Obligated Opera (browswer) Fanboi

Well I use the Opera browser and have been for years and have consistently found it to be the best of the best (though FireFox with its extensions does give Opera a run for its money). On their site they asked users to post this video to help show people what the new Opera 9.5 is capable of:

Opera Mini 4
Uploaded by operasoftware

Buddhas of Bamiyan

Buddhas of Bamiyan
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

I was in the Bamiyan province again recently and stayed overnight in Bamiyan city so I went to see the buddhas again. This picture is just a distance panoramic showing the mountain they are (were?) carved into and both of the statue remains (far left and far right).

Panoramic of Kabul

Panoramic of Kabul
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

This is hands down the largest panoramic photo I have ever taken, it consists of over 60 separate photos stitched together (ok, so I have seen gigapixel panos but for me this is big) and the original .psb file was over 600megs, my little laptop just about choked on it. To get under the flickr 10meg requirement I shrank the photo to about 1/3rd of its original size (the original is a bit over 50,000 pixels wide), converted it to jpeg, and used a quality setting of ~70… whew. But hey, I got just about exactly what I wanted, the mountains with the homes built on them. In Kabul what I think of the most is these homes that are built on the sides of the mountains, apparently where Kabul’s poorer citizens live. I had tried to take a photo to capture what I see before but it just didn’t turn out the way I wanted so I had some Afghan’s in my organization ask the construction crew working on a 5 story tall building not far from my office and they said sure so I went armed with my dinky little SD700 IS cannon camera a tripod and spent like 10 minutes taking pictures for this panoramic.

Car hits person...

I was on my way to the hospital to try and get some meds for a bad cough I have and not 5 minutes after we pulled out of the driveway we hit a person.

 

I am still getting over this incident, I wasn’t driving (between the insane drivers and the insane pedestrians you couldn’t pay me to drive in this town) but I still remember it in slow motion starting with the driver slamming on the brakes and honking. A young guy was crossing the road and was standing in the middle waiting for a chance to go across I guess but all I remember was hearing the brakes and seeing us careening towards him, he smacking our windshield, and then his being thrown down onto the pavement. This is a first for me, and in truth I don’t feel as bothered by it as I think I should be (certain dehumanizing aspect of humanitarian work are troubling at best).

 

I have to admit though that the heartening part was how our driver ran out of the car, scooped the guy up, a witness jumped into the car with us and we raced to the hospital but the irony was that the person who could have easily drove off (my driver) was the one with a lot to loose (another person with my organization was jailed for hitting a pedestrian just recently) was the one who risked quite a bit, we raced to the hospital and the doctors actually made the guy wait and made my driver go get a ticket then they spent all of 5 minutes looking over him and then said he was “hoobas” (fine/good) no x-rays, not checking for internal bleeding etc just hoobas; I was miffed and ready to shell out the money if anyone asked “who will pay” (or more likely to pay a bribe to expedite the process)  but honestly everyone seemed satisfied with the diagnosis including the victim.

 

The victim wasn’t mad, yelling or anything (though he could very well have at least been partially at fault but in Afghanistan that is a moot point, the driver is always at fault and the victims can quite often make quite a bit off the drivers in bribes). We then went by a pharmacy and my driver dropped me off and then took the guy home…

 

It’s still rather surreal.

 

 

 

The eeepc as a portable server?

I have been trying to follow uber cheap laptops for awhile  mainly because I want a server and I am abroad alot, I’ve been following a bunch of them but it has pretty much come down to the EEEPC and the OLPC

 

My needs for a server are kinda minimal, I guess because assuming it has enough USB ports I can plug in most of the extra functionality I need.

 

My criteria are as follows:

 

1. Extra Small (can pack up and be take to the next place without needing to rent a shipping container)
2. WiFi enabled (preferably Wireless N)
3. Minimum of two USB ports, four would be better (of course this could be remedied with a USB dongle but I hate those things)
4. Low power usage / Long battery life
5. Cheap
6. Doesn’t have too much funky hardware (i.e. can install Linux on it ok)
7. And a few other things I can’t think of now

 

It seems like the EEEPC would probably be the best choice in this situation while the OLPC would be better for individual users/schools as a primary laptop. I would be interested in seeing if the EEEPC could be saddled with a larger/cheaper non-solid-state hard drive but that is not critical.

 

The things I would use my server for are:

 

1. Printing from other gizmos
2. Scanning (I hate connecting/disconnecting stuff from my primary notebook when I want to carry it around so the less stuff the better)
3. Super customizable firewall
4. Always on VoIP &/or Asterisk/PBX
5. Network handling (that is, give my primary computer & VoIP priority over everything else, QoS/balancing)
6. Running long processes (like panoramic stitching, video rendering etc [yes, on the EEEPC I would be *really* slow but I don’t care so long as my primary device isn’t slowed down])
7. P2P downloading (so I can have emule and bittorrent running on it instead of my primary computer)
8. File server (not sure about this one, I’ve been drooling over the thought of getting the D-Link DNS-323 2-Bay NAS and loading it up with two terabyte drives)
9. DVR (I haven’t investigated this too much yet but I am positive there is some USB gizmo that would allow me to connect to a satellite or cable box)

 

Yeah, that’s about it for now. I am betting some people would say “just get an old desktop” and indeed I know rich expats who toss most of their stuff

 

 

Medical Care and Knowledge in Afghanistan

It is amazing how far a little education can go. I work for an NGO in Afghanistan and most of our staff is Afghan with varying degrees of education (mostly just high school graduates, which in Afghanistan is better than average). Our janitor Sayed is fairly typical, very nice to me and most of the staff, hates cats (drowns them), and doesn’t let his daughter go to school… and almost no education. For some reason, in my whole organization, there is no first aid kits so my personal kits has been used for everyone except me (ok, not true, for 2 staff and one day worker). One day Sayed was limping around and I asked why (he speaks no english and I barely speak Dari) and he pointed to a festering cut on his foot that he had wrapped up with a dirty rag. I sighed, fetched my first aid kit cleaned the wound, gave him some antibacterial ointment and some sterile gauze and got our translator to help. Turns out the doctor had said putting a rag on it and washing it (with water) would suffice, it hadn’t.

 

Well a few weeks later he came with his son whose sibling had apparently taken a large swath of skin off his heel (with a stone or something) so I busted out my med kits again and went through the paces (this time it hadn’t been long enough to get infected). I actually had run out of some things and sent my translator to go to a pharmacy to get supplies (I had used up all the antibacterial ointment on the father, guard, and a guy installing a generator). Amazingly enough, the pharmacy didn’t have any hydrogen peroxide and no medical tape, but what they did have was some of the hardest/scratchiest bandages I have ever seen/felt so I made do with those. I also had to tell the father to use boiled hot water (not straight from the well) with soap, then wash the wound, then put bandages on it and I had to re-stress that no dirt can get on the wound… and he took it all in saying it sounded like good advice (advice he hadn’t heard before).

 

 

 

NPR : Wal-Mart Expanding Discount Drug Program

The title was enough to get me to listen to this report about Wal-Mart and generic drugs but what struck me was what the commentator said at the end of the report, something about this possibly being Wal-Mart taking aim at the American healthcare system as a whole.

I am not a fan of Wal-Mart by *any* stretch of the imagination, not at all (I have not been to a Wal-Mart to shop for myself for over 10 years, though i have tagged along with friends) but for the first time in a long time i am rooting for Wal-Mart to take that first shot across the bow of the healthcare industry. I also am not a fan of government run institutions since they are quite often chronically bureaucratic, and i have heard of nightmares in European countries about not being able to get appointments for months at a time so i guess i fall somewhere in between. Despite my being (somewhere) in the middle i am wholly convinced that the American healthcare system is deeply flawed and just as entrenched so having someone like Wal-Mart shake things up can't be a bad thing.

How can you tell if a Politician is lying?

If their mouth moves, or so the joke goes.

At first it seemed like Obama might have a chance in the election but lately it seems that Hillary has a strong lead again (she has always had a lead but not always a strong one). Hillary would not necessarily be my first choice just because I don’t feel she is entirely trustable, or more actually she is a dyed in the wool politician.

My point of writing this though is my wish of an vote aggregation/statistic site that can list a bunch of topics and then show statistics on how the person voted in each of those areas. Example, during her tenure Hillary voted for 10 measures providing more environmental protections out of 13 so I would know that despite what she says (remember the moving mouth) she tends towards environmental issues. Showing something like this in a bunch of graphs etc would be great, and their might be such a site but I have yet to find it.

Since you can’t really trust what a politician says, you should be able to see what a politician does, or in the ideal world you should.

Another error of Iraq

I was catching up on my podcasts (not easy in a world of seriously limited bandwidth [an average of 1kbps]) and was listening to NPR’s “Ted Koppel Report” and “On The Media”. I consider Koppel’s commentary to be relatively fair (obviously leftist but in his case not unfair) and he made the mention of what Iran’s place was before 911/Iraq and what it is now, at least in terms of rhetoric and influence they are stronger now than before, why? Well there are no doubt a myriad of reasons but one of the reasons that Koppel points out is that Iran (Shite) was pretty much a balance to Iraq (Sunni) but now that Sadam has been toppled Iran is now somewhat unchecked. The balance held by these two countries was imperfect at best but would it not have been better to let them keep each other in check (neither has been found to ever have supported Al-Qaeda) than sacrifice our troops, reputation, and money to take out Iraq?

 

Another point that I seem to remember now but had forgotten is that the Bush administration (more like Cheney) originally said that Sadam was harboring Al-Qaeda, well it turns out Sadam wasn’t harboring Bin Laden’s cohorts but the irony is that now Iraq is crawling with Al-Qaeda “franchises”, the irony is painful at best.

 

Swan Shaped Paddle Boats, in Afghanistan

Swan Shaped Paddle Boats, in Afghanistan
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

This is one of the last things I would have expected to see in Afghanistan, especially out here where there is no paved road leading to it (you actually need 4 wheeled drive to get here [this is the first country I have seen true 4wd minivans, complete with locking hubs]), no electricity, and no running water but they have paddle boats.

As I have mentioned in some of my other posts we arrived here (Band-e Amir) fairly late so I don’t remember seeing these boats but the next morning as we were eating breakfast people started a line for the paddle boats which made for an entertaining breakfast.

That I am aware of there are very few bodies of water in Afghanistan (lots of little streams and a few rivers thanks to the yearly melting of the snow in Afghanistan’s many mountains, but few ponds or lakes) so Band-e Amir is a special treat for many afghans. There were many more people crowded around the docks (two stones used for stepping into the boats) and I am not sure if it was because they didn’t have enough money (conceivable but if they could afford to go to Band-e Amir I would think taking a boat wouldn’t be too much extra) or because of fear. I never asked any of them why but I have heard that many Afghans aren’t the best swimmers (one could hardly expect them to be given the lack of water) so that is a plausible explanation.

Around The Behsood II Office

Around The Behsood II Office
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

Behsood II is a district in the Wardak Province that is just about as isolated as Behsood I. I had just finished playing volleyball that evening (the seemingly favorite after-work past time) and thought I would snap off a few photos so I walked out from the compound to a spot nearby where I thought I could get a good 360 degree photo.

The compound to the right is my organizations Behsood II field office, by far the nicest/biggest field office I have seen so far (though I hear the one up north in Mazarsharif is really nice). One of the things that amused me (though I am not sure amused is the right word) is the satellite TV the office has. Every evening after volleyball they rev up the generator for lights and TV. I will admit that these offices are homes of sort to staff and life out there can get pretty boring but satellite TV just seems a bit frivolous to me (as does spending 4-8 liters of gas per evening).

Anyway, the compound is up on a hill overlooking the valley kinda. I never did get the name of the village (left/center) but I thought it would make for a nice picture. The part to the far left is what is behind the compound, lots of nothingness. Actually nothingness is not true there are little roads and foot paths that lead to little villages scattered around but no large roads/town/buildings for miles and miles.

Taliban House

Taliban House
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

I'm not sure how obvious it is but this is an outhouse, one of the less sanitary outhouses in Afghanistan I might add and was the only place to poop other than outside (which many many people did, you literally had to watch where you stepped if you chose to shortcut behind a rock or house because it was very likely someone saw that same spot as a private place to poop).

We had arrived at this site in the evening so we didn't see the writing on the outhouse before but while walking by the next day we saw it "Taliban House" written on the side of the outhouse. Now I have no idea if a foreigner wrote it (likely) or an Afghan wrote it (possible, there are plenty of Afghans that know alittle English) but I was amused. The Taliban particularly brutalized the people in this region (the Hazara) so there is no love for the Taliban here (which makes this region a particularly safe place for foreigners).

Stopping for no particular reason

Stopping for no particular reason
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

We had been driving for a few hours (according to my GPS at about 15-20mph) and came across this cluster of houses and a stream. I am not sure what prompted the driver to stop here instead of somewhere else but we did so everyone (all four of us) got out to stretch splash our faces with some cold water (ironically it started to rain not 2 minutes later) and some kids appeared. With my “French beard” and no scarf to hide it they picked me out from a mile away and began staring. I have never been a fan of being stared at but can tolerate it sometimes better than other times. Since I had been discovered I thought “what the hell” and pulled out my camera and started snapping photos of the area (usually I try to be a bit more discreet so people don’t single me out so quickly but here I had already been discovered, there were no women around, and this area was a safe area [something you have to consider when in Afghanistan]).

Two layer Panoramic

Two layer Panoramic
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

Honestly I just wanted to make a “Two Layer Panoramic” (that is, multiple photos in width AND in height, if that makes sense) and this seems as good as good a place as any, plus I had a lot of time on my hands.

This is a village (in the lower left hand corner) that is about ½ 3/4th of a kilometer from my organization’s office. I thought taking a picture of the village with the mountains in the background would be pretty enough but I goofed and cut out part of the village (taking multi-picture panoramics is not as easy as you might think). Anyway I like “middle of nowhere” type pictures and having mountains and fields just sweetens it for me so I took the shot.

A new day in central Afghanistan

A new day in central Afghanistan
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

This was my first morning in Behsood I (now that I think about it the title sounds a bit misleading/hokey) in central Afghanistan and I apparently got up too early (5am, when the sun came up). I will have to admit that I was treated *very* well (not sure if it was because I am the program manager, a foreigner, or both [I suspect both]) and got a fairly cushy afghan bed, a long mat on the floor, so I slept pretty well so getting up early was not a problem but was apparently unnecessary so I ended up just aimlessly walking around for about three hours. The more bored I got the further I strayed from the office (Again, this is central Afghanistan and is quite safe, especially compared to Kabul not to mention southern Afghanistan) and since the office was at the base of a small mountain I thought “Why not?” and started to climb but I was in sandals so that didn’t last very long. Once I gave up climbing I sat down and soaked in the morning sun, clean air, etc and thought I’d take a few photos. I did manage to take a few pictures but the wind was blowing pretty hard so keeping the camera steady for a multi-photo panoramic shot was difficult.

Anyway on the left (partially covered by trees) is the office and further to the right is the nearest village (it actually looks closer in the photo than it does in real life, odd, it seems that it is usually the other way around).

Nomads?

Nomads?
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

This is one of the many times I have been confused; I was told these people are not nomads but they don’t have homes and they do travel around… go figure.

One of the things that caught my eye was the yurts they used; here they are using a combination of tents that the west is familiar with and Mongolian style yurts. I have also learned that “modern” nomads often use trucks to bring their livestock to central Afghanistan to graze on the “readily available” vegetation… and these people have vehicles… but they are not nomads, go figure.

Later I was informed that some villages make a yearly exodus to the grassier areas to let their livestock graze so just a few people stay in the village and the rest head out so that could be the situation here (yes, I was told these people have no home but I am regularly given contradicting information so its possible).

Afghan Nomads?

Afghan Nomads?
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

Actually I have no idea if these people are nomads but we were easily 10 miles from the nearest encampment (and further from any established villages, at least any visible villages, there could have been a village tucked away over/between one of the hills/mountains).

I just wanted to mention the nomads though, here called “Kochi” (pronounced Koochee). I am still trying to figure out the difference between Nomad and Kochi, usually when I mention kochi people think of the nomads that were just coaxed out of central Hazarajat after killing almost 15 people over land disputes (and weren’t even punished, I don’t pretend to understand this), people here aren’t too fond of them so at first I think they are a specific group of nomads but I am told that “no, kochi just means nomad” and there are several nomadic groups in Afghanistan and they aren’t all as seemingly evil as the ones in Hazarajat (to give you an idea of how despised they are in Hazarajat I heard one old man compare the Kochis killing of Hazara to the Israelis treatment of the Palestinians… and trust me, there is no love for Israelis here).

Kamaz Trucks

Kamaz Trucks
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

Pronounced “Kah-Mahz” I think. This is a Russian truck manufacture that I think has been around since the soviet days. To me these trucks just look menacing and uber industrial.

The history of the kamaz in Afghanistan is interesting (ok my knowledge of it is short) but I believe it was introduced while the soviet union was here (makes sense) and was widely used but when the soviet union left the remaining Afghan government forbade private individuals from owning these vehicles, only government could. Either during (or more likely after) the Taliban private individuals and companies started buying Kamaz trucks and now they are pretty much ubiqutus here. I get the impression that they are kind of the VW Beatle of trucks here in that they are practical, cheap, and easy to fix. I am not sure about how often they break down (my guess would be often but I am basing that on the 15 year old soviet trucks I would see in Eastern Europe) but they have to be fairly sturdy on the outside to endure afghan roads (or the lack thereof) and Afghans seem to think pretty highly of them.

Example of nowhere

Example of nowhere
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

I find myself taking pictures of scenes that look particularly representative of Afghanistan even if they are middle of nowhere type pictures. Because all the projects in my program are in central Afghanistan (and due to safety) that is were I go most when going out of Kabul, but this area is also pretty remote and mountainous with small roads (this one is more or less an afghan highway) going through narrow valleys (here), through mountain meadows, or along cliffs

The Eye of the Beholder Mannequins

The Eye of the Beholder Mannequins
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

I was walking with a friend through one of the shopping centers in Kabul when we came across these mannequins. We werent quite sure whether we should be repulsed or laugh but if I was a kid I would have peed my pants.

I swear whoever made these Mannequins had to be a fan of the twilight zones The Eye of the Beholder (11/11/60) episode.

Afghan Bike Bling

Afghan Bike Bling
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

I have noticed in various countries that bikes are the American lowrider car equivalent, that is, they get dressed up with all sorts of non-functional “bling”. Another observation is that the grand majority (there are of course always exceptions) of the bikes in a given country are all from one place. This bike is pretty (really) standard and I am told it is probably either Chinese or Indian (most manufactured things here are either Chinese, Pakistani, or Indian) and as usual some color has been added which can take the form of ribbon, stickers, or in this case stars and reflectors and even a light with a mini-generator (back wheel).

Cheaper by the dozen

Cheaper by the dozen
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

Ok, so I am not sure our host had a dozen children but I would bet that he had close if not more than 12 kids. Every child here is his and I know that it is not all of his children (for example the girls were not allowed to come out) and for every dish that was brought out it was a new child, geeze. You would think a condom manufacturer could make a killing here but nope, the large family sizes are in part due to the lack of a governmental safety net, the reasoning is that if you have a large family then you will have many children to take care of you when you are old.

Afghan soldier's graves

Afghan soldier's graves
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

In my travels (here in Afghanistan) I have seen tons of these “graves”, sometimes they are intricate little mausoleums other times they are a pile of rocks, but they always have green flags (or rags) flying for those killed during combat (bystanders that are killed apparently don’t count). One kind of gets accustomed to seeing all these graves but if you stop to think about it then it becomes pretty sobering.

More soviet kitsch

More soviet kitsch
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

I have not posted all my photos in chronological order for various reasons (not the least of which is personal disorganization) but if you have been following my postings you will have noticed at least a few photos of soviet tank remains and a picture of a stone wall that has tank wheels incorporated into it so this photo is a continuation of that theme. Here the roofline is lined with soviet mortar shells which I admit is an eye catcher compared to most of the architecture I have seen in other parts of Afghanistan (i.e. mud).

Chill'n in Panjshir

Chill'n in Panjshir
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

We had been invited by a resident of Panjshir (who also owns a house across the street from my organization’s office) to come to his house. They setup a cloth, cushions, etc for us to sit on right beside the river (big river). So we chilled on the cushions until the food started coming out.