Last month I moved out of my office in the Brightleaf Square South building, an old tobacco warehouse from 1904 that had been restored and converted to retail and offices in the 1980s. I had had an office in that building since I started working at Duke in 2002 – so for 20 years. At […]

2/22/2022

After 16 Years in office, Germany’s former chancellor Angela Merkel hands off leadership of Germany’s government to Olaf Scholz. Chancellor Scholz will lead a historic 3-party coalition government of his Social Democratic Party, the Green Party, and the centrist Free Democratic Party, with Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Party in the opposition for the first time […]

On Easter Weekend, our newest family member, Betty the Goat, came to live with us. She is a Nigerian Dwarf Goat and she is only a few months old. We bought her from a guy down the road who felt sorry for Sassy when we told him that her sister Snoopy died last year and […]

The last few days have been pretty chilly around here. Sunday morning it was a brisk 15 Deg. F (-10 °C) and the waterfall at the little fishpond was almost frozen. Kühl war es hier die letzten Tage – minus 10 °C am Sonntag morgen. Sunday night it snowed and Monday we had freezing rain. […]

We are proud to present the 11foot8 Team @Overheight When Flashing@! This intrepid team of athletes will take on the Doughman Race on May 28 – a challenging eating/athletic competition right here in Durham. This race is also a fundraiser for SEEDS – a local nonprofit that builds community gardens and teaches kids to grow […]

… this year has been a bit of a pisser! Most of all in Haiti, of course. Please contribute what you can afford to relief organizations who work in Haiti. My favorite is Doctors without Borders; they seem quite efficient, appropriately god-less, and they were helping in Haiti before the earthquake. And also reach out […]

Maybe Obama will check out the Accra Mall while he is in Ghana.  I am bummed we missed that when we were in Accra. We came through Tatteh Quashie Circle several times, but never saw any signs. The Accra Mall is the largest mall in West Africa, and it is remarkable because many of the […]

Today I finally bit the bullet and moved my blog to a new hosting service. Looks like everything works fine now. Since I did not change the domain name, moving the blog was just a question of installing the new blog, dropping all the tables, restoring the database to the new server, uploading some extra […]

In late June, an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 variety of the avian (bird) flu was reported in Southern Togo, near the border to Benin: Togo’s Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Minister, Yves Madow Nagou, confirmed here late Friday, the outbreak of bird flu in a poultry farm at Sigbehoue, south-east of the country. “Preliminary findings […]

There is so much interesting and important stuff going on: A new film documents the ongoing genocide perpetrated on the Acholi people in Uganda (HT to Vicky), perpetuated by, among other things, US military aid (war-on-terror-dollars) The US Congress is debating about subsidies for a road fuel that releases twice as much pollution as gasoline: […]

Today began the Year of the Pig in the Chinese lunar calendar. Apparently this is considered a very auspicious sign in the Cinese zodiak, and so many Chinese are planing to have a baby this year. Gung Hay Fat Choy!

The recent Sony rootkit scandal takes all that’s wrong with our “brave, new world” of networked computing: spam, viruses, spyware, malware, sloppyware (=Windows) and adds a major technology and entertainment corporation’s bad attitude about consumer’s rights. Earlier this year, Sony sold music CDs with copyright protection software that installs a rootkit on Windows machines, making […]

Here we go: I finished the new dress for this blog. It’s just the WordPress default theme with new graphics. I am not much of a graphic artist, but it’s good enough for now. The hardest thing about amateur graphic design is to resist the PowerPoint effect. That’s what happens when the VP of Marketing […]

Updated to WordPress 1.5 today – very nice! The current look is just the default, but I like it. I am still looking around for a more exotic theme. Stay tuned … Also, I registered a new domain, yikpa.info. This website will be dedicated to this small village in Togo, and I am hoping to […]

The comment spam was getting out of control, so I turned off comments on older posts. I’ll just keep the newer posts open for comments for now, until I implement a better solution. [UPDATE: the solution should be somewhere here …]

This is good news for Togo! Faure Gnassingbe finally relented and stepped down, yesterday. Now the speaker of the parliament, Abass Bonfoh, has replaced “Baby Eyadema.” This puts Togo back into compliance with the original, pre-coup constitution. The good news is that now the sanctions against Togo have been lifted and there should be elections […]

… yeah – like the word wide web needs more words! Well, here it goes ….