Christmas is Coming!

Is it really Christmas time in Ghana?
Not that I am the festivity type - Infact I have never been interested in Christmas but perhaps this time round I can afford to think of it somehow. This Christmas, in Ghana, the political campaign songs are louder than the Christmas carols.
The gospel according to political parties is more pronounced than the gospel of the coming of the Lord.
And we anticipate more, the coming of the next president (whom we don't know yet) than the birth of Christ.

The Good Old Days
In those good days the world's biggest problems could be solved with some little persistence and some cry. So soon that already belongs to history but I still relish it.
Every Christmas we were dressed up in the best attire. This included spectacles that with images of animals on them.I still remember the "up and down" that was sewed for me a few times. I felt on top of the world and the two pockets in the front of the shirt came in handy. Sweets, spectacles, biscuits and other Christmas items competed for space in the little pockets.
And I remember how we went door to door in Yendi singing Christmas Carols and the gifts we got after wards - and how we quarreled over the distribution of the gifts.
I also remember how a month to Christmas, Mom would ask me to behave if I wanted to have that bottle of Fanta like the rest of the kids. Chocolate was for the privileged and I knew I would never taste it even if I behaved a saint.

Time has passed since then. Now Christmas means looking back and wishing I still had 3 more months to the end of the year. Another year is just around the corner. Bills and rent should be paid. The plans for the year have not been fully met - not even halfway!
Christmas cards have to be bought or printed for friends and loved ones! You don't want to miss out anybody.
Christmas day is perhaps not going to be different from other days. But certainly, it will mean one less Christmas in this life of (y)ours
Merry Xmas if you read this.

The Obama in Me

I am not the kind of person who would normally idolise other people. Sometimes, I believe this attitude actually prevents me from finding a much needed role model in life. But this year, two people have got me really routing for them and wishing I were them. See, I really idolise them

First was Usain Bolt at the Olympic games. Only heaven knows how I wish I had a son today. I would personally hand him over to Usain and ask him to make sure he transforms him into the next him.

Second and even more important ......... the Obama factor. I still I'm suffering from the Obamania that infected me a little over a year ago. I should have had a son last Tuesday, he would have been named Barrack. Yes, Barrack!

The Obama factor brings a lot of thoughts to me;

First he is an African American, not the original type whose roots cannot be traced. This is the African American whose Kenyan roots are well known. He stood at a time when his native Kenya is in political turmoil. It couldn't be used against him.

Even in Kenya, his tribe Luo doesn't quite sound like an influential tribe. Very few Luos have been able to make it big time even in Kenya. And that couldn't be a discouraging thing! I have a Luo friend and I know what I'm talking about here.

And did you know his middle name is Hussein? This name is not a very likable name in the US, thanks to Obama's predecessor. Yet his middle name couldn't be used against him.

He is a first time senator with very 'little experience'. And when his opponents brought this up, it actually earned him more votes.

For me, the key lessons in this feat can never be over-emphasised; No matter what conditions you find yourself in or are born into, you can wade your way out of it just if you are determined.

The world is gradually moving to the stage where colour or creed or tribe or looks would no longer matter. And that offers a lot of hope.

I feel so Obama these days and hope this euphoria lasts till the day he becomes the first minority to successfully rule the United States to hand over after two full terms.

What does an Obama Presidency offer Africa, Asia and Latin America? Not much, in my opinion. What I do know is that it offers more hope.

A close shave

Last weekend I decided I had had enough of the complains that I was working myself out.
So off I was to the VRA clubhouse in Tamale on my motor bike and backpack. I thought I would have a hard time getting into the water since I was without company and could easily become self-aware. Fortunately there were a couple of known faces so it was an easy thing to dive in there and to start doing my own thing.
After a while of "flexing" my swimming skill I decided to go for the kill. I handed my camera to a friend, Paul. His task: - To video me on my non-stop return trip across the Olympic sized pool. It was an easy trip to the shallow end. I promptly turned for the return lap.

Who ever deceived me I was capable of snatching an Olympic gold medal in swimming had obviously been lying big time to me. Why did I try this adventure in the first place?
Just as I got back into the deeper waters (about 7 feet deep) my muscles gave in; they were too tired to go on. For my lungs, it was decided it was time to recycle that stale air in there. The short breaths I had been taking while breathing were not enough to sustain me now. But that was the wrong place to think of doing that. I stopped to catch my breath but.... No, I am only 5'10". I panicked as I tried to come to the surface for atl east a milliliter cube of air. The time above the surface was too short for that. I found myself going down there again. That was when it dawned on me I had made the mistake of my life. What was I to do?
I took a U-turn, at least I was closer to the shallower part than to the end of the pool. So with a couple or so double strokes I tried swimming away from danger. I thought I'd done enough to stand up and take some rest but................ No. It was still too deep. At this point, I decided to throw both hands in the air to signal a desperate swimmer. No one took notice. But I simply could not afford to cry out. with a strong effort I pushed again for the top, with my hands in the air to signal that I NEEDED help. Wasn't anybody human enough to save a poor soul? Still, no one took notice.
So... a few more strokes and this time, it was just enough have my feet on the ground with my head above water and phew! some long awaited sweet oxygen. I waded to the other end of the pool to finally take a good dose of air.
Paul walked with me camera in hand to announce that he had captured it all on video. I could go back home and view how I had had to abort my return journey and how I had struggled to escape drinking a few cups of pool water.

"So you knew I was suffering and you didn't come to save me?" He smiled and responded, "I knew you would come out"

What's all the hussle for?

Two days ago I called up my old man just to say hi - his first sentence was, "so today you have been able to make time to call?". I was a bit shaken but has since given me loads of food for thought. I haven't even reached my peak and yet some of the things I complained about older folks a few years ago are beginning to show in me - they are too busy to have time for us. It is a fact that I am losing lots of social (especially family) too early.

Teaching at the Bolga Polytechnic, Computer Literacy and Management Information Systems plus some administrative work is already a full job description for the average man. But for some reasons, it is one quarter of a job description for me.

I also have Physics classes (students) to take in my alma mater, the great Notre Dame Seminary School (35km away) till December. Surely, preparing the lesson notes, being in class to deliver and to mark scripts is already a job description for thousands of teachers in the country.

I have my little office of BoldTech Consults (www.boldtechghana.com) to grow and training for my new office manager at the Tamale Polytechnic campus (160km away). This alone is a hell of a job with so many contacts to build and maintain. Making up follow up calls and visits, strategising on how to "cripple" competitors by offering better and more innovative services etc. This was like the full time job for me shortly after I finished up with my MBA studies - today, it is "just one of them"

That's not all. I would have to be constantly in touch with CIC stakeholders at Navrongo (35km away), Bolga (right here) and Zebilla (about an hour away). Each presents a completely different story and scenario with regards challenges of growth. New issues keep coming up and I have to organise and also attend meetings frequently to keep the issues burning.

So, the weekends will have to see me sleeping loads then. Nope! I will have to travel down to Yendi (260km away) to take the engineers of the district assembly through Project Management (using OpenWorkBench) and spreadsheets (in Calc and Excel).

In the long run, I just burn up energy and dont really achieve much except for the happiness it brings - I feel so happy when I see some effort yielding some fruits.

Dont even bother to ask if I have a girlfriend and if I make enough time for her - There is a time for everything under the earth.

But one question I keep asking is; Will the world wind down to a halt if I died today? There will be nobody to do what I do right? No sah! It'll just continue to exist and continue to burst with life. That little candle that will extinguished with my life would be one candle off in a field that has billions of lit candles. Except that the soil will get more fertile around where I am buried.

So what's all the hussle for?

Google Chrome?

Of late there's been a lot of discussions in the IT geek world about the new kid on the block - Google Chrome.

It's perhaps too early to start comparing Chrome with other browsers but since I started trying out Chrome about a week ago and constantly have to go back to Firefox when I see don't have the time to go searching for tools.

First, Chrome is just too bare - too simple. Maybe add-ons will come with time
And surprisingly you will have to visit the Google home page before googling. In Firefox you just have to type in your keywords in the navigation toolbar.

I'm also not too enthused about Chrome showing my most visited sites once a new tab/window is opened. Doesn't that come too close to personal privacy?

On the whole however, I see Chrome as more of a threat to Firefox than to IE. Most of those who will "experiment" with Chrome are already "experimenting" with Firefox.

On the whole however, I expect a bright future for Chrome. Google has always proved that! Perhaps I have already been caught in the web as I post this blog from Chrome

Reuniting with Yendi

20th of August 2008. I found myself in a bus in the one hour Tamale - Yendi journey.
Earlier in life, I had spent my first three years in Primary School in Yendi and it was there I made my first real friendships.

Memories
As the bus moved on and as I half slept, thoughts of those days kept coming up.
My first fight with one Osman which ended in a draw only because some bigger boys stopped us from going on. I remembered how I was about to get beaten.
I also remembered how we ran after the bush rats to catch them for a roast - how I was never fortunate (or skilled) to catch one.
I remembered fondly how we hunted birds and again I was never fortunate (or skilled) to kill one.
My mind drifted to those primary school days. I was one of the few in the school who could read basic words. One particular name kept coming to mind - Adjubi.
She was a Primary One class mate. I wont even remember how she looked like but I remember her as one of the brilliant kids of the school at the time. I hope she is making is somewhere today.
And I remember the shy me at the CYO meetings where I could not be given any acting role during Easter because I was too shy to act.
I also remembered how I was urged on to grow my little farm just by the house. And I was so proud that I could harvest a bowl or two of groundnuts and some roots of potatoes.

And I still remember how we packed our belongings into the waiting truck ready to make that transfer to Tamale. It was 12th Sept 1989 - I was just 9.

As the bus approached Yendi, I tried replaying all the paths and streets in my mind to see if I could be right.
Lo! I wasnt too wrong. I did not have time to move into the Junior Staff Quaters where I spent some growing years but when I return in two weeks, I will be visiting JSQ18 where I lived and grew.
I will be happy to meet a 6 to 9 year old boy in the house who will look shyly at me and remind me of me.

Purpose of visit
This time I found myself in Yendi not because my parents were on transfer but because I was an ICT trainer.
For 5/6 weekends I will be training staff at the district level some basic usage and applications of computers.

The icing on the cake during the period of training will be walking along the paths I walked through almost two decades ago as a kid. Back then, all problems could be solved by finding some little corner to cry. It's very different today.

It's a mixture of history and expectations

Northern Ghana Train the Trainer Workshop Aug 04 - Aug 6

Three days of the first ever Train the Trainer Meeting for us of the Northern Ghana IICD affiliated trainers was not just a very steep part of the learning curve, it was an exhilarating time.

I'm not going to forget how from the 4th to the 6th of August, 2008 we stuck to time and detail.
How we evaluated each others' presentations and how we encouraged each other.
How we had fun and yet staying focused on what brought us together.

On the 4th of August which was Day 1, there was an Overview of Training Activities and Methodologies used by IICD. This was an insightful presentation by Ousseni Zongo who was the lead facilitator and current Capacity Development Officer for IICD in charge of Burkina Faso and Mali.

I was excited at the time we took to make an inventory of the Important Documents (Checklist) and logistics for seminars and other capacity development activities. I'm surely going to keep my list till I cease being a trainer (and that is not going to be any time soon).
The group work on Developing a seminar was very interesting also. This was the first opportunity for participants who were all soon going to be trainers or already trainers to be evaluated by other trainers.

Day 2 - 5th Aug
The most exciting part of the day was actually a carry over from yesterday. We had hands on stuff on SkillSoft and TurboDemo.
We continued to work on General Training skills of trainers plus more group work.
I (and obviously most participants) were thrilled at the exploits of TurboDemo. I have never assumed I could ever make my own interactive tutorial (sound, graphics and all) with such ease. I'm certainly going to urge all trainers to lay hands on TurboDemo

Last Day
On the last day, my only regret was why I am not a member of the Black Stars of Ghana. After another interesting session of knowledge sharing which was dominated by participants evaluating each other's presentation skills, we went out to "face" each other in a football match - What would you expect anyway from a male dominated activity happening in Ghana? I was part of the winning team that conceded one controversial goal but scored six.

I'm looking forward to the activities of the group in building capacities of not only IICD affiliates but other individuals and organisations who seek to push forward the development agenda.

I wish today were August 4, so we could begin it all over again!

Relationship Problems.

Years ago, I met this lady who I liked so much, and before long, we kind of…….abi you know!
During our years of courtship I got to know her dad was my cousin. This was not close enough however to prevent a marriage. It was after the marriage that we realized what we had gotten ourselves into.
First, her dad was my cousin, which meant that I’d married my niece. Then again, my cousin was my father in law. Where does that leave me? I am my brother-in-law!
Now if my wife was my niece, I qualified to be her uncle. In that case I was my uncle as well.
Things got more complicated when our first boy arrived.
He was my son and yet my niece’s son. So my son was my grandson. My father-in-law was not just his grandpa, but his great grand father as well.
Now between him and his mum, more complications were obvious. His mum was his dad’s niece and so mother and son were cousins. Wow! But it didn’t end there. He was a great grandson to his mother father and so his mother was his grandmother. The grandson of my wife, sorry my niece, obviously is my great grandson, so my son then is my………….

How Ghanaian are Ghanaian websites?

In the last post ( or so) some mention was made of the e zwich system. More information on the system is available at http://e-zwich.com

But this is not the import of this post for now. I was rather hoping the website for such a Ghanaian innovation would be on a domain like e-zwich.com.gh - never mind if e-zwich sounds more German than Ghanaian.
This pricked me to take a casual look at a few 'Ghanaian sites' and it didn't take me long to notice quite a few. The majority of the sites representing Ghana in one way or the other do not reflect so in their domain names. For examples the sites mentioned below, I thought, should have .gh at their end;

www.gbcghana.com
www.ghanafa.org
www.tamaletoday.com
www.agricbank.com
www.prempeh.or
www.opokuwareschool.org
www.ghanaweb.com

Is it extremely difficult to purchase Ghanaian domains or what? So far it appears only the 'big organisations' have managed to get .gh in their domains.

Can someone educate me on this?

In other countries even small scale businesses have "national ID" in their domain names. What is the thing preventing us from doing same.
Once again; Can someone educate me on this?

Please post a response if you have one

E-Switch or E-zwich?

I couldn't help noticing that once again Ghana has adapted a heroic attempt at digitising the economy by the introduction of the e-zwich smart card system. A system which bears semblance of the widely used (not in Ghana though) Credit Card system except that identification is by use of biometric features of the user for identification.
I believe this is especially laudable given that Internet Fraud is on the rise in the sub region. Biometric identification perhaps presents a better fraud-proof alternative.

However, the other side of the coin seems to indicate that the user will have to be physically present at the point of business (I hope to be corrected on this one) to transact business and this I thought reduces the 'e' part of the whole initiative.

One thing that, makes me think, will hamper the exponential growth of e-zwich users in Ghana is the commission taken by merchants and banks for transactions made using the system. Although this is not new to the system, it is new to Ghana. How many people dont return goods to the shelf, after learning at the counter, that the price tag excludes tax? Yet this is widely practiced in other jurisdictions.

It's just matter of time before the real merits and demerits of the concept will emerge but for now, maybe observation is what a lot of the population is will be doing.

For now, I'm keen on seeing what will happen.

Will we ever do away with computer keyboards?

I have had to teach people on a number of occasions how to type on the 'rather awkward' computer keyboard. Each time, I take some time to explain that this 'rather awkward' arrangement actually makes typing much easier and faster than a 'properly arranged' keyboard.

However, as we move towards 5th generation computers and are already familiar with touch pads, I doubt if the role and usage of keyboards as we know them today will remain the same.

Now a prediction; gradually the touch pad will get more incorporated into personal computers to the extent that users will actually just write using the light pen (or any common device such as a pencil) and then have this converted to any font of choice on the screen onto say a word processing document.

As time goes on, people will get more used to that and making the keyboard somewhat an obsolete 'accessory' used only by techies and conservationists. Gradually, later generations will only see keyboards in a museum or on google images or wikipedia or ..... anywhere else except on their laptops or desktops.

But.....
What will happen to the non alphanumeric keys such as SHIFT, ALT, ESC etc, the Function keys (F1 - F12) and all such?

There will be a small key pad somewhere on the computer or attached optionally to the computer for use as and when needed.


But will this last very long? I doubt how long it will given the trend that voice recognition is also on the rise and is certainly going to be of more convenience. But the challenges of this are yet to be sorted out especially with accent. For example if a computer will respond properly and print out "Water" when it is mentioned by an American, the same computer might just print out "What a" when the same word is mentioned by a Ghanaian.

Its a long interesting road to go. And I look forward to it.

What you think?