As I suspected, Addis Ababa is a lot cheaper when you leave Bole. But
prices are still high - which is curious. Why would prices be lower in
Indonesia, which has a much higher GDP than Ethiopia?

Elle and I realise it's probably to do with the fact that almost every
processed or manufactured good in Ethiopia is imported. Ethiopia
doesn't have much of a domestic market for a lot of processed goods
we're used to buying in the West. So, for example, beans, rice, flour
and other staples will be cheap as dirt. However, things like
toothpaste and shower gel will be imported, and almost as expensive as
in Italy.

However, as in all countries, there are expensive ways to do things
and cheap ways to do things. We have started using minibuses, which
are the preferred method of transport for locals, and it can cost
between 5 and 10 Euro cents for a journey across the city. Addis Abiba
is also a relatively safe city to walk around in (compared to Nairobi,
where we'll be in a few months). I've been walking around to get a
feeling for the geography of the city. I'll upload some pics when I
get a chance.

My EU geek readers might be wondering what most Ethiopians think about
Europe and Europeans. In Europe, the recent EU election monitoring
report on the Ethiopian elections was seen as very weak and watered
down. In Ethiopia, it seems (as an outsider) that people consider to
report to have been very harsh. This includes the opposition, who hold
it up as condemnation of the government. I'll hopefully be meeting
with some EU representatives in Ethiopia privately, and would love to
hear their impressions of the country from an EU-perspective.

Anyway - the internet is not very good here, but we're doing our best
to get it up and running. Mobile internet really does seem like the
best option. More soon (including photos).

So, this is my second day in Ethiopia. Some initial reactions: Addis
Ababa is nowhere near as cheap as I was expecting it to be. We were
hoping for prices closer to those we paid in Indonesia, where we lived
for about 5 months in 2007. Instead, prices are honestly not much
cheaper than Trento, Italy. A bag of groceries costs almost the same.
A meal in a restaurant is just a bit cheaper. The prices are also
almost always more expensive than advertised because 15% tax (and
sometimes also 10% service charge) are added afterwards.

However, I think part of this is because we're living in Bole – the
suburb of Addis where all the embassies and NGO headquarters are and
where prices have been seriously inflated. In Indonesia we lived in
Yogyakarta, a city where there weren't many foreigners. We also
traveled to Kalimantan and Sumatra, places where few tourists venture
(most visitors to Indonesia go to either Bali or Jakarta). It also
helps that we spoke enough Bahasa Indonesia to have a decent
conversation.

In Ethiopia, we are living in the most expensive suburb of the capital
and we do not speak a word of Amharic. If a middle-aged businessperson
with a fixed income came to Ethiopia, she would think it was the
cheapest place on Earth. For students like us it's going to stretch
our modest budget.

However, you can't really compare prices between Trento and Addis. We
lived in Trento for almost two years, so we knew the cheapest place
for good food (La Grotta pizzeria) and the cheapest places to shop. In
Addis, we have been living here for two days. We know only the most
expensive places to eat and the most expensive places to shop. As we
learn more about Ethiopia, this will change.

Anyway – apart from the prices (which will hopefully fall as we learn
the cheapest way to do things) we're enjoying it. Ethiopia has a
unique feeling to it, and we're looking forward to exploring it more.
Further posts to come.

So, I've arrived in Ethiopia. I'll write a proper update soon.

This is my first post to this blog using Mozilla Thunderbird. It's an open-source e-mail client from the same people behind Firefox. Hopefully, it's going to let me write my blog posts offline and upload them easily to Posterous when I have an internet connection in Ethiopia. I'm also adopting Thunderbird as part of a move towards greater "independence" (or whatever you want to call it) online. In this spirit, I'm looking forward to the release later this year of Diaspora - an open-source and self-hosted social network in the same vein as Facebook. I'm hoping that more and more people are going to start hosting their own services online - maybe not this year, but over the next decade or so. When the internet is truly mature, I hope it will resemble a decentralised network of individuals, rather than relying on large, centralised corporations like Facebook or Twitter as hubs. Let's see...

I'm having bizaare internet problems at the moment. The entire range of Google products works at full broadband speed (Google search, images, news, maps, etc.)... but nothing else. Any other non-Google page fails to load. The strange thing is that I can pull new, non-cached content in from other web-pages absolutely fine. If I go to Google images and search for something - I can see all of images displayed as thumbnails. If I click on them to take me through to the original image, however, it gets stuck loading forever.

It's not malware - because any computer on the network is affected in the same way (even a brand new netbook which has never been used before). I've gone down to the command line and tried flushing the DNS, renewing, resetting and reconnecting everything. I've gone into my router and changed the settings there. Nothing works.

What makes it incredibly frustrating is that there is one website that loads perfectly fine: the Daily Mail home page. I can read all of the articles on that site without any problems. Also, and maddeningly, if I follow a link from the Daily Mail site to anywhere else on the internet, it works. However, if I got to exactly the same page directly... it fails. This leads to me desperately searching through the Daily Mail archives, looking for the site I want.

Is this some sort of Google / Daily Mail sponsored plot to take over the internet? Or is it a problem with Tele2 - my Italian ISP? Anyway, I'm glad I have a Posterous account set up. I can still blog easily, by sending off an e-mail in Gmail. I think Posterous is going to work very well in Ethiopia, which is why I'll hopefully be talking to some NGOs over there about using it in the field.

I'm also glad Google Reader works, because it means I could keep up with the blogs I follow. If it wasn't for Google Reader working, I might have missed this post by euroblogger Julien Frisch. It might be one of the best posts he's ever written - and I can see that moving to Brussels is working out very well for him.

Finally, I got to try out an iPad at a store yesterday. They're really beautiful creatures - and I can see exactly why they're the hottest geek toy around at the moment. I tried out a couple of blogs I admire for their design (Jason Santa Maria, Dustin Curtis, Paddy Donnelly, Gregory Wood and a few others) and they look stunning with the iPad. Me want very much...

@OreganMichael on Twitter has automated his Twitter feed so that every day it tweets:

Michael is enduring a life of repetitious, soul destroying drudgery.

It tweets this every day. Nothing else, just this. For the rest of his life. There's something calming and philosophical in there somewhere.

At least - I hope he's automated it. I hope he's not just sat there with a script, typing the same message day after day. What a cheery thought.

This patent is from 2000, so I'm sure it's out of date by now. The interesting thing is that most keystroke logging I read about is to do with surveillance - but this one claims to have a commercial application. It's an attempt to do away with usernames and passwords by identifying your unique "keyboard signature" (the specific speed, style and pattern you use when you type on a keyboard). With it, you could potentially go up to any computer in the world and start typing away then, after the computer has analysed a sufficient sample of your typing, it would log you on to your unique online identity.

What an absolutely crap idea... no wonder it hasn't caught on. Why is it that surveillance technology always seems so perfect (on paper) for commercial application? And then it causes outrage and paranoia when anybody tries to actually implement it (*Cough* Facebook *Cough*).

*Sigh* Can we have a decentralised, direct and open web, please? As a friend on Twitter recently tweeted, "bring on the #TruWeb."