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.

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.

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.