I just got a little note from Royal Mail telling me that I need to come pick up a packet at the post office. It has this choice bit of stupidity on the back: Royal Mail, the Criciform, and the…
No, not 300, that’s a movie. 350. Parts per million CO2 concentration. Pass the word. Oh, right, it’s just a number, not words… PS: This posting does not constitute an admission that CO2 causes global warming. But I happen to…
(Good lord is this a day for blogging. I suppose sometimes the dam breaks and the thoughts spill out…) Today I got a question from Jon: What is OCA and OCP? MSF is getting into the acronym business like everyone…
I was thinking about data archival the other day because David Hagan was telling me about one time when he spoke to a group of librarians and told them to expect a data gap starting in 1950 and extending until…
A friend sent me this question: Speaking of healthy, when you’re in Africa, do you take malaria medication the whole time you’re there? Is 45 days too long to take it? First, taking it 45 days is no big deal.…
One of the headlines that came out of my trip to Freetown was “The Skills Exist, Use Them!” First, a bit more about what I was doing there. I was on a contract with the Health Metrics Network, which is…
I am back from Freetown, freezing in Leeds. I’ve spent today trying to get software working including reinstalling Chrome (which started marking all words as misspelled) and Word Press which inexplicably started hanging. I’ll write a note, maybe this weekend,…
There’s a nifty feature hidden in Gnome that’s interesting to play with. Click on the date in the upper right. You get an applet with a calendar. Below the calendar is “Locations”, click on that. Nifty little map showing the…
Rare is the dinner in an expat restaurant in Africa which is not (politely and quietly) interrupted by a DVD-man. They have a stock of DVD’s in their backpacks, and work their way through the restaurant giving you a chance…
I started a two week trip to Freetown, Sierra Leone yesterday. I am here as an IT consultant for the Health Metrics Network, part of the World Health Organization. We are taking a bunch of random hardware that the government…