What A Woman Says, What A Man Hears

I was going through some old paper notes today when I came I across this joke below. I don’t remember who shared this joke with me or where I read it from, but I laughed out so loud and for so long that, I thought you might enjoy it too. Here we go…

What a woman says:

“This place is a mess! C’mon,
you and I need to clean up,
your stuff is lying on the floor and
you’ll have no clothes to wear
if we don’t do laundry right now!”

What a man hears:

“blah, blah, blah, blah, C’mon
blah, blah, blah, blah, you and I
blah, blah, blah, blah, on the floor
blah, blah, blah, blah, no clothes
blah, blah, blah, blah, right now!”

As you probably know I do provide free tech support services here on this website.

I get lots of requests for help with various issues ranging from installing web applications and using various web services… to fixing computers and other tech tech stuff. I even occasionally receive requests for help with non-technical issues like study abroad programs, scholarship search, information about Ghana, etc.

While I’m always glad to help whenever I can, it’s pretty annoying answering the same questions over and over again. I’ve contemplated running a forum or a proper help desk software but, being the lazy person that I am, I haven’t gotten to doing it yet.

So I was trilled to find that Google’s Gmail service now has a brand new feature designed just to ease my pain… called “Canned Responses”. I jumped right in since the announcement to create a couple of canned messages, and already it’s saving me a whole lot of time!

New Gmail Canned Responses feature

Cannned Responses also work with Gmail’s filters, so you can use the combo as a smart autoresponse tool to automatically reply to incoming messages based on the various criteria supported by Gmail’s filters.

Gmail Filters With Canned Responses

Canned Responses is currently a Gmail Labs feature, so to use it you have to manually turn it on. Click on the green test tube at the upper-right corner of your Gmail screen, scroll through the list for “Canned Responses” and enable it. Don’t forget to save the changes afterwards

Yesterday while writing about WorldSpace’s banckuptcy filing, I had lots of memories coming back to me — from my undergraduate days at KNUST in Kumasi, here in Ghana.

Back then I’d just come into contact with both computers and the Internet for the first time. And my department didn’t have any functional computers, let alone Internet, so I’d often skip lectures and spend hours at one of the Internet cafes on campus then — paying by the minute and reading about technologies and projects that were far more interesting to me.

One of those projects I became seriously interested in was Teledesic, a startup that was building a US$9 billion commercial satellite constellation to provide broadband Internet services around the globe — with backing from high-profile people including Bill Gates and Paul Allen (co-founders of Microsoft), Craig McCaw (founder of Nextel & Nextlink), and Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

I don’t know of a more ambitious satellite communication project do date. In its original 1995 proposal, Teledesic sought to build a global network utilizing a constellation of 840 active satellites with “in-orbit spares” at an altitude of 700 km.

Model of Teledesic's original 840 satellite constellation
(photo from Lloyd’s Satellite Constellations -- link below)

Using low-earth orbitting satellites, small terrestrial antennas could then be used to provide uplinks of as much as 100 Mbps and downlinks of up to 720 Mbps.

But in 1997 the scheme was scaled back to 288 active satellites at double the altitude - 1400 km. And this was later scaled back further in complexity and number of satellites as the projected market demand continued to decrease.

Model of Teledesic's 288 Satellite Constellation
(photo from Lloyd’s Satellite Constellations - link below)

Then what happened? Teledesic officially suspended work on the project on 1 October 2002, and eventually gave up its frequency licenses on In July 2003.

But what really happened? Why did the project fail? Some insights from Lloyd’s Satellite Constellations, Wikipedia. And you can browse archived copies of Teledesic’s website from the Internet Archive’s Way Back Machine.

Edit: If you read this earlier, sorry for the mess. I’m running this blog on the pre-beta WordPress 2.7, and looks like something is wrong somewhere — my posts weren’t being saved in full. I just upgraded to the latest nightly build, and that seems to have solved the problem.

——–

After battling for years to stay afloat, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA-based satellite radio operator, WorldSpace Inc., finally filed for bankruptcy protection last Friday, 17th of October, 2008.

I first came to know about WorldSpace during my undergraduate days at KNUST here in Ghana, when one professor asked me to do a review of the space segment of the company’s broadcasting network.

WorldSpace uses its two “geostationary” satellites, AfriStarâ„¢ and AsiaStarâ„¢, to broadcast 62 digital-quality audio channels offering news, sports, music, brand name content and educational programming to some paid 170,000 subscribers in Africa, Middle East, Europe and Asia.

In July 2008, the company changed its name from WorldSpace to “1worldspace”. The company was founded by Ethiopian-born US lawyer, Noah A. Samara, who says about the motivation for founding WorldSpace:

In the mid-1980s, I read something that changed my life. It was an article in the Washington Post about AIDS in Africa and how it was spreading because millions of people had no information or the wrong information. It became clear to me that people weren’t simply dying of disease; they were dying of ignorance.

Something had to be done. I came up with the idea of launching a satellite over Africa that would broadcast digital radio across the continent to inexpensive portable receivers. In 1990, I quit my job and devoted my body, mind and spirit to a quest that required securing international regulatory approval from 127 countries, designing a new communications system, building and launching satellites, establishing a corporation, hiring staff and raising capital to pay for it all.

We needed around $1.5 billion to make it happen.

WorldSpace offered its IPO on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange on August 4, 2005, closing at the end of the first day of trading at $22.36 a share. On October 17, 2008 (the day the company filed for bankruptcy) the stock closed at an all-time low of $0.18. In bankruptcy documents filed in the U.S Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., the company listed assets of $307.4 million and liabilities of $2.12 billion.

Hitachi Worldspace Radio Receiver

More about the WorldSpace bankruptcy filing on WSJ (article behind pay wall).

This is just for everyone’s attention: if you’ve sent a support request but haven’t gotten a reply from me yet, it’s because I’ve been knocked off the Internet grid.

Over the weekend a passing truck brought down a main overhead telephone cable in my area, and my telephone line (from which I get ADSL Internet connection) was affected.

The telephone company (Ghana Telecom) guys were around yesterday to mount some new poles and fix the cable, but service has not been restored yet.

I just spoke to them, and they promised service will be restored by end of today. I’m very sorry for any inconvenience, and I hope to respond to your mails as soon as I my telephone line and Internet service have are restored.

(Note: I’m sending this mail from a public Internet cafe).

Internet Unplugged