Another side of Janet Mbugua

Watching Janet on the telly, reading the news, presenting Sunrise Live, her smile filling the studio, giving us one more reason to smile or laugh or criticize her joke or just to love her, one would never have thought of the real Janet Mbugua. The Janet Mbugua outside the telly, the Janet Mbugua without the make up, Janet Mbugua the "life of the party" as she would put it.

After her leaving KTN, wonder why they say "we never fully appreciate the things we have", I googled a bit about her and got some very interesting stories. "Tender, She calls" is a story by Janet Mbugua which kind of reflects her other side. Maybe not each and every other sentence, but the whole story does bring to light some bits of her that we dont know. The story kinds of smoothens the blurry picture that one might have of her, its a kind of glue that glues the different pieces together.

Anywayz, long story short. With the personality of Janet Mbugua that you know, read this interview from the standard. Any pictures forming, or different pieces of puzzle? Then read Tender, She Calls by her and tell me if that story might not be mixed with bits and pieces of her real life experience if not all of it is about her, although that might be far fetched.

Wat do you think?

kenyan men we are at it again

A funny look at kenyan men.

http://www.eastandard.net/mag/InsidePage.php?id=1144017336&cid=303&

the whip has been cracked, or is it will be cracked

Life for Nairobi's residents has just got a little bit more interesting. Woe unto you who dont follow the street lights, have nuiscance dogs and depend on mikokoteni (hand carts) to go about your businesses Phillip Kisia, the new Nairobi Town Clerk wants to do some whip cracking.

More on this in http://www.eastandard.net/InsidePage.php?id=1144017316&cid=4

Uhuru's Budget

After reading this years budget I was convinced that Kenyans we dont lack people who think straight. UK is one of them and the technocrats who were involved in the budget making process. Though there were no tax reductions on some of the common items for you, me and Wanjiku, we will definetly reap from it in some few years should it be implemented.

The huge allocations to be channeled through CDF is quite encouraging and the only final thing that UK should do is pass a motion making our greedy MPs mere patrons with no or very little say on the day to day running of the CDF committees. This would be where the rubber meets the road. Imagine that we can have 210 Alliance High Schools, or Mangu or Starehe!! My brother would not have to rot in a sub-standard school just because he missed the cutoff by a few marks. What about the opportunities people will enjoy in each constituency.

So hold your breath and lets hope that we will be able to navigate the murky waters ahead.

[MapServer Error]: msLoadMap(): First token must be MAP, this doesn't look like a mapfile.

In my development machine, I managed to set up mapserver to run on both windows and PUbuntu OS without much problem. On pushing the files to the host, I kept getting this as a first warning followed by another warning PHP Warning: Failed to open map file mapfile.map and then the killer PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function setextent() on a non-object . This was so disturbing since I was using the exact same copy of files both in the development machine and the server, although the sever was running on fedora.

Basically it boils down to this. Depending on the version of mapserver that you are running the map file might not be used on both versions. Some versions of mapsever requires a directive MAP at the beginning and an END at the end of the map file and a SYMBOLSET directive at the begining of a symbol file and a END directive at the end.

These two directives have made my life a living hell for 3 days, so I am posting this to help anybody who might be in the same pool.

Internet Everywhere Follow Up

In last post, I hailed Internet Everywhere from Orange as the internet solution of choice for people like us, who are on the move and internet is a must everywhere you go.

Now this is a quick follow up or just a big complain.. infact this post should be Orange your customer service SUCK!! What about that?

So this ka Internet Everywhere(IE from now on) works fine until 3wks, on a sato, into using it when it dies on me. Am like iz how? So on monday I take it to the orange guys and they start acting dumb, ati everything is fine on their side its the system fault. Since am a developer I kind of understand and I am like hey, do your thing I will wait. There is a guy there by the name Korir? Please Korir if you reading this, go into a PR class, your customer skills SUCK? First, not everybody is a kid in terms of technology, we kinda understand some things so treat us like "grown ups" and am sure there are guys out there who can teach you a thing or two. So basically this guy tells me that he will sort me, it was at 5pm, and i should wait. He keeps me waiting only at the end he tells me that the person who should sort me out is out and he cant do anything. That is after keeping me there for close to an hour. HALLO then why didnt u tell me that at the beginning? So I go home cursing like... but since the ka IE wont work I vow to show up at their offices the next day.

So the next day I show up at 8am and meet the supposed "saviour" Koros, another guy good PR aint part of his vocubulary. The guy takes me round in circles, circles, circles instead of just telling that there is a problem with the all IEs on post paid. One thing, if that guy tells u leave your number he will call you, dont even dare! That will never happen. He started telling me that right when I was buying the ka IE till "my one week of crisis", when I discovered my mistake. Its like he has a hobby of collecting customer numbers.

All in all when I discovered that its a kind of a "universal problem", I just chilled till when it would start working, which was a week later.

Now this is another funny part, when I went to pay my bill, nobody knew how much I should pay. Yea some of you would say that since I am on post-paid should it should be a flat rate, I was paying late and had either overused my bundle or my month was up. They checked their systems and did all they could, they just couldnt figure out my consumption.

So am just waiting with abated breath. Anywayz at least its working.

Will keep you posted!