Quoth Corey to the cat, "Curiosity killed y'all."

black blurb

2008-04-30T16:28:06Z

History is way cool, and knowing it is even cooler. Philosophy, theory, same thing. But, if I'm reading right, the best organizers tend not to be ideologues. Maybe I'm the classic carpenter, who, hammer in hand, sees every problem as a nail. But I think people organize around bread and butter stuff, unless they are very young, in which case they organize around a passionate battle against boredom. Lots of wonderful and colorful things have come from both.

book art

2008-04-29T21:54:48Z

From a small exhibit at the main library on campus

non-profit question

2008-04-12T19:57:04Z

Dear LAZYWEBZ:

Is there an accounting or tax or other official distinction between a "non-profit" and a "public-private partnership"? I'm a little confused as to whether a PPP could file as a 501(c)(3). I guess it would depend on the structure of the organization, but...dunno. Cornfused.

Update:

From Gloria Guard, President of the People’s Emergency Center homeless shelter and transition program (PEC):
"The PPP is descriptive. Like XYZ is a faith based childcare ctr or XYZ is a community development agency. Its not the legal definition. The non profit 501 c 3 is the legal def of how it is incorporated. Under fedl law. You should be able to get their state form 990 on Guidestar website. "

Zimbabwhat?

2008-04-01T00:22:28Z

ZOMG, you mean Zimbabwe's election results are UNCLEAR and CONTESTED? hey Mugabe, don't let the door hit your arse...

When localvore-ism wears thin

2008-03-31T17:44:26Z

And in a desperate fit of escapism, they found themselves in the critiquable position of being nauseated at the idea of eating local for even one more meal. Localvores turn into loco-vores when their passports haven't been stamped in a while, and at that moment, there was nothing in North America that could slake their thirst for the smell of that smoggy, tropical air that drapes over the shoulders, heavy with humidity, diesel particulates, and sticky papaya sweetness, outside metro stations in central Sao Paulo. In headphones, Tom Ze crooned a love-lorn yarn about the stops around Ave. Paulista: "Augusta, between you and Angelica, thank god I found Consolation." The corrosive saudade tasted a little bit wonderful in their mouths, but mostly it just made things worse. Barreling through just didn't seem possible that day.

Most likely, what happened next was that hours passed, and they went to the park--maybe the farmer's market was on that day. Maybe they got some baked goods from Amish country and ate, and maybe drank, and certainly slept, and the smell of spring in their natural habitat created enough instant nostalgia that they could get through another season. But while that was a perfectly reasonable response, reason seemed awfully tragic, and at least one of them surely googled recipes for aipim and vegan feijoada.

Pornography of the Bicycle, Philly tonight

2008-03-25T20:40:05Z

Late breaking news, the bike porn people found a last-minute Philly venue.

http://bikeporntour.blogspot.com/

Tuesday March 25th
8:45 pm
Magic Gardens
1020 South St

Carpentry in Vermont...you know you want to

2008-03-21T22:19:38Z

I'm signed up for Basic Carpentry at Yestermorrow for May 5-9, camping onsite, and hopefully some nature time before and/or after. Who's in??? They're also offering Sustainable Treehouse Design and Construction that week. C'mon, I do everything by myself. You should come. Then we can rip apart the back of my house and rebuild it super pretty and maybe strawbailey or something because I'M GONNA LEARN HOW TO FRAME A MFKN HOUSE. In May. In the mountains of Vermont. In a tent. You know you want to take a potentially chilly solar shower in this:

Anyone have a tent one-person tent I can borrow? I can lend you a HIGH-QUALITY KITTY CAT as collateral.

My AIRQUOTES work boots AIRQUOTES are in the process of biting the dust. What are good and affordable big-girl work boots? How do you properly escape html characters to make fake tags for comedic value? I'll bet it's easy but I've used up my 2 minute quota, cuz it ain't 3 minutes worth of funny.

UPDATES ALL DAY: March 19th coverage - 5th anniversary of Iraq invasion

2008-03-19T15:21:15Z

IMC coverage from San Fran. Really good stuff. The tech team sounds tight. Very, very tight.

And of course Philly Imc.

Let's hope we don't have to do this again next year.

Update: activists got into the Chevron building. They shut down business for the day before 8:30am local time. Chevron is not answering phones. The FM feed is back up.

9:25 PST: ""Balloons have been thrown at the Citibank we're not sure what they're filled with, if anything, but ballons have been thrown at the Citibank."

10:16 PST: Market St is shut down by a die-in.

10:31 PST: im from voip tech volunteer: "wow. so many callins right now. im ringing like crazy"

10:55 PST: "The Black Bloc has turned into more of a pink and blue bloc"

11:46 PST: Live feed from a bike. Cellular card and helmet-mounted webcam

12:47 PST: Legal observer arrested, suspected of having paintballs (?!?)

14:14 PST: Police report "anarchists" on the streets. Seems they have paint-filled balloons. :-)

When Sweet and Savory Attack

2008-03-07T03:55:22Z

As highlighted by the Paula Deen Is Trying To Kill Us series, a bacon burger with a fried egg served on glazed donuts. Not forgetting the vegetarian version on whole wheat Krispy Kreme, a brand name that I find confoundingly oxymoronic. NB: This dish was prepared to comply with a Lenten sacrifice!!! All glory to the most high!

Also, fried butter balls.

Also, as seen on Ellen, VELVEETA FUDGE BALLS DIPPED IN CARAMEL, WHITE CHOCOLATE, AND PEANUTS. There is some slightly suggestive, slightly funny banter that is worth 45 seconds of your day. But the real money shot is in the comments:

"Would velveeta light combined with splenda and half the amount of chocolate make a difference? I'm fat enough as it is already..."

LATE BREAKING NEWS aka Comments are Comedy Gold...

And apparently Velveeta fudge is an old recipe. Wow.

Speaker cables

2008-02-28T23:37:13Z

I'm consolidating old hard drives, and I'm finding old inboxes and pictures and chat logs. I found this, from sometime before May, 2001:

I make my bread and butter huddled over a keyboard muttering obscenities, climbing under desks fumbling with connectors, and scuttering around in a very loud, cold data center following ethernet cables to their (il)logical ends.

I'm a geeklet.

I got my first computer job because I'd done more muttering, fumbling, and plugging at a college radio station, and had discovered that your web page changes faster if you work right on the unix server. That was enough to get me in the door for digital editing of taped technical courses. Hours and hours of drier-than-drywall rambling about ansi standards punctuated with coughs and clearings-of-the-throat.

So you'd think with this kind of background I'd be able to plug in a speaker.

I thought so too.

The boy and I were at a gig setting up for the night. We plugged in the turntables and flipped on the amp. McCoy Tyner tumbled gracefully out of one speaker, but not the other. I did a little trouble-shooting and before Boy quite understood, I told the owner we had a bad 1/4 inch cable, and he went to get another.

He found one and came back to the turntable area. I stood in front of him and held out my hand.

He handed it to the Boy.

1 br apt available March 1

2008-02-25T00:48:48Z

1 bedroom apartment available March 1 or later. Roomy for one, comfy for two. Perfect for a couple, or a couple of close friends. 1.5 blocks from 34 trolley, Satellite coffee and Firehouse bikes. Amazing light during the day, fresh paint throughout. Newish stove. New fridge, windows, and heating system, all Energy Star. Whole-house fan cools significantly in summer, 1 window A/C unit. Sharable porch and back yard, including space for growing stuff. Cat, queer, and gardener friendly. $725/month including heat, hot (and cold) water, wireless. First/last/security to move in. Owner (me) lives downstairs, so you can expect prompt response to problems. Contact: beleza99@gmail.com. Pictures under cut. x-posted to west philly.

Living room:

Bedroom: (You know the paint is fresh when the blue tape is still up around the window...)

a blessing

2008-02-20T02:07:06Z

A Safety Third blessing from jg3, on the occasion of using D's air-acetylene torch because propane is so not bling enough:

"Good luck and good safety. May your eyebrows live to express your thirst for life tomorrow!"

logistics

2008-02-20T01:18:30Z

Yesterday started like this:

and ended like this:

Today started like:

and continued toward:

It turns out one of the few things I like less than help, is needing help.

Today hasn't ended. There have been two major victories today: 1) I managed to eat, AND 2) I did not throw up. No, I'm not preggers, I'm afflicted with the ennui, and an imbalance of the humours. I hope to have some attractive GIS maps by the time today is over, in many hours.

Pelted with shoes

2008-02-13T00:18:44Z

"As a Valentine's Day card smoldered, more than 100 members of the Hindu extremist group Shiv Sena gathered in central New Delhi chanted "Death to Valentine's Day" and "People who celebrate Valentine's Day should be pelted with shoes!""

Also, A Late Decree declaring that Manufactured Romanticism Day be changed to honor Joshua, Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

With thanks to Christina.

This is the first year I'm really, truly, like not just trying to be cool or anything, completely apathetic about valentine's day. What would be nice is to hit up a migra rally with Juntos or something. Also, years ago I was informed that v's day has actually already been repurposed into Plant Day, the day when you sketch out the garden and order seeds. It is customary to exchange small gifts of seedlings or gardening supplies to remind us that spring thaw is right around the corner. Though someone forgot to send the memo to the bulb flowers that it's still only February, and they are already popping up. Man, they are gonna be pissed about today's snow.

I leave you with this:

""My heart is like a cabbage, divided into two; the leaves are for others and the heart for you."

just sayin'. (oracle)

2008-02-12T23:28:27Z

# uname -a
Linux lolserver.domain 2.6.18-53.1.6.el5xen #1 SMP Wed Jan 16 04:10:44 EST 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ ls
10201_database_linux_x86_64.cpio config-assistant-failures database install.txt kernel-requirements

You caught that, right? x86_64

INFO: gcc -m32 -o ctxhx -L/opt/oracle/oracle/product/10.2.0/gls/ctx//lib32/ -L/opt/oracle/oracle/product/10.2.0/gls/lib32/ -L/opt/oracle/oracle/product/10.2.0/gls/lib32/stubs/ /opt/oracle/oracle/product/10.2.0/gls/ctx/lib/ctxhx.o -L/opt/oracle/oracle/product/10.2.0/gls/ctx/lib/ -ldl -lm -lctxhx -Wl,-rpath,/opt/oracle/oracle/product/10.2.0/gls/ctx/lib -lsnls10 -lnls10 -lcore10 -lsnls10 -lnls10 -lcore10 -lsnls10 -lnls10 -lxml10 -lcore10 -lunls10 -lsnls10 -lnls10 -lcore10 -lnls10 `cat /opt/oracle/oracle/product/1
INFO: 0.2.0/gls/lib/sysliblist`
INFO: /usr/bin/ld: crt1.o: No such file: No such file or directory
INFO: collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
INFO: make: *** [ctxhx] Error 1

# ls /usr/lib64/crt*
/usr/lib64/crt1.o /usr/lib64/crti.o /usr/lib64/crtn.o

You caught that too, right? gcc -m32, .../lib32. Fixed with yum install glibc-devel.i386. But I'm just sayin. Is there a good reason for this?

IBM SAN: a caveat

2008-02-09T01:00:41Z

I tend to be vague about the technical details of my job. Exclusive to this blog post: things to know if you are considering dropping a couple hundred grand on IBM servers and SAN stuff!

The equipment I run was bought before I was hired. I came from an office whose work groups were very strictly segmented. Merely glancing askance at a database or a screwdriver could get you a stern talking-to. So it was very nice to come to a small facility where I got my hands on everything. However, I hadn't dealt with hardware, much less IBM stuff, for a long time, or ever. It's taken a long time to determine what difficulties were due to my lack of familiarity and what was just dumb (bad) luck, but it's just been hassle after hassle, and our uptime sucks. I shudder at the thought of the TCO on this stuff. It might be that my magnetic personality, so delightful in conversation, is just too much for electronic equipment. I might be terribly unlucky. I really don't know if my experience is typical. But the failures I've seen are of a distinct pattern, which I shall describe forthwith.

The work stuff consists of about 2 racks of 1-3 u servers, some blades, some switches, some trays of disk, and a san controller. We've got your average app servers, web server, firewall, vpn, backups, the usual suspects. Some servers have been just fine, while others have required firmware upgrade after part replacement after firmware upgrade. Our most expensive single server, a $22k x366 has never actually been in production for real because it crashes and burn every 2-6 months. Sometimes it acts hacked, sometimes like there's a bad cpu, sometimes like the scsi bus is busted. The upshot of this is that it took about 2 YEARS for the firmware on this box to become stable. I say "stable" with a smirk...the last big crash-n-update we had was probably about a month ago, so we're due for another failure before too long.

Now onto the SAN. We have a DS4300 controller, some EXP710 disk enclosures, and an EXP100 SATA enclosure. The disk is arranged in mostly raid 5 arrays with some hot spares, and I have to say before going further, that the actual data has been remarkably safe. I really haven't seen corruption or disappearing data, except for this one time, but it might have been my fault for letting the nfs server run on the dying x366 and not getting it off sooner.

However, availability has been a disaster. Every so often, let's say every 3-6 weeks, production falls on its face b/c the NFS server starts serving out read-only mounts. The logs contains buckets of spurious scsi errors and the SAN will often report media scrubs, diagnostic runs, and path redundancy errors. For a while, I thought it had to be something on the server...bad version of NFS? Bad disk drivers? Bug in ext3? Bad kernel level? I banged my head against that wall for a while. It's clear now this behavior comes from the SAN. Precisely what causes it, I have no idea. IBM support is usually vague in the style of, "omg that firmware level is like super dangerous and backrev and you need to upgrade NOW or your shit will fail forever". Which is kind of awesome, considering, um, they publish the firmware. Granted, IBM doesn't actually MAKE very much stuff anymore, they just buy parts from other vendors, rename them so you can't google them or find downloads for them easily, build them into really fugly cases (though parts are really swappable, props on the component placement design), and mark the price up a bajillion percent. So some of this blame goes to upstream manufacturers.

However!

I do NOT expect to pay a bajillion dollars to have a SAN that is such a delicate Princess and her pea, that faeries, sunspots, bad karma, or a slight breeze in the data center can cause my production NFS server to flop.

It gets better. Often when this happens, one of the logical volumes will come back WITH NO PARTITION TABLE. This problem kept me up all night one time, after which my bolder and wiser co-worker just fdisked in a new table defining all the space on the volume as partition 1, which was correct. But when I found that out I was like HOLY SHIT WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO YOU HAVE BALLZ THE SIZE OF TEXAS OH YOU MEAN IT WORKED? And poof, the partition mounts as good ol' ext3 and all the data is healthy. However, I doubt I have to point out that a supposedly fully redundant SAN should not turn its head and cough, resulting in dead mounts and eaten partition tables. DO NOT WANT.

This last time, the mysterious errant voltages caused all these symptoms (yes, we've actually entertained the idea of a power conditioner in the rack...another thing you shouldn't need in a data center with decent PDUs) and I sighed out yet another hardware service call, yawned through the requisite firmware upgrade advice, and managed to barely lift one eyelid at the recommendation to reseat some modules. What caught my attention was that the enclosure ID selector (like an old-fashioned scsi-id selector...remember those?) is supposed to go from 00 to 77, indicating the loop id in the tens column, and place in the loop in the ones column. We have 5 enclosures, so we needed numbering like 01, 02, 03, 04, 05. But the dial on the back of this thing only went up to 72, or in our case, 02. That's right, the ones column just stopped advancing at 2. I thought I was crazy, thought maybe it was reversed for this model, that maybe there was something about these trays, that maybe the limitation was there because of some requirement about how to chain devices or....you can see where this is going. I had all sorts of crazy hypotheses. Turned out it was just BROKEN. Called to have that replaced. We pulled the fibre cables to remove the device from the loop, because yanking this part, or changing the id, could damage the SAN.

But yanking the cables caused yet another path redundancy incident, scsi errors, NFS r/o, production down. Anyone get the joke? A path redundancy error after pulling a path? HAHA? At this point, no one in the office actually expects services to be up, so what the hell ever. We replaced the part, checked the cabling, checked the firmware levels, I recreated 2 partition tables, and we're back up today. We also tested pulling cables after the fix, and we got errors (as expected) but no failures, which was a pleasnt surprise. Yawn, 1 all-day outage and a few smaller outages this week, all unplanned. Awesome. Maybe it will be stable now? Now that our gear is starting to age and glancing toward end-of-life, maybe the firmware is finally mature. I'll find out over the coming weeks, I guess.

Then there is IBM linguistics. Just in my environment, we have 2 programs called Storage Manager, one to manage devices in the SAN, and one for backups, a Tivoli program. As mentioned, they maddeningly rebrand and rename, so it took me a long time to figure out that a FastT card was just a QLogic hba. Instead of lun masking, they say "storage partitioning", which to me is a COMPLETELY meaningless phrase. It could apply to, like, anything in computing, and unless you're down that particular rabbit hole, that wording gives no indication of what it's actually about. IBM loves the vague.

My experience with IBM is that the only way to make it work is to drink the Kool-Aid and try not to breathe too hard. Anyone have history with IBM hardware that confirms or contradicts this experience?

<3 sysadmin lore <3

2008-02-07T19:34:15Z

"Once upon a time, BIND only understood units of seconds for the four fields we just described. (Consequently, a whole generation of administrators know that there are 608400 seconds in a week.)"

from o'reilly grasshopper book

cusp

2008-02-07T03:38:58Z

It's carnival and lunar new year season, and today spring breathed on our necks just a little, first breath of the year. Baltimore Ave: huddle of dudes at wusrt/best house, mix of nerdy, cute, awkward, outspoken, freewheeling and principled. You guessed it, a linux user's group. Almost stopped to chat about fibre channel cabling. Fiddle music out of a matte silver mac on a porch, two listeners, a human and a dog on the human's lap. Kulture Shop's new spot next to the coffee joint across from the gas station looks really good. The propane heater in a restaurant looks like a elliptical concentrator, and it is turned off because it's light sweater weather.

Bitter treats me bad but I stay cuz it's so sweet.

hey

2008-01-28T22:09:48Z

fantastic hey

unicorn hey

cat in wigs

dogs in wigs

dog with balloons

dog with warholish balloons

David Carrardine, Jose Feliciano, Cannonball Adderley

mah-nuh mah-nuh. Please watch all the episodes of Jam you can find.

nom

2008-01-22T06:09:18Z

Nom iz teh new lol.

What You Can Do To Help Kenyan Journalists Bridge the Digital Divide

2008-01-15T07:51:11Z

Latest (and last??? I hope??) version of a piece on imc-kenya's recent history, response to the election, and need for volunteers and donations. The intended audience is blog and magazine/newspaper readers, and as such it takes some liberty with length and is couched as a personal narrative. I think it's bound for some political blogs or something, not sure. Forward around if you like. If you need a byline that's a little more legit than steph99, ping me. Also, a photo from my friend Douglas, who is available as a freelance photojournalist, HINT HINT. See the rest of his photo essay on displaced people in Nairobi.

The best excuse I ever had to avoid the dishes came at a big house in a genteel suburb of Nairobi, Kenya.

I was there during the World Social Forum with about 40 independent journalists and tech geeks from all over the world to expand Independent Media Center (Indymedia/IMC) and community radio capacity with the Prometheus Radio Project. I left Philadelphia in a worried tizzy, refreshing my inbox every minute, leaving my chat client logged in everywhere, and my phone set extra loud so I wouldn't miss a word from friends who were already there. I knew they were busy, but I was a little miffed at their sparse communication. I needed news!

When I got there, I was in for a major attitude adjustment. Phone calls and email came in from people back home who were hungry for information. But on this day, like many others, the electric was out. The natural light in the house was so beautiful that I hadn't even noticed until a laptop battery drained. I was helping with the breakfast dishes when the hot water ran out. Then the cold water got weak. That's when we realized the big water tank in the yard was fed by an electric pump, so without electricity, we were out of water. Oh well, no more dishes or showers, no more laptops or minidisks for a while, and certainly no chatting on the Internet. But there was plenty to learn, discuss and share, and we found ways to do it without the tools we were used to relying on.

This is the kind of infrastructure disparity we're talking about when we compare a place like my hometown of Philadelphia, where the Internet literally wafts around in the air, to a place like Nairobi, where many of the tech savvy people we met paid for computer access by the minute in cyber cafes. The examples go on and on - from Paypal refusing to do any business even suspected of being connected to Africa, to lack of competition in wireless carriers, to vendor-provided install programs that immediately choke any computer on the subnet with really vicious viruses. When confronted with these realities, you start to understand just how systematically Africa has been technologically and economically ghettoized.

When we looked to our friends in some of the roughest, poorest, and most ingenious neighborhoods in Nairobi, we got a crash course in how to sidestep lack of resources if there's a problem you need to solve. Want to tell your story but don't have the money to make a film? Start a pirate radio station in a converted shipping container, and camp out in front of the Communications Commission of Kenya until they make you legal, like Koch FM, in the Korogocho neighborhood. Want to teach transmitter building in your community center but don't have an outlet to plug in a soldering iron? Gather some parts and rewire a light fixture into a temporary outlet. That's what Pro-Active Youth did in the Kangemi neighborhood when we spent a day sharing skills, meals, and frank discussions about the joys and brick walls that face youth in our respective hometowns.

After we left, the core groups in Nairobi and Kisumu started planning their next moves, armed with new relationships, renewed energy, and the strength of their combined skills. IMCs represent dozens of cities and regions around the world, but they mostly live on the Internet. Was that model appropriate for a country where many villages don't have land lines, and wired infrastructure has often been leapfrogged in favor of cellular communication and solar energy? The Kenya crew decided it wasn't. They prioritized making content to share via local media like radio and print. They focused on coalition-building, on the networks that would form the sinew of self-directed strength. And it worked.

Before we swept up the champagne corks from our New Year's celebrations, our friends in Kenya had stood in line for hours to vote and nurture their 45-year old democracy. Reports indicate that a clean, peaceful election was derailed by botched tallying, and simmering tensions erupted in Africa's bastion of peace and stability. Our friends have watched these tensions threaten to fracture their country along fault lines of community identity and economic imbalance. They saw neighbors turn against each other, burn down homes, loot, riot, and feel the hand of police slam down on them. Refugees who fled to Kenya from war-torn Somalia and Sudan have frightening glimmers of déjà vu, while bordering nations suffer shortages of food and fuel because transport arteries have ground to a halt. Blaming the conflict on tribalism can distract us from the reality--different constituencies have different interests and levels of power. When power is unequal or abused, people get upset, no matter what continent you're on or how you name your community.

The friends we've contacted are mostly ok, persevering through 4-day water outages and ransacked offices, relocating from their homes in search of safety. Since the election, they've changed their minds about how to use their media capacities. It's time to get news out to the world.

Those of us refreshing our browsers across the ocean have been able to slake our feelings of powerlessness just a little by supporting our allies in Kenya. They already had a website and tons of local talent and for telling stories. They reached out to the Indymedia network so they could concentrate on content, and let us deal with logistics. This renewed partnership means that Kenya.indymedia.org is publishing stories for the first time in almost a year. When I sit down at my laptop in the morning, still in my pajamas, I get to be the first pair of eyes and ears on reporting directly from the source--not filtered through foreign media, not translated through a government mouthpiece, but directly from friends and allies, in the middle of everything. It's an honor and a privilege to facilitate this purest form of independent journalism. This is why networks like Indymedia exist.

The IMC-Kenya web support crew is motivated and enthusiastic, but small and overworked. We are a few busy, lucky, excited people who don't have the capacity to support the Kenya team the way they should be supported – the way we ought to support them if we want to continue seeing the kind of reporting they've produced. We need to post articles, work on design, research ways to use cell phones to get news to the web, and otherwise support the journalists in Kenya until they build their local capacity and take those tasks back. We need editorial, web design, hosting, and SMS gateway support.

The team in Nairobi has outlined very tangible needs. With the economy practically halted, people are looking for work. If your publication wants stories and images from the ground in Kenya, you can hire someone on this team to deliver top-notch reporting and photography. They desperately need funding for cell phone airtime, which can mean the difference between life and death. Text messages in Kenya cost about 7 cents apiece – so literally every cent you donate counts. IMC-Kenya has put together a budget of about $4,000, an attainable sum which they plan to stretch to the limit for things like Internet access and a modest lending library of cameras and recorders to be shared throughout the country. Your donation can also go to help displaced adults and children who left everything they had to get to a safe place. For the past year or more, Urbana-Champaign-IMC has been handling donations to Kenya, and have kindly agreed to continue.

You can be right in the middle of excellent indie reporting and cutting edge technology. To see if there's a fit for you on the tech team or to inquire about freelance writing and photojournalism, please email the IMC-Kenya mailing list at imc-kenya@lists.indymedia.org, and they'll get you sorted. To donate to IMC-Kenya, visit ucimc.org/info/donate, and make a note in the comment field. In the meantime, check out the reporting at
Kenya.indymedia.org.

Will you toss in a bit of your spare time or funds for a sustainable team that's working to expose corruption and encourage peace at home, and help us over here in Internet-land understand the situation and what we can do to make it better? We can't wait to add your talent and passion to this project!

Mixmaster Mike Nutter

2008-01-11T16:56:27Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zxCOKG3orQ&eurl

omg i love philly so much right now. But ?uest....c'mon...

I love you, correct syntax, but I've chosen fat-fingering

2008-01-10T19:21:29Z

Never seen this before.

serverzomglol:/dirzomglol # ps e-ef |grep rm
ERROR: Embedded '-' among BSD options makes no sense.
********* simple selection *********  ********* selection by list *********
-A all processes                      -C by command name
-N negate selection                   -G by real group ID (supports names)
-a all w/ tty except session leaders  -U by real user ID (supports names)
-d all except session leaders         -g by session leader OR by group name
-e all processes                      -p by process ID
T  all processes on this terminal     -s processes in the sessions given
a  all w/ tty, including other users  -t by tty
g  all, even group leaders!           -u by effective user ID (supports names)
r  only running processes             U  processes for specified users
x  processes w/o controlling ttys     t  by tty
*********** output format **********  *********** long options ***********
-o,o user-defined  -f full            --Group --User --pid --cols --ppid
-j,j job control   s  signal          --group --user --sid --rows --info
-O,O preloaded -o  v  virtual memory  --cumulative --format --deselect
-l,l long          u  user-oriented   --sort --tty --forest --version
-F   extra full    X  registers       --heading --no-heading --context
                    ********* misc options *********
-V,V  show version      L  list format codes  f  ASCII art forest
-m,m,-L,-T,H  threads   S  children in sum    -y change -l format
-M,Z  security data     c  true command name  -c scheduling class
-w,w  wide output       n  numeric WCHAN,UID  -H process hierarchy

Update from Kisumu, western Kenya

2008-01-10T15:24:14Z

Email and SMS from my friend Brian, a communications student at Maseno University:

Hi Steph,

Hope you're doing fine and everything is well with you. Am doing fine since am alive and for the first time since December 30th 2007, am outside the house and am actually in town.

My family is doing fine and we are all safe though some of our stuff was stolen, for instance clothes, my dad's office was vandlised and everything in it stolen, then they set his car on fire.

Am really sorry for writing to you this late only that I had nowhere I could get to a cyber cafe since most of them were looted and it was risky to walk in town for fear of being shot.

At the moment am in Kisumu--its really hot and dry. Most of the people in town are still afraid that violence may start again but we hope that it wont.

Yesterday I went to a slum in Kisumu known as Nyalenda slum and I witnessed one house set ablaze by some youths. I was not able to establish whom it belonged to but I think it was from one of the tribes that allegedly voted for the government in the just-concluded general elections.

Kisumu has also witnessed some tragic deaths in the past one week but most of the victims were shot dead by the police and not the residents. The dead included children, youths and adults, but one wonders if children were demonstrating and if they had to die.

Schools are set to open next week but am not sure if the turn out will be 100% since most children have been displaced by the violence that has rocked the country.

Steph, thanks again for your concern, have a lovely day.

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Hi Steph it's Brian and we're safe, Kisumu is ok but we have less supplies like food fuel n 4 the 4th day we dont have tap water. We lost some stuff n cash bt we are alive. In ur email u askd hw u can help, we need alot of stuff, but just let me knw what u can provide ie 4 my family or educational materials.

Good luck with that

2008-01-09T02:47:33Z

And last, a monstrosity: