andersoj.org oddments

After some long delay, I’m writing the final message (we hope) from our trip to Africa. We find ourselves at Johannesburg International Airport (again) due to a slight hiccup in our space-available travel plans. This is the first time I’ve gone through immigration twice in two hours before. Sadly, our luggage seems to have hitched a ride on our reputations and preceeded us to Frankfurt. South African airways assures my wife that this evening’s flight is “wide open”, so we hope to be enroute soon.

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Friends-

Today I write from Gabarone, Botswana. We have been here with Phil Rotz for the last couple of days, and enjoying ourselves immensely. When last I wrote, we were in Cape Town. We rousted ourselves very early in the morning (as is our wont, and that of every space-available air traveller), and drove to the airport in Cape Town to divest ourselves of a rental car and hop on an airplane. Since both of these operations create stress in my life, I was very pleased to find that the airport offered omelettes and coffee.

We arrived back in Johannesburg at 8:00am, at which point we set about getting into town, to the bus terminal at Park Station. One would think that public transport of some kind would be available, but no dice. A short but fairly spendy taxi trip got us to Park Station, where we cooled our heels until 2:30pm in Buffalo Bill’s Pub and Grille. We then hopped on the Seabelo bus bound for Gabarone. After an enjoyable communal experience of watching Maid in Manhattan (go, J-Lo!) with our fellow travelers, we arrived at the border with Botswana around 7:30pm. Then the magic of border crossing by bus commenced. It took quite a long time, involving unloading of bags, wandering around, and aimless-looking official types milling about sending SMS messages and generally not paying attention.

Happily, we reboarded the bus and made it into Gabs by 9:30. Phil and companions picked us up and ushered us to a hot meal at very trendy digs.

We had a chance to have dinner last night with a number of friends of Phil — more later on this — and today, we visited a wildlife preserve at Mokolodi. Lots of good pictures, and we got to see Elephant, Rhino, and Cheetah close up. Angela had a chance to pet the Cheetah, but it seemed to react badly to Phil and I.

This afternoon, Phil drove us by an artist’s community. We had a wonderful discussion with the owners of a pottery shop and picked up some interesting pieces.

Tomorrow, to Maun and more wildlife.

I have posted a few more of our photos at:
http://andersoj.org/gallery/v/2006-africa/

For those of you who have missed the earlier emails, I’ve also posted these at my much-neglected blog:
http://andersoj.org/oddments

But I have had to cut down on the uploads due to the fact that this is a
satellite internet connection, with end-to-end latency with the US of
about 3.5 seconds. That makes for a 7 second roundtrip, and TCP/IP was
not designed for such insanity.

Cheers.

JA

–
Jonathan S. Anderson — andersoj@andersoj.org
tel: 540.961.0229 (H) 540.818.2896 (C)
www: http://andersoj.org/oddments
pgp key: http://andersoj.org/personal/0xF0BE7EF8-pub.asc

Enough with this “virtual world” nonsense. I love to see it when folks use the internet to push people back into the real world in new ways. Here are a couple of services I’ve recently discovered and taken great pleasure in:

The first is LibraryThing, a simple mechanism for listing the contents of your personal library online. By making use of open APIs provided by Amazon.com, Library of Congress, and others, they make it quite simple to add items to your collection, “tag” them into categories, and share with others.

Second: Commit random acts of literacy! Read & Release at BookCrossing!. The BookCrossing service provides an way of building community by sharing books. As a member, you are encouraged to place a simple bookplate with a numerical ID into books you leave laying around in bus stations and doctor’s offices. When someone picks up one of these books, they are implored to read, make a journal entry online for the book, and pass it along to a friend or stranger. I’ve just had my first release caught by a VT student, and it’s oddly thrilling… An old NPR interview.

–JA

I have just opened an account at ShareBuilder, and so I’m on an “ethical investing” kick. Christian Science monitor has an interesting article on DIY investing along with some related internet resources. –JA

The Josh Kornbluth has a show on PBS. I have no idea what to do with this, other than suggest that others take a gander at Haiku Tunnel (or, of you’re a Netflix aficianado), then sit back and marvel with me. –JA

I wanted to call your attention to a few features I’ve been playing with on this site. The first thing to note is the partial integration of my del.icio.us links with the blog site. You can jump to the full interface here. I’ve also introduced a cached copy in the “pages” section of the sidebar. This allows me to maintain a local copy of these links in the event that the del.icio.us server goes down, and it helps reduce load on the server. I’d be pleased to hear if anyone else has a del.icio.us account…

I have also provided a link to my tribe.net profile in the “andersoj stuff” section of the sidebar. This is an interesting social networking project that you might enjoy visiting. If you’d like a tribe.net invitation, please let meknow.

Another interesting feature is the geourl link, which provides a database of web services organized geographically. Have a look at the geourl site to see how your web services could participate. The link from here will show you, for instance, what web services claim to be located near our home in Blacksburg, VA.

Renewed interest in secure email has encouraged me to make my GnuPG key available. See the page called communicating-with-jonathan for my public key and links to related resources. An S/MIME key is also available upon request.

I have also registered this site with a few blog search services. For instance, google’s blogsearch service now indexes the stories on this site, and you can follow links between this blog and others by looking at technorati.

My brother David has put his ‘blog up on blogger.com, so I’ve added him to my “community” links over on the right. Stop by and say hello to his son, Tryston. –JA