Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category.
Last week I finally finished my clearance for the University, meaning that I’m now free to leave. Was quite a long drawn out process – you can see in the photo how many signatures I needed in the end.
Now have only 2 weeks left in Mekelle, have a few days in Addis, then return to the UK. Will be good to catch up with everyone once I’m back 
Over the last week, Mekelle has undergone a bit of a facelift, repainting, rubbish collected and flags put up, all in preparation for the celebration of 35 years of the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF). The road near our house was never quite tarmaced in time, but no-one seems too bothered. Town has been full of federal police, with small celebrations and events happening each day this week.
But today is the big day, the fields behind the Hawelti monument are full of people, most of the town and thousands of people from Tigray and further afield have arrived for a day of speeches. People began arriving last night and stayed up overnight – a huge firework display at midnight then today there is due to be a speech from the Prime Minister.
I’ve been up there this morning already to see what was happening, there doesn’t seem to be any schedule and I’m not too keen on spending all day in the sun listening to political propaganda speeches in a language I don’t understand. Fortunately our house is close enough that I’ll hear if anything significant starts to happen and can then take walk up. I’ll update this posting if there much else to report during the rest of the day.
45 signatures from each of the 30+ university departments, plus finance, stores, personnel from all campuses and all in triplicate. That’s all I need for the clearance procedure so I can officially leave the university. Despite still having another 5 weeks left, I’ve heard from others about how unbelievably time-consuming and bureaucratic the clearance procedure here is, so thought I should make start.
I managed to find a secretary who would go round and collect most of the signatures for me (for a small fee), so far I have 30, the remaining signatures needed are for finance, stores etc, so for these I need to sign my computer over to someone else, so I can prove that there isn’t any equipment still in my name and that I don’t owe any department any money.
It looks likely that this will take much of the next week or so to be complete and I’ll be extremely relieved when I finally have everything signed off and finished.
On all the major holidays here, the telecoms company sends various greetings to all mobile phones, we also occasionally receive them from other (government) institutions. Here are 3 texts I received over the last few days:
“New Year, New Life! Test for HIV, test with your partner, get your children tested and brighten the future of your family! Free testing. Happy New Year”
“The Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation wishes all Ethiopians a happy and joyful festivity of the Ethiopian New Year 2002″
“Wish you a happy and prosperous new year. Compliance to laws including the laws governing tax and customs is basis for a sustainable growth”
What was once a computer lab for students has been turned into a branch of the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia:
The chance of it turning into a trendy wine bar at any time in the near future is quite remote.
Have had quite a busy last couple of weeks, hence the lack of postings, so time for bit of a catch up…
Firstly a weekend up in London and heading over to the Kingsnorth protest for the day on the Saturday, though all very peaceful & sedate compared to some of the other protests there. (photos).
Then one of my friends who I met in Ethiopia managed to get herself onto the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square last Thursday lunchtime to protest against female genital mutilation. She’d only got on at short notice, so a few of use who’d been in Ethiopia together helped out painting t shirts and buying essential equipment (fake blood, string etc). I got plenty of photos, but Julia also managed to get a mention in the slightly more widely read publications of the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday.
Finally, I’ve also had several meetings so start off a new elearning project at Mekelle University. The Spanish government (with University of Alcala, Madrid and Lund University, Sweden) are funding a pilot project building 2 new computer labs for the health science and engineering departments. I’ve been asked to manage some of the technical aspects of the project. Rather than building 2 new labs with Windows PCs, servers etc, we’ll be testing out using Sun Ray terminals instead. This should allow the IT dept to make better use of their existing servers, ad reduce the amount of time spent rebuilding and fixing virus-ridden Windows machines. But, there’s a lot to be done and organise if we’re to be ready for the start of the next semester in October.
Still no firm return date for me going back to Mekelle, but fingers crossed it will be soon!
After a little time away from programming and active web development, I thought I’d get back into things by giving myself a little project to create a Google maps and Upcoming mashup.
At the moment it’s fairly basic as I’ve only spent a few hours working on it, but seems to be working well. I’ve deliberately tried to keep the number of options and fields down to a minimum (I know there are far more options and functions I could add).
Enter some search text in the ‘What?’ field, then a location in the ‘Where?’, finally select ‘When?’. All the events matching your search (within a 50mile radius of the location) will be shown on the map. Click on the marker to get more info about the event.
Neither the ‘what?’ or ‘where?’ field are required, either or both may be left blank. If the ‘what?’ is omitted then all events in the area are shown and if the ‘where?’ is omitted then the centre of the current view of the map is used.
All the events are from Upcoming and you can use their interface to add your own event, to then appear on the map.
For the technically minded, the site uses the Google Maps API (including for geocoding the location) and the Upcoming API.
If you know of any other feeds I could use for adding events to the map, then please let me know so I can try adding them.
I’d also be grateful for any feedback, problems or suggestions – just leave a comment below.
After over 7½ years at the OU, today is my last day. Still hasn’t quite yet sunk in that I’m leaving, or that in only 2 weeks time I’ll be beginning my placement in Ethiopia.
I’ve really enjoyed working here, in IET, KMi and on the OpenLearn team, have learnt loads and have met lots of great people.
Also thanks for all your generosity in donating to VSO to help with the work they’re doing – very close to reaching my fundraising target now
I’ll be making sure that I keep my blog up to date so you’ll be able to keep track of how things are going, so keep in touch and there’s an open invitation if you fancy a holiday in Ethiopia!
Just been to visit the “IT Volunteers in Ethiopia” group that I set up the other week, only to find that I get the message “The owner of this group has banned you from this group. “:
So apparently I’ve banned myself from the group :-/ (not quite sure how I would’ve managed that- or why!)
Then if I try to return to the groups homepage, I get “Forbidden Your client does not have permission to get URL / from this server”:
*but* if I then log out of my Google account, I’m able to see the group and I have permission to get to the Groups homepage…
I’ve just submitted my assignment for the OUs Effective Leadership Skills course (GB003). It’s only a short course (approx 20 hours), and non-credit bearing but it’s taken me little while to get through. It’s different from most of the other OU courses as there are no fixed start and end dates, which I think the OU should probably be doing more of – though I know there are plenty of reasons as to why the OU still has fixed start/end dates for the vast majority of it’s courses (including tutor workload planning and exam timing). But there have been lots of times when I thought about doing a particular course, only to find it’s not running for another 6 months.
This course content is pretty much what I’d expected, though there was less reading than I thought there would be – especially compared to the Law course (W200) I took couple of years ago. My feeling is that most of these types of courses (e.g. effective time management etc) generally contain common sense approaches to work that you should probably know anyway – but sometimes they just need to be reinforced.
The assignment itself was very reflective and making you look at how you going to apply what you’ve learnt directly to your work, which is the whole point of doing the course in the first place, though I generally find these types of reflective activity quite hard!
Only had a couple of little niggles about the course and these are totally related to how the course delivery software (Moodle) forces content to be given to users (rather than anything to do with the course content). Firstly, that the navigation was quite poor, once you were on a content page, there was effectively only 3 links to navigate the content – (a) return to course homepage, (b) go to next page or (c) go to previous page. There was no quick way to jump back to a particular page in another section that you wanted to refer to. This is also a problem I’ve had with course content in OpenLearn (but we’re working on that one).
The second problem was that there was no search facility on the site, so the only way to try and find the page that I’d read about ‘virtual leadership’ on was to just scan through all the pages. Not a huge problem for this course (not too many pages), but frustrating nonetheless, but this would be infuriating for much bigger courses. I had a similar issue with the law course, in that we were provided with the course manuals in paper form and I asked to have the manuals in pdf format too, basically for ease of searching and for taking away with me (didn’t want to be lugging around heavy course material when I’d already got my laptop). My request for this was rejected (on what I thought was a fairly lame excuse), even though I know the manuals are produced in pdf format to send to the printers!
Hopefully as Moodle (sorry, OU VLE!) is rolled out and more courses have their full content online, this search issue will be sorted out!
