In Trinidad, a 1904 Gem of a House Is in Distress - NYTimes.com

The last decade has seen the destruction of a number of the island’s historic buildings, including the 1904 Union Club, which was torn down in 1998 and replaced by a 21-story office tower; the Coblentz House, an 1877 estate near the Savannah, demolished the following year; and a turn-of-the-century gingerbread house restored in 1954 by Colin Laird, Trinidad’s most prominent contemporary architect, which was torn down in 2005 and replaced by a faux French chateau. When the Boissiere House was listed for sale, many feared a similar outcome, given its location on prime real estate.
Read the rest of the article here...

Drupal Takes Home 2008 Overall Open Source CMS Award

I've always loved Drupal for its power, but it's too much for my main little personal site, so I use joomla. Maybe it's time to look at Drupal again...

Drupal cleaned up for the second year in a row in the 2008 Open Source CMS Awards, taking home both the Overall Open Source CMS Award and the Best Open Source PHP CMS Award. This marks the first time in which a content management system has ever won the overall award in back-to-back years.

Read the rest of the article here at the Content Management Blog - InformationWeek

G.ho.st Twitters From Amazon Web Services

G.ho.st was founded in 2006 to develop what founder and CEO Zvi Schreiber calls a global hosted operating system (hence the name G.ho.st). The company's platform is a combination of Java-developed server software running on Amazon Web Services and Flash-Java browser code.For users, G.ho.st provides Web applications (Google Docs, ThinkFree, Zoho), e-mail (Zimbra, Meebo IM), file storage, and keyword tagging in an integrated, browser-accessible environment. That includes, at no cost, up to 5 GB of file storage and 3 GB of e-mail storage. G.ho.st refers to it as a virtual computer. The G.ho.st environment is accessible from Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, with Chrome and Opera support planned.

Read the full article at  InformationWeek

Trinidad leading gender equality!

Good news - maybe the day is coming when I can rejoice!


 GENEVA, Switzerland, November 12, 2008 -

Trinidad and Tobago not only leads the Caribbean and Latin America in closing the gender gap, but it's among the top 20 countries in the world making that progress, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2008 released today.



The twin-island republic jumped 27 spots up from its ranking last year to be number 19 in the survey of 130 countries this time around.



"Trinidad and Tobago makes a remarkable climb up the rankings to hold the highest position in the region and to become the only country from the region to hold a place among the global top 20," the report said. "This is partly due to an improvement in the economic participation and opportunity sub-index, but can be mainly attributed to an increase in the number of women in parliament."



Argentina, at 24, is the second-highest ranking country in the region this year, moving up nine places due to an overall increase in political empowerment, driven by large gains in the percentage of women in parliament and among those holding ministerial level positions. Cuba, a new entrant last year, fell three places to 25; while Barbados, one spot down, took the fourth highest spot in the region as it entered the ranks for the first time this year.



Suriname (79), Bolivia (80), Belize (86), Mexico (97), Paraguay (100) and Guatemala (112) occupy the lowest positions in the region.



Norway leads the chart, followed by Finland, Sweden, Iceland and New Zealand. The United Kingdom is at 13 while the United States is ranked 27.

Read the full story here: Caribbean: News in the Caribbean - Caribbean360.com

Spam Volumes Drop by Two-Thirds After Firm Goes Offline

Cool! They will of course come back somewhere, but in the meantime, that's good news!

The volume of junk e-mail sent worldwide plummeted on Tuesday after a Web hosting firm identified by the computer security community as a major host of organizations engaged in spam activity was taken offline.

Read the full article here

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Dem Tiefin’ We?!?: Copyright infringment and the local blogging community

Excellent blog post referring to the lack of respect for copyright - the Trinidad Express, a daily newspaper, stole a photo from a local blogger and used it without attribution in the newspaper!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Obama must attack Israel's apartheid... Raffique Shah, Trinidad Express

He qets to the root of the strife in the Middle East...

"...the root of Islamic "terrorism", lie in Palestine. America must come to terms with the reality that there are three million of these people condemned to living in the most atrocious conditions, many for generations, because of Zionist inhumanity. Another five-or-so million live in the Diaspora in neighbouring Arab states, while many more have migrated to distant lands."

another quote:

"A few months ago a delegation from the ANC in South Africa visited the West Bank and Gaza. In their report, they said they were shocked at the inhumane conditions under which millions of Palestinians lived. "It is worse than anything we ever experienced in South Africa, under the apartheid system," one of them said. We did not need the ANC to tell us that. But the world-and this includes many wealthy Arab countries-has ignored this problem for far too long."

Link to the full article

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44 women murdered in T&T so far this year...

In Trinidad and Tobago, 44 women have been murdered this year to date.
That's double the number from last year.

So Obama's in the White House, all's well with the world?

Not when women (the majority of the population) are being murdered in ever-increasing numbers, when US media commentators are not censured for abusing female candidates in ways that they would not dare to do to an african-american male; when in the Cairo courts last week, the magistrate informed the male accused on the best way to beat his wife without running afoul of the law;

and we are 52% of the population.

The world rejoices when a representative of a 15% minority wins an election, but what about the total lack of representation world wide of the 52% majority?

Women don't have anywhere near proportional representation in ANY government.

So when will I have a reason to go out into the streets and celebrate?

When the promises of Beijing are finally met, when half of our population is no longer paid less for the same work; when we are fully represented in the halls of government and in the White House; when we no longer live in fear of our husbands, our fathers, our brothers; when the courts of law cannot say provocation is a defense for the violence of rape; when anyone who expresses misogynistic views on cable or network television is treated as severely as if s/he expressed a racist view; when our daughters are proud to be female and have all the opportunities that should be there for the 52% majority of the population!

THEN I will put on my t-shirt, I will cry on television, I will run down the streets rejoicing.

Until then - I will contiue to work for TRUE change, change we can ALL believe in - change for the unrepresented and abused MAJORITY of the people of the world.

Change for the WOMEN of the world!

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The power of myth and Barack Obama - part 1

Heard the news of Barack's grandmother's death. Thought about the role of death as transformative in mythology. Death sacrifice always gives a great boost along the path towards a difficult goal. The timing of this death fits so perfectly with all the great myths - great sorrow and great reward go together - it's as if the sacrifice is necessary to finally achieve the reward.

I wonder if his grandmother knew this deep down somewhere, and realised that Monday was the best day to die to support her grandson and his strong ambition ?

Barack and his supporters have invoked mythology at every turn. It is fitting that it happens again, as he stands on the brink of success...

Of course, another theme in mythology is the need for the hero, once he has achieved what he "wants" and has striven for, to fail badly in the role, go through another transformation and come out at the end as the shining beacon he was meant to be.
A question to think about is - is this the first mythological victory for Mr. Obama, or the second? If this is the first, we look forward to a spectacular failure. If the second, then a true golden age for the US is about to dawn. I know which one I think it is...