More of the story so far, but in brief :) Nairobi was a little disturbingly unmodern in the spot where we holed up on the day before the trip. I am pleased that that turns out not to be the case everywhere :) (I like Nakuru, for example) The Silver… more »

We have finally made it to Nairobi! We took a few days in Dubai on the way over, for a break and to catch our breath (so as not to have to spend more than 24 hours on airplanes and in airports at once). The flight to Heathrow from Calgary was nothing… more »

See you when I get back. Adam is in charge of spamwhacking until I get back (thank you, Adam!). I will have lots of stories to tell :) more »

Much as we may lament the takeover of most Radio Shack store by Circuit City, it has imparted to the store a "cool gadget" mentality, with pretty reasonable prices on most things, to boot. We were looking for an alarm clock to take on safari. Well, The… more »

I was wandering around in other peoples' blogs, and ran across what seemed like a very odd quote indeed: When God, or Yaweh, or Elohim, or any of his buddies from Psalm 82 gets off his ass and comes down and knocks on my door, I'll be open to the idea.… more »

The big safari is nearly upon us! I must admit, I'm getting nervous, although I feel a little better knowing our tickets are available for pickup (I thought I'd picked them up and forgotten where they were; we booked this quite a while ago!) I'm going… more »

Colloquial Swahili What this book has going for it are a number of natural conversations, some good attention-gettings ("Hebu!") and the likes of how to invite people and turn down invitations, and some pretty clear grammar sections. What's… more »

(A side note: I know there's a lot of jargon in here. One of these days, I'll have to tackle one jargonesque term at a time and try to bring it to a public level. In the meantime, if there's something that looks interesting but total Greek, just ask) A… more »

Yay! They're back into space, up in orbit. No explosions, no Busey-esque terrorists on the platform. We took a break around lunchtime at work yesterday to watch the launch. I'd forgotten what it felt like to watch a launch, in particular when it's… more »

I didn't even notice it creeping up on us: the GST has been reduced from 7% to 6% here, just on the Canada Day weekend. We first encountered it waiting in line behind a couple of people making returns at a store. We wondered why it was taking such a… more »

Not published yet, but came across this interesting paper which did a sort of Michelson-Morley experiment but for the expansion of space. The hypothesis being tested was that if local space was expanding, effects of this would show up if you let lasers… more »

Wow, talk about a labour of... well, some combination of emotions which may have included part love and part obsessive-compulsive disorder. I'm talking about the Bible done entire in lego. (From a link on the Divine Afflatus) When my mother was… more »

My wife and I gave her parents the game Crib Wars for Christmas, and I got to see it in action yesterday. You can play regular crib on the board if you so care to. There's a spot marked "121" for the number of regular holes in the path. What's the fun… more »

Spending a pretty relaxing evening with the in-laws yesterday, we got out to see the fireworks. They moved it from the nearby pond to a bigger venue, which was understandable given the increasing population of Strathmore, but which robbed us of… more »

Well, no' quite. It may not be official, but it was chosen in voting run by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. They had a choice between: Scots Wha Hae (Scots Who Have) Scotland the Brave (eminently recognizable when played on bagpipes) A… more »