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 colour red are registered trademarks of Royal Mail. Christmas - Sorry you were out, Copyright (C) Royal Mail Group 2008. What I want to know is who is the idiot lawyer who actually thinks that not only can he trademark red, but that he can copyright “Sorry you were out”? ...

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 agree with everything that anti-carbon campaigners believe in, even if I think that global warming is a hoax. And this is a nifty animation with cool music, so I’m posting it anyway.

(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 else! The simple answer: OC = Operating Centre, or Cell depending on the person. OCB - Brussels OCA - Amsterdam OCBA - Barcelona/Athens OCG - Geneva OCP - The mythical Parisian OC, which does not exist as far as I know An OC is supposed to be a reflection of the difference between the hosting section, which has a responsibility to communicate with the people of the country for temoinage and fundraising, recruit, etc and the OC, which has a responsibility to all of the donor sections that contribute to it to get the work done, and report back what got done, so that the donor section can explain to their constituency what got done with the $$. ...

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 we get serious about data preservation. According to David, the time when we stopped being able to save data was in the 50’s because xerography (which is the same as laser-printer technology) came into existence then. All other data archival techniques (magnetic storage on tape or disk, recordable CD’s, etc) are inferior to toner pressed onto paper, which is itself inferior to ink soaked into paper fibers. And, come to think of it, ink on paper is inferior to marks on clay tablets – though ink on paper has proven to be stable enough, since we use knowledge today gleaned from papyrus scrolls from thousands of years ago. ...

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. It’s taking it for months on end (9, 18, 60) that is not recommended – not because of actual risks, but because of not enough study. Second, here’s Jeff’s “cut-through-the-crap” guide to malaria meds: ...

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 a project running under the auspices of the World Health Organization, but funded by the Gates Foundation. HMN is supposed to go around building a network, not of routers and switches, but people who understand the challenges of constructing and running health information systems. Those people should be researchers, technologists, and public health people. And those people should be a mix of those talking about it (easy to find in Geneva, they are douze pour une centime) and those doing it. The latter are a little harder to find… ...

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, about what I was doing in Freetown. It was fun, and we got a lot accomplished, so it’s a worthwhile story to tell.

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 line where sunset and sunrise are. Click on edit, and you get to add your favorite locations to the map. But not just your favorite timezones, you get to pick from a huge list of geographic places. My hometown, little Roseburg Oregon is in there. African capitals are in there, though sadly Monrovia got missed. And when you add the clocks, you get weather too! ...

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 to peruse their wares. You have to see the DVDs to believe them, they are made up of several pirated Hollywood movies, with many different versions, all on one disc, enclosed in a professional-looking full color envelope. They have titles like “Segal vs Chan”… a DVD full of Steve Segal and Jackie Chan movies. Another great title is “Superhero Schoolwork”, including Spiderman, Superman, and Wonderwoman (and all the sequels thereof). The DVD’s are billed as “50 in one”, though it requires some clever counting to find 50 movies on one disc. Typically, there are more like 12 movies on a DVD – in itself an impressive achievement of DVD mastering and compression-algorithm optimization. ...

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 bought with a not-quite-complete architecture and putting in place a foundation for IT services related to the Health Information System. Of course, the HIS relies on lots and lots of low tech forms and paperwork “up country”, but there’s also a need for a datacenter in the capital. ...