Yesterday, the 25th of July 2008, Dr. Randy Pausch, the noted Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University finally caved in at the prime age of 47, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Pausch was a founder of the famous Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University and worked on the “Alice” program, an animated educational system for high school and college students. He is survived by his wife and children Dylan, Logan, and Chloe.

I personally think Randy’s greatest gift he’s leaving behind (especially for those of us who only came to know him during his last days) is his “Last Lecture” talk (video embed below). Might be a perfect time to take to heart Randy’s admonition to relentlessly pursue your childhood dreams.

And while you’re at it, remember another advice from Randy: that those “brick walls” we encounter along the way are there for a reason, for us to prove that we really want that which we’re striving for.

Farewell, Randy, we’ll always miss you.

After the last marathon of interviews at Huawei Technologies (Ghana) I thought everything was settled. Well not quite, as it turned out later.

I was invited back to their office last Friday, the 18th of July, to meet the Managing Director. Which I did.

After a lengthy conversation, they’re still going to “get back to me”. The issue? They’re not convinced that I’m going to stay for long. And I understand their concern. Many people have been in and out — most from KNUST, the only technological university in Ghana. So why should I be trusted to stay on?

And for my case, two additional issues seem to raise more alarms in their thoughts: a) I’ve flipped jobs a bit since graduating in 2002, and b) they just can’t understand why I left a high-paying job in 2005 to engage in voluntary work. In their minds, there has to be something wrong else which I’m not telling them.

Well, while I cannot say I’ll stay with them forever (who can really say so to an employer and mean it?), I really don’t have any immediate plans for anything else: I just want to settle down. I’m not “shopping” around for jobs, and I’ve already decided to let go of my prior plans for grad school.

And I’m not the fresh college kid I was, back then.

So I’m still here waiting for them. Hopefully I wouldn’t have to wait for long.

Do you follow me on Twitter?

If you do, you’ll surely remember the great distress I went though last Sunday the 12th of July, when I was invaded by a large army of one mouse.

While my courage didn’t take me far in pursuing this enemy, I validated my smartness by devising some rather creative ways to outwit this enemy. Much credit also to the professionally certified mouse exterminator who came to lend a helping hand.

So in the spirit of sharing everything I’ve got, here is my fool-proof strategy to help you too kill the the most annoying mice in your life … whether it’s real rodents (like in my case) or some rodent-like homo sapiens sucking up energy from you.

1. Run. Shout. Immediately.

Didn’t you just see something moving around? If you’re thinking you saw something, then you probably did. Trust your guts. Take action NOW. Run. Shout for help.

But sadly, I didn’t trust my guts, and I didn’t take any action myself. I continued to watch my 1935 movie, A Night at the Opera, totally oblivious of the advancing army of one mouse.

Yet I was smart, you see, when my enemy struck. I quickly grabbed the most important possession in my life, my MacBook, and run out of the room. No, I ran out of the house. I bolted the iron gate and left the walled compound.

Just because of a mouse, you’re saying? My friend, you don’t know what you’re saying! Mind you, it was not just a mouse… it was a whole army of one mouse! And tell me, have you had the experience of being a coward before?

2. Call For Mouse A Exterminator

Yeah, that’s right. They don’t carry business cards, but they are there nonetheless. They are everywhere. There’s one probably sharing an apartment or room with you.

So call for help. Dial 666 from your cellphone. That’s the universally recognized contact number for Mouse Exterminators around the world. Works great no matter where you live… best when you don’t have cellphone coverage at all!

For my case, it turned out, I had a Certified Mouse Exterminator sharing apartment with me. Or maybe it’s the banality of heroism at work here (hint: there was a lady around too).

Who knows? And who cares? I got my army of one mouse defeated.

3. Don’t Live In A Bad Neighborhood

That is, if you can help it. This is really a preventive measure though.

You see, Ghana, and Accra in particular, is such a great place to live — for the lawless, that is. And I live in an area of Accra called Tesano. East Tesano, to be more precise. It’s supposed to be a residential area. That, in Ghana, simply means two things: a) rich people live here, and b) robbers pay frequent visits.

How a poor boy like me ended up in a rich folks’ neighborhood is another story I hope to tell someday. Suffice it to say now that I was visited by thieves everyday for the first week that I was here. After all, a new rich guy had moved into the neighborhood.

Isn’t it ironic that “poor neighborhoods” in Accra are safer than “rich neighborhoods”? But I digress. On to the mouse story now.

Next to our house (and I mean next, as in … just a wall separating us) is a large undeveloped piece of land. Half of this land is farmed all year round, and the other half is full of weeds. So we have all kinds of unwelcome guests jumping over to our end: rodents, ants of all colors and sizes, armies of caterpillars, etc.

The only guests we’ve not received in our home are those from the reptile family.

Now for the records, I have nothing against urban gardening. But when it has to be at such a great nuisance to others? And imagine all the smoke that engulfs the entire neighborhood when this heartless urban farmer “slashes and burns” to plant new crops!

So that’s it. If you follow these three simple, ground-breaking strategies, I’ve no doubt in my mind that you can deal with any mice in your life, whether rodents or human mice.

Hello folks… here’s the latest in this little life of mine:

I’ve finally decided, after three years of being out of formal employment, to return to a full-time working life. And in all likelihood, I’ll be joining Huawei Technologies pretty soon.

I spent the better part of last Tuesday (08/2008) at Huawei’s office here in Ghana going through a series of tests and interviews (5 in all!), and in the end I’m glad to say I’ll be working with these folks in building Ghana’s telecommunications infrastructure.

More about the interview itself in a later post.

Huawei Technologies is a Chinese company specializes in research and development (R&D), production and marketing of communications equipments, and providing customized network solutions for telecommunications carriers around the world.

Starting from a humble beginning in 1988 by Ren Zhengfei as a distributor of imported PBX products, the company has grown rapidly into a global operation providing next generation telecommunications networks. Huawei is the largest networking and telecommunications equipment supplier in China and in many emerging markets, and also has a strong presence North America and Europe.

I’m joining Huawei as a Radio Network Planning & Operations Engineer . in Ghana and potentially other operators in the sub-region. I’ll be doing a “physical” (fitness test) next week, and then begin working shortly afterwards.

Thank you all for your encouragement and support during these past two years that I’ve been on “voluntary unemployment”. Being out of work formal work sure had its perks… but like anything else in my life, it had to change for something new to take its place.

When my sister was returning to her books and husband (in that order ) in the United States after coming down home to pass a kid down the factory line (don’t tell her I said that!), she left a PC here with lots of her personal data on it.

After promising and procrastinating for well over a year, I decided, today, to upload her stuff to an online storage account for her — so she could download them to her computer (I know she’s not the “hang all your panties online” sort of person.)

So I went over to Mediamax (which I must confess, I’ve not used for quite some time), pulled out my account details from Gmail … and see what I found (all emphasis mine):

So I clicked over to The Linkup, and of course, I couldn’t log in. The password retrieval tool even told me my email address is not in their system.

Sure, my account was a free account. And there maybe a clause buried somewhere in their TOS that says that all free users who don’t log into their account after x number of days would be kicked out (which like you, I never bothered to read).

Who knows? That’s why I really want to give them the benefit of my doubt — and just make believe that the issue with my account may be a random one… some bug or something that occurred during the transition.

But with statements like what’s above, I’m left with no choice but to conclude that they kicked out all free users during the transition from Mediamax to The Screwup Linkup.

Have I contacted them? Nope. And I’m not going to. I really didn’t have anything I couldn’t afford to lose in there. So no back-and-forth communication is worth my while. And oh, I do multiple backups with different online services.

I’m still waiting for GDrive to arrive, if it ever will. For now I’ve created a new Mozy account that I’m using to backup the girl’s data so she can grab them.

Two days ago I posted here and on Twitter asking for your recommendations for live video streaming services.

While no one posted a comment here (nothing new ) I had a couple of emails, and A LOT of tweets with great recommendations. Whew … I didn’t know there were so many of these services out there!

I was able to prune the long list down to just three (3) fairly quickly — mainly from the look and feel of their sites: Kyte, UStream, Justin.TV. I’m using Ustream for the time being (look up, right!), but not sure if I’m going to run with it. I’ll have to test all three of them over a period of time, before I can make a final selection.

Thank you once again for your recommendations.

I’m finally taking the plunge and getting into live video! I’ll primarily be using this medium to provide technical support online, and I’m looking for an online video service to use. I know of a whole lot of them there, and a personal recommendation would be appreciated.

My primary needs are:

• Extreme bandwidth efficiency, as I’m on a pretty slow ADSL connection
• Ability to broadcast without recording: who cares about archives of me just sitting and staring at the screen?
• I’d also like to add pre-recorded video AND audio into the stream
• Integrated chatting service
• Ability to customize player with own branding
• Would be great if the service can also toast bread and do the laundry, but that’s not an absolute necessity

Please post your recommendations in the comment form on this post, or (better) via Twitter @GeorgeAppiah — either way, don’t forget to add what makes you swear by the service you’re recommending.

Anyone?

Where is that spanking new design that I spent hours and hours of my life on? Short answer is: it’s gone, long with the yet-to-be-launched plans for this site.

Rightnow if there’s anything I can count on to remain stable in my life, it’s change itself. There’s yet another new twist in this little life of mine, which necessitates some sweeping changes going forward.

For starters, my plan to get out of bed this year has come to a screeching halt. Grad school isn’t happening any longer, and I need to make a lot of further lifestyle adjustments if I want to stay alive.

Rightnow I’ve lost the last bit of respect I had towards long-term planning (wasn’t that much to begin with anyway). Time I embraced this near certainty of “change” and thrive in it. Time to go with the flow, and live one moment at a time.

Yesterday I cannot change. Tomorrow is but an illusion. But I’ve got today. “I May Never Get To Heaven”, but I surely can live very close … every moment … including this one.

UPDTE: Not any longer. Here’s the gist.

After what seemed like a never-ending marathon of bug fixing, the long-awaited re-design of my website is here. While it’s certainly not perfect, this new design is very dear to my heart in a very special way.

Sure, there are a lot of really great and completely free WordPress themes out there ready for the taking — but it’s always felt like I’m throwing my legs into someone else’s shoes whenever I pick one of these off-the-shelf designs to use.

While I certainly didn’t build all the components pixel by pixel and line by line, I — at least — planned the whole damn thing, from concept to the finished work you see now. What I really wanted to do was to bring out that little child’s voice that continues to coo so loudly inside me — in vivid imagery. But being the graphics-illiterate person that I am, I could only settle on using colors.

Still Undone - Lots of Known & Unknown Issues:

Despite the many hours of labour, there are still some issues with the new design — some known and (likely) many others unknown.

The obvious one is that most of the pages from the previous theme aren’t showing anymore, and clicking on the “Home” navigation link at the top takes you to the Journal (blog) section of the site. This is done on purpose, as I’m still preparing those pages to transfer to the Site Build It! platform.

I’ve been trying to woo some of my graphics-savvy friends to design a header image for me — but none has been wooed yet. Now I’m using text and a background color — and I really don’t like the colors up there. So this will change soon.

There are also a couple of minor bugs under the hood that I need to fix, and I’m sure there may be a lot more that I’m not even aware of. Feel free to contact me if you find anything fancy.

The Building Blocks

As I’ve said already, I pulled in components from here and there, spent what seemed to me like eternity on these building blocks, and ended up with the design you see now. There were times when I would stare at the screen for hours (yes, occasionally clicking here and there aimlessly) and not knowing what I was doing.

If it helps, you may think of this “design process” as a million monkeys dipping brushes into oil for a million hours — to produce the Mona Lisa — except in my case it’s a single clueless monkey (that’s me) that spent a billion hours.

The Horizontal (Top) Navigation

The top menu is a pure CSS menu I grabbed from 13Styles.com, a fine website that provides a few but high quality CSS menus. At time of writing there were only 12 CSS menus available at the site. All the menus are free, and for $US29.99, you get the source Photoshop files to customize to your heart’s delight.

But you probably know that even if I had these Photoshop source images, I couldn’t make any use of them. So I simply grabbed one of the pre-built menus (Wax) and used as-is.

The Vertical (Left) Navigation:

You probably have guess this by now: that this was also got from somewhere. Well, if you did, you guessed right!

The vertical menu you see on the left is a customized version of the Accordion Menu script from Dynamic Drive — a very popular website for script kiddies like me and (arguably) the source of the many fancy and completely useless animations you see on many websites.

This is also a free menu that’s available for anyone to use. But unlike the horizontal menu from 13Styles, this one uses Javascript to handle the accordion-like feature. Click on any of the yellow navigation menus on the left to see what I’m talking about

There is a “static” version of this menu from their companion website, CSSDrive, that uses pure CSS (no javascript) — but this doesn’t have the the accordion effect.

The original menu is shown to the right. I essentially changed the two background images used for the main menus: one for the “open” state (red) and the other for the “closed” state (black).

While I like the collapsing nature of this menu, I don’t know how long I’m going to keep it, as I really don’t like heavy client-side scripting that doesn’t add any substantial new features other than eye-candy effects.

The Layout & Other “Inspirations”:

The actual layout of the new site is based on an SBI! template I used in the past. But note that this was not a complete design — just a layout.

I used SBI in the past (and will be using it exclusively henceforth for clients’ websites) so I have lots of SBI! stuff lying round. Also I’ll be moving the main section of this website itself to SBI very soon, and that’s how I could justify using their layout to design this site even though I don’t have an active subscription for this domain.

It’s 5am now … and I’m already feeling dizzy. Probably hungary. Chest pains are also lingering around. I guess another trip to the hospital later in the day. Time for exercise now though. Let me know your thoughts about this new design.

After several lonesome moons of planning and procrastinating, I’m almost ready to launch a new version of this website. While the redesign is a welcome one (and it’s really been long overdue), this is not just about a new design at all.

Throughout the past two years this blog has been a great companion to me, more than any human. We’ve fought our individual battles (website hacking, server crashes and a fight for my dear little heart), some of which we lost, but many of which we won. Heck, we’ve even been in and out of love together.

We’ve stood together as close pals packed and left, and as dear little things wandered away without a word. We even reminisce together over good ‘ole days and what life could have been.

But of course I’m not leaving you … my dear reader … out of this love affair. How could I? I’m very grateful to all of you for standing solidly behind me throughout all the turbulence. You rock!

That’s why, now that I’m quite stable (health-wise), I’m taking this website away from sharing my troubles with you … to more like sharing my knowledge and know-how with you. This transformation has taken way too much time … but, alas, it’s almost here.