I tried. I really tried my very best. I gave her all I had and sometimes what I didn’t have. Once I even had to steal when I had nothing to seed– just to keep her sweet and delicate body in shape. What more could a girl ask for?

But now I cannot trust her any longer, till I can change her tight-fitting bra. For that, she says, is her problem. That, you say, is your problem — why you’ve been such a pain to love, no matter how hard I tried, ever since you came into this little life of mine.

But why didn’t you ever tell me about your tight-fitting bra? Dinah says you’ve been trying to tell me all along about how uncomfortable you are in your tight-fitting bra, the one same bra you’ve been wearing ever since we met some eight full moons ago. She also says I’ve been so busy showing off your beauty to my friends that I hardly noticed your suffering.

Your suffering, that jealous thing claims, was all too plain for anyone, except a fool of my kind, to see. And now that even this old fool can see and feel your pain, how can I have your tight-fitting bra changed? Dinah, that same jealous Dinah, says she knows someone who’s got the right bra for your delicate breasts. But that will be delivered after half a moon, and at a cost you know I cannot afford.

So keep on sleeping, as you’ve always done throughout the past year since we met. Keep on wasting all the time two of us could have spent together dreaming about how we could hack poverty out of the world, or at least, out of our world. And I’ll continue to slave harder and save every pesewa that my sweat and luck will bring along, so I can buy you the perfect bra that will fit your sweet and delicate breasts.

But until I can have your tight-fitting bra changed, I simply cannot trust her with my secretes any longer. Until I can have your failing hard drive replaced, I cannot trust you with my data. Not any how, not anymore.

I still love her though. My MacBook, that is.

I’ve come to believe that when you make up your mind to embark on a journey, any journey, all the Angels lineup to march forward with you, and things just begin to happen.

This week has been one of such Angel-led forward marches.

I started off the week with a great and mighty fall (pic) on Monday morning while returning from my usual morning jogging, and boy… what a mighty fall it was. I got bruised all over and got back home feeling like chicken! But this little misfortune was more than compensated for by other happenings later on in the week.

Out from the blues I started receiving calls from people who say they have been “hunting me down all over” (my contact numbers have changed quite a bit over the past 3 years). These are people whom I had chance encounter with some time back, and whose lives I had the privilege o impact in some way, during one of my workshops, keynote speeches, and some other random encounters.

Two have returned to graduate school, 3 have switched jobs and are doing what they seem to trully love now, one (a lady) has opened a brand-new factory line to produce babies, and others have either started their own businesses, or are in the process of doing so. And they sounded happy and wanted to say “hi and thank you”.

I’ve had 12 of such calls this week already: 10 from Ghana, and 2 from elsewhere on this planet. It couldn’t have been planned, because these people don’t know each other from Adam. Mere coincidence? Who knows.

To all the girls I’ve loved before of you who have called me this week, Hi, and thank you too, for your calls. And to everyone else, thanks for the opportunity to serve you. You all do, and will always take a special place in my little achy breaky heart as well.

I’ve been getting lots of emails and direct tweets from people asking why I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet for some time now. And I’ve not answered a single one of these mails and tweets for the same reason why I’ve been quiet. To all of you who wrote and never got a response from me, and to all of you who came here and didn’t find anything new, sorry to disappoint.

No I’m not sick or “busy” or anything of the sort. But I really needed a little time for myself. I needed time for some deep introspection… time to do some serious digging into the SELF, to ponder over where I’m headed, to assess my current plan to get there (and why it doesn’t seem to be getting me there)… and to uncover the old and dusty path one more time.

And I’m glad to report that this was time well spent. Perhaps I’m fortunate enough to have known what I really want to live for very early on. And after all these years, every single “self discovery” exercise takes me back to the very same place. The real difficult thing for me has always been having the discipline to stay on track.

But how do you stay on track, when you don’t know where your next meal is coming from? When you’ve got rising medical bills? And when you’ve got ageing parents whose only retirement plan is their investment in your education? That’s a big trap, I’d say. And no, I’ve not had any “ahaah” moment, yet. I’m simply going to trust that, somehow, the dots will connect somewhere in the future.

And here is to hope that poor Stephen & Agartha will be with us for a little longer.

From this point on, this blog, the only thing I can trully call my own, will be chronicling that journey. Not much is changing here, except there will be a) less and less stories about my cat spilling milk on my dog; b) more and more in-depth articles on the subjects of technology, entrepreneurship and development; and c) more frequent and regular updates.

Thank you all for your support and encouragement throughout these hard times.

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.