Aaaah! slightly frustrated

Today was the 'day of silence' protest against the high royalty fees that are about to be imposed on internet radio sites. I really didn't realise how much i rely on these online radio stations for my work time entertainment until today. I was truly frustrated! Last.fm didn't join the protest and i could have gone over to their site to listen to music but I was constrained to support the industry that has brought me so much good music. And so I stuck by my guns and went music less all day!

C# is frustrating me, it has this way of making really difficult thing really easy, but also making really simple things seem supper difficult! I'm trying to pull data from an xml file and use it to dynamically create tables in an sql database, then display them in a grid view on a GUI. If anyone has any ideas on how to do this, please let me know. also, if anyone knows how to run a perl script from a C# GUI app. let me know.

I am learning that there are a lot of things that are learn't over time. I too often look at people doing something that i would like to do or being some way that id like to be and conclude that they have always been that way. but im slowly learning that i can learn to do almost anything... which is a reasurign thought.

Gods been good to me.

Does anyone have any thought on whether to give people on the street money?

Project progress

Im in the middle of building what I consider to be my first major application that actually does something of substance. It reconciling output from an application run on two different environments and presenting the output on a GUI. The project necessitated that I learn perl, a language that i have since come to love coz it's file parsing capabilities. It also seems really light and so I think it would be very usefull when programing in areas where resources are limitied like on mobile phones.

I am currently building the GUI in C# using visual studio 2005 express. It makes GUI building really easy but I don't know if I really like the way it just feels big and heavy. Also its now suitable for linux environments and I'm getting more and more interested in the platform (I just installed ubuntu on my laptop... yet again).

The weekend was a lot of fun. I got to see a bit more of brooklyn and also went to china town with a good friend. I watch people dancing to some type of eastern european sounding music at the south steet see port, it was another fun weekend in the city.

I finished reading this nice book called "fooled by randomness" (expect a review soon), and now I'm reading an even more interesting book called "the search". I hear the subsaharan coder has read it and loves it. I can see why, its a must read for any technology inclide person.

So I'm back in new york for the summer

I'm already into the 4th week of my internship and convinced more and more that the financial industry is where its at for me. New York is definitely one of the few if not the only city in the states that I feel i can live in for any extended period of time. I think i mentioned before how much it reminds me of Nairobi with all the hustling and the dirt and the assortment of strange odors. Its alive! I need a city that's alive (as well as one in which public transport is the defacto mode transportation, another similarity with Nairobi.).

I have been toying with a couple of interesting business and philanthropy ideas. Keep watching this space for updates on how thats coming along. One particular idea i have had for a minute and just haven't been in the state of mind to think of it as presently achievable. I'm hoping to meet with a friend who has already taken the plunge into setting up a non-profit so that she can demystify the process for me (I love this city! making connections is so easy).

My illustrious cousin just returned to from attending TED Global in Arusha where she met the creme de la creme of African innovators and visionaries, I hope the start an Africa specific chapter of TED. I would love to attend next year (finders crossed).

"white African" (who was also at TED Global by the way), just wrote a post on an innovative corporate blogging project by my good friend and former co-worker John Nyukuri. check it out here.
The team behind the project is really visionary and bent on building disruptive technology.

Saw this random guy with an entire office, desk and all parked on the corner of 51st and Broadway, getting internet from starbucks and working on his stuff. He even had a desk lamp and flowers (albeit artificial)in there. I love this city!



The pictures grainy coz i took it with my trusty old school cell phone