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Depending on where you live and what you do HIPC may or may not mean much to you. For geeks, the International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC) may come to mind. But for those of us living in Sub-Saharan Africa, HIPC is a constant reminder of the harsh economic reality that is so prevalent in the society.

The HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor Country) program was initiated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1996, following extensive lobbying by NGOs and other bodies. It provides debt relief and low-interest loans to reduce external debt repayments to sustainable levels.

HIPC ought to be advantageous; instead, Ghana’s President John Agyekum Kufuor and his New Patriotic Party’s decision to sign on to the HIPC initiative within weeks of taking office in December 2000 remains second only to the January 2003’s 92% oil price rise in unpopularity with Ghanaians. Trust me, it’s no joke to be walking about carrying a placard that says you’re “poor and heavily indebted”.

Today in Ghana, HIPC (pronounced “hipic”) has become daily a jargon. To “go HIPC” means to go broke. A cheap, inferior product is referred to as HIPC, the NPP government that started it all is called the “HIPC government”, the President “HIPC President” … and on and on and on.

But the fun doesn’t just end there. Our President is not only the “HIPC President”, but the junction leading to his private residence in Accra has also been dubbed “HIPC Junction.” And you can imagine my joy when I recently came across this sign below erected by the Ministry of Tourism and Diaspora Relations! Good job, Mr Minister!

How seriously should we take CommonRoom? A startup who’s founder recently claimed Facebook was his idea, boldly display a logo with the message “Created by an unlicensed version of BB FlashBack” in their public demo!

No, they’re not being cheap, for there are many open source tools out there. And I’ll bet my head on this, that they can afford to buy one if they feel too lazy to dig around. That leads me to conclude: they just don’t care.

But I do. So for once, saying NO was so easy.

Yeah, this is no news: everyone knows Twitter hates me. It’s very personal. All those cats. Ha! Doesn’t she know I’m allergic to cats? And shouldn’t she know I’ll feel envious to see a cat fixing computers when I dunno how to? Aiyyyyyyy. Yet I never complained.

Then she changed her international SMS number, and since then SMS has never work for me from Ghana, where I live. Yea, I live in Ghana, which is a country on the continent of Africa. I’m even flirting with the idea of switching my cellphone provider, just for Twitter. Is this not enough to convince Twitter I love her?

But no, Twittter doesn’t care. And now she’s taking her hatred of me to the next level. I simply wanted to go to the homepage. Twitter gives me the page below.

Alas, there was no code leak :-) :-)

Ghana Bee is a new web service that provides a mobile-friendly access to aggregated news from major Ghanaian media houses. As far as I can tell, this is the first Ghanaian website built solely for mobile devices.

While all the 4 mobile phone operators in Ghana now support some form of Internet access, I’ll be the first to admit that there are very few local websites that are usable at all on mobile devices. And when you’re paying by the kilobyte, as is the case with GPRS/EDGE rates in Ghana, you have no room to experiment with poorly designed websites.

In its present form, Ghana Bee simply displays a sanitized excerpt of content collected from several Ghanaian news sites via RSS, and provides a link to the original source. Other features and are in the works, and SMS integration is also planned.

The website was built by Yours Truly overnight, with much of the time going into Stumbling/Facebooking/Twittering/JTVing and very little actually going into development of the site.

Here are screenshots of the site, as seen on Nokia N70 and Sony Ericson K750. Interestingly, I don’t even currently have an Internet-ready cellphone. These screenshots were taken with cellphone emulators. So go give Ghana Bee a try and send me your screenshots, if you can.

Just a quick note to let folks note that I’m now running WordPress 2.3-Beta-1 over here. If you observe any weird stuff, that may as well have something to do with it.

WordPress 2.3 has a couple interesting new features such as integrated tagging (with importers for UTW and other popular tagging plugins), “pending review” post status (great for group blogging projects), plugin update notification, and lots of other goodies.

And oh, plugin developers be warned: lots of plugins are sure to break.