The last 3 months in pictures
16/8/2008
As promised, the first of my photos from Tanzania are now on the site, just waiting for you to come and take a look. In fact I've copied all 354 photos I took onto the server, so if you go through them manually (entering the full names such as gilesfleming.com/tanzania/giles/001.jpg into the address bar by hand) you can see them all. Unfortunately it takes a little longer to fill in all the descriptions and so forth neccessary for the full pages to be displayed, so I've only done the first hundred of those so far.
I've taken this as a good time to drop the "thoughts" page (since I'd only ever put two entries into it and hadn't done any for quite some time) and replace it with a jumping-off point for all the photos that are on here. I hope over the next few years I'll be doing a few other exciting things that'll produce content for that section, and I've already got the two sets of ball photos and now the Tanzania ones to link to.
Putting in the descriptions for the other 254 of my Tanzania photos may have to wait now, because I'm getting very close to greenbelt. This year indeed I'm being allowed to start my festival a couple of extra days earlier: I've stewarded for a couple of years now, but this'll be the first time I've been on the team that keeps an eye on things during the build week. (It may in fact be the first time there's been such a team, I'm not sure). So in about 36 hours' time I'll set off for a small patch of heaven on a racecourse in Cheltenham :-D.
CAPTCHA-ed
16/8/2008
I've been seeing lots of spam turning up in the comments here of late - I suspect I haven't been squashing it quickly enough for you not to have noticed as well. In a way it was quite a pleasing moment for me, realising that my site was seen as worthwhile enough to spam by whoever runs that particular botnet, but it was becomming rather annoying, having to trawl through the database to track them down and delete them. So as of today I've put in CAPTCHAs (those squiggly text things that you've probably seen when trying to post comments and so forth in other places).
Now I do know that it's annoying having to waste your valuable human potential solving those little bits of text, which is why I haven't gone for just your basic CAPTCHA system. The ones you'll see on my site come from a group called reCAPTCHA, who noticed that there was a parallel between getting a human to read some text that a computer couldn't read in order to stop comment spam, and the problem of converting old books and newspapers to electronic formats when the text isn't machine readable. So, rather than generating a random set of letters that get deleted as soon as you've proved that you can read them, these CAPTCHAs show you a couple of words scanned from archive material that computers are struggling to translate. Your answer to the CAPTCHA is then used to help preserve this archive.
Pretty nifty, eh ;-). I think the best bit, for me at least, is that you don't have to feel that your skills are being wasted. Full details on the project, and code if you want to add it to your own commenting system, are available from the reCAPTCHA site.
Out of Africa
12/8/2008
Well I'm back... not sure how pleased I am about that, but then that's to be expected. As you can no doubt tell, I'm hugely behind with the bits I wrote in my diary while I was in Yamba, but I dont think it's a good idea to try to wait til all that's been filled in before I add anything new. So I'll be catching up with it over the next few weeks, but for now I'll just share some of the best words I've managed to come up with yet. I left Yamba just before I left the project completely, spending the last couple of days in Milingano. It was on the first of those days that I found myself trying to think of something to write in the Village Africa visitor's book.
"Last night I wrote this in my diary:
Tomorrow I'll get up before daybreak & steal away from Yamba - to all intents and purposes I've seen the village for the last time. I've filled scores of pages writing about it, but I realise now that I have never, and can never, really describe it. I've twice filled my camera's memory card with photos of Yamba, but I could never capture it. In twenty years' time I'll have strong memories of the last 10 weeks, but they'll never be as sharp as they are today, and that's something I'll take a long while to accept.
It's no easier to express my feelings here than it was there.
I've been hugely fortunate to come to work on what must surely be the world's most welcoming building site, and to see such progress both at the Kwemshi store and the new Kindergarten. Being able to say that a small part of that progress is down to me is a real thrill too. But none of that is really important. Nor are the apocalyptic sunsets, the dappled shadows cast by unfamiliar plants, or even the joy of finding the ant that's been biting you for half an hour and squashing it under the steamroller of a triple-A battery. None of this holds real significance compared to the people.
On site I owe everything to Freddy for teaching me, and to Lucas, Epimark, Edward and particularly Paulo for their constant good humour and for making me feel at home. Away from work it's been a pleasure to discover that where you go and what you do says more about you than I'd ever realised, so despite being half across the world with people I'd never heard of, I've made great friendships with the other volunteers. I'm hugely relieved that we live in an age now where there doesn't have to be any question of whether we'll be able to stay in touch. Cosmas has been a great entertainer, both at football and teaching us Kiswahili, depending sometimes on sentence. And Clemencia - how can I express my thanks to Clemencia? All the housegirls have been great, but I think I've been particularly lucky to have her to look after me, tease me, and of course to braid my hair in ever more inventive designs. I'll miss her more than I can say.
I've been signing off in my diary with "NeverLoseYourSenseOfWonder", and now that I come to say goodbye I hope I'll be able to keep following my own advice, back in the ordinary world. Yamba could never be encompassed by anything I could describe as ordinary, I'm quite certain.
Asanteni, na Mungu awabariki.
Giles"
I think that's the closest I can come to summing up Yamba - the photos that I'll hopefully get up in a few days should help, too. And in case you were wondering, the bit of Kiswahili at the end there means "Thank you, and God bless you all" (or at least, that's what I wanted to write ;-)). Now, though, I do have to face this "ordinary" world. Thank God it's nearly Greenbelt.