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Spent a couple of minutes speaking with one of my friends.. and suddenly realized how “easy” the internet has made communication….This dude is that half-shy - half-reserved type who can barely keep a conversation going, but is absoutely fabulous on MSN or Facebook.. This dude manages to pull off witty comments that i’ve never heard from him in real life…. I began to wonder if maybe communicating in real time involves so many nuances that most people just wilt rather than communicate effectively…. Make no mistake, this guy is good - he finished in the top two in my class back in 9ja while yours truly finished in the never land of mid-table obscurity (as the football pundits so aptly put it) but the guy never was a talker…. ...

Found this story on the BBC website. Its an ambitious heist at a top notch Paris jewelry shop.. Wonder how much publicity this might have gotten if it happened in Nigeria - or online????

Found this interesting article on Boundless.org. Dennis Prager is a Jewish American and a talk show host.. Enjoy his thoughts from the commencement address he gave to the 1997 graduating class of Pepperdine University. One: The Greatest Struggle Is with Yourself - not with society.. Two: Trust Your Common Sense Three: Race is Unimportant Four: Don’t Leave Your Values at Home Five: Beware of Bad Ideas Six: Behavior Matters More than Intentions Seven: Religion is the True Counterculture ...

Just felt i needed to get this off my chest…….. Last week marked the third month of my latest episode in the ongoing saga of “DB goes to school”. I’d been away from my books for about 6 yrs – served the nation for one year and worked 5 - but then a number of work related events made me ask myself the hard questions… On the surface I had a great life - an OK job, loads of wonderful friends, and I was racking up experience in an area of engineering i loved…. But somehow, one morning in March – after yet another emergency at the plant had made me come to work on a sunday and leave by past 9pm – I decided I’d had enough and I applied to a school for an MSc placement…. Got a letter of admission a couple of weeks later, and thus started my journey back to books….. ...

WOW..took some advice from y’all on blogsville and joined a discussion group plus reactivated my library card… Have averaged 4 hrs of serious book work a day since sunday… I should be on course to smash my exams at this rate.. Hmm - Just curious but can guys and girls be “just friends”? What do y’all think? I know a dude who’s stuck in limbo land over some young lady who he is “just friends” with and i’m wondering if that category even exists in the first place……. Fire away y’all…

Got a rude shock a couple of days ago… My Degree Program Administrator circulated an email to all of us chaps on the provisional examination timetables.. Exams start off in just over a month and this dude has been chilling instead of reading since… Told my friend that I was having problems motivating myself to read.. His advice? Print out all my fee receipts and my pay slips from 9ja and put them on my white board… His reasoning is that if i keep looking at how much I’ve paid and how much I will not earn this year, I will sit up and read..Great advice anyways.. ...

Just saw the shocking videos referenced by the waffarian. Such behavior is not only appalling, it is simply unacceptable. I’d hazard a guess that while Akwa Ibom may be in the spotlight on this issue at the moment, things like these are happening all over the country in the hinterland… The combination of spiritual zeal and half-baked knowledge has always being a fatal mix. I’m deeply ashamed to admit that I spent a couple of years in Eket and did not realize the full extent of this problem - yes we saw kids on the road and occasionally gave them money - but there was no concerted effort on our part to do something about it.. A couple of expats came together from time to time and provided funding to get some off the streets and into safe houses in other states for their safety - but the overwhelming response from us Nigerians was one of apathy and studied indifference… ...

Found this interesting article about forgeries of academic qualifications by some Asian students who somehow got admitted into Newcastle University.. With all the bad publicity 9ja has been getting (no thanks to crackdowns on journalists, inventive facebook scams and the brutalisation of a certain Ms Okere); its somewhat gratifying that not all things bad are Nigerian. On a more serious note though - what do y’all think drives the need to forge documents to gain entry into a University especially when these Universities have access to a plethora of tool for verifying these documents? ...

A poem I wrote many years ago – when i was still a beardless teenager way back in Nigeria.. Enjoy… Waiting for forever. We had our hopes, we had our dreams, We somehow believed,in words and swords, We somehow believed, that one more coup, That some more troops, Would consign to the past, the pains we felt forever. Somehow we believed, in sugar coated tongues, In “fellow country men”,In “khaki covered men” To wipe away the past, like a bad night’s dream forever.. ...

Meen – Haven’t felt this miffed in a veery long time… Had a 9am class today, woke up at 6.30am, browsed through blogsville to catch up on all I’d missed over the weekend and popped into the bath.. only for the fire alarm to sound… The silly porters had decided that 8.15am on a Monday morning was the best time to have a fire drill… The resulting 30 min delay meant i only completed preparation for classes at 9.00am and finally arrived the lecture hall a full 30mins after the lecture had started… Doubt I learned anything form it by the way……