DrBacchus' Journal

I told Bert I'd journal this, so here it is.

I'm trying to choose a distro for my training machines, so that I can do a rebuild periodicaly. With the following requirements:

* The distro is usable by people not completely familiar with Unix

* The install does not require baby-sitting

* The install does not install a horribly broken Apache distro, as so many of them seem to these days

Personally, I have been using Slackware for some time, and I used BSD before that, so my personal requirements are a little different. But I can't assume that my students know anything about Unix (although, so far, most have) or know how to use Enlightenment. Plus, I want something I can rebuilt in a few minutes of baby-sitting.

I've noticed that my personal email volume has plunged over the last week. Apparently the spammers took the week off as well as the folks that contribute to the various email lists I'm on. I rather expected that spam volume would skyrocket during the Christmas holidays. I really wish I had spam stats from before last week. It would be interesting to compare my perceptions with reality. We'll see what happens in the new year when things get cranked back up.

Presidential Results - Latest

The ECK (Election Commission of Kenya) has officially announced the results, and Mwai Kibaki is the 3rd president if Kenya. The inauguration will be tomorrow.

There's a lot of celebration going on. The losing candidates conceeded very gracefully, and violence has been almost completely avoided. This is a very promising start to things.

President-elect Kibaki has stated that he has no interest in forming a coalition government with Kanu, because he wants a strong opposition to keep him on his toes. I think I am starting to really like this guy.

I heard the term "The Umbrage Industry" used recently, and now I can't recall where that was. If you're not familiar with the term Umbrage, it means, to put it simply, being offended. We, the people of the United States of America, have perfected the art of umbrage. We manage to get offended at anything, and we manage to see offence taken by people who are merely commenting.

I probably should not mention any names. You probably either know who I'm talking about, or you don't. Dude, lighten up. If you can't take a little constructive criticism, then don't post your ideas in public places where the whole world can see them. Nobody is calling you a sh*thead, as you claim. And, unless this is something that is unique to your little corner of things, which, after all, came out of a big organization into a little one, not the other way around, nobody is abandoning trust.

You seem like a nice guy. I enjoyed meeting you, and I enjoyed talking to you, but you've got to quit acting like every issue is a matter of Good vs Evil, with you the sole defender of All That Is Right. It gets a little old. Some things are just matters of opinion, and there's a chance, however slim it might be, that you're not always right. Getting offended every time someone disagrees with you is a great way to get a stomach ulcer, but accomplishes precious little else.

Followups:

The phrase was actually in a piece in Newsweek (or was it Time) that my Dad read to us on Christmas, about the ACLU furur surrounding Christmas. Here are some relevant links:

http://reason.com/0212/fe.tc.e.shtml

http://www.jaycaruso.com/archives/001327.html

I managed to spend the entire day so far watching the Kenya elections. Which was made harder by the fact that information is extremely hard to come by, so I spent most of that time watching my own web site.

The results are unsurprising. Kibaki has somewhere around 65% of the vote, and seems sure to win, unless something surpassingly surprising happens in Rift Valley and the various other, smaller, districts that have not yet reported in. Counting could take as long as late tomorrow to be completed.

The most important things now seems to be:

How Kenyatta responds. If he challenges the vote, or hints at impropriety, it could spark discontent and violence. If he concedes gracefully, and offers his help and support to the transition, it could signal an era of cooperation and peace. So much is up to the reaction of this one young man, who has so little experience in politics it is really very alarming to watch.

How the transition is handled. Moi has set some very good first precedents, and we should be very grateful to him for that. He is removing himself gracefully from the scene, offering no resistance, or even nasty barbs, and has very publically said that he will step down gracefully when Kibaki wins. The period of transition can be handled cooperatively, giving the new government pointers they will need to do a good job, or it could be handled beligerently, setting the stage for a future in which nothing can be accomplished.

The makeup of Parliament. I am actually glad to see 25% of the seats going to KANU. If they were utterly removed from the scene, I actually think that it would cause a rockier transition, as there would be no tie to the past. Now, clearly, we want to distance ourselves from an unpleasant past, but completely severing that link would be dangerous, in that the new government is so inexperienced that it might make all the same mistakes that we are trying to distance ourselves from.

Communication. Things will not change in a day, or a month, or even a year, however well intentioned Kibaki and his government will be. It will take time. And communicating this to the people, and keeping them updated on progress in a completely open manner, will be crucial to reducing the frustration, and subsequent discontent and violence, that comes from a populace that expects immediate change and does not get it. Next week, and next month, and so on, there will still be high unemployment, high crime, high illiteracy, lots of corruption, street people, tribal unrest, and other results of the last 10 years of misrule (giving Moi and Kanu some credit, the first years of their rule were not so terrible), and these things will take lots and lots of time to overcome. In the best of situations, we'll see these things changing immediately, but even then, it will take years before they are at the state that they were before 1986, let along making real progress.

God bless Africa. God bless Kenya.