Kizua Mwangola: Benguela's first game

We made it to the stadium! Shahin covered it on her facebook, but here's a teaser. The crowd was much bigger in the end, but it took ages to get in!

Kizua Mwangola: Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

There isn't much in common between the Angolans and the English. One exception is an uncanny ability to engineer defeats where no one else would believe them possible. That was most certainly the case against Mali tonight.

Kizua Mwangola: HOWTO: Underplaying your hand

Right, not only are we all traumatised with the events of last Friday but we now have to deal with the media coverage of it as well. And lordy, lord is it bipolar or what. On one side we have the dramatic, disaster-intensive coverage coming from the west, making it clear the world is coming to an end - Angola first. On the other side we have a Beijing style, 1980's coverage from the national media that makes it all sound oh so alright and downplays Togolese suffering far too much.

If the authorities were media savvy they would have instantly recognised a neo-liberal sort of moment and played it to their advantage. Shock and awe and all that. How easy it would have been to make the most out of this disaster, using it to unite the national and international communities around the "war on terror" disease - all the while promoting the continuation of the CAN as a duty to all who do not believe in giving in to terror. Someone needs to go to America for a 101 course on modern propaganda.

Anyway, three hours for the game against Mali. Força Palancas!

Kizua Mwangola: Kick'em while they're down

So yet again our hopes were dashed. These past couple of months since we arrived here, up to last Friday, have been nothing short of amazing. The whole country was involved in a giant wave of positiveness, as if nothing could stop us now; as if the long war and the troubles were something that could and had been overcome; as if, like England, Germany or Vietnam, we too had the right recover from the war and build something, to move on. It was great to be part of this wave. But, just like in the past, it felt really bad to see it crash, hard against the rocks. Angola just seems to be one of those luckless countries.

Truth to be told, the bullets didn't steal any of the roads, bridges, hospitals, school's or even stadiums: those are still standing. The losses feel far greater though. The bullets stole Togolese and Angolan lives, and they stole the Angolan belief in a hard-earned decent future, a future paid in blood and with interest. They made everyone realise that, no matter how hard things were to earn, they can be harder still, forever out of one's reach. Just like the bombings in London or in Madrid, a very small number of people managed to inflict extremely severe damage to millions. Unfortunately, unlike Madrid and London, no-one will remember this incident as a terrorist attack; instead, the insanity was to ever conceive the idea of having "a high-profile tournament held on a country were civil war is rife", as a commentator put it on the BBC's forums.

As I walk through the long, wide avenues of Benguela, admiring a few of our new sidewalks and the manicured gardens behind fences, as I see a bunch of young boys joyfully going to basketball practice, I cannot help but think that the world's view of Angola will never change. And I cannot help but to be cynical. I wonder how many of those who are now incensed about "countries rife with civil war" even watched the last CAN or the CAN before that. If deaths occurred then, media coverage would have been next to non-existent, nothing but numbers flashing at the bottom of the screen. Now that their teams' backbones are in Africa, suddenly its at the top of the global news agenda.

Yesterday, the mother of a good friend of mine said: "You're wearing that t-shirt? They've started killing people already". I looked at my CAN top with the palanquinha and sighed. She spoke in a nonchalant, matter-of-factly sort of way - the weary voice of someone who's been through it before. Too many times before. "Too good to be true, hey?", my nod said without needing words.

Lord have mercy. Lets pray we can still make _something_ out of it.

NP: Jorge Palma, Ao Meu Encontro Na Estrada

Disseste que vinhas
E não chegaste
Mudaste de planos, ok

Mas isso deitou-me tão abaixo
Espero que tenhas pensado bem
Estou triste que só eu sei
Preciso de alguém

Chaminés pretas deslizam
Nas janelas de mais um comboio
Casas e pessoas
Feias árvores falidas
E um céu angustiado
Tal é o meu quadro
Estou bem chateado

E agora toca a arranjar o buraco
Que eu tenho no coração
Vou mudar de cenário
Que a coisa assim está mal parada
Vou procurar calor
Mudar de estação

Há-de vir alguém
Ao meu encontro na estrada

Pensei tanto em ti
Que não calculas
De manhã, à tarde e ao anoitecer

Andava louco de contente
Só com a ideia de te voltar a ver
Ahh, mas que grande idiota
Voltei a perder

Procuro no fumo e no vinho
A forma de chegar depressa à fronteira
Mas sei muito bem que a dor que sinto no peito
Não vai com a bebedeira
Pus-me a voar e caí
Da pior maneira

E agora toca a arranjar o buraco
Que eu tenho no coração
Vou mudar de cenário
Que a coisa assim está mal parada
Vou procurar calor
Mudar de estação

Há-de vir alguém
Ao meu encontro na estrada
Há-de vir alguém
Ao meu encontro na estrada

Nerd Food: Flash won't beat me

One of those days. For the last day or so, I've been trying to watch a financial video from one of my favourite gurus-that-predicts-everything-before-it-happens Peter Schiff (thanks Fuzz!) and a Google talk with Boehm (of the c++ garbage collector fame). I had thought Miro was going to save the day on all things flash, and to be honest it has been quite useful in the past; I've managed to search for a bunch of talks and then download them for later consumption. This killer feature is entirely under-appreciated in Europe, where bandwidth is plentiful, but once you get to Africa - with its sporadic-but-expensive Internet connections - it really comes to its own.

However, of late I've found Miro's search to behave weirdly. Links in YouTube which I can clearly validate don't show up on the search results; or when they do, I get a "file does not exist error" at the download stage. And I don't seem to be able to feed it a straight YouTube URL either. Extremely annoying. So after much searching it suddenly occurred to me that I could literally play the whole video while doing other stuff and then copy it from the browser cache! Not particularly efficient, but great as a last resort measure. This was done, but then I found out that the cached files have the weirdest names in the whole world and no extensions:

[marco@perlis Cache]$ cd /home/marco/.mozilla/firefox/ft6kqpe4.default/Cache

[marco@perlis Cache]$ ls | head

total 57200

-rw------- 1 marco marco 63548 2010-01-05 12:07 00723220d01

-rw------- 1 marco marco 75884 2010-01-05 12:34 047E9A92d01

-rw------- 1 marco marco 72071 2010-01-05 12:14 04D19A3Dd01

-rw------- 1 marco marco 36826 2009-12-27 15:55 050CF10Ad01

-rw------- 1 marco marco 30346 2010-01-05 11:42 05FF9B13d01

-rw------- 1 marco marco 30487 2010-01-05 11:59 0A86946Ad01

-rw------- 1 marco marco 48362 2010-01-05 13:45 0C9499D4d01

-rw------- 1 marco marco 37458 2010-01-05 11:46 10E28E0Ed01

-rw------- 1 marco marco 38169 2010-01-05 12:00 12C78C2Bd01

Great for a cache but not so for humans. Bummer. Some googling later I found a chap which pointed out a way of figuring out which files are which, windows style. That got my neurons firing:

[marco@perlis Cache]$ A="*"; for a in $A; do file $a; done | grep -i video

76568185d01: Macromedia Flash Video

806EBA02d01: Macromedia Flash Video

82C84C55d01: Macromedia Flash Video

Sorted. A few cp's later and the cache was stored safe and sound! All hail the command line...

Nerd Food: Kindle my Fire!

Being in Africa, one of the things we miss the most is access to books. Y'all know how book mad me and Shahin are - all those full shelves we always had. Suddenly we had to downsize significantly, and books were at the bottom of our priority list. I frantically searched for ebook replacements for all my programming books - and largelly succeeded, it must be said. But novels and so on were nowhere to be found (other than project Gutenberg, that is). I ignored the whole Kindle revolution because I'm not a big fan of ebook readers. For one I find them far too expensive. Also, when space is at a premium, you really don't want to have to carry yet another device on you. However, my ignorance played very much against me this time, as I missed the Kindle for PC. Luckily we have slashdot.

Amazon, being the great Linux company they are, they released a Linux version of their product. Not. (Just kidding! The amazon MP3 downloader is absolutely fantastic!).

Early reports of wine support were quite promising so I gave that a go, only to find out that the latest release does not work! Luckily our faithful ubunteros discovered the old version, which works just like lifehacker had reported.

All of this to say, I got Kindle for PC working on wine, and it works well. I must say, the experience was not perfect:

• The whole .com vs .co.uk amazon websites is rather confusing: for dead-tree items (and for MP3's too) one is supposed to go via the .co.uk website, which has prices in GBP. However, for kindle I could only find a .com website with prices in USD. On the plus side, my English amazon account works perfectly, and I was able to use the 1-click (TM) order to buy my first Kindle ebook.
• The Kindle interface is a bit too spartan; after buying an item, its difficult to tell how long the item will take to download, how fast the download is going, etc. Its obviously not designed for dialup style internet connections like the ones we got here, that bounce more than a basketball.
• Shantaram is not yet available, and that was one of the main things I wanted to (re) buy.

But even taking those problems into account (and the lack of a Linux version, of course), its still a great product. I mean, its nothing more that a pdf reader, really, but the availability of a lot of books at a decent price makes it really compelling. And for someone like us who cannot access dead-tree books at all, man, its like having all your birthdays in one go.

Kizua Mwangola: Part 6: Benguela

We've finally arrived at the destination: BENGUELA!!! We still need to sort out Shahin's documents, but since she still has two Ordinary Visa renewals, which take us to the end of the African Cup we're not too worried right now.

Benguela has improved a lot since we were here last. The roads are now paved, and there is a revolution with regards to side-walks. Its beginning to shape up like the Benguela of old.

We've also managed to sort our accommodation for the next 2 months, a key worry of ours. The price is steep, but its much lower than anything on the market; it's also the place in which we stayed three years ago. Now, all we need to do is find jobs!

Shahin has progressed more than me on this department as she has made friends with the American expat that runs an English school. Unfortunately, as the semester is winding down here, the work is also slowing down. Things look good for the next academic year though.

I've also managed to open up a bank account and get myself a bank (ATM) card.

No beach as of yet though.