I have a confession to make: I’ve never written about this here or elsewhere before — but I have a deeply-rooted fascination about motor homes (also called mobile homes, recreational vehicles, etc).

And I’m convinced I’m going to live in one of these someday, that’s I’ve been incessantly shedding away all but absolutely needed “stuff” and living a really lean life (another confession, eh?). It’s just a matter of time.

For now I nurture my passion by frequenting various RV forums, blogs, newsletters. Thanks to the Internet, I can easily find and interact with like-minded people from all over the world. This doesn’t come so easily for me in the brick-and-mortar world.

Today someone passed along these massive beasts from UNICAT: The UNICAT Expedition Vehicles, passionately nicknamed “land yachts”.

Designed, engineered and built to take you practically anywhere you want to go: from the heat of the Sahara to through the cold of the North Pole, even through up to 4ft of water… God have mercy!

Fitted with redundant GPS units … so you’ll never get lost on the desert!

On board “escape” vehicle:

Now just look at the interior: real and rare luxury on the road!

I want one of these. Pricing depends on the particular model and fittings, so you want to buy one for me, just let me know… so we can take out all those stuff that I wouldn’t need

More photos of these recreational / expedition vehicles from UNICAT’s website.

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Update: Turns out that I’m not the only one fascinated by these beasts. Veronica Belmont from Mahalo Daily took a trip to UNICAT Ameicas’ Palo Alto HQ to check out their entry level vehicle.

Now this “entry level vehicle”, with all the fittings will take you back US$600,000, and US$800 to completely fill the tank (at current gas prices). Hmmm. Here’s the Mahalo Daily video:

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.

Today marks the 51st anniversary of Ghana’s independence from British colonial rule. To all my Ghanaian readers: you’ve (presumably) worked very hard all year, and you certainly deserve a break. Go put on your best clothes, hook up with your favorite human being(s), and enjoy yourselves. It’s your day, enjoy it to the fullest.

[As for me, I'm still busy at work with a large entourage of professionals (who are much smarter than myself!!!) -- trying to put my new apartment in shape]

[Beautiful cat dog photo from DonnitaMae on Flickr, and edited with iPhoto on my MacBook ]

Later this year, somewhere in September, I’ll be packing my single little suitcase again, and head for Sweden for graduate studies. Now it’s not if anymore. It’s when — when the time comes.

That means I have about six months here in Ghana, six months in my new apartment, and six months to do all the things I have to do and clean up all the mess I create along the way.

The above is a photo exhibition at the Second House of Sweden in SecondLife.

Just for everyone’s information — yesterday I packed my single suitcase out of my Haatso (Accra) apartment, after hanging around for about 12 months. I really loved the quietness of Haatso, but I moved primarily because, I couldn’t get a faster Internet connection at a reasonable fee.

I had been using Ghana Telecom’s “Alvarion Broadband” service, which is capped at 256/64kbps (shared, with an unlawfully high contention ratio). There are no fixed lines around, and hence no DSL, and the other alternatives are prohibitively expensive.

Anyway, I’ve moved to Tesano, also in Accra. And I managed to work out a fixed line and ADSL service even before I moved in. This came as a big surprise to a friend who has lived in the area for over three years, but has not been able to get Ghana Telecom to provision a fixed telephone line for her.

So how did I get? No, I didn’t pay any bribes. Nada. I never do. In case you didn’t know, I once worked at Ghana Telecom as a Radio Network Optimisation Engineer, and a lot of my college mates are still there, some in big positions. So I certainly have a lot of strings I can pull at GT.

Currently there’s only data and no voice. Actually the voice number has been assigned but not fully provisioned yet. I’m also using just 128/32kbps — but so far I find it faster than the more expensive 256/64 kbps service I was using at my previous apartment. That tells how terrible the contention was. I’ll push the data speed up as soon as I settle down to do something serious. Tell you about that later.

But what about my plans to live in the streests? Great question. I had a chat with one of my doctors about this, who managed to scare me out of it. How ingeniously stupid of me! As you probably know already, I’ve been battling a heart problem for a quite some time now, and my doctors remain one of the very few peple on this plant who’s opinions I truly value.

I’ve got a lot of things coming shortly. Stay glued.