Yesterday I impulsively decided to go to Ghana with my friend Stuart. He used to work there about six years ago, for Wycliffe the bible translating missionaries. He’s going back for a ceremony to dedicate the completion of the definition of written language for the village that he was in.

I don’t approve of bible translation, because I don’t believe in God or Christianity. However, it’s a great opportunity to see another world, to see Africa, to visit remote and materially poor villages, and meet some people working in development. With a guide who is a good friend and knows the area.

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Today I showed Sheila at the Harambee Centre how to turn a Word document into a sensible email questionnaire. We just went for copy and paste from Word into an HTML email, then asking people to reply and fill in their answers.

Outlook 2000 has a nice feature that if you type within a reply to an email beyond the end of lines of the replied-to message, then it marks your text with your name and a special colour. This makes it much easier to read the responses!

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Went to the Cambridge Co-operative Development Agency (CCDA) today and had a good long chat with Adrian Ashton there.

I am investigating the possibility of persuading someone to start their new software-related business as a co-operative, rather than a more normally structured sort of company limited by guarantee. But that’s just an excuse, as I want to know about it myself anyway. Maybe I will start an open source charity consultancy, and then I’ll need to know.

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Oh yes, and the new domain name has propagated but there is nothing there yet.

Had a really good day at the Harambee centre. Wayne arrived just before 11am with the new computer, and quickly and consummately set it up. Crimson Technology provides proper service. He moved the old computer, set up the new one, installed printer drivers for the printer, and even put in a network card that i had bought along. You try and get Dell to do that.

A little before he left, Phil arrived, and then we spent all afternoon setting up the network between the two machines, with internet connection sharing. I say “we”, but I mainly made tea, wallpaper and looked up Swahili names for the computers. They’re called Hujambo (“Are you fine?”) and Sijambo (“I’m fine!”). Harambee means “Let’s pull together!”.

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Last Thursday I went to an introductory meeting about Re-evaluation Counseling (RC), also known as Co-counseling.

It’s a curious thing. The core is that you sit down with some one, and listen to them talk for 45 minutes. You don’t add anything to the conversation, just nod, be interested, engage, but certainly not ask questions or tell your own story. Then you swap over and they listen to you for 45 minutes.

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It’s a strange sort of loneliness living your life as a free agent. I’m use to some social interaction at the club that is Creature Labs in amongst writing and coding. Yesterday afternoon I went for a run to stop myself going to sleep. If I was working from home for an extended period I’d have to create a system of hour-long afternoon or late lunch time activities to sustain all my needs.

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Happy Tuesday. This afternoon I went into the Harambee centre again. Talked to Sheila there about the DFID research project, and I’m going to help her next week with sending out an email questionnaire. You’d be amazed at how hard it is deciding what format to send a questionnaire in. We decided against emailing Word documents in the end because it’s easier to just hit reply to a text email.

Also updated the virus checker, and had another go with incremental CD backup. The CD software didn’t work quite how I expected - it claims to have appended files to the CD, but they don’t appear. Needs more work. Finally, we registered a domain name! harambeecentre.org.uk

OK, that’s enough blogging for today, I’m off to Tesco. I’ll tell you about the weekend and other things from last week on Wednesday when I’ll have nothing else to say.

After having been half shaved my hair is definitely back up to furry length now. It was prickly to start with, but when the gap between the hairs becomes smaller than the length of the hairs, it suddenly feels like a cat.

Thanks to everyone who made a donation for Jimmy’s Nightshelter / The Big Issue Foundation. It was a fun experience, and much appreciated. Pete, I think my halfhead email signature got you one extra donation today from an old employee.