Wednesday, 1 August 2007

Of Good Samiratans and Light Bulbs

A couple of fellow bloggers (huyu na huyu) acccused me of being too quite so I'll break the silence a bit. Let me start with a little story about something that happened to me recently.

Last week I had some time off work so I went Immigration department to collect my passport which I had applied for at the end of April. I knew they had been having a few issues recently but that was more than adequate time for them to sort me out. However my name was not on the list of printed passports and after spending a few minutes on the queue at the counter I was told to come one week later. That really surprised me but I decided to walk out but just as I was heading for the gate somebody tapped me on my shoulder so I turned round thinking I'd see a familiar face but it was a stranger.

Apparently he had been given the same story before so he told me to go and confirm the status with the supervisor. Thought the guy had some ulterior motive at first but that was it and after thanking him I made my way to the supervisor. I explained my situation and she went to look for it and it was there after all, they got my name wrong though but that's for another day. I was surprised to see that there are some genuinely good people out there.

Now on tto the next topic. Earlier this week a I read this article which describes how Google can save up to of power by making the background on their page black. There already is a black version of Google called blackle but I doubt is it's endorsed byt the company. This led me to think about the recent news that some power consumers in Kenya might have to change their work patterns to conserve electricity.

I remember some time back in the papers there was an article about Uganda moving to energy saving bulbs to conserve power. Have our good friends at KPLC considered this or is domestic demand not such a big factor in their calculations?