Hey everyone, I hope you are having a great day, night, afternoon, siesta-time, no time, everytime, wherever you are.

Quick Thanks…..Again

I am pretty psyced:I did my first ever radio interview with Linda from Capital FM this morning and surprisingly I was super comfortable doing and so public thanks to Linda for making me super comfortable and for creating a fun and informative question list.

The interview had between 4 - 7 false starts and so the way she rolled with the punches even as sleep did battle with her eyes was pretty cool, pretty cool. Asante sana sana sana (Thank you very very very much).

Today’s Video

It will make a lot of sense as I go through the journey.

Questions and Actions

One of the key ideas of the book, the 4 hour work week, which I absoloutely love is quite often in the book he has Q & A: Questions and actions.

This is where he basically makes you look inward and ask yourself particular questions all with the end result being that you take action that takes you closer to your ideal lifestyle. The D for Definition part of the book has three questions and actions so I’ll get right into it

Questions and Actions: Pulling you Out of the Comfort Zone

Tim knows that a lot of what he says will seem counter-intuitive and illogical and so in his first Q & A immediately goes about the task of poking holes in this real world and its rules that we hold so dear to.

To play along with me let’s answer the following three questions which are the first Q&A:

1) How has being “realistic” and “responsible” kept you from living your ideal lifestyle?

2) How has doing what you “should” resulted in sub-par experiences or regret for not having done something else?

3) Look at what you are doing and ask yourself, ” What would happen if I did the opposite of all the people around me?”

4) Finally, ask, “What will I sacrifice if I go down this track for the next 10, 20, 30 or 50 years?”

My Answers (No Copying Though )

1) Hmmm. I think this one goes all the way back to when I was 16 years old. As those of you who have read my story would know, I have had delusions of grandeur for many years.

Though I am a huge supporter of secondary education and love the fact that I have a great high school diploma, I think as I had simply dropped out of school if I had intended and committed myself fully to serving Africa and Africans and/or becoming a performer, projects like the Displaced African would have started a lot sooner.

I was at the peak of my mental clarity when I was 16 and since then my ideas have definitely been clouded and influenced by superficial concerns of the world.

I’ll never really know what I could have achieved or what I could have created or changed had I thrown caution to the wind and gone out into the world with a clear vision and a deep passion. (Hope that answer wasn’t too ambiguous, leave me a comment below and let me know if it was)

2) This answer will probably fly over the heads of a lot of folks, but I don’t know if I shared this, but I am very pedantic and anal about how I interact with people. I analyse it and think about it quite often, what I did wrong or right, what different groups of people respond to and so on and so on.

I think following what other people did and their ways of interacting and not sticking to my guns resulted in my social life not being as it should have been at many stages in life.

I abdicated responsibility for determining my identity within social situations to other people and over time I lost my spark, my fire, became more and more timid and lost my chutzpah. A lot less women were met and I had a lot less fun than I should have. Hmm, dunno if folks will get this answer either, but it felt like the right answer to me.

3) I am already doing this: let’s see what happens at the end of this 4 hour work week journey and over the course of the life of the Displaced African.

4) You know, one of the huge reasons I chose to start this blog was because of looking around and overall not really being impressed by the way African immigrants were conducting life. In the United States for example, we are the best educated ethnic group and here in Oz folks are far from book-illeterate or penny foolish.

And yet, I never heard much about people who were doing great things in the diaspora. No books, no movies, no websites, no “urban legends”, no real legends. Even once I got here, over time I realized that many people here seemed to be living waaayyyy below their potential in terms of intellect and education. Now this could be for two reasons:

a) We Africans in the diaspora are not good at getting the word out there about our successes and/or I am very ignorant about the people who do great things out here.

b) We don’t have that many successes to celebrate. Either way, this blog makes some sense.

Hmm, this post is long enough as is and so I will leave the other two Questions and Actions for the next post.

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Have a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious day,

Mwangi

In my case: I use MS Outlook under WinXP (at home) to sync the address book on my mobile phone (despite of online service as mentioned earlier). I could just as well use an alternative e-mail client, but I am using MS Outlook (under XP, that is).

There’s this colleague of mine who uses an MS Excel sheet to manage his appointments. Needles to say that these sheets are on his computer only and remain there.
We requested him to open up his calendar to the whole team but he hasn’t done so since then.
I am not the one to complain about this because I am also hardly ever using that MS Outlook calendar at work.

screenshot of a calendar @ MS Outlook 2003

The other day an old friend of mine (who happens to work in the same organization) asked me if I’d like to have lunch with him. Now, instead of just accepting my “OK”, he then proceeded and sent me a request for the Outlook calendar. Since we both work at the same company, since we’re both using Outlook to organize our schedules, since he has a company phone that syncs with our MS Exchange server - all of this makes sense (for him).

However - I am not using a company phone. And I do prefer running a paper version of my calendar. If it had to be an electronical version, I would love to have one that:

• syncs with just about any phone / PDA / etc.
• syncs with any corporate IT structure & their regulations (!!!!)
• is an all-in-one solution for private and professional contacts
• has a public and private section

Google Calendar…is it a suitable alternative for my needs?

And: a request for an open synchronisation - is that due to MS Exchange or the inability / unwillingness of our IT dept. to unlock this special mode due to security reasons & co? What is MS Exchange capable of and what kind of services are used? What is required so that users from different organisations can have one tool online that manages their schedules and still syncs with all different systems? Which system doesn’t require one single server but instead just syncs different servers & user data to a global network? Which system (mabye Zimbra?) enables me to sent a request for an appointment to a user that isn’t connected to our MS Exchange server?

To the Commissioner of Police and the Government of Kenya:

We demand the unconditional release of our patriotic colleagues in the civil society who were brutally manhandled and arrested this morning as they exercised their constitutional rights to demand the resignation of Amos Kimunya as Finance Minister.

Their right to freedom of peaceable assembly was brutally violated by members of the Kenya Police. We demand their unconditional release for they have committed no crime. The Police officers who directed the assault on Ann Njogu and her colleagues must be subjected to appropriate discipline by the Commissioner of Police.

Kenya is not a Police State and Kenyans will not surrender their constitutional freedoms or their right to complain against wrongdoing, or to speak against grand corruption and impunity.

The arrested members of the civil society must be released.

In any event the man they were protesting against, former Finance Minister Amos Kimunya has resigned his office and stepped aside to facilitate investigations into the subject matter of the protest of civil society. In the spirit of a transparent enquiry into the role played by numerous public officers and institutions in the grand corruption saga that is the Grand Regency Hotel ‘handover’ and sale, it is morally and legally right that no one should be punished for speaking out for the Kenyan people in their time of need.

July 8th 2008 Mwalimu Mati www.marsgroupkenya.org

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He is, at 46, an atypical political leader. One who will, as Finance Minister, dare suggest the taxation of the grotesque (no other way of describing it really esp. the fact that most of it is tax free) MPs pay, self awarded in a moment of unadulterated hubris, so as to raise much needed revenue to cushion wananchi from spiralling living costs. He gets it.

But this was never about that.

That transaction that saw the Grand exchange hands was quite evidently mishandled. Whatever the value of the one glaring reminder of an era of ridiculously lucrative air export schemes, the ex-minister was caught in a complex web. Struggling to fill a gaping hole in his budget (his best yet, friends and foe agreed) mostly brought on by an ill timed mix of astronomical oil prices and slowed economic growth in the aftermath of the December elections, there was indeed a rush to raise money fast. When fuel retailers have to recalibrate their pumps to accommodate a new pricing paradigm, urgent action has to be taken to contain the inflation fuelled instability that is surely nigh.

There cannot be any doubt that he rightly expected a fight on his MP tax proposals and thus was not expecting extra revenue from that source for at least several months, had already sold off a significant part of the an actually well run and profitable government owned company and was running out of options. He had to sell the Grand fast. So when tales finally emerge that cast doubt on the integrity of the whole transaction, the messenger as opposed to the sender was unfortunately met with a parliament in desperate need to assert itself. The man who had the nerve to question their decadent ways was actually fallible himself! Not an opportunity to be missed.

After losing a confidence motion and MPs refusing to do business in the matters of debating and approving various parts of the budget, the fall guy had to fall.

Damnation or absolution simply cannot be passed yet but alas the brutal ways of democracy have to prevail.