Archive for August, 2009

Aug200927

Solomon King

9

Download the Unknown Soldier, Volume 1 – Haunted House

Unknown Soldier

Tumwijuke ( Ugandan Insomniac ) blogged about it a while earlier, and it’s been making a few waves. And right now, I just discovered from @whiteafrican that Vertigo, the DC Comics subsidiary is making the first Volume first Issue in Volume One ( Haunted House ) downloadable. Yup, it’s free, and yes, it is legit. Get your copy here. ( 20MB Download)

I’m too excited but dashing out for a meet so I can’t download it right now, but let me know what you guys think!

For a synopsis:

Welcome to Northern Uganda. In 2002, it’s a place where tourists are hacked to death with machetes, 12-year-olds with AK-47s wage war, and celebrities futilely try to get people to care. Moses Lwanga is a pacifist doctor caught at the center of this. But when his life is threatened, Moses suddenly realizes he knows how to kill all too well. What is this voice telling him the only way to fix what’s wrong with the country is by slaughtering those responsible? And what is Moses’ connection to past bandage-wrapped warrior?

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Aug200927

Solomon King

5

Whoops. BHH is today.

In all the kavuuyo of trying to get the new BlogSpirit out (and other dragon fights), I completely forgot to put up the BHH banner.

Well, it’s on today at Mateo’s, 6pm. Spread the word.

BHH Uganda

BHH Uganda


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Aug200921

Solomon King

26

mad props to the Node Six and Elemental Edge family!

For more reasons than I can possibly list, about 50% of all businesses fail before their first anniversary and about 30% fail before their third anniversary.

On 1st August 2009, Node Six and Elemental Edge made 3 years and 4 years respectively. Both these companies were started with next to zero, in my two spare bedrooms and lots of Abba’s grace, and guess what? We’ve survived becoming one set of statistics, and entering our fourth year as Node Six and fifth year as Elemental Edge, we’re looking to becoming another set of statistics, the ones that begin with “The Best….”

It’s a mean playing field out here, and survival can be for the strongest, or the fastest, or the most cautious or the bravest or whatever, really. There’s no formula, no “magic trick”, no set of carefully balanced equations. There is only a wicked combination of common-sense, poor sleep habits, tonnes of hard work, gut feeling, luck, faith, idiocy,  management lots of money (if you’re lucky) and lots and lots and lots and lots of mistake.

And if you’re like me and dropped out of University in your first semester, with no credentials to your name other than being Abba’s son and wearing geeky glasses, then you need all the prayers you can get.

But…

Through all these years, I have been blessed and honoured to work with some of the most brilliant, hardworking, self-sacrificing people I know.

This post is dedicated to all of you. Yes, the whole lot.

I will make this personal because, a) it’s my blog and b) this is about the blessings I have had working with y’all. [ The rest of you can go home now, read the stuff below, or skip to where it says "Moving On" ]
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Aug200917

Solomon King

20

you. yes you. you’re a wuss.

Yes. You are.

Allow me to explain.

First, the general description of a wuss is; “a person who is physically weak and ineffectual”. It has been used more recently however, to derogatorily  describe a man who is weak, ineffectual, effeminate and wishy-washy, especially when it comes to the ladies.

Some friends and I have a long running joke about wusses, sometimes even dissing ourselves in the process. Don’t sweat it, it’s a guy thing.

So, couple of days back, at the week-long peak of this joke, we’re in an informal meeting discussing a way forward on some project and because someone was being indecisive about a certain action, we jokingly called him a wuss. We laughed it off and eventually forged a way forward.

That night however, those same words came back to torment me during my quiet moment of self-reflection, and the reality hit me hard;

I realised that I was being a (business) wuss in so many ways.

It was a very painful blow to the gut.
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Aug200905

Solomon King

27

The Advent of True Broadband in Uganda? No, Not yet.

On Thursday, 23rd July 2009, Seacom went “live”.

For Ugandans, that was a momentous occasion in more ways than one. As one of the speakers put it, it heralded the beginning of “new beginnings”. I’ve been priviledged to be involved in the excitement to an extent, and I will do my best to recap.

The Seacom Launch Event

The event was more of a media launch, a demonstration of the capabilities of the Seacom fibre optic cable. I was invited to the event by Lowe Scanad’s PR department, through Mr Collin Asiimwe.

My verdict? Honestly, I was blown away! For the first time ever, in Uganda, I was able view online video tutorials real time. We’re talking tutorials that are close to 700MB. Typically, I leave them downloading overnight(s) and watch them the next day, but this time, there was almost zero buffering of the videos. Mr Godfrey Ivudria of Business Week was seated next to me and he was watching CNN Live… well, live. Realtime.

I was also getting simultaneous download speeds of close to 180KB/s (about 1.4mbps) while watching the video tutorial. To put that in context, my normal internet connection gives me download speeds of about 10 KB/s (about 81kpbs) at night, when the rest of the users are asleep! I wasn’t able to run some more stress tests due to time constraints, but needless to say, I was very impressed. I should have planned more and brought a whole batch of files to download!

The highlight of the day though, was the live broadcast of the continental Seacom launch. It was held in Tanzania and presided over by the Tanzanian President, Jakaya Kikwete. Picture quality was excellent and the video stream was seamless, apart from one or two brief glitches. I was witnessing broadband at its truest.
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