Madsvibe – Mad Vibe

First, the title of the post is completely random. I couldn’t come up with a good enough title fast enough before I completely abandoned the idea to post something.

I have been away from here a while, chiefly because of this and partly because I may just be plain lazy. While I was away, a new year came upon us. Problem is, in my mind and to my eyes, it looks exactly like that last one. So far anyway. We’ve been played people!

Having said that, this should be a pretty interesting year for Kenya. We have a referendum coming up, if the politicians can agree on when and how to hold it. I am not holding my breath. Politicians are like procrastinators, only with deadlier consequences for their actions for the governed. Reminds me of something Mark Twain said: ‘Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.’

I am sufficiently impressed by the Nexus One but I think it may not necessarily shake the iPhone’s dominance and the mass hysteria it stirs in people around the world. Not that it doesn’t have other issues to deal with in the mean time. An unlocked Nexus One is selling for about Sh40,000 in the States on T-Mobile. Wonder how much it will cost when it gets to Kenya, considering the Orange began selling the iPhone 3G at a whopping Sh60,000.

I see this as the year Safaricon Safaricom’s mobile money transfer service M-PESA grows into an even bigger phenomenon. At over 7.3 million subscribers, you can already see why banks are worried. And one gets the feeling that Safaricom is only getting started. Some interesting perspective on the M-Pesa ownership from blogger Tovuti Sanifu. Chief competitor Zain’s ZAP should have only scratched the half a million users mark.

How much longer before Facebook is completely outshone by Twitter, if ever? I took slightly over a month away from Facebook and I returned this week to find it even more pointless than when I had left. Not to mention the ever-lingering privacy issues.

What exactly happened to the once promising Kenya Blogs Webring? It lost its mojo some time back, right about the same time the aggregator got a ‘new look’ that resembles a document done by a novice on Word. Then it got taken over by jobs advertisements and unending sports commentary. You may still find the odd good blogger in there somewhere [like Yours Truly ] but what is that they say about needles and haystacks again? There are some efforts by KDN’s Butterfly to provide an alternative but even that needs some work.

Also towards the end of last year, while I was busy roasting the insides of a particularly tasty goat, one Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was busy ruining the picture perfect American Christmas. And now, the frenzied American media won’t have enough of what to do, or not to do with him. Why a priviledged 23-year-old Nigerian with the best education and exposure money can buy gets radicalized and is convinced suicide bombing a plane somehow helps his cause beats me.

I have become a bemused spectator to the never-ending ideological feud of the American TV people Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann, Bill O’Reilly and the rest.

Gotta run, have a great ‘new’ year, if yours looks better than mine