T-Birds are Crazy
I’ve been in Senegal only 3 1/2 months and already two of my roomates (Toshi and Henry) have already visited. It just comes to show that if you ever invite a T-Bird to come visit, no matter where you are in the world, you better be sure you actually want him to come! In this case, it was great to share the Senegal experience with Toshi-son and the Paum.

Oh my Google
It seems Google is hard at work at spending the 4 billion dollars it has recently raised from stock sales. Yesterday, it just released Google Talk its messaging and voip chat client (interestingly based on the opensource chat protocol Jabber). This in addition to the new Google Desktop Bar tool which I think is its attempt to counter Yahoo’s recent aquisition of the awesome widget tool Konfabulator as both begin to draw battlelines for the upcoming thin-client WebOS war. Despite these two exciting releases, I am most stoked about Gmail’s quite feature addition of Send As. What this basically means is you can now use Gmail to send messages from any of your email accounts (Your college email, work email, etc). It is really only a matter of time before Gmail ousts hotmail as the free webmail king.

BaolBaol.com
With my first term in Senegal winding down (I leave back for the states this upcoming wednesday), progress with Kocc Barma (pronounced “Couch” and formely Leuk) has been going well. A number of African merchants have started to use the system on a regular basis and we are currently in the process of introducing it to large women groups who I think stand to benefit dramatically from this software. If you are curious a working version of the software is up at BaolBaol.com (Wolof slang for crafty merchant). Admittedly, I don’t have any kind of tutorial up so it may be complicated to understand at first. I have found that with a brief 10-20 minute introduction most merchants are able to successfully use it on their own. Anyways, if your interested take a look and let me know what you think keeping in mind this is still very much a work in progress.

 
Scene from the Cape in Dakar

Desert Garden
For the first time in 9 months, Dakar has gotten its first real showers. Even after spending signficant time in Arizona its hard to imagine how an ecosystem survives without water. The transformation water brings to the desert is really amazing. The sand which you grow accustomed to trudging through is replaced almost instanly with green grass. Also gone is the dust, allowing for blue skys, starry nights, and a much needed dust respite for my labtop. On the other hand, the rain has brought excessive heat (it has gotten REALLY hot) and mosquitoes.

Long Lost Friend
Above is a picture of the parrot I had as a kid growing up in Senegal. When we left it was adopted by a family friend and to my utter shock is still alive and I guess is still only in its early to middle ages. I guess if you are sick of having your dogs die get a parrot. It’ll probably live longer then you.

Scenes of downtown Dakar and Sandaga where I work

Digg.com
I just came across a great new site Digg.com where news articles that users find and submit are combined in an aggregrate site. What is really cool is when you “digg” an article the article’s popularity increases and it rises to the top. As a result, most of the featured articles are very current and typically very interesting.

Some recent gems I found from Digg include:

• How to make the best paper airplane in the world
• The Science of Lance Armstrong
• Paper CD Case

Gmail Mail Importer
As I mentioned earlier, I now manage all my mail through Gmail. I continue to be very happy with my decision. However, one thing that bothered me is that all my old email has been popped onto my unreliable, constantly crashing labtop hardrive. Fortunately, there are people like Mark Lyon out there who created a great little app called the Gmail Loader (GML) which has allowed me to export all my important messages to the safekeeping of google.