walked out once when J was crying for our mum…just walked in saw the tears and walked right back out!

I seem to be on a roll with the blog posts this week. I’ve been quite encouraged by the comments you leave on the posts and twitter, thanks. Anyway today’s post is not the faint hearted and is rather explicit in nature but it’s important that I put this down because it got me asking some really really difficult questions. I just hope that I can tell the story well enough so you get what was going on clearly enough.

Hey everyone! I know its been a while since I did a new post and I’m sorry, I’ve been so busy as any of you who follow me on twitter might have noticed. I’ve been going up and down the country trying to organise matters school. I could definitely write a blog post about that and I probably will one day.

But today I want to cover something I’ve covered before;fashion. So I have in more of my looking at people on the streets come up with another list of thing chics wear that they’re probably greatly thankful for that I’ve come to hate! So now without further words or ado here it is…

Hey guys!! People have been complaining about how difficult it is to comment on the standard Blogger template for a long while so from today we’ll be using Disqus comments which should make it much easier for anyone to comment. Let me know what you think of it by commenting or by e-mail. Peace!!!

This post is inspired by some tweets I saw in my timeline by shee_wanjiku. She was complain that one of her friends, a dude, didn’t understand that she just wanted a platonic relationship and not anything else. She was saying that dudes need to realize that just because a chic is nice to them it doesn’t mean she wants to jump your bones. There’s also I heard somewhere on TV “There’s no way a dude and a chic can be just friends” a dude told his date. I thought I talk about these things but in relation with what I’ve experienced myself.
I’ve said severally here that I’m someone who really enjoys the company of girls infact I can as far as saying that I have more girl than boy friends. I’m not entirely sure why that is. I’m by far more selective of my guy friends. I think it’s an ego thing I get from the company of girls.

This is a description of the eyes of a girl I know, she’s beautiful but one of her striking feature is her eyes they contain so much that I fear this description falls short of what they contain but I’ve tried my best and thought I’d share it with you:

These aren’t her’s but they give you an idea

Deep,drowning with a sort of simmering energy behind them like they could instant explode into intense emotion…they know what your thinking and it amuses them…calling,daring,dreamy and ever so seductive.Enigmatic a twinling of mischieviousness in them,playful

Soo…the teacher didn’t come today,apparent he/she wasn’t feeling well and I’m thinking:Really? The fact they were paid last week and had 2 massive matches Sunday night had nothing to do with it? So anyway the class begins officially tomorrow…

All we did to day was receive the course material…which btw is one thick ass book and a smaller booklet…(see the accompaning picture)I went through the book and I find myself thinking What the Hell have I signed myself up for? I’ve never been a hardware person, software has always been my passion, and I’m wandering if I can hack it to my usual super genius standards….hmmm,only time will tell though I’m going to try my very best!

So I was randomly checking out my analytics-something I do to make sure at least one person has checked what I’ve written- and noticed among the reports the search engine Keyword traffic the most hilarious thing. Some one googled “I’m in Kenya, I want a girlfriend” and landed on my blog.

This got my thinking about what this person was thinking when googling this and the post he may have landed at. I decided to do a whole post on the Keywords that had landed people on my blog.

First I’d like to thank Sgyreju for allowing me to put up her posts on my blog and I’m sure all of you thank her too. She wrote them almost a year ago but the ideas and questions she asks are priceless and I’ll continue to cherish them forever. Second this is an edited conclusion of what has been a very fun week of posts that Sgyreju originally had on her blog. It contain mostly her thoughts interspersed with mine.

…the Storymoja Monthly Blog Posts Expo. Yeah I was nominated along with a host of other more talented writers such as Savvy Kenya. Yeah someone considered my writing to be at the same level of Savvy!! Yeah I’m feeling rather good about myself right now. You can read about the nomination here, doesn’t seem like there’s any prize to be won though.

Here’s what was said about the nominees

"…today, all I wish to celebrate like we have every month on the Storymoja Writers’ Community, is the diversity of writing and the creativity of forming that can be found on the Kenyan blogosphere.

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I’m commitment-phobic. I couldn’t believe it, it’s something that has been having a subtle effect on all my relationships. I’m calling it subtle because I didn’t notice it but I’m thinking someone else may have.

I’ve always complained of how I don’t have a girlfriend and to realise that I’ve been sub-conscientiously sabotaging my own chances makes me laugh. Anyway so I did some research into it (Google/Wikipedia of course). The description I’ve written below is interspersed with commentary from me with how what I’ve written best describes me and how I’ve seen it in my life. These comments will be in brackets so don’t skip to the end hoping to see what I’m thinking.

This post is inspired by some tweets I saw in my timeline by shee_wanjiku. She was complain that one of her friends, a dude, didn’t understand that she just wanted a platonic relationship and not anything else. She was saying that dudes need to realize that just because a chic is nice to them it doesn’t mean she wants to jump your bones. There’s also I heard somewhere on TV “There’s no way a dude and a chic can be just friends” a dude told his date. I thought I talk about these things but in relation with what I’ve experienced myself.
I’ve said severally here that I’m someone who really enjoys the company of girls infact I can as far as saying that I have more girl than boy friends. I’m not entirely sure why that is. I’m by far more selective of my guy friends. I think it’s an ego thing I get from the company of girls.

It’s been so long since I’ve updated this blog, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The psych to do anything has been at nil recently. I can’t seen to find the psych to do much other than look at what other people are doing. I check into twitter only to watch the tweet stream not to contribute.

I went for Bake happy hour quite sometime back and was inspired to statrt blogging by seeing all those bloggers gather. I didn’t really keep that promise to myself did I? Perhaps I should make a resolution to start doing so. You can read all about Bake here on Savvy’s blog.

Hey y’all. I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted but I’ve been busy with exams which, between you and me, I think I’ve aced but don’t remind me of this when the results come out next semester saying different. So now it’s the end of the academic year as a fresher and I can tell you for someone just finishing their first year I’ve done it all.

This year, I’ve helped a friend I had sex with have an abortion, made new friends drinking and got my laptop stolen from me. As the semester’s come to an end I’ve found myself falling for one of my friends and I must say things are looking rather promising from me…and her.*knocks on wood*

This is one of those posts where, I just talk randomly about whatever is on my head, as I have nothing of much significance to talk about. Usually when I a have random stuff to write down it’s about one specific topic but today, I’m going random about random.

Random like the colours in this picture

I was in Kakamega over the weekend visiting my cousin; it was all kinds of awesome, drinking and raeving and hanging out and drinking. While on the rave, I happened to dance with a big mama by big here I mean fat. This girl had big everything; big boobs, big ass, big thighs, big stomach; big everything. While she was grinding on me and I’m starting to get a little feeling in my nether regions, I realized that big women may actually be able to be able a rouse something in me. I didn’t know that, I’ve always found fat girl’s unsexy, this weekend is causing me to re-examine that.

So yeah I need your advice but for I get into that let me show you a bit of an SMS chat I was having with a friend of mine:
Lilly: Hey you, now can you break the ice, I hate being anxious, it makes me miss me moments in bed
Me: Which moments in bed are these? Can I join you and see? :)
Lilly: My moments. I have a thing with my bed and we don’t need company.
Me: I don’t think it’ll b too hard for me to get in between you.

Today I’m in a sufficiently depressed to post this rather dull post. I wrote it when I was going through a really bad time in my life. I’m feeling right now something similar to what I did then.
Has any of you really contemplated suicide? As in really really thought about it? I have. Sometime I feel it’d be better than all the sadness in the world. Where everyone’s life seems to be going better than yours?

Hey y’all! I’ve been on a kind of high since the weekend. I finally got off my ass and went for the shopping I should’ve gone for 4 weeks ago meaning I have some food in my room finally. I went shags(the country house) for a day so that I could have a bit of solitude and found my dad there, he gave me some cash:) which for someone my age is better than solitude. Also he gave me something even better than money; my own laptop!!

So while I was narrating this story( Catch part one here) to you guys-and girls- I’ve tried to as objective as possible and tell the story as I saw it then, through my eyes, without giving you too much of what I thought of the situation after really thinking about it. So that’s what this post is about.

I don’t know about you but I’ve always been of the opinion that get pregnant at my age-which is rather young, think kid, baby-is stupid. Yes, I’m saying that Q was stupid to get pregnant. I mean think about it in this day and age you only get pregnant if you want to, what with condoms, contraceptives, e-pills and of course abstinence, it’s either that or you’re stupid. I told Q as much.

Continuing from here

I don’t like this dude, E. He looks shifty, dodgy. But then again that might have something to do with him knocking up my friend but not so much, I remember I met him when I went Greenpark (local around school), he didn’t seem to like me cutting in the way I did.

He seemed to look rather scared when Q asked that he clears the room of everyone, except me and W. Then she began to talk to E. She told him that she had gone to hospital to get tested, that the results were positive, she was pregnant. And guess what he asked?

I needed to out this up quick which is why I’m doing this on a day I already have on post up but I feel the longer I wait the less relevant what I have to say becomes. Also I’m not a political scientist or any sort of expert on revolutions and such matters, these are just my thoughts.

Recently, ever since the Tunisia and then Egypt protests and revolts there’s been a lot of chatter on my time-line(Twitter) about whether such a thing can be repeated in Kenya. Today there was even talk of one  on 28th February. I don’t know where this one came from but there were a lot of tweets tagged with it in the morning.

Continuing from here

“Hello, R?”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Fine, it’s cdohnio”

“Ahhh, cdohnio how are you? How’s school?”

“I’m cool, school’s fine, listen I have something rather delicate to ask you”

“Ask…”in serious and curious tone.

“First of all you have to promise to keep this secret, you can’t tell anyone, not my mum, not aunty, not your bro….(add several family members here)….no one!”

“Okay, what is it?”suspicion.

“I have a friend, a girl, she gotten herself in a delicate situation and she wandering the price of something. You know Hosithis, right?”

Continued from here

I found out later, that I actually exclaimed, ’Whoops!!’. I can’t remember that. Q then took the results out of my hand to see for her self and after W also took a look he ripped the results into pieces. Dee began cursing how she couldn’t believe it as she fought hard-I could tell-not to cry though tear still leaked from the sides. She collapsed for a few seconds into Q arms and all I could do was rub her back. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that useless, or that confused or maybe lost is word, in my young life. I mean, what could I do? Or rather I didn’t know what I could, should do.
This may be the best place to mention the baby wasn’t mine.

I don’t really know how to start this. I’m scared. A girl I was intimate with is pregnant. Yes pregnant and I’m freaking out for her. Yes my only concern is her. I’m really worried how this will affect her mentally and psychologically. It’s just the first month of year one and already I’m in such a difficult situation. I’ll start at the beginning.

So I have this friend lets call her, Q, we had sex… She was the first on campus. The next week she tells me and some of our friends (we’re kind of a group, small) that she thinks she’s missed her ps. One of us, we’ll call him, W, asked how long it had been and she says 2 weeks. She then goes on to say that she wants us to take her to the clinic so she can get a pregnancy test.

Hey y’all! Starting tomorrow I’ll be dropping a bunch of posts I wanted to put up last year but didn’t have the chance or means to. There are 4 or 5 posts that were actually written as one but would have been too long for one sitting/post in my opinion. So I cut it up. I’ve done it such a way that it provides the most entertainment while still managing to convey what was happening. I hope you like it because I personally think I did a great job on them. Either way your thoughts on them would be much appreciated so stick around. Peace!!

And aromantic too! I really do! Life would be so so much simpler like that, atleast for me! I could be friends with anyone without becoming confused with destructive feelings and my pride bruised. If you don’t know much about asexuality you might wanna read this post here or google it. (I’d prefer you read it here thoughJ). Now let me go on.

I’m great with people and make friends easily. Most of these are of the female variety and I don’t mind that one bit. I’m friendly, charismatic and charming. And I believe I’m quite handsome (my mum tells me this too and she never lies). I have the gift to draw people to me. I like being the center of attention.

Hey guys! Did you miss me? I missed you. Really I have. This should technically be a new years message but it’s already so late in the month there’s barely any point of talking about it except perhaps to say" I hope you new year has gone well so far. How are the resolutions coming along long? I mean are you still sticking to them?"
I personally don’t do new year resolutions. I think it’s because I’ve usually have made my long term decisions long before the new year checks in. And also because I’m awesome. I mean why wait for new years to take a look at your life and make decisions about it? Anyway before I go rambling on for too long without saying much of value. I just wanted to do this post to let yáll know that I should be posting more regularly now.

So this is the like the 4th day of questioning week and so far so good. I’ve been able to post something each day so far. Today we talk about dating and perhaps at the end you’ll help me answer questions I have.

A coffee date

A date is an appointment or engagement, especially a social one with a member of the opposite sex. That’s what my phone dictionary tells me, and I quite agree, anyone with a different interpretation feel free to share it in the comments. It’s a simple enough definition and we can begin with that. NOTE: This will be told from my point of view so it’ll be biased to what might be “the guy” side.

Today I ask questions about God but before i do a little background would be good. My parents divorced some nearly 5 years ago. Since then things haven’t been exactly easy for my mum. She’s always been short on cash and can’t seen to be able to do much. She’s a very strong Christian. My dad has had smooth sail as far as I can tell, very well paying top job and new wife. He has lives quite comfortably. I’ve never seen him in a church or praying in all my life.

Today I’m going to talk about religion. I’m not so sure how long I can write about it so we’ll see how far I go. I’m a Christian and to be more specific Seventh Day Adventist. I go to church on Saturday while most other Christians do this on Sunday.

There probably several hundred devisions of Christianity in the world. We have Catholic, Pentecostal, Baptist, Protestant, Angilcan and our very own home bred, Finger of God church just to mention a few. I personally belive my church is the right one and you probably believe yours is the right one so how can you ever be sure?

I promised I’d do a post a day and I’m trying to do my best to do so. Today we actually start the very first topic of my questioning week, love. This seemly complex thing that we all seek after in one way or another.

My dictionary describes love as an intense feeling of deep affection or a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone. But when ever most of use use it we’re talking about out boyfriends or girlfriends and the second description. Even then its not a word we use casually.

I’d been reading a blog(Rainbow Amoeba’s Petri Dish) that had something she called Questioning Week. She had just moved her blog to a new site and was also celebrating the 4th Anniversary since the evening in her own words
“during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.”

I encourage you all to go read the 7 posts she did because in my opinion they’re great pieces that I might even one day feature here.(If she allows that is)

I wrote this a while back but my phone mem-card decided it’s misbehaving and got a virus or bug of some sort and I had to format it. And this post was on it so I had to write it again which I’m sure it’ll not be as awesome as when I first penned it but know I’ll try my best.

So my cuzo came to room about a week ago with what I saw as both shocking and awesome news! The girl he was aiming for, the one I told you about before, had ingia’d box(That’s to say she was really feeling his vybe, hey half my audience is actually from the US). Yup she had been papped!!:-D Of course I was happy and proud because as far as I could tell at the time he was setting pace for all freshas. Most freshas are still keeping to themselves looking as confused and lost as ever.

Too soon to be doing another post? Have you even fully digested the last one? It’s okay you can read both of them! Right? Anyway I’m in my room at about 10.30pm, not really trying to sleep but in bed none the less, phone in my hand and it hits me there’s a lot of noise in the background.

I pause to listen and I hear about 4 different sources of music and sound all seemly competing to overpower the rest.
The dude across from my room is listening to traditional Luyha Christian choir songs, some dude up the hall is booming his favourite rhumba and lingala tracks while his neighbour watches an action movie at max volume. Two doors down from me is some playing what seems to be a Hip hop mix and further down opposite some is listening to reggae/ragga.

Okay ladies and gentlemen! This is the very first post coming direct from my campus!! The first campus-post! Yeah I joined campus, finally, in Maseno! It’s written in two parts, the first were the thing’s written on the first day I arrived in the morning and mostly on the registration line. Everything else was after! This is not conclusive, I’m still organising my thoughts, but it’ll have to do until I can give you something more solid. Hopefully this means a return to more regular blogging for me!*Fingers crossed*

So remember my weird really pissed of post, the one I wouldn’t allow y’all to comment on? And remember I said I wanted to see a psychiatrist but couldn’t seem to get to it? Well at the pressing of one of my dearest friends I finally got round to doing it.

Yeah, some weeks back I went to see one in a very informal type meeting. Her phone kept ringing and I also kept tweeting. My friend was there also I guess for moral support and its was in a public place not I some office where you lie down and talk incessantly about yourself and your feelings.

Hey everyone!! It’s been awhile since I last did a post and I’ve been wondering what to write about. As this blog is about my random thoughts and feelings so I guess I can write about anything I feel about and y’all will have to read about it, won’t you?:) That might sound arrogant but hey I’m right, aren’t I?

Last week I was in Kisumu and its surrounding environs and towns. I travelled on my birthday. I know most people would’ve  waited to celebrate their birthday’s first then travelled but I haven’t really celebrated a birthday in the last 8 or 9 years. Sad, I know, but then again my life has really been a happy one in past years but more on that in another post if I ever get the courage to tell the world about it. So I went to Kisumu, on my birthday. Why?

Gender is something I have only begun to think about very recently, and I still have work to do in order to understand better where I stand in relation to it. But, even though I have only been exploring my own gender identity for about three months, I had known for a while longer that it is quite a complex matter.

The first thing to know is the difference between sex and gender. While sex is a biological fact, gender is an identity; it is about how one perceives oneself. For a long time, I did not know about gender; this is not a widely known concept in mainstream France (recently, someone I know wrote a survey with a question about “gender”. She told me her professors had said it was the politically correct word to use for questions about biological sex.). I knew about transsexual people, but I only knew about them as “people who feel they were born in the wrong body and need to change their biological sex”. As to myself, my being a girl was just a fact, like my height or my birth date – a fact about me I had no control about, and which meant even less to me than my height or my birthdate do – and I could not imagine it mattering at all.

Gender is something I have only begun to think about very recently, and I still have work to do in order to understand better where I stand in relation to it. But, even though I have only been exploring my own gender identity for about three months, I had known for a while longer that it is quite a complex matter.

The first thing to know is the difference between sex and gender. While sex is a biological fact, gender is an identity; it is about how one perceives oneself. For a long time, I did not know about gender; this is not a widely known concept in mainstream France (recently, someone I know wrote a survey with a question about “gender”. She told me her professors had said it was the politically correct word to use for questions about biological sex.). I knew about transsexual people, but I only knew about them as “people who feel they were born in the wrong body and need to change their biological sex”. As to myself, my being a girl was just a fact, like my height or my birth date – a fact about me I had no control about, and which meant even less to me than my height or my birthdate do – and I could not imagine it mattering at all.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

Very often, people use the word “relationship” to refer to romantic relationships – just as they use the word “love” to refer to romantic love. It rather annoys me to see those words trapped into one of their specific meanings, especially as this specific meaning is not one I can relate to. So, be warned – in this blog, “relationship” refers to all kinds of relationships, and “love” refers to all kinds of love.

I did not always identify as aromantic.

For a long time, I did believe in the whole romantic myth that one is truly happier with a romantic partner, and I wished for one. I longed for the time when I would finally live those idealized shared moments with my beloved: having breakfast together, taking long walks hand in hand, talking about everything and anything for hours, kiss passionately like in my favorite love scenes in movies…

Sex is a complex matter. It is hard to define – for some people, only genital penetration counts; for others, anything involving someone’s genitals is sex. It also has several meanings: an expression of romantic love, a fun activity, a way to experience pleasure, a way to prove one’s worth… and many more. Some use it as a means of pressure (withholding sex in punishment or offering sex as a reward in order to obtain something), while others plan strategies to obtain it.

I will not lie to you: Questioning one’s identity is scary.

The evening of June 4, 2006, when I finally became aware that I probably was not heterosexual as I had always assumed, and the night that followed were, at the time, the scariest moments of my life. Now, four years later, they have only been pushed to second place by another evening that I do not want to talk about (and anyway, it has nothing to do with asexuality or any of the other matters that I wish to discuss in my Petri Dish).

Since today is the fourth anniversary of the evening during which I realized I needed to reconsider my assumed and never questioned heterosexuality, I thought I might as well tell the story of what exactly happened then.

I had a LiveJournal account in which I wrote regularly – and there are entries about that event. The first one was published at 10:18PM that night, which means that the event happened before.

Most people divide relationships with people who do not belong to their family in only two categories: friends and romantic partners. A specific set of expectations and “normal behavior” is associated with each category, and transgressions are frowned upon: One is not supposed to kiss one’s friends, or hold hands with them, for instance, but on the other hand, it is not considered “normal” not to kiss or have sex with one’s romantic partner.

This post is inspired by some tweets I saw in my timeline by shee_wanjiku. She was complain that one of her friends, a dude, didn’t understand that she just wanted a platonic relationship and not anything else. She was saying that dudes need to realize that just because a chic is nice to them it doesn’t mean she wants to jump your bones. There’s also I heard somewhere on TV “There’s no way a dude and a chic can be just friends” a dude told his date. I thought I talk about these things but in relation with what I’ve experienced myself.
I’ve said severally here that I’m someone who really enjoys the company of girls infact I can as far as saying that I have more girl than boy friends. I’m not entirely sure why that is. I’m by far more selective of my guy friends. I think it’s an ego thing I get from the company of girls.

This is a description of the eyes of a girl I know, she’s beautiful but one of her striking feature is her eyes they contain so much that I fear this description falls short of what they contain but I’ve tried my best and thought I’d share it with you:

These aren’t her’s but they give you an idea

Deep,drowning with a sort of simmering energy behind them like they could instant explode into intense emotion…they know what your thinking and it amuses them…calling,daring,dreamy and ever so seductive.Enigmatic a twinling of mischieviousness in them,playful

First, I’d like to apologise to you, my readers, for not updating this blog for so long. I don’t know why but I’ve been extremely lazy to do stuff recently. I have no syke for school or lessons. But still I promised more regular updates and I plan to keep that promise. I have a laptop after all.

Anyway away from that and on to today’s topic: The player’s wife. I have a friend; he’s the player (Kelly*). I have another friend (Dina*), she’s the wife. And why is this spectacular or note-worthy?
Kelly is the type of dude who on a typical weekend could bed 2 different girls and then not call or talk to them ever again. He’s a player and he’s not ever abashed admitting it to anyone who asks him (It’s weird that girls never think to ask questions until his already bedded them). He’s a nice guys to hang around and he’s one of my close friends here in uni.

So while I was narrating this story( Catch part one here) to you guys-and girls- I’ve tried to as objective as possible and tell the story as I saw it then, through my eyes, without giving you too much of what I thought of the situation after really thinking about it. So that’s what this post is about.

I don’t know about you but I’ve always been of the opinion that get pregnant at my age-which is rather young, think kid, baby-is stupid. Yes, I’m saying that Q was stupid to get pregnant. I mean think about it in this day and age you only get pregnant if you want to, what with condoms, contraceptives, e-pills and of course abstinence, it’s either that or you’re stupid. I told Q as much.

Continuing from here

I don’t like this dude, E. He looks shifty, dodgy. But then again that might have something to do with him knocking up my friend but not so much, I remember I met him when I went Greenpark (local around school), he didn’t seem to like me cutting in the way I did.

He seemed to look rather scared when Q asked that he clears the room of everyone, except me and W. Then she began to talk to E. She told him that she had gone to hospital to get tested, that the results were positive, she was pregnant. And guess what he asked?

Continuing from here

“Hello, R?”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Fine, it’s cdohnio”

“Ahhh, cdohnio how are you? How’s school?”

“I’m cool, school’s fine, listen I have something rather delicate to ask you”

“Ask…”in serious and curious tone.

“First of all you have to promise to keep this secret, you can’t tell anyone, not my mum, not aunty, not your bro….(add several family members here)….no one!”

“Okay, what is it?”suspicion.

“I have a friend, a girl, she gotten herself in a delicate situation and she wandering the price of something. You know Hosithis, right?”

Continued from here

I found out later, that I actually exclaimed, ’Whoops!!’. I can’t remember that. Q then took the results out of my hand to see for her self and after W also took a look he ripped the results into pieces. Dee began cursing how she couldn’t believe it as she fought hard-I could tell-not to cry though tear still leaked from the sides. She collapsed for a few seconds into Q arms and all I could do was rub her back. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that useless, or that confused or maybe lost is word, in my young life. I mean, what could I do? Or rather I didn’t know what I could, should do.
This may be the best place to mention the baby wasn’t mine.

I don’t really know how to start this. I’m scared. A girl I was intimate with is pregnant. Yes pregnant and I’m freaking out for her. Yes my only concern is her. I’m really worried how this will affect her mentally and psychologically. It’s just the first month of year one and already I’m in such a difficult situation. I’ll start at the beginning.

So I have this friend lets call her, Q, we had sex… She was the first on campus. The next week she tells me and some of our friends (we’re kind of a group, small) that she thinks she’s missed her ps. One of us, we’ll call him, W, asked how long it had been and she says 2 weeks. She then goes on to say that she wants us to take her to the clinic so she can get a pregnancy test.

I promised I’d do a post a day and I’m trying to do my best to do so. Today we actually start the very first topic of my questioning week, love. This seemly complex thing that we all seek after in one way or another.

My dictionary describes love as an intense feeling of deep affection or a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone. But when ever most of use use it we’re talking about out boyfriends or girlfriends and the second description. Even then its not a word we use casually.

But as you may have realised… or not, the post I put up a few minutes ago was one of sometimes back, I think almost 2 months. So just to make it clear I haven’t quit blogging, y’all would miss me too much anyway! So where I have I been the last two months?

In school obviously living life and watching other people live it. I’ve done a few things that I’m dying to tell you about and also seen other people do stuff I wanna tell you about(keeping their anonmity intact as mush as possiple, ofcourse).

Yesterday I had a security breach on the laptop I use to write the posts I put up for you. No, my posts for you aren’t so important that someone would spend their time trying to hack my laptop trying to steal them as creative secrets(Though to me they are) and anyway the laptop is never connected to any network.

BREACH!!!!

Yeah, a friend of mine found one of the posts I had written for posting some day. The way she found it was kinda suspicious. She asked if she come to my room and use my laptop for 5 minutes. I, at the time clueless, just thought she wanted to use it for programming or something. You see, not many of my classmates have laptops yet despite being computer science students but I suspect next semester most will.

Hey y’all! Yes, I already have another post for you already! I don’t know how long this momentum will maintain but recently I keep finding more and more stuff to write about. Also I really don’t have to much to do in the evenings because well the assignments haven’t really kicked in. So for now I have much to write.

The other weekend my cousin, yes the one featuring in the last post and one before it, invited his girlfriend from home to school,with her sis, who he was trying to hook me up with.

I wrote this a while back but my phone mem-card decided it’s misbehaving and got a virus or bug of some sort and I had to format it. And this post was on it so I had to write it again which I’m sure it’ll not be as awesome as when I first penned it but know I’ll try my best.

So my cuzo came to room about a week ago with what I saw as both shocking and awesome news! The girl he was aiming for, the one I told you about before, had ingia’d box(That’s to say she was really feeling his vybe, hey half my audience is actually from the US). Yup she had been papped!!:-D Of course I was happy and proud because as far as I could tell at the time he was setting pace for all freshas. Most freshas are still keeping to themselves looking as confused and lost as ever.

I’m not even sure what to start writing about. So much has happened in the last 5 days and there’s much to write about but I think I’ll do a separate post for each separate thing. So where to start? Like I said there’s much to be talked about, but we’ll do it in chronological order starting with Thursday.

So on Thursday I was in the office doing my work as the intern. So I was kinda free and monitoring twitter quite closely and what do I notice there? @savvykenya tweeting about something called the Microsoft Imagine Cup where she was competing. So I asked her what it was about and if they allowed spectators. She said yeah so I decided to take the afternoon off (being an intern does have its benefits though I was asked after :) and go join her there.

I wrote this post immediately after that night described to read it like you were reading it immediately after:

So today, or is it yesterday? Oh yeah, its after 12. I have to right this before I forget it or lose psyke in the morning light. So yesterday I went to my boy’s, Jewlz, house for his birthday party. It was cool, actually it was very very cool. Meet a lot of new people, meet some old school buddy’s and had lots of fun. No it wasn’t as crazy or as wild as the last time I went drinking in Karen but still fun.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. For the next week,every day, starting tomorrow, I’ll be featuring a number of posts that I read a long time ago from Rainbow Amoeba’s Petri Dish . She called it Questioning Week.  They really inspired me, so much so that I started my very own Questioning Week inspired by the series of post I’m going to share with you during the coming week

Too soon to be doing another post? Have you even fully digested the last one? It’s okay you can read both of them! Right? Anyway I’m in my room at about 10.30pm, not really trying to sleep but in bed none the less, phone in my hand and it hits me there’s a lot of noise in the background.

I pause to listen and I hear about 4 different sources of music and sound all seemly competing to overpower the rest.
The dude across from my room is listening to traditional Luyha Christian choir songs, some dude up the hall is booming his favourite rhumba and lingala tracks while his neighbour watches an action movie at max volume. Two doors down from me is some playing what seems to be a Hip hop mix and further down opposite some is listening to reggae/ragga.

When I stared this blog I did it for fun! For the fame. To let the world know what I was thinking. But yesterday I just realised that having this blog has enabled me to learn a lot more about human nature! It’s a truly overwhelming feeling to get comments from you, my readers, that force me to think and do research. Thanks to you all I was able to write a post on Homosexuality in pre-colonial Kenya and now again thanks to my last post I’ve learnt about asexuality. But thats not that brought on this post.

Today’s post is quite an interesting one. It brought upon due to the recent anti-homosexual debate going on in neighbouring Uganda. Well not exactly because I really couldn’t care what laws they enact across the border but the enraging debate online did reach my attention due to Joliea who I follow on twitter.

Now what some, well actually most, people are saying online is that homosexuality is a completely un-African concept being imported from abroad to corrupt our “traditional” African values. However on one particular comment caught my attention in all the clutter of hate and intolerance on a pro-homosexuality article on a Ugandan blog. It went somehow like this, from memory: It shocks me how intolerant Ugandan’s are of people of different diverse backgrounds. This argument that homosexuality is a foreign import trying to corrupt our African’s values is an extremely ludicrous and unfound accusation. It shows just how brainwashed we African’s really are. That some are calling homosexuality a form of neocolonialism is stupid. Africa has always had homosexuals in it history. The fact is that this homophobia is actually part of our neocolonialism that stems from the imported religions that the colonisers brought with them. Of course it was more eloquently put than this (it caught my attention after all) but I hope you get the gist of what was being said.

…the Storymoja Monthly Blog Posts Expo. Yeah I was nominated along with a host of other more talented writers such as Savvy Kenya. Yeah someone considered my writing to be at the same level of Savvy!! Yeah I’m feeling rather good about myself right now. You can read about the nomination here, doesn’t seem like there’s any prize to be won though.

Here’s what was said about the nominees

"…today, all I wish to celebrate like we have every month on the Storymoja Writers’ Community, is the diversity of writing and the creativity of forming that can be found on the Kenyan blogosphere.

This is continuation from yesterday’s post, I told you I’ve been busy and there’s much to write about.

On Friday I was at work reading the paper, Nation, when I came across the an article on asexuality. Usually I don’t read the zuqka, mostly I peruse, prefer the Pulse by far, but asexuality was something I had actually talked about on my blog not so recently so I decided to read what they had to say about it.

This post is inspired by some tweets I saw in my timeline by shee_wanjiku. She was complain that one of her friends, a dude, didn’t understand that she just wanted a platonic relationship and not anything else. She was saying that dudes need to realize that just because a chic is nice to them it doesn’t mean she wants to jump your bones. There’s also I heard somewhere on TV “There’s no way a dude and a chic can be just friends” a dude told his date. I thought I talk about these things but in relation with what I’ve experienced myself.
I’ve said severally here that I’m someone who really enjoys the company of girls infact I can as far as saying that I have more girl than boy friends. I’m not entirely sure why that is. I’m by far more selective of my guy friends. I think it’s an ego thing I get from the company of girls.

savvykenyaSo on Sunday I posted a tweet that resulted in a conversation on twitter between me and Savvy ,writter of The Dairy of a Kenyan Campus Girl, that had me thinking of a new blog post. I’ve posted it here so that you get what I’ll be talking about….

cdohnio: I’m sure its just me
but I’m finding it difficult to
maintain vybe with a chic…

savvykenya: @cdohnio but
you can maintain vybe with a
guy?

And aromantic too! I really do! Life would be so so much simpler like that, atleast for me! I could be friends with anyone without becoming confused with destructive feelings and my pride bruised. If you don’t know much about asexuality you might wanna read this post here or google it. (I’d prefer you read it here thoughJ). Now let me go on.

I’m great with people and make friends easily. Most of these are of the female variety and I don’t mind that one bit. I’m friendly, charismatic and charming. And I believe I’m quite handsome (my mum tells me this too and she never lies). I have the gift to draw people to me. I like being the center of attention.

When I stared this blog I did it for fun! For the fame. To let the world know what I was thinking. But yesterday I just realised that having this blog has enabled me to learn a lot more about human nature! It’s a truly overwhelming feeling to get comments from you, my readers, that force me to think and do research. Thanks to you all I was able to write a post on Homosexuality in pre-colonial Kenya and now again thanks to my last post I’ve learnt about asexuality. But thats not that brought on this post.

So this is the like the 4th day of questioning week and so far so good. I’ve been able to post something each day so far. Today we talk about dating and perhaps at the end you’ll help me answer questions I have.

A coffee date

A date is an appointment or engagement, especially a social one with a member of the opposite sex. That’s what my phone dictionary tells me, and I quite agree, anyone with a different interpretation feel free to share it in the comments. It’s a simple enough definition and we can begin with that. NOTE: This will be told from my point of view so it’ll be biased to what might be “the guy” side.

Today I’m going to talk about religion. I’m not so sure how long I can write about it so we’ll see how far I go. I’m a Christian and to be more specific Seventh Day Adventist. I go to church on Saturday while most other Christians do this on Sunday.

There probably several hundred devisions of Christianity in the world. We have Catholic, Pentecostal, Baptist, Protestant, Angilcan and our very own home bred, Finger of God church just to mention a few. I personally belive my church is the right one and you probably believe yours is the right one so how can you ever be sure?

This is a short story written by one of my best friends. It’s my very first guest post so I look at it as part of the growth of my blog. You know showing that other people don’t mind their work appearing here and actually might appreciate it being put up. Look out for another guest post soon!! 

Sunsets always brought out the beauty I wanted to see. Every day, the sunset looked different to me. That day, I had been looking at the sunset for a really long time. As the sun continued to set, I saw everything in a new light. It was the most beautiful blend of colors ranging from orange to pink and just the lightest touch of purple. It reminded me of him and what he meant to my life.

This post is for a girl called Mich. She’s someone extremely special to me and since she’s so special she gets a post all for herself! One of my very first posts was about her, back then I called her M but now I have her permission to use her name.

So why is Mich so special? Well first of all she’s one of the one of the few people I know to consciously decide not to be affected by my charm. I found that intriguing and went out of my way to make friends with her. After I changed her mind about being charmed by me I found out a lot about her. I always thank God that she refused to be charmed by me otherwise we may never have become the great friends we are now.

Okay it’s been a while that I’ve done a post on fashion so today I’m taking the time out of very empty schedule to bless you all with my knowledge. Before we go on, I have no idea why my fashion posts never get any comments even though I’m usually telling you guys the truth as I see it. And I’m always right.:) So know on to the rant.

POINTLESS

Big ass handbags. Yes I’ve talked about them before and I’m going to do so again. I don’t really like them. I don’t see the point of someone carrying around a handbag bigger than my bagpack. What is y’all carry in there? As in when I leave the house all I have on me is a wallet and my phone but y’all chuck with a massive hand bag filled with nothing and that time I ask you whether you sleep over somewhere(or planning to be chips’d, apparently they’re also called chip funga bags. You might wanna read @savvykenya’s post for an explanation) and you say no. SO WHAT THE FUCK YOU NEED A BAG THAT BIG FOR!!

Hey everyone! I know its been a while since I did a new post and I’m sorry, I’ve been so busy as any of you who follow me on twitter might have noticed. I’ve been going up and down the country trying to organise matters school. I could definitely write a blog post about that and I probably will one day.

But today I want to cover something I’ve covered before;fashion. So I have in more of my looking at people on the streets come up with another list of thing chics wear that they’re probably greatly thankful for that I’ve come to hate! So now without further words or ado here it is…

So I’ve been thinking of what I’ll put for my new blog post for the last couple of weeks and just couldn’t make up my mind. So many ideas but no executions at all… Also I found a couple of things I wrote out a long time ago and I’ve been debating wether to post them here, I still haven’t decided yet, they’re of a rather personal nature but be sure you’ll see them some day.

@eGichomo recently launched his Kenya Blog Contest asking people to vote for their favourite Kenyan blog. Voting is currently on going and as of the time of writing this post this blog was leading with 33 votes. Thanks guys! However polls will close on 30th of this month after which the winner will be announced. There are three categories:
Art Award: Recognition and appreciation of poetry. Creativity, choice of words, originality and show of talent.
Beauty Award: Best layout, design, cool features, attractiveness and finest integration of themes and magnificence.
Action Award: Pursuit of ingenuity. Most interactive and frequent in content update.

I’m not even sure what to start writing about. So much has happened in the last 5 days and there’s much to write about but I think I’ll do a separate post for each separate thing. So where to start? Like I said there’s much to be talked about, but we’ll do it in chronological order starting with Thursday.

So on Thursday I was in the office doing my work as the intern. So I was kinda free and monitoring twitter quite closely and what do I notice there? @savvykenya tweeting about something called the Microsoft Imagine Cup where she was competing. So I asked her what it was about and if they allowed spectators. She said yeah so I decided to take the afternoon off (being an intern does have its benefits though I was asked after :) and go join her there.

I wrote this post immediately after that night described to read it like you were reading it immediately after:

So today, or is it yesterday? Oh yeah, its after 12. I have to right this before I forget it or lose psyke in the morning light. So yesterday I went to my boy’s, Jewlz, house for his birthday party. It was cool, actually it was very very cool. Meet a lot of new people, meet some old school buddy’s and had lots of fun. No it wasn’t as crazy or as wild as the last time I went drinking in Karen but still fun.

Am not sure how to start this but I realise that by writing this I’ve already began…Its been four days…four days of a really bad mood. I’m not sure why but of the last four days I’ve realised that I’ve been very angry for most of the time lets look at the days one at a time.

Day 1: My baby sis, J, wakes me up to tell me that she’s been left by her school bus so I immediately wake up wondering what could’ve gone wrong this morning! So I walk out into the sitting room and right there taking care of her stupid kid is H, the stepmother! Stupid woman how does Joyce skip the “adult”(using this extremely loosely) in the house and come wake me up!! NKT!! And she didn’t even seem concerned!! so anyway I immediately take J to school but seriously how is it that am the one taking all this responsibility of a parent when there are two adults in the house??? They’re just fair weather parents.Dad with his bullshit “bonding” sessions.He’s never there when J is crying or sad or angry.He’s even walked out once when J was crying for our mum…just walked in saw the tears and walked right back out!

So I’m sitting in the balcony at my dad’s place, writing this post and thinking of exactly how to do it. I have been out here i a while and it feels good to be out in the fresh air of Uppah. My sister is in one of her moods because she’s coming back from her weekend with my mum. She always comes back like this and I’m wandering if its really doing her any good but thats a story for another post…

I seem to be on a roll with the blog posts this week. I’ve been quite encouraged by the comments you leave on the posts and twitter, thanks. Anyway today’s post is not the faint hearted and is rather explicit in nature but it’s important that I put this down because it got me asking some really really difficult questions. I just hope that I can tell the story well enough so you get what was going on clearly enough.

Today’s post is quite an interesting one. It brought upon due to the recent anti-homosexual debate going on in neighbouring Uganda. Well not exactly because I really couldn’t care what laws they enact across the border but the enraging debate online did reach my attention due to Joliea who I follow on twitter.

Now what some, well actually most, people are saying online is that homosexuality is a completely un-African concept being imported from abroad to corrupt our “traditional” African values. However on one particular comment caught my attention in all the clutter of hate and intolerance on a pro-homosexuality article on a Ugandan blog. It went somehow like this, from memory: It shocks me how intolerant Ugandan’s are of people of different diverse backgrounds. This argument that homosexuality is a foreign import trying to corrupt our African’s values is an extremely ludicrous and unfound accusation. It shows just how brainwashed we African’s really are. That some are calling homosexuality a form of neocolonialism is stupid. Africa has always had homosexuals in it history. The fact is that this homophobia is actually part of our neocolonialism that stems from the imported religions that the colonisers brought with them. Of course it was more eloquently put than this (it caught my attention after all) but I hope you get the gist of what was being said.

Okay…yesterday for the three hours I was supposed to be doing Remote Desktop accessing I was trawling the web looking for an app that would allow me to comfortably blog from my phone and also it had to free, before you call me cheap Kenya is still a little behind when it comes to online transactions. So after an almost three hours search I found a few…but most where not free and even the one I’m using now is a demo for 30 days.

Last week, Friday, my lecturer announses that we’ll be having our exam the next week Friday. Being that we’ll only be having two exams for this whole course it coud be considered major!

Anyway he, the lecturer, goes on to talk about cheating and how he can tell when people are cheating but the things he was talking about were for catching amatuers! If he new all the skills my old classmates in high school developed he’d be shocked!! On that note I have to mention that I heard that Nairobi Uni uses CCTV for exams!!! As in WTF!!! Let the children copy,dub,lift and cheat! It doesn’t mean they don’t know…they just forgot on that particular day!

Okay so right now am sitting in class and we’re about 9 students so far…am sure the rest are a little late…like our teacher… Everyone is still at that stage of wierd silence but am sure before long we’ll be making lots of noise…

Unfortunately for me there’re like only three girls in class and all look older than me and not so very fly or even mordern,hmmm…however that won’t stop me from making friends with them… The dudes in class also look unmodern(most are dressed in some extremely formal clad,like they go to Strath, except two). I haven’t talkwd to any of them but again it won’t be long…

Soo…the teacher didn’t come today,apparent he/she wasn’t feeling well and I’m thinking:Really? The fact they were paid last week and had 2 massive matches Sunday night had nothing to do with it? So anyway the class begins officially tomorrow…

All we did to day was receive the course material…which btw is one thick ass book and a smaller booklet…(see the accompaning picture)I went through the book and I find myself thinking What the Hell have I signed myself up for? I’ve never been a hardware person, software has always been my passion, and I’m wandering if I can hack it to my usual super genius standards….hmmm,only time will tell though I’m going to try my very best!

Have y’all(and at this point I’m not sure who coz no one follows this blog yet) ever been presented with a challenge,by someone who didn’t know you, unconsciously? You know,like through their feelings or attitude? No? Well that wouldn’t be so so shocking,you have to be able to read them first and, thankfully, thats one of my many talents.

Well there this girl I know from chruch,lets call her M, she hadn’t really come to my attention much before but somehow one Saturday(yes,I’m SDA) I happened to find myself talking to her and I felt this distinct chill eminanting from her. Now understand this:I’m the type of person who loves to be liked and I have the gifts necessary for making this happen. So I turned up the charm expecting her to be won over in a few minute or atleast the chill coming from her to recede but it didn’t. Infact I could say it was like she increased it…

Okay so right now am sitting in class and we’re about 9 students so far…am sure the rest are a little late…like our teacher… Everyone is still at that stage of wierd silence but am sure before long we’ll be making lots of noise…

Unfortunately for me there’re like only three girls in class and all look older than me and not so very fly or even mordern,hmmm…however that won’t stop me from making friends with them… The dudes in class also look unmodern(most are dressed in some extremely formal clad,like they go to Strath, except two). I haven’t talkwd to any of them but again it won’t be long…

Soo…the teacher didn’t come today,apparent he/she wasn’t feeling well and I’m thinking:Really? The fact they were paid last week and had 2 massive matches Sunday night had nothing to do with it? So anyway the class begins officially tomorrow…

All we did to day was receive the course material…which btw is one thick ass book and a smaller booklet…(see the accompaning picture)I went through the book and I find myself thinking What the Hell have I signed myself up for? I’ve never been a hardware person, software has always been my passion, and I’m wandering if I can hack it to my usual super genius standards….hmmm,only time will tell though I’m going to try my very best!

Today was an exceedingly good day…I’ve been in a good mood all day and there wasn’t once I felt depressed or pissed at anyone or anything,a rare occurence these days,but even more than this is the fact that I was happy the whole time…

[image from bettyhogue.blogspot.com]

I woke up at 8.40 or there about,this is earlier than usual because for me its usually 10 or later. What? I have class only in the afternoon from two. Infact I wake up at 10 coz of school so that I can have both breakfast and lunch! Otherwise I’d be waking up between 11.30am and 2pm!! Anyway after waking up I had breakfast and then showered,unfortunately I couldn’t watch cartoons as I had to be else where early. As I dress up I thought of the coming day and the things I had to get done,I was kinda nervous about how one would get done but being me I looked in the mirror,saw near perfection and left the house.

Okay so right now am sitting in class and we’re about 9 students so far…am sure the rest are a little late…like our teacher… Everyone is still at that stage of wierd silence but am sure before long we’ll be making lots of noise…

Unfortunately for me there’re like only three girls in class and all look older than me and not so very fly or even mordern,hmmm…however that won’t stop me from making friends with them… The dudes in class also look unmodern(most are dressed in some extremely formal clad,like they go to Strath, except two). I haven’t talkwd to any of them but again it won’t be long…

Okay so right now am sitting in class and we’re about 9 students so far…am sure the rest are a little late…like our teacher… Everyone is still at that stage of wierd silence but am sure before long we’ll be making lots of noise…

Unfortunately for me there’re like only three girls in class and all look older than me and not so very fly or even mordern,hmmm…however that won’t stop me from making friends with them… The dudes in class also look unmodern(most are dressed in some extremely formal clad,like they go to Strath, except two). I haven’t talkwd to any of them but again it won’t be long…

Okay so right now am sitting in class and we’re about 9 students so far…am sure the rest are a little late…like our teacher… Everyone is still at that stage of wierd silence but am sure before long we’ll be making lots of noise…

Unfortunately for me there’re like only three girls in class and all look older than me and not so very fly or even mordern,hmmm…however that won’t stop me from making friends with them… The dudes in class also look unmodern(most are dressed in some extremely formal clad,like they go to Strath, except two). I haven’t talkwd to any of them but again it won’t be long…

Note: I wrote this back when the iPad was first launched

Okay, am not an tech expert and I’ve never even used the iPad but I’ve read the reviews of the pros and cons from some of the best and the industry…so this is waht I think of the iPad…

Its probably the very sexyest tablet ever made…it just looks like a must have,but I wouldn’t buy it just yet…

Note: I wrote this back when the iPad was first launched

Okay, am not an tech expert and I’ve never even used the iPad but I’ve read the reviews of the pros and cons from some of the best and the industry…so this is waht I think of the iPad…

Its probably the very sexyest tablet ever made…it just looks like a must have,but I wouldn’t buy it just yet…