This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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In the future, is this going to happen every time anybody goes missing? Once again there is a Mechanical Turk project to help search and rescue find a missing person:
Help Find Steve Fossett
(kdawson, Slashdot)
An anonymous reader invites us to join in the hunt for the missing Steve Fossett using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. DigitalGlobe, one of Google’s imaging partners, has acquired new high-resolution satellite imagery of the area where Fossett disappeared on Monday. The public can now go through this imagery and quickly flag any images that might contain Fossett’s plane. Flagged images will receive further review by search and rescue experts.
I did some for a few minutes. I don’t think I found him.
The book above is not available at all your normal book outlets. (At least not for the vast majority of the readers of this blog.) These are the memoirs of Valeriano Ferrão, who was Mozambique‘s ambassador to the United States from the mid 1980’s to the mid 1990’s. It was just published in Mozambique. He is the one on the right of the cover. In the center is Samora Machel the first president of independent Mozambique. And who is that on the left? Oh yeah, that’s me. :-)
According to my dad, who just received an actual copy of the book:
The caption on the photo in the inside of the book reads:
O autor com President Samora Machel e Samuel Minter, filho de Ruth e Bill Minter, professores na escola de Bagamoyo
Translation: “The author with President Samora Machel and Samuel Minter, son of Ruth and Bill Minter, teachers in the Bagamoyo school.”
I of course do not remember being there when this picture was taken. I do remember meeting Ambassador Ferrão a number of times when I was a teenager living near Washington DC. And I remember meeting President Machel once during those same years when I got to attend a reception for him while he was on a state visit to Washington. I remember him quite clearly saying something along the lines of “This is little Sam? He looks so much like his father. I remember you when you were THIS tall…” and showing his hand at a level about at my height in this picture. Not too long thereafter he was killed in a plane crash the cause of which is still controversial today.
In any case, I have now made my way to the cover of a book. Although I don’t imagine I feature in the narrative itself at all. :-)
It is somewhat strange to me that at that age I was in the middle of some very interesting and historic events, but because of my age I have no memories of it beyond snippets of stories from my parents. (For instance, I know I was passed overhead from person to person to get me out of a stadium where there was a major rally celebrating independence to keep me from being trampled by the crowds… but of course I don’t remember a thing.) I think I am now at an age where I could appreciate those memories and learn from them. But they are not there. I was a little too young to retain anything.
And even when I visited Mozambique again for a few weeks while I was in college, I was still a little too young and not quite ready to get a lot of value out of it. The culture shock was a little too big and the time too short. Perhaps someday I’ll visit again. But probably not any time soon.
A little over 4 hours ago once Amy was back home from her class trip, she actually was able to use her computer for real for the first time. I had finished all the mucking with it I was going to do and moved it to the location it will live last night. So far she’s been watching her Tivo via her Slingbox and then watching a DVD while IMing me and Brandy occasionally. She seems quite happy. Cool.
On the way to work today there were a huge amount of people walking across the bridge. A large proportion of them were wearing pink. I am guessing it was some sort of organized event and not just random. :-)
Just some random thoughts:
- No bills longer than two standard typewritten pages (with appropriate full definition on what exactly that means)
- Bills must be self contained and not incorporate other content by reference
- Previous laws can be repealed, new laws can be passed, old laws can not be amended
- Any house or senate member can introduce any bill at any time
- Bills introduced must be introduced by a single member only
- The full text along with the name of the introducing member would be published immediately
- No amendments
- No debates
- Each bill must come to a yes/no vote no sooner than 5 calendar days after introduction and no later than 10 calendar days.
- If a bill passes in one chamber it would be automatically introduced in the other chamber and an up/down vote must occur within 5 calendar days
- Once again no amendments and no debates, just the vote
That would be much better. The way they do it now is non-sensical. Oh, and add to that one more item that would have to be a constitutional amendment, not just a change in congressional rules…
All laws, without exception, expire automatically 10 years after they are signed into law. All existing laws will expire on the next 10 year anniversary of their original passage beginning 5 years after the passage of the amendment.
(OK, some of the others might have to be amendments too if they were to stick rather than just be guidelines that the congress could override for itself whenever it wanted.)
There ya go.
Of course, if I was going to do all that, I might go even further and require a 90% super-majority to pass any legislation at all. Then you’d only get the stuff where there really was widespread agreement and you’d have a government with a much more limited reach I think. Dunno.
OK, I’m done musing about my completely unrealistic notions of how I would structure a government. I’ve got other things to do tonight.
Yout know, I’ve been thrown all off by the Pandora thing. I’ve still been messing with minor things on it each evening, adding a few more bits of software, cleaning out Amy’s spam (not just deleting it all, but looking through it for false positives) etc. So I haven’t been answering email and I didn’t make a blog post last night. I was going to say something about the new iPods. But I didn’t. So here is a random post about not much.
In the mean time, Amy is on the one day overnight class field trip that her school always does the first week of each school year as a way for the kids to spin back up (and meet the new people). So tonight I’ll finish up everything I want to do. Anything I don’t get done, I just don’t worry about right now. I want her to have the machine and have me done with fiddling and such when she gets back from her trip tomorrow.
Looks like the little service that was supplying those map widget thingies I posted about yesterday and put up elsewhere on the site earlier today has fallen over and died under the increased load of all the people trying out the map thingy. Or something. http://whos.amung.us/ gives a nice little PHP information summary page rather than their website, and http://maps.amung.us/ just isn’t answering at all any more. Cool.
I guess they got a bit too much traffic a bit too fast and melted their servers. Oops.
I’ll leave their stuff up on my site for the moment assuming they will recover. If they don’t by the time I get home tonight, maybe I’ll comment out their stuff until they come back.
Hmmm… the maps one just answered… just REALLY slow and not quite functional. Maybe they are on the way back. That would be cool. I like the map thingy.
The first (bad) picture of Amy with Pandora. Pandora is the chosen name of the new iMac. Seems appropriate in a variety of ways. Pandora is now busily transferring stuff from Amy’s account on Cronus. In the meantime Cronus (and thus the webcam and AbulWiki) are down. This will probably last a few hours. She has 30 gig of stuff to move. Not as bad as when I moved from Zeus to Cronus, but still plenty!
Then after that stuff is all moved, I have a few other things I’ll be setting up. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it all done before TOO late tonight. I have a meeting at 15 UTC today, so I’ll have to be up even earlier than that. I suspect even if this all gets done, it will be a day relatively light on sleep. This migration process takes forever, and then after that’s done I’ll probably be messing with it for a couple of hours before everything is set how I want it to be to hand over to her.
Anyway… we’re in process.
John Donaghy, a second cousin once removed of Brandy’s… see, since I’m been doing that genealogy stuff I’ve got that terminology down… is having some adventures in Honduras…
Eye of the Storm
(John Donaghy, Hermano Juancito)
The crowd was ugly, obviously whipped into a fury. At one point they opened the back door of the van and began shouting and hitting the floor. It was a very tense moment but I took a picture. Looking at it later many of the people didn’t appear to be angry, but appeared as if they were just “having fun†by trying to terrify us. This was my first experience of a real mob and it was ugly. The police intervened and closed the door. The police slowly opened up a path for us, even while the mob banged on the windows. But as we slowly progressed, we noticed several people walking beside the van. The people from the blockade were walking beside the van. They had come to protect their bishop. What courage!
As we left the bishop said that he had thought of getting out of the car. Thank God he didn’t; he would probably have been beaten, at the very least.
I was a little shaken up – but more than that I have a sense of gratitude for having had the chance to accompany the bishop, the human rights office, and the people.
He’s been posting a few times a month since he left Iowa for Honduras. It is interesting reading.
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