How my 2008 fared

We saw a new year drive into our lives, hang on there, and would drive on into history, leaving another year in place after 365 days. Today is the 24th of December, christmas eve. In 6 days time, this year shall make way for the other.
I look back at the occurences that stood out
The localhost and open source content management system
It's been said best things in life are free. Studying some forums and other web resources I "discovered" Xampp, Joomla and Moodle. The last time I was so excited was during compilation of my first FORTRAN codes.
Awardspace
This hosting service is without doubt the greatest whereby even with a free hosting account, the user is given lots of goodies. Frankly Awardspace drove me to acquire debit card account for making online payment where I got even better goodies.
Debit Card account
Some really good stuff is available for little payment on the Web, but is inaccessible if you don't own a means of online payment. Having acquired the powerful plastic card, I am now head and shoulder above an average crowd, and I like it. I'm able to enjoy a domain name like danielmakundi.com...
Windhoek
I attended an international conference organized by Information Society Technology for Africa, an EU-FP7 project. Held in Windhoek, Namibia for three days, I met many people, built new network of professional colleagues, and, yes, had a peek of South Africa from Joburg Airport during one day wait during transit there on way to Dar-es-Salaam.
Obama
The incredible happened. America said Yes to Barak Obama. I have an earlier post taking my hat off for Michelle Obama, and am repeating here that with the two in the White house, things can only go right, and may Gof bless them!
Albino deaths: The most deplorable
Here in Tanzania we have abject poverty mixing with ignorance and plain stupidity creating automatons of unbelievable actions. Armed with deception that organs from albinos (unfortunate brothers and sisters whose skins are without pigment that's resistant to sunshine, making them vulnerable to sunburn and skin cancers) could make them rich. Many albinos have been killed, others maimed. Thanks to public reaction, some arrests have been made by now.
Obituary
Hassan Shamsi, a workmate and one of the finest electrical artisans I've ever known.
Isaac Hayes, a voice like a rumble of thunder, a phenomenon in Shaft etc

Fast-changing ICT: why I'll start an ezine

I made an effort of writing a computer hardware book some three years ago. I photographed stuff, I scanned pictures I browsed the web etc, I had quite a cache of material. When I would pause for a couple of weeks or so then get back to the writing work, I would discover some information needed to be updated. After some time I gave in--too much patching up.

My favourite indicator of the computer world gallop is a cutout from Newsweek titled Model price cuts, where they were talking about "fast 386s" and "screaming 486s". Not that far back, that was just 1992. The prices were USD 2,286 and USD 4,891 (down from USD 7,198 a year before.

I bought my Pentium in 1999 and felt really good about it. It was boasting a 3 gigabyte hard disk and 16 megabyte of RAM. A tower design clone, it didn't have sound card, no CD-rom drive and definitely no USB port. At that time 16x cd-rom drive was very good. CD writers were virtually nonexistent and DVD wasn't in the vocabulary.

I like reading the past, therefore I have with me the whole load of magazines--news, computers, aircraft, etc etc. I also browse through old catalogs that I possess, such as Sears. It's interesting that the older non-ICT catalogs don't have much difference with the currernt ones (I guess everyone has heard that humour about Microsoft and GM exchange about their respective technologies).

This yearning for reading the past led me to thinking, heck, whyn't write the current bits of ICT information and publish them somewhere or other, and when they get obsolete they become history? We all know that so many good guys are offering loads of free space on the web, such as this blog.

This therefore announces my intention of publishing an ezine. The idea is still a mere sketch--how often to update, whether it will be on a website, in a blog or mailing list, those matters are still undecided.