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.