If you do follow me on Twitter, you will remember about a week ago I said I was going to work on some 3,000-plus ADSL modems.

Yep, no typo here: I had this unpleasant task to update the firmware and pre-configure a large consignment of ADSL modems — a little over 3,000 units — for one local ADSL service provider.

This was to make these boxes work with both their ATM and IP DSLAMS.

How I got myself into this big holly mess is another story altogether — that will, hopefully, be told in the not too distant future.

But I’m glad the work is done. It took exactly 8 days — within which time I never stepped out of my bedroom-turned-workshop, and never had more then 10 hours of sleep (total). Of course I got great help from my little friends Christopher Bennett and Remy Edmundson, and I’m really grateful for their help.

Now that this torture is over, it’s about time I moved on: go out there into the streets of Accra, find a cute little girl who can think, marry, have a whole lot of kids, and live happily thereafter.

Or something like that. What ‘ya think?

Technorati Tags: ADSL modems, IP DSLAM, ATM DSLAM

Mine is apparently worth US$5,000. That’s the price the poor fellow who owns the domain name “appiah.com” is asking for at BuyDomains.com. The other two generic flavours “appiah.org” and “appiah.net” are owned by another Appiah, Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University.

While I’m glad I own my name [georgeappiah.com], I obviously cannot share this with my family, if I ever happen to have one. So I was hoping to grab the last name, but it looks like was too late to the game. Actually I didn’t expect this generic domain name to be available, and I was willing to buy it, if the price was right. But US$5,000 does not smell right at all to me.

Of course, some domain names have sold for millions of dollars (“sex.com” reportedly sold for 2m), but I didn’t know my last name was this valuable

This morning, while unpacking some documents to scan, I found a little piece of paper with these words below, written in my own hndwriting. I don’t know exactly when and why I wrote this piece, and I don’t even remember the subject here.

Yet this little piece of paper drew down buckets of tears — salty tears of sweet descent — as I read line after line. I wasn’t crying because of the content of the poem though: I was crying for the part of me that I’ve has slipped by. I was crying for my childhood writings I lost — literally hundreds of poems and short stories. I was crying for never daring to take my pen and paper to write once again, after all these years since I lost my writings.

And I was crying for all the days gone by, and for all the dreams left behind.

Update: From some other scribbles on this piece of paper, I’m almost certain of the context of this writing now. I wrote this piece, back then during college days, to my sister. But the subject is someone else. You see, there was this cute little girl, who was my sister’s roommate, who….

I wonder where she is now and what she’s doing. The memories are all coming back to me now. The tears are falling, once again, except faster this time. The battle continues. But who can see me? Who can rescue me?

When I first registered the domain georgeappiah.com for this website, one of my goals was to control my identity online. I knew that while I couldn’t control what someone would write about me, I could have much say in what people discovered about me through a web search. And I wanted to make it easy for people to find what I wanted them to find about — about me.

So after many turns and twists and two fatal database crashes, today if you google “George Appiah” (without quotes), you’ll find information about me all over. At the time of this writing, the entire first page results (1-10 web pages) were all about me. In fact, but for a few usurpers, the entire initial 100 websites (first ten SERPS) would have been about me.

Obviously I’ve more than exceeded that particular goal of controlling my online identity, even though — I will confess — I’ve not done a decent job at building one coherent personal brand yet. More about that later.

But I want more, ya know. I’m up with another goal, this time a more specific and measurable goal: I want to be the #1 on the search result page for the name “Appiah”. Here’s the current competition:

As you can see, Stephen Appiah’s Wikipedia entry is right at the top. That his name is at the top is neither surprising nor interesting at all to me. What’s interesting to me though is that his personal website, www.stephenappiah.com does not appear on the first page at all.

Aside this Stephen Appiah anomaly, the rest of the page, and in fact, most of the first 100 results, is dominated by Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University (no relation to the soon-to-be Prof. George Kwabenah Appiah ).

This is the competition I’m putting myself against now. I don’t have any plans yet to win at this game, but I’m going to cook some ideas and share the progress over here.

You recently married. I got to know about it just 3 days to the event, and even then, from someone else. You never gave me the slightest clue, and you still haven’t. But I had my own plans made already, so I couldn’t be around. Besides, you surely had a reason for not telling me about your marriage — I obviously wan’t wanted around. So coming around, even if I did have the time and inclination to, would have been rather disingenuous on my part.

I’m not complaining. I’m human, and I do understand why you didn’t want me around. But your family and our mutual friends obviously don’t. So they keep bugging me about not being around when you tied the proverbial knot. If only they knew what we both know.

Good luck, my dear little thing. May the Divine Wisdom grant you the desire to dream once again, the strength to wake up from your slumber and live your dreams, and the courage to live your life, your way. Hasta mañana.