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RwandAir
Everybody was somebody on today's RwandAir flight.
On the tarmac, I met a woman from the check-in counter: the same woman who sold me my ticket in downtown Dar es Salaam on Thursday.
The flight attendants appeared twice in the in-flight magazine. (I suppose most RwandAir staff are in the magazine, with the predictable exception of the white people in the cockpit.) It's the magazine's first and only issue, in RwandAir's first and only airplane, a fifty-seater made by Quebec-based Bombardier.
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Rains
Those aren't boats: they're buses. This is a picture of Dar es Salaam's main public transit canal, Posta.
It's the rainy season.
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Mapping Tanzania statistics
When people talk about a developing country, they usually lump every part of that country together. But that's misleading.
I found a neat way to display indicators on a map of Tanzania. I tested it out with Tanzania census data and the result was so neat I figured I should publish it.
If you are not using Internet Explorer (8 or lower), check out a map showing some of Tanzania's development indicators.
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Mbongo
In Dar es Salaam, "mbongo" is the way to be.
An "mbongo" is a cool person, and using the slang term is the first step to becoming one.
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The Queue
Few facets of life in Dar es Salaam are as reliable as the queue.
It begins near sunrise. The dala-dala pulls over, the conductors yells, "I'm going to Posta, climb in, hurry!" and each collected passenger obliges, squeezing into the territory inside until the few gaps between standing people carry drops of sweat to their feet. Hearing a hurried rat-a-tat on the door frame, the driver yanks the gearshaft into place, swings his steering wheel (sustained by electrical tape) clockwise, lurches back into the fray and promptly stops.
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He Shoots, He Scores!
Montreal and Dar es Salaam share a love of sport.
Sunday I took a bus around 2 p.m., before the soccer game between Simba and Yanga. The traffic was intense, to say the least.
On another bus around 6 p.m., the radio broadcast the end of the match. All of a sudden, "GOAL!" and Simba took the lead. The bus erupted in cheers and claps.
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I am in Tanzania
I am in Tanzania.
I wasn't excited. I wasn't worried. I wasn't afraid. I was only wondering: when does preparation end and the feeling of "Tanzania" begin?
The plan, in broad strokes, is this:
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Beginning of the End for Flash?
The iPad Apple announced today is, from what I understand, an oversized iPhone—which is great, in my opinion, especially considering it's cheaper than analysts expected. But web developers have already noticed that this mega-iPhone is missing one tool: Adobe Flash.
What's Flash? Only the most ubiquitous proprietary format on the Web. It plays videos on YouTube, handles file attachments in GMail, tells interactive stories on the New York Times, energizes punch-the-monkey online ads, and….
And, it's proprietary. Adobe owns the file formats and the only tools that produce and play Flash files properly. That means YouTube, GMail, New York Times, and just about every web browser on the planet depend on Adobe to function, because Adobe has the right to dictate what happens with Flash files.
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Should a Headline be a Question?
No.
The correct headline for this post is, "Headlines Should not be Questions."
Television news ads ask unanswered questions all the time. When I care about the answer, I look it up online and boycott the news that night on principle.
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U.S. 2012 Elections Might Get Crazy
I can still remember the spin of campaign wheels.
Remember how candidate Barack Obama was "palling around with terrorists?"
Whew, glad it's over, right? When the confetti settled, the Federal Election Commission tallied that $1.3 billion dollars had been crammed into campaigning. That's up 61 per cent from the 2004 election's $820 million, which was itself a 90 per cent increase from 2000's paltry $430 million.