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.