There are a billion quotes about my continent, a lot of sayings about us, and I am sure you have heard some of them. From “Africa is a sleeping giant”, to “Africa is yet to be discovered” to “Africa is coming”.  Well, Africa is here and Africa is happening. Ask the Africans in Africa. I am a stickler for African Technology and Ideas and I remember one time Erik Hersman once recorded a video of me debating with some dude about African Development At Barcamp Nairobi 2008. Well, for all the ingenuity and hardwork, the celebration is here. Maker Faire Africa has come to Nairobi this year and for the guys who will be reading this in the future, its 2010. On August 27th and 28th and is will happen at the Chancellor’s Court of the University of Nairobi (UoN), its going to happen and we are coming to witness the smarts of Africans. So see you there, leave the excuses at home.

What to expect

Well, to be honest, I haven’t attended one of these yet, but someone told me expect anything and everything. And I am. Emeka and his crew have got me psyched up. I mean seriously, there are guys from Rwanda coming to show us something that deals with SMS and Matatus and Directions. How cool is that? Africans have come up with great ideas, most of them have been exploited, forgotten, most don’t make it cause most don’t get funded, but with General Electric (GE) sponsoring this one, the possibilities become greater. And its not just GE, there is Google, Mozilla, Butterfly Works, Zuku, Twaweza, Freedom To Create and Engineering For Change. Possibly even more. And there is more media sponsorship in the forms of the bloggers who are and will write about this event and followup on developments.

Location

For those of you who think Africa is a country, understand that The Chancellor’s Court is in the University of Nairobi, which is in Nairobi, and Nairobi is in Kenya, and Kenya is in Africa, and in Nairobi, the ingenuity will be celebrated on Aug 27th and 28th 2010.

Buy beer

You need to buy the following people a beer if you see them for making this happen this year. Emeka Okafor, Erik Hersman, Mark Grimes (he knows everyone and he lost 20 pounds I heard), the lovely Emer Beamer from Buttefly Works, Henry Barnor, Jennifer Wolfe and Linnet Kwamboka. If you see this lot, buy them a drink. I’m sure there are a lot more people. And for the sponsors, thank you.

So, What is Maker Faire Africa???

This is the best spam message I have received so far.

Kahenya

from    Tarina Quillano <tarin.tarin@btinternet.com>
reply-to    tarinqusill4@yahoo.com.ph

Hello Friend,
 
It give me a great pleasure to write you after viewing your profile from this site vc4africa.Little about me,I love sport, swimming, reading and singing.My favorite colour is blue and green. I love sea food, pizza, Chinese food, Arab food, Italian food,spaghetti, America and other. I love plenty of salad too.
 
Before I proceed further, please permit me to introduction myself to you. I am Mrs.Tarina Qusillano. A complete citizen of Philippines, 42 years old living in the Philippines, widow to the late former minister of finance in Philippine who died on 21.august 2006.
 
I inherited a total sum of $21.5 Million American dollars from my late husband, the money was concealed in a metallic trunk box and was deposited with a security and finance company in Abidjan Cote D’ Ivoire, that was because I needed a maximum security/safety of my consignment and no body nor government organization can trace the where about of the money until I am ready and prepare to claim it. but the Secuerity company didn’t know the real content of the box, because it was deposited as a family valuables.
 
My main purpose of sending you this mail is because of the way I found you and perhaps trustworthy to give you this priority of shipping the box of money to any address that you think is very secure and save in your country for onward lodgement your account for the purpose of future investment with your percentage of which we shall chat on soon. I will send you the Authorization deposit code to call them in my next mail which is the code of deposit that they gave me on the very day when the box of money was deposited under their company. I give thanks immensely for your co-operation as I look forward to hear from you for quick conclusion of this business.
 
The percentage will be your reward for all your moral and financial assistance during the period of moving the money to your country.Please if you can assist me I will be very grateful. And repay you many times over,declaring your willingness to assist me in this venture.
Waiting for a very quick response from you so that i can send you my photo to you to see me in my next reply as soon as i hear from you again. Have a nice time and remain blessed
Best Regards,
 
Tarina.

Disclaimer: No Sense Of Humour, Go Fuck Yourself. Someone sent me an email to write this.

Smile fool, the braces make you look sorta like a geek, its all downhill from here, you are a geek, but the smile down the road is gonna kill the women, and your head will always be big anyway, and ur Chinese eyes and red lips will be a hit down the road with the ladies, boy will you get a shit load of ass, wait a shit load of ass does not sound right, but who the fuck cares, right? Don’t fuss at them now, you are not a pretty boy, wait till you hit “39”, that’s 3 times what you are counting now, a pretty girl will make you suck at dominoes, and she will always assume you will be “39”. Be nice to her.

Now, here is a couple of things you need to think about, Sylvia sure is pretty but it won’t happen. Father Giordano won’t kick your ass, he is a half baked crazy Italian anyway, don’t forget to read this when you grow up and dump the name Steve. What the fuck was that eye-talian thinking? The name Kahenya will get the foreign chicks practicing the name, and later that night, screaming it. And Miss Fernandes sure has a sweet ass. Bonus tip: Be in school before her and check her coming out of her Mini. Its called an upskirt and that’s will be your first preview of what women hide inside their skirts and knickers. Don’t freak out that she has a moustache down there. Its negligible. You should be staring at that. Miss Kinyanjui has some serious boobs. When she is teaching, and bends towards you to pick something, Double Ds maafaka, the first pair of real live ones too. Hope she don’t get married and fuck everything up. Read a lot more Hardy Boys and a lot less Nancy Drew.

The sucky part, you will be a geek anyway, those signs are permanent, you will love Unix, and Linux and BEos, your first password will be password, and and you will do all sorts of things with computers, reject the job offer from Microsoft, that shit sucks anyway, you will love being by the beach and your pubes will turn to dreads in 3 years, difficult to explain when you hit Japan a couple of years from now. Just say you are African. Stay away from the “hot soup”. It will make you drunk. I promise I will get us that house by the beach and put the pretty girl there, or atleast die trying.

Stay healthy fool, your kidneys gonna stress you for a minute, don’t even think about being homophobic, your best friend will be gay and then he will die and then you will have a serious sexual identity crisis. It works out quite well though, you find that you prefer threesomes and not foursomes. Crisis over. And you like pizza and pasta when u turn “39”.

As per The Compiler, you will get saved next year when you hit Ditchez. Now, that shit will help you get a free pass to go to Church and meet hot chicks. Nigga I am telling you, this shit will be better than ever. You will end up boning a nun, so God is gonna be after you for a while, but then watch a movie called Virgin Territory and the guilt trip will be over. But before you find that movie, watch another one alone called Virgin Hunters, *BEFORE* boning the nun. Trust me on this. You will know why when it gets there. I won’t ruin the surprise. And stay away from Facebook. Its evil.

Don’t smoke weed now or in high school. It will mess you up. Wait till you come back from London, that shit will rock. And don’t have sex in the house either. Mum will catch you out twice. And then you will be in shit. Dad will be pissed in public, but wait till its man on man time, he will shake your hand and give you 1000 shillings to buy condoms, which you will waste in Nairobi Sports House buying a pair of Bart Simpsons Sneakers. Fucking idiot. Bart Simpson is not your God. God is.

You like cigars, Amarula and beer, you drive like you are insane, because you are insane, you will have a fly missus for sure, you will fall in love with Ethiopia, to be honest you won’t like injera, but then again, you will fall in love with everything else about that country. What else, lets see, you love traveling and reading, not to big on playing with yourself, though for a while, when you are in Pretoria, its gonna rock, especially when you see what else you get to play with. Boobs, real nice boobs too. Porn is important. Watch a lot of porn. And I mean a lot. Watch it after you come out of church even. Its ok. It will help you deal with a lot of conflicts in your life. I know it does not make sense now, but wait till one Saturday morning, when you get a doctor’s visit, that shit will make sense. Trust me on this one. One morning, you will be in Mombasa, you will wake up and take a shower and then go for swimming with this pretty girl called Cindy, and this will be a profound moment in your life cause when you come out of the pool, Cindy will look at you strange, and when you go back to your hotel room to shower and look a your 1-Pack in the mirror, you will realise the saddest shit in your life. You my friend, will start balding. It won’t crush you though cause a couple of years before this shit happens, you will live with Buddhist Monks in Pretoria and Hemel Hempstead. Its ok, they will teach you a lot about free love and shit, and you will get a ton of ass there too, but the condition is that you shave bald, so, its ok. Honest.

I know you are scared now, you are confused, voice is breaking, they will grab you at 4 am in the morning and take you to the river about 2 minutes after you finish reading this shit and do things to your dick you won’t believe. With a knife too. You are fucked. Do me proud, don’t cry. Man up!!! There won’t be anesthesia. Only cold water. And then your half caste Kikuyu-Maasai blood will kick in and that dick will be the source of pleasure for a lot of women. And you too. But don’t bone chicks with moustaches. Those are called she-males. I won’t talk about that one incident though, but its in your best interest to avoid that night club in Rosebank. Trust me, you won’t miss much except some South African crap music called house and they dance funny too ha ha ha and some funny gun fight, and whatever shit happens there, well, it will pass. Eventually. Infact just stay away from Rosebank. Period. Well, maybe except the Teazers. Speaking of which, you will get a free pass for life to any Teazers in South Africa. See, I’m looking out for your best interests. Now, somehow it will come pass that Christmas of 2003, you will spend it inside there eating ribs with Charles. Now, shave bald that day cause when the stripper gives you a lap dance and puts her boobs all over your head, and her hands on your other head……

Hi,

We are excited to bring out Beta 3 of the new ViRN Instruments site powered by our universal WebC Platform. We have been talking about WebC and the ability it has, and hopefully you get to share in the experience.

WebC will manage services on the backend while any site we run will sit atop it and refer to it for specific data, e.g. User Details, Messaging amongst other thing. Its a seamless platform which means you don’t get to actually know when you step out for Authentication.

Authentication

WebC also has an authentication mechanism that any site can attatch to, making it easy for them to authenticate us. This is important if you want to be able to engage with our growing user base. Its easy to engage with a new set of people and they don’t have to keep registering on different sites. Soon, we will begin support for Wordpress and Joomla sites amongst others, allowing a shared user base, and all for free.

Mobile

While WebC is mobile compliant, we have chosen to first avoid releasing for mobile until we exit Beta status. In the near future, you will be able to engage with the site from any device.

The Old

What happened to the old sites? WebC is now powering ALL ViRN Instruments sites. What this means is sites like Ukurasa, News, Blogs, Wallapa are all now in WebC. The domains don’t change but the sites will improve a lot.

Corporate

The following changes have taken place corporate wise so we have new staff members and contractors.

Wallapa - Acting Managing Director - Kamau Wanyoike

Ukurasa - Managed and in Partnership with Njeri Wangari

Blogs - Editors - Njeri Wangari, Richard Wanjohi

News - Editor - Ephantus Mwangi

Jobs - Internal

Metro Advertising - Managed by Level1

IPO2 - Managed and in Partnership with Kobe Projects

Crowd Sourced Couriers - Managed by Njeri Wangari, Street Manager - David Kamunyu

Pixomia.TV - In partnership with Pixomia Television Africa

Unsigned Kenya - Head Tailor and Designer - Steve Omollo

Yoghurt v3.0 - In partnership with Patricia and Simon, General Manager - Simon Nandoya

Thank you.

Kahenya

For Katy, sorry it came late, but it came.

All of us, yes, ALL OF YOU, we all have a second and third phone, have to start declaring out clande phones. We all have that phone that we use for certain affairs we choose to keep to ourselves. Let me declare mine before hand. I have my Safaricom number, retained for MPesa and the odd caller who forgot I switched to Zain. Zain my official line and I have another one. Simcard varies between Yu and Orange depending on what bad I’m up to. And a Telkom CDMA, the landline thats not a landline. So gava wants me to register all this numbers cause it will reduce crime. I’m not quite sure what Mr. Iteere is snorting, but worse, whoever told him that this would help reduce crime, someone needs to point him/her to real white lines.

The Theory

If an Osama type decides to buy a simcard to blow up Mr. Iteere’s office, I fail to see how registration helps. For all anyone knows, my name is Mathew Iteere and I live with Saitoti somewhere in Kajiado and my address is P.O. Box 1234, Kajiado, Kenya and my ID number is 12345678. In all accounts, that’s a valid individual with the number 0700000000. And I will blow up whatever and that story will die there.

And it does not help that there is noone to call for help either. All those who are in Kenya, try dial 999 or 112 or 911. If I can’t call for help, what’s the point in having all this information that noone will use in the first place? And worse, its been reported a thousand and one times.

Mr Iteere, finger out of Saitoti’s ass. And no sniffing, time to start listening.

It does not matter if you register 15 million people because if a single one cannot call for help, then the whole exercise is a waste of time, money and effort. If I cant call to say that John at 070000001 has robbed me, then how does it help?

And don’t get me wrong, *IF* properly utilized, this could help reduce a lot of crime, but this is Kenya, Kenya is in Africa, and This Is Africa, first of all governments are not charitable to actually worry about the protecting the citizens. That’s some shit Americans came up with as a way of creating employment for the would be criminals.What did you think this is? Africa is about $$$ and you pay policemen to come pull you out of that hole that the policemen criminals put you in, in the first place, assuming they don’t shoot your ass, plant a gun on you and start claiming you kidnapped yourself. Or worse, you kidnap prostitutes, discover there is no pimp willing to pay ransom or discover you can’t afford to pay for that ass, and start murdering their asses and calling yourself a serial killer and since the police will lose your mobile number anyway, you can actually end up getting away with shit.

And then there is the issue of the will of men and women. Our ladies and gents in blue don’t have petrol to drive up and down shooting people, so having the number of a criminal matters as much as it matters that Lucy Kibaki shaves her pubes the constitutional process is already flawed. If they have no petrol, screaming the fuck out of your mind is useless, cause guess what, they can’t come to you. And if they do, means you had to use MPesa to send them money to buy petrol, assuming you had time between your robbery, your rape or your murder to MPesa them money. How about we start by actually having the policemen respond effectively to crimes? A basic. I call, someone answers, someone turns up in a few minutes, someone gets arrested, someone goes to court, someone discovers their innocence or guilt. How about we get that working smoothly?

Kenyan policemen lack the Forensic Tools to actually investigate anything, yet Saitoti and Iteere roll large in their rides. The only forensic tools a Kenyan Policeman has is his/her gun and a pair of gloves and tell me how the hell registering my simcard helps. First of all, if the guy has a gun and a pair of gloves, I dont know about you, but I shrink quick knowing my ass is about to meet my late grandfather’s ass. And its a bitch that they have my number, so they call me up and because my phone is set to loud, they hear the fucker it ringing allover my ass and you know how that story goes.

Conspiracy Theory

I know who shot Oscar. So does he. So do you. We all know who did this. They can’t deny it. Neither can we. To me, this are the security organs (NSIS, CID, Special Branch etc) vying to get more information about who calls whose clande and at what time and what they talk about. It has zero to do with crime. They made people do it in Botswana to prevent handset theft. Khama saw the opportunity and took it. And handsets are still being stolen in Botswana, and that information is not being used for shit. So I wish Mr. Iteere just came out and said the truth. We want to tap all your phones, all you dissidents and assholes, and we want to find out what you conspire after hours politically. Crime in Kenya is not about to go down cause the government decided to register sim cards. Thats some dumb shit someone tried selling to us. First if all, all and I mean *ALL* the top criminals in Kenya sit in plush government offices hypocritically trying to change our world to a better working place. Terrorism won’t reduce. For all we know, government elements were responsible for that Uhuru Park shit. And governments cannot beat humanity. We will find a way to overcome this nuisance. Cause its what it is. Government couldn’t give a fuck if crime went up or down. And this mendacity of government being concerned about us and crime needs to stop.

The problem with crime in Kenya is not that its a lot or violent, this isn’t Jozi or Mogadishu, it has to do with the ineffecient system we are about to vote for in a new constitution. If the Police and already overwhelmed with having a call centre for emergency services, I doubt dealing with over 15 million sim cards makes them more efficient and after the bullshit of losing the so called Serial Killers number twice, I want to see how they secure the country by spying on us. Iteere has went and flapped his gums and he gets his legacy as the guy who gave the security organs the best information who registered sim cards in Kenya. Prick.

About this exercise, wrong timing, wrong team, and for all the wrong reasons.