Hujambo!

I saw this Swahili kanga on Google the other day, a celebration of the East African Community:

Umoja ni nguvu, utengano ni udhaifu

The phrase is some deep Tanzanian Swahili, but I cracked the code with a little dictionary magic: “Unity is strength, separation is weakness.”

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Has anyone seen the movie Sita Sings the Blues? It’s an animated full-length movie which has some interesting ideas behind it; a note from the artist on the official website:

I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.

How cool is that? This is the exact idea behind the Linux kernel, the Free Software Foundation, and the FLOSS movement in general. Do what you want with it, as long as what you do with it remains under the same freedoms. It’s not a restriction, it’s a lack of restriction.

Download it and pass it on; it’s free.
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Here’s a group photo from the Introduction to Linux seminar I gave last weekend.

The seminar was held at ILRI, Nairobi on April 17th. The Regional Students Group of East Africa seems to be very active in Kenya (especially at ILRI, where the seminar was organized). The intended audience of the seminar was students doing a grad or undergrad course in a field related to Bioinformatics. The slides for the presentation are here.

I’m giving a seminar on the Linux operating system at ILRI on Saturday, April 17th. The audience is around thirty aspiring bioinformaticians from the Regional Students Group of East Africa. Most of the participants are from Kenya, but we’ve had confirmations from students in Uganda and Cameroon as well. I haven’t taught since I left Tala and Holy Rosary College about eight months ago, but I like talking and I like Linux, so it should be a good day!

I’ve been pretty busy at work lately, so I haven’t had so much time to prepare my notes. The target audience is beginners, but the talk is all day and should be both hands-on and intensive. Not wanting to let anyone down, I decided to leave work early today to work on my notes from my house, only to find that there was no electricity in Westlands. Fantastic!

I have walked to the Sarit Centre in Westlands and am now working away to the sweet taste of an iced coffee inside Java House. I might head over to Art Cafe in the Westgate mall just to change the scenery a bit. I still have about 50% of my slides left… oh no!

It’s hard to believe that five months ago I was living in Tala, working as a VSO volunteer. Life was good then, simple; I was living in a rural area of Kenya, hakuna matata (no problems). I didn’t particularly enjoy teaching, but I loved my colleagues and the pole pole (slow) life was easy to get used to. Teaching was a great experience, and sure it was challenging, but I just didn’t enjoy it. I want to be the guy hacking the computers, not the guy writing about hacking computers on a blackboard!

Life at ILRI has been great since I started in August, 2009. I wear khakis and a collared shirt once or twice a week, and jeans and a t-shirt the other days. I’ve worn a hat before and nobody seemed to mind, but I promise I won’t make a habit of it. Scientists at ILRI are all brilliant, and I’m learning new things about molecular biology and bioinformatics every day. I’ve always had a hobby interest in science, and it’s fun to be surrounded around “real” scientists.

Being around scientists all the time means I’ve realized I need to up my game. There is so much to learn, and every little bit of biology I pick up helps me work better with the scientists. The thought of going back to school is daunting, but the thought of being a part of something, like finding a vaccine or cracking some genetic code, is exciting (even if I was only the guy who set up the software). I’ve been given a one-year contract, so we’ll see what happens…

But first, before we crack Theileria parva, I gotta see if I can shake this cold I’ve been fighting for a few weeks. Goodnight!