Knowing when to leave can be a difficult thing. Here are a few signs that might indicate it’s time for you to pack your bags and run for the nearest airport.
Archive for the ‘Off topic’ Category
You’re an aid worker with 10+ years experience under your belt. You earn a pittance but it works for you because you are non-resident at home so you don’t pay tax, you are catered for on assignment so you don’t pay rent,and your mortgage is covered by the people renting your place because you are never there. Welcome to your future – these are your life options …
I hadn’t been following the news recently, so I was genuinely surprised when I saw “Google Buzz” in my Gmail dashboard today. My first impression is: this could work for me. But not as a replacement of Twitter. I rather see it as something to replace FriendFeed. I have to admit – I never really got the hang of FriendFeed. While I want a service or an application that helps me to aggregate different forms of information streams, I don’t[...]
I just finished reading Joel Hafvenstein’s “Opium Season“, a book that has absolutely nothing to do with social media but which I’d like to recommend to anyone working in the aid-business. Opium Season is about Hafvenstein’s time in Afghanistan in 2005, when he was working for a USAID funded cash-for-work project that was supposed to supplement the income of people who were due to lose money because of a poppy-eradication campaign. The problem with donor driven programmes What makes this book[...]
I’ve used the New Year’s break to do some minor housekeeping on the blog. Among other things, I updated to WordPress 2.9 which has some really interesting new features. I also (finally) created a Facebook page for the blog so that you can see updates in your news feed – if that is something you want. I had been hoping that “Networked Blogs” would help me to get the word out, but so far I’m a bit disappointed. While I get some traffic[...]
I’ve recently started to “play” Foursquare – and I’m equally fascinated, amazed, confused and slightly worried by the paradox it presents to me. For those who have never heard of it, Foursquare is a web service that asks you to broadcast where you currently are – via Twitter if you want to – and leave comments about the places you visit. You can also track your friends locations and comments. In addition, you can get badges for certain activities and if[...]
Google Web History is a service that stores your Google searches and the results you clicked on. This can be helpful if you can’t find a site anymore which you found useful earlier. What Google Web History is not supposed to do is to continue to log searches from a computer that you haven’t been using in months! Spying with Google Web History Here is what happened: About six weeks ago I logged into Web History when I noticed some strange entries.[...]
Yesterday, around 3,000 people demonstrated against a WTO in Geneva. While coming back from the super market I saw a really bizarre scene in the middle of the riot police and dissipating clouds of tear gas: I was walking through my neighbourhood Paquis, a part of town where the streets are lined with middle-aged prostitutes and drug dealers. At a street corner there was a big gaggle of riot police who had set up an improvised command post the and were processing[...]
