How do you make sense of death?

FM100 Papua New Guinea Reaching You 100%

This morning Hon. Member for Wau/Bulolo, Sam Basil MP updated his facebook status with:

So you can guess what I did next. Tried seeing if FM100 online. And Alas!

They were!



You can listen to the station live, however today there was a network error. I really hope they can fix this slight issue but other than that, well done to the team at FM 100!

Here's a pic which Mr. Basil uploaded of the interview with Mr. Hau'Ofa OBE

Twitter plans to buy TweetDeck Inc.

Imagine - a world where you didn't need so many tabs open or to click from browser to browser finding where your Facebook page or Twitter page was?? TweetDeck is the solution!


This morning, while crossing my things to do checklist, I checked my Twitter account. Read a tweet by Mashable about how Twitter is in talks to buy TweedDeck by Chris Taylor.

I had no idea what TweedDeck was until I read further in the article that:

TweetDeck is one of the most popular third-party Twitter clients, available in desktop, iPad, iPhone and Android versions. It displays your Twitter news feed, @mentions and direct messages, along with your Facebook feeds — all on the same screen, all updating in real time. TweetDeck can also support updates from MySpace, LinkedIn and Foursquare (Taylor, 2011).

TweetDeck's wikipedia article states that:

TweetDeck is an Adobe AIR desktop application for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, and MySpace. Like other Twitter applications it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. It is the most popular Twitter application with a 19% market share as of June 2009, following only the official Twitter.com website with 45.70% share for posting new status updates. It is compatible with several operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. An iPhone version was released on June 19, 2009 and an iPad version was released in May 2010 as well. An Android version was recently made available after a public beta period.
Users can split the program into columns which show different things, for instance tweets from friends. TweetDeck interfaces with Twitscoop, 12seconds and Stocktwits, all of which can appear in separate columns. It also allows users to split the people they follow into groups, a very useful feature to many users. The client supports URL shortening which can be done on-the-fly.

It took me less than a minute to download. If you've got Google Chrome, you can download the app from the Chrome shop for free here. Otherwise, TweetDeck is also available for iPhones, iPads, desktops and Android.

Rainy weather music: Summer in the city - The Boys and Girls Club

So it rained this morning and continued (for a while). I struggled to find a song to listen to today, but remembered 'Summer in the City' by the Boys and Girls Club.

I first came across this track, Summer in the City by the Boys and Girls Club in 2007 after reading a post by Analog Giant.

The link to download the mp3 did not work so I managed to download the mp3 from iTunes and eventually created a Youtube video for the song because there wasn't one.

Taylor K. Long from www.t-sides.com provides a review of the song that really sums it up:

“Summer in the City” is the right kind of electro pop for a lazy late summer. It’s got a solid beat that’s not quite fast enough for dancing, but great for waking up in the morning or walking down the street. The vocals are a soft and tongue-heavy purr, building a picture of the typical summer romance – afternoons spent at home in bed, the kind of commitment that needs no declaration of its loyalty beyond frequent time spent together.

It’s a gracious anthem for those of us wanting to make the most of these last hopeful summer nights.

Enjoy!
Spowf



If you love it so much, you can download the track for $1.69 on iTunes here!

World Music: Zimbabwean artist Oliver Mtukudzi

I just visited my friend, Tawanda's blog, Thoughts, Experiences and Insights.
A proud Zimbabwean, his post Soundtrack to my life cont.. really made my afternoon. I am calling today a spiritual mental health day.

This song by Zimbabwean artist Oliver Mtukudzi aided that effort.

Face of a dancer from the Alotau Canoe Festival

If you remember, I wrote a post about Michael Fletcher's beautiful footage taken for North Star Cruises. I somehow, ended up on Flemming Bo Jensen's blog. Flemming is a self-described photographer, traveller, dreamer and nomad.

I found a particular post on Papua New Guinea in particular. Her images taken at the Alotau Canoe Festival of a strikingly beautiful, local, male dancer (see image on left -
Source: www.flemingbojensen.com)

I'm seriously contemplating getting a well-known local Papua New Guinean painter, Jeffry Feeger to paint this.

John Pilger on Obama and Obama, the brand

"Real activism has little time for identity politics" - John Pilger

The Political economy of everything that's wrong in PNG by the Namorong Report

I recently signed up on Twitter about two weeks ago and searched 'Papua New Guinea' to start seeing which fellow New Guineans were on Twitter. I scrolled down the list and started following a few random names that had interesting (if any) filled bios.

I began following Mangimosbi and today only visited his twitter profile and read replies to a post he had published on his post called The Namorong Report.

He claims to a medical school drop-out but after reading his post "The Political Economy of Everything That's Wrong in PNG", I don't see why he can't be published.

Martyn Namorong, aka Mangimosbi writes about the education trap that is the Papua New Guinean education system.

Excerpts include:

The solution is not necessarily to 'teach a person how to catch fish' but to give them a net. I believe it's now fair to comment that microfinance institutions in Papua New Guinea have failed in providing people that net. Politicians, Churches, NGOs and business interests have been excellent distributors of free handouts instead of the 'net'. The net I'm referring to is the ability to trade goods and services and/or labour. Our rural people need efficient and affordable transport networks to move goods to local and global markets and to access services. Our urban people need jobs or financial assistance to start small businesses.

Quotable quotes include:

"I believe change is driven by innovation and innovative people are empowered people."

"I don't dream anymore, I am grounded in the reality. I grapple with the facts as they are. Perhaps there are too many visionaries and dreamers such that no one is there to deal with the reality of life in Papua New Guinea. Even a vast majority of people who a trapped like me do not wish to deal with reality. That is why fast money schemes continue to thrive and voters are gullible towards politicians."

Masalai blog, you should definitely contact this young bright man and include him in the next Forum you chair.

Revolution in the Arab World

For those of who have not subscribed to foreignpolicy.com I suggest you as being a subscriber has it perks. Foreign Policy is published by the Slate Group which is a division of the Washington Post. I just have downloaded an eBook for only US$4.95 for a special report done by Foreign Policy called "Revolution in the Arab World".

Edited by Marc Lynch, the co-editor of The Mideast Channel, FP editor in chief Susan Glasser, and managing editor Blake Hounshell, Revolution in the Arab World: Tunisia, Egypt, and the Unmaking of an Era, is an exclusive new ebook that offers an authoritative look at the rapid reordering of the world's most strategic region and the dilemmas it presents for American power.

With contributions from noted writers Issandr El Amrani and Ashraf Khalil to bestselling authors such as Robert Kaplan and leading U.S. policy experts like Aaron David Miller, the six chapter book includes the prescient rumblings of revolution noted by Amrani and other writers in FP over the last year, a dramatic re-telling of the drama in Cairo's Tahrir Square, deeply reported articles on the behind the scenes players who drove the revolutions, and insights on Washington's back-stage drama over how to respond.

Published in real-time and available to readers on their Kindle, iPad, and computers , Revolution in the Arab World uses new technology to tell the story of the uprising that continues to spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Excerpt from Synopsis:

Where did this wave of anger come from? Why did it begin in Tunisia, and what does it mean? FP's special report starts with a revelatory first chapter that shows how the revolutionary rumblings were ignored, dating back to Issandr El Amrani's prescient warning to Barack Obama in January 2010: Egypt, he wrote, could be the ticking time bomb that overwhelms your international agenda. The coverage also includes a dramatic day-by-day retelling of the battle to hold Tahrir Square, insider accounts of Washington's flip-flopping and struggle to keep up with events, and some of the world’s leading authors and experts, from James Traub to Gary Sick to Robert D. Kaplan, on where we go from here.

Consider it a guidebook for these revolutionary times.

Click here to purchase Revolution in the Arab World.

Cultural resurgence - not rebellion

Pacific Pulse visited the Festival of Pacific Arts in 2008 and covered a story about the resurgence of traditional tattooing amongst Pacific Islanders - a tradition that had been discouraged by earlier missionary settlement in the last century. I personally had planned a trip to my grandmother's village in Yule Island over the Christmas holidays recently solely to get inked - to honour my grandmother, who is almost in her 90s. Taita, my grandmother traditionally was required to have her entire body (like many other girls on our island) to get her entire body tattooed as a sign of matury and womanhood when she reached puberty. As a young Papua New Guinean who left Papua New Guinea in my early teens, I have confronted issues of who I am, and my personal cultural identity. It is said that in order to know who you are, you need to know where you come from and it has given me a sense of immense pride knowing that I come from a rich cultural background. Thus, in order to celebrate the women before me and to gain the cultural strength to develop an individual identity in the 21st century, I must first know the history and traditions of my people. Click here to watch Pacific Pulse's Episode here.