After five years of civil war (2002 – 07) and a year of relative peace, it appears that Côte d’Ivoire is getting back on track to stability, democracy and eventually, relative prosperity. In the 80’s, the West African nation was still one of the continent’s successes. In those days, many of my Togolese friends dreamed […]

Geoeye published a great satelite photo (half-meter resolution) of the inauguration ceremony for Barack Obama. The image above links to a high resolution version. Geoeye provides the original high resolution image (3.5MB) that shows the entire National Mall.

Last Sunday was a bit chilly but nice, so I decided to go biking at Little River park. I biked the 10 miles to the park and hit the trails. About two thirds into the trail, on a downhill, my front tire lost grip on some wet leaf litter, the bike slid into the side […]

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Presidential Oaths of Office Inaugural Address below the fold …

An inch of snow on the ground and, as usual, most of Durham shuts down. And since no one here owns a set of snow tires, I think it’s a pretty reasonable decision to stay at home. So we made some waffles and coffee and settled in to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama as […]

Note to self : turn off theme before updating the blog software. After I installed the update nothing worked. Internal server error. So I deleted everything and rolled back to the old version, turned off my custom theme, updated again … and everything worked just fine. We’re now on WordPress 2.7.

This is very cool: A US airline has completed the first test flight of a plane partly powered by biofuel derived from algae. The 90-minute flight by a Continental Boeing 737-800 went better than expected, a spokesperson said. One of its engines was powered by a 50-50 blend of biofuel and normal aircraft fuel. Wednesday’s […]

A close presidential election in Ghana has put the West African nation’s electoral system to the test, but in the end the opposition candidate John Atta Mills, 64, won by a very narrow margin. There were allegations of fraud on several sides, and the runoff election in the Tain region had to be re-done due […]

2008 was a pretty good year for us. We stayed healthy, sane (more or less) and employed. Jacob and Julia grew a lot. We had a great family vacation in the mountains of North Carolina and we did a couple of short trips to the beach. Both kids changed schools. Jacob and I started learning […]