Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Recent Goings-On

The government lowered the price of gas at its stations by about 50% the other day, which is nice to see since for a while there I was convinced that Benin couldn't be influenced by the economic realities of the rest of the world. Other nearby countries have apparently not yet lowered their official prices so all the smuggled gas that was previously sold on the side of the road has been taken elsewhere and all the gas stations have incredibly long lines, when only a week ago they almost never had any customers.

Thursday, January 01, 2009

A Proposal for a Relative in Denial

Jimmy,

This is like a haiku.

Your life is becoming a Japanese poem.

How is my effort to wean you off dog progressing?


You clearly want to do what I have done. There is nothing wrong with this. Just come to Benin and I will take you to see the wonderful village of Tapoga, where minds are opened every Friday in the far back corner of the market. I'll even arrange for there to be no paws on display.

Ubuntu

My laptop was having a lot of problems so I reinstalled Windows, only to discover that for some reason it could no longer detect my network card no matter what I tried. I eventually gave up and installed Ubuntu.

This is the third time I've tried Linux. The first time I had no idea what I was doing and it was too complicated for someone who knew nothing about how it worked. The second time it was much improved, but there were still a few annoying bugs and it couldn't download pictures off my camera. But the latest version of Ubuntu seems to have gotten rid of all the problems that bothered me, and now that I know a few basic things I'm able to do pretty much everything I want to do. I wouldn't exactly recommend it to my mom (no offense, Mom), but it works well enough that I'm not ever going to get Windows for my personal computer ever again.