While most of you might have seen it on the news yesterday, the bandit shot dead happened not too far from where I'm staying and where I grew up. The gunshots around 3 a.m. off of Moody Stewart Street and later in the area of South Street were noticed by every household in the area, two men were seen getting out of an SUV on Moody Stewart Street during the incident - these ended up being the police (witnesses wisely stayed away from the windows afterward).
The next morning, one neighbor told me that Dave had been robbed - Dave Seon, a man who used to pitch marbles with an Uncle. The owner of Seon's Beer Garden on Royal Road, a place that I have been known to haunt every now and then. Dave, who used to deliver newspapers to my father back in the 1980s. Dave. Dave?
Dave.
So I headed up to the Beer Garden and spoke with Dave and Penelope even as the neighborhood seemed to rally to support the bar. And they're all well. The police were applauded - something new in the area that I grew up in. And the bandit shot dead? A quote from patrons:
"Good. One less."
In a time when capital punishment has been debated so vigorously, on the street the people are so tired of crime that it doesn't seem like an armchair discussion.
And for what it's worth, TTPS should take a bow for their rapid response on this - and emulate it more often.
When Dr. Rowley, leader of the Opposition, starts asking questions about the proposed Aluminium Smelter, I scratch my head. There has been so much outcry in the past about it, whether it be about the environment or the failure to provide jobs to residents in the area where the smelter itself is planned, enough so that it's likely that this was one of the political failures of the People's National Movement (PNM) and the past leader of the PNM - Patrick Manning.
Thus it seems odd that the Leader of Opposition would attempt to use this as a platform. Nevermind that this was basically an UNC initiative that the PNM put in place, nevermind that it will allegedly provide jobs, nevermind that the former PNM based government never answered questions about its economic viability. It's the reversal that is interesting, the fact that though no answers were given by the PNM lead government - enough so where the former Prime Minister, Patrick Manning, is on record as saying something along the lines of, "we don't care what the people think".
But then, people do have a short attention span and can shore their own perspective with soap bubbles if necessary.
On the flip side, as I drove to MovieTown in Port of Spain on Saturday, I couldn't help but notice a piece of People's Partnership political detritus on a billboard - stating that they would stop the smelter and toss laptops from the Red House. Even as the media has done little to ask the hard questions about the government's laptop plan for SEA students, I also thank Dr. Rowley for pointing out that there was a political promise made regarding the smelter.
A promise that there hasn't been much public information shared on. {Read more}
Just a quick pointer - while the Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has put out the specifications for laptops that 'public' tender has started on (see the specs here), there were remarks made about a laptop in the local media (Newsday, perhaps? ) that did not do much to answer questions regarding a cheap laptop that India was making.
...The tablet computer, developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi and the Indian Institute of Science in Bengalooru, will eventually be made available to the public. It will run on an open source Linux operating system with Open Office software and can be powered by solar panel or batteries as well as mains electricity. It will have no hard drive but users will have access to a USB port, 2GB of memory and a video-conferencing facility, internet browsing...
Is the present government of Trinidad and Tobago agile enough to reverse course and accomodate this technology, or is their political inertia going to press the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago to pay exponentially more for a political promise made with no plan in actually assisting educators and children?
Just something that's bugging me after seeing the Trinidad and Tobago tabloidnewspaper 'written media' headlines at the express checkout line in Hi-Lo:
600 cases in an estimated population of 1.2 million is 0.05% of the population. If we go with another estimate of Trinidad and Tobago's population, 1.5 million, we come up with 0.04% of the population.
Oh. And 3 people? 0.00025% and 0.0002% of the population dead, respectively.
*AHEM*. If we abuse the term 'outbreak' on a national level like that, I wonder how they would classify HIV infection? A really big outbreak? Oh, and the common cold becomes the plague.
That said, it is possible that there is are localized outbreaks in different parts of the country - something good data reporting and collection could and should identify so that one can isolate the problem areas and deal with the mosquito problems in a sensible manner - through triage.
But scaring the public? Socially irresponsible. The media should be doing a better job at informing the public. Perhaps that's a job that the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago (MATT) could get started on: sensible reporting.
When I caught the headline, Rowley Slams Kamla for 'ATM' remark, I couldn't help but note that this was largely a style issue. And Dr. Rowley does have a point - the remark to CARICOM could be seen as flippant.
The reality, though, is that Trinidad and Tobago has to see about itself first - something that other CARICOM nations have said in various ways within their own sovereign contexts. Barbados's stance on immigration was not too different, and while it caused an uproar everyone knew that Barbados was well within its rights to assure that immigration laws were enforced. Would that Trinidad and Tobago did the same.
But the ATM issue brings to mind a review I had to do on a junior software developer at one time: 'To be a better team member, Mr. X needs to become more self sufficient.'
CARICOM nations, individually, should practice that. And many of the smaller islands have at least moved in that direction, probably because money doesn't come free from anyone.
As it is, with the global economy as it has been and will be for the forseeable future, it's quite possible that CARICOM will go the way of the West Indies Federation... which is sad because if member states actually came up with and acted on regional plans as diligently as the elected political representation at CARICOM did for their elections, the region might actually move forward.
Before I post the specifications, I'll add my commentary. The hardware requirements for the systems are well defined, exceedingly so. As a software developer with over 20 years of experience and as a software developer who has worked as a technical lead on projects with budgets in excess of $1 million dollars U.S., I have some concerns. I believe you should too.
The logical progression to hardware requirements for such a project are: (1) Identifying the problems, (2) Identifying the software to be used to solve the problems, (3) Identifying the hardware that runs the software (this treats the operating system as an extension of the hardware).
What we have here is actually the complete reverse - which leads me to question the competency of those who are undertaking the project. I could delve into more detail with what is wrong with these specifications but I don't want to spend more thought fixing their specs than they spent in creating them.
In short: This is stupid but it meets the government's apparent requirement: Meeting a political party's promises while assuring that money is spent on something that will have no measurable benefit in the context of education of the children of Trinidad and Tobago.
Here are the requirements, as posted on the main computing list of Trinidad and Tobago:
I wrote about this in a more general way over at KnowProSE.com, but I think it would be a good localized experiment for people of Trinidad and Tobago to see how much influence they have globally. Where Facebook seems to be the uniform social network of the day, it often astounds me how often good things posted by Trinidadians and Tobagonians aren't actually shared on Facebook as much as they are liked.
And for a nation so proud of its own, that seems a bit peculiar. We celebrated a World Cup team whose only goal in the last World Cup was on itself with rampant festivity and yet people don't dare click the 'Share' button on Facebook.
So here's what is going on. Fast Company, the magazine, has an Influence Project underway. Bloggers, users of social networks and anyone can take part - and the results are to be published in the November issue of Fast Company. And influence is almost always about who shares what one says.
Thus the challenge: Media houses, individuals and anyone else from Trinidad and Tobago should get on and check their influence - like this. And the interesting part of influence is that it requires people to work togetherin spreading a message.
So spread it. See how influential you are and by extension how influential your fellow citizens are.
Or don't for fear of finding out how socially significant you are. The gauntlet, tossed. :-)
Since the election, I've been glad to hear the dolting adoration of the new government fall away into critical thought regarding how Trinidad and Tobago governs itself. That the new Opposition Leader, Dr. Keith Rowley singled out Jack Warner regarding a possible conflict of interest has created friction within the social networks around me.
I've read that Dr. Rowley was wrong to point at what could be a conflict of interest. I disagree - I think that no one is above this and would ask that anyone in government do the same, even Dr. Rowley. I've read ignorance on both sides and I've read more enlightened commentary from either side. The idea that this could be an issue has a lot of people delving into the laws, enough so that 'Make A Choice, Jack' has some teeth. Comments on that article reflect most of the discussion that I've seen, but a link to a YouTube video got me interested. The video linked to, here, doesn't seem too prejudiced.
Yet in looking around further on YouTube, I found the video below.
Now here's my question: Is this how Trinidad and Tobago should be represented? {Read more}
I find it difficult to believe that on one hand, the newly appointed Minister of Community Development plans to wean out handouts while on the other hand the People's Partnership Campaign promise of lobbing laptops out of the Red House for children:
Newly-appointed Community Development Minister Nizam Baksh will be moving towards weaning out social programmes which act as handouts causing an increase in the poverty bracket. Speaking to reporters after a tree-planting exercise at Lady Hochoy Home, Gasparillo, on Tuesday, Baksh said people must not depend too much on handouts. He said his philosophy was that people should be taught how to catch a fish rather than give them...
Or has the People's Partnership undergone a lobotomy such that the philosophy of the Minister of Community Development varies from that of the People's Partnership?
...On Monday, the Prime Minister formally launched a programme with catchy title and acronym in ’Clean Up and Beautify Trinidad and Tobago (C&B T&T),’ which briskly communicates a clear message. Will the communication succeed in rallying public and private bodies at all levels, and the masses of ordinary citizens to whom it is addressed?...
Really? Maybe I need to come up with some catchy titles and acronyms for other things.
Maybe that's been the whole problem. Catchy slogans. Like, "Wey de man wid de dusbin gone?"
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