Drones, iSaint Jobs, and Libya

I recently assured an angry reader of this blog that i will squeeze time and do an end-of-the-year-2011 blog post. Needless to say, this is the one. Sorry about the long silence.

2011 like many years before it, had lots of surprises, disappointments, thrills, ups and downs. Thats the way life goes. It has been like that long before homosapiens learnt how to count time. In fact, the only reason people started keeping track of time is to keep track of events - both planned and unplanned events - including acts of God.

Talking of which, i personally believe that for rats and roaches to team up and run after a head of state, a head of state of an oil-rich country; forcing him to run out of his palacial tent into a sewer culvert in the middle of the desert; and making the same head of state cry out for mercy, before he was killed and buried, in an unmarked grave, at an undisclosed location, was indeed an "act of God".

One Libyan man recently said on Al-Jazeera TV that "the Tunisians have always been calling Libyans dead people who fear death, but now that we liberated ourselves, we have proved that we are not dead people and we do not fear death".

And then the earthquake in Japan that wobbled the very foundations of a real nuclear power plant causing lethal leaks, not mentioning the instant deaths and destruction of infrastructure. That act of God sent me wondering: why would human beings explode nuclear bombs in Japan many years ago, and as if that was not bad enough, fate allows an act of God to play with the security of a nuclear plant in the same country? Double trouble and tragedy. We do not yet know the full impact of that nuclear disaster.

By the end of this year, East Africa will have no less than three submarine communications cables connecting the region with the rest of the world. Just a couple of years ago, there was none. Nevertheless, we are still to see the real and desired effect of the high speed cheaper communications cables manifested on price and speed at the end-user level. The Internet "www" still means "world-wide-wait" - web pages still load without any pomp or swag.

Keeping track of some of the thrills, it was in 2011 that i discovered the beautiful minds of the guys at Android. The IDEOS smartphone running on Android thrilled me with its networking capabilities - at such a price - less than US$ 150 in Kampala at Orange.

The passing of the iSaint at Apple was such a down - money would never bail the wealthy geek out of the hand of the angel of death that was calling him for over a year. Jobs, so far, has been immortalised in Budapest, Hungary, courtesy of Graphisoft, the creators of ArchiCAD. To counter-balance that down, an uplifting moment came through the philanthropy of another very wealthy guy who, years ago, declared that he wants to give away his billions of dollars before he dies. Charles Feeney, 80, just recently dished out US$350 million towards construction of a technology-based satellite campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City.

Surprises? One big surprise: how could a US drone, intact, end up in the hands of Ahmadinejad? I read somewhere that the guys employed GPS spoofing and caused the highly sophisticated aircraft to land normally at a location of their choice. As we know now, they said that drones are going to be mass-produced and made available cheaply and easily.

My biggest disappointment was why Obama, er... the CIA did not go and pick it up a.s.a.p - at whatever cost - human or otherwise. Please do not call me a gibbering twat. That drone should have been hunted and picked up. Now i live in mortal fear of flying objects!

Well, there is so much to review but so little space. Finally, the lesser disappointment of 2011 - for me - was the ever rising pump price of fuel.

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