Ben Tshin

I have been thinking recently about poverty, since it is all around me in Sudan. But one thing I have seen is a difference between slum poverty and village poverty. I mentioned this in an email to a friend:

It’s all about contrast and our sensitivity to poverty. Village
poverty is wide spread through a village. Usually, the entire village
has very little, including the elders and leaders of the community.
Village poverty is more akin to rural poverty, in that people are
usually survive through subsistence activities. It is usually no
market economy. Also, villagers are usually more spread out having
more land with which to scavenge materials like firewood, as well as,
land for their cattle to roam. Slum poverty usually occurs in pockets
within a larger city. Slums are packed and congested, and usually
without proper sanitation or water. A lack of sanitation isn’t a
problem in isolation. The diseases occur when people are congested,
bringing the lack of sanitation closer to each person. Slum poverty
might be a stones throw from a 5-star hotel. I was once in the Ritz
Carlton in Shanghai, and it overlooked a neighbourhood on the other
end of the economic scale. It wasn’t necessarily a slum, but you can
easily translate the scenario to Africa, and Asia and shift the
economic scales downward.

So slum poverty akin to acute pain and village more like chronic pain.
If you stayed in villages and small towns for long enough, you become
inured to the standard of life that people “enjoy”. But in a city,
it’s easy to see the horrible conditions endured in the slums,
especially when you sleep in a nice house with guards at the door.

Your comments on this would be very appreciated. I haven’t fleshed this out completely, but it is still on my mind.

Christmas is coming and it will be a repeat of all the craziness. Here’s a short list of Christmas-related things that people want to eliminate:

• packed malls full of neurotic parents
• eating dinner after dinner of turkey and tryptophan
• Christmas CDs on infinite repeat
• bitter winter weather with -20C windchill

And I propose one more: Christmas cantatas and the pain of out-of-tune choruses.

So this past Sunday I went to People’s Church to watch their Christmas concert. Dread. That’s all I felt leading up to it. And a bit of sleepiness. To my surprise it was thoroughly entertaining. A bit slow at parts, but fun. It wasn’t just singing (yawn), but they did choreographed dance along with a full live band. Too bad something like this would be too “revolutionary” in our Chinese church circles. I think the grannies and gramps would have heart attacks.

I’m just looking into the realm of possibilities. It’s still a ways away, but maybe I won’t sleep at my next Christmas concert when I return home.

In the process of migrating my sister’s blog I decided to test it out first. It’s always a good idea to do a few dry runs before starting anything like this.

She’s using Movable Type hosted on our tshin.com domain. Since all our Movable Type blogs are administered together, I realized that my old blog was still in the database, just not published. So I imported it here. Partly for nostalgia, partly for testing.

Go ahead and read some back posts from 2002 to 2004 in the brain drain.

[NOTE: I haven't edited anything except for dead links.]

For some reason it feels really good to be mentioned in Timothy Appnel’s blog entry: MT was never open source so far. My blog has been validated by readers other than my own friends and family. Other people care to actually read it and then leave long comments too!

Anyway, for those wondering: Timothy Appnel writes a manual for Movable Type (a blogging tool like Blogspot, WordPress, TypePad), so he’s just defending his turf. And for good reason: I didn’t really do my homework about SixApart and the Movable Type open source vs. “closed source” debate. Then again, even with 2 years experience in the software industry, I still don’t know much about the difference between GPL and other licensing schemes. But I’m glad he does.

Kudos to everyone who slogged through his comment. If anything you learnt something: “MT was never open source so far”. But kudos to Timothy Appnel who actually read my last blog entry complaining about Movable Type.

My sister is back home and we got talking about techy-geeky things and blogs.

We took a look at something on her site and she complained about how tacky or boring it looked. I think it was still using the original design style from Movable Type. So being familiar with WordPress and blogs in general I know that it’s relatively easy to change styles since it’s all in the CSS. So we find the thing to choose designs and off we go. But for some reason MT messed everything up with the sidebars.

I am my sister’s tech saviour. I provide hardware (i.e.: Canon PowerShot A560, Western Digital Passport 120GB, et al.), software (Windows & Office) and most importantly movies and TV shows (i.e.: Ugly Betty, Prison Break). So now I am my sister’s blog saviour.

I’ve used MT on my previous blog, and my brother currently [nominally] uses it as well. The gripe is the user interface (or user experience) for MT3.33 is clunky, static and just plain yuck. WP2.3 just seems light years ahead. I feel like a geek to say it, but WP is just better web.

But that’s not the big issue. The main issue is open source software. SixApart, a for-profit company) is the primary developer of MT. So they took the originally open source MT2.x and made it “closed source” for MT3.x. Lots of Movable Type developers fled and created WordPress.

Now look: MT4.x is once again being released as open source (Movable Type Open Source). And now SixApart is playing catch up. Too bad. Movable Type was a pioneer, but WordPress is the new king of the playground. Just don’t mention Google and Blogspot/Blogger.

So my mini-task for this week: migrate my sister’s blogs from MT and Blogspot to WordPress. I pray for clear skies and strong tailwinds.