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Apr 29, 2011
You woke to the buzzing of your mobile phone, 7 O'Clock in the morning. The office: your presence required, for some gruesome murder in the middle of the night somewhere in Kotu. You stumbled sleepy eyed to brush your teeth, down some coffee.
You drove to the site of the murder. There were five suspects, people present during the event. They were rounded up, brought to you. You wrote the five vowels, from the first to u, one for every suspect. Then you sent them home, disinclined to hold them until they were proven guilty.
The following morning, refreshed, following some deep thinking during the night, you requested their return to the police questioning room. Four showed up. In line with your conclusions, one did not.
Apr 07, 2008
In the beginning, there were no cellphones. Back then, the only way to talk to someone was either on a land-phone, yelling at them through the fence that separated you (if you were neighbors), or walking - running if they owed you money - over to their house. (If they were mobile at this time then you were pretty much out of luck - you did this complicated thing where you first called their house, then their grandmother's house, then their best friend's, then their girlfriend's, each time just missing them, until you gave up and just went out on the streets to see if maybe you could meet them face to face).
Oct 17, 2007
I saw in the paper today an advertisement from Quantum for their new service ( jambarr), which lets you send and receive emails from your mobile phone, via a gateway. Check it out - sending emails from your phone deducts from your credit (D1 for each sms, which price includes a reply from the email address); and to send sms from your email address you have to buy jambarr credits, which they say you can get from any Quantumnet Internet cafe. The service works for all the cellphone carriers, which is a big plus. There is a problem with receiving emails as sms though - every time I tried sending an email from my gmail account my phone gave me an error ("Text not formatted as ASCII - could not parse", or something similar).
Sep 10, 2007
Yes, it's over. The finals happened on Saturday, from 9pm to about 3am, at the Kairaba Hotel's Jaama Hall. I was invited as a blogger (at the table I was sitting at I mentioned this fact during introductions to an elderly gentleman - he said 'Oh', and turned around to talk to the next person). Yamundow Leigh won, to noone's surprise. Jainaba Touray came second. All very predictable, given the course of the voting over the last week. Each of the girls got a ten thousand dalasi cash prize, and each of the guests (that's us) got all sorts of cool Africell swag, from sim cards to mobile phone holders. Now back to your regular GRTS programming ennui...
Aug 28, 2007
Yesterday ten people were voted out of the face of africell competition, so now it's down to twenty. The girls voted out put on brave "it's ok we can live with it" faces - for five minutes, then burst into inconsolable tears. The ones who didn't get voted out tried to hide their relief, and be gracious, hugging the others and patting them on the back. The GRTS cameraman swung the camera around wildly ("too many cool shots here - which to choose, which to choose?"), so you'd get a glimpse of a thigh here, a flash of a cheek there. Afterwards they showed the scores, and Ms Leigh came first on the voting tally, with Lilian Bruce Oliver right behind her. The votes will accumulate instead of being reset at each round, which means unless something unexpected happens they will stay as they are now, with very little change from week to week. The finals are on the 8th September.
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