diary of a coder
I turned on a simple image verification for people posting on my blog in the past. Two days ago, I got a rush of pingback spam. The spammers are moving on, and so will I. You don’t need to fill in that annoying comment verification to leave a comment on my blog anymore. I now use Akismet and I hereby declare that it truly rocks!
Update:
I’ve finally pulled off the rel=nofollow auto-insertion on links on my blog. I just wish Blogger had a way to do that… :(.
I’ve been getting calls to update when I would rather sleep. Four days is really a long time in the blogosphere.
For want of something to say, I’ll leave you with someone I became fascinated with. He owns the year 2007, and his codename is 007 — yes, his name is Bond, James Bond.
Entertainment Weekly‘s featuring some Bond lists and I thought I’d share them with you.
Goldfinger comes out tops, but I think it should be You Only Live Twice — I’m a little biased because it’s the only film whose book I’ve read.
Rosa Klebb as one of the sexiest best Bond Girls for her role in From Russia with Love? Hello, somebody?
In other news, some Nigerian Niger Delta militants are going over the top. Why seize a ransom and still demand release of some criminals?
I was somewhere between five and six years old playing on the veranda of our house with my elder brother and some of the neighborhood kids. What we’d been doing remains a blur to me, although I think it was somehow related to ‘cooking’ with sand and leaves.
“My English name is Fred,” Nonso, one of our playmates suddenly piped up. “That’s what I’m called in school. What’s yours?”
It had never occurred to me that having an ‘English’ name was important. I didn’t know how to answer, and I was slightly miffed at my parents for naming me ‘Azuka’ — at the time, it seemed like the most unimaginative name ever.
“When’re we going to get English names?” I asked my mom sometime after that.
“Isn’t Azuka enough for you?” my mom was surprised, but looking back it now, I don’t think I’d blame her.
“But everyone on our street has an English name!” I protested.
“You don’t need one,” my mom had said curtly, and that was the end of the matter — or so she thought…
I’ve always been ‘strong headed’ since I was little and although the cane could be counted on to get my ‘cooperation when’ I was younger, as I’ve grown older and more cane-resistant, more of my stubbornness has surfaced. Back then, the cane still held sway and even in my young mind I could tell that something as little as changing my name would have dire consequences.
I didn’t need to look very far to find a name I liked. From reading my stack of [children’s] encyclopedias, I had come to admire the inventor Thomas Alva Edison. I became Edison and began to call myself that, but never in any way it would leak back to my parents.
To strike a suitable compromise between getting my way and appeasing my parents, all my school notes from Primary 4 through 5 had the name ‘Main Guy’ instead of mine on their backs. I think my teacher was amused and condoned it only because I was his best student. A classmate who used the name ‘Muammar Gaddafi’ on his got 12 strokes of the cane for his pains and had to put his real name back on. On one of my tests, however, my teacher’s veneer wore thin. I wrote ‘Dharam V Okuleye’ (after the Indian movie Dharam-Veer) as my name on my test script and got into trouble with my Dad.
I digress.
My elder brother got himself a plethora of names, getting on my parents’ nerves many times. My little brother Uche came along and when I was eight I dubbed him Eric (at the time Vikings were my rave and both Erik the Red and his son Leif Erikson fascinated me). He’s the only one among us boys who legitimized his name with my parents’ approval when he got baptized.
I kept using my Edison name secretly throughout secondary school until I had to represent Nigeria at the 2003 National Geographic World Championship. I sneaked it onto my passport application and although my mom raised eyebrows, I didn’t care. I’d finally achieved my silly childhood dream formed when I was probably making idle chatter over sand and leaf soup.
I’ve evolved since then, and I keep wondering what led me to make that choice. My Dad (and all his family) answer to English names but my mom doesn’t and I think somewhere within me I wanted to belong. My parents knew why they gave us Ukwuani and Yoruba names, and in the folly of my youth I thought the names unrelated to my culture were ‘cool.’
I’m proud of my name now and it’s a source of embarrassment to me every time I look at my passport and see that name Edison on it. I won’t drop it because I believe it should server as a reminder to me that I once refused to identify with my culture.
There’s this video on Youtube featuring the Nigerian comedian Basketmouth joking about the way we respond to different names. Names like ‘Natasha’, ‘Sandra’ and ‘Latifa’ are considered more ‘tush’ than ‘Chioma’ and ‘Kemi.’ If you have the misfortune of bearing one of those ‘conc’ cultural names like ‘Atutupoyoyo’…
I think it’s high time we became proud of our names as an embodiment of Nigerian and African culture. Sure, most non-Africans would say ‘whatever’ when given a difficult name to pronounce. It’s ironic that they’ll most probably get annoyed if you call them ‘whatever’ when it’s your turn.
I’m proud of my name. I’m proud of my accent. I’m not exactly proud of my country Nigeria.
Sorry, I just had to rant…
I must confess I’ve been quite lazy for the past few weeks — as well as busy on the WritingInn and AUGNG websites. I’d almost lost interest in continuing the series until Nino of Akopo asked if he could translate it into French. I figured that if my miserable attempt is worth translating into French, then it’s probably worth continuing.
I know how much almost everyone (including yours truly) hates long posts, but I’m going to ask you to bear with me as I intend to post the last part of the bulk content in this post. We’re going to be discussing anonymous blogging, as well as pings and pingbacks. Grab some coffee or some other stimulant as you’ll be spending a while in terms of screen time.
I had two important calls yesterday.
For some reason Tracfone doesn’t allow calls to or from Nigeria so my Dad had to bring the entire family to his office to talk with me on Skype. I haven’t heard my mom’s voice in a long, long while and I was happy to catch up with the rest of the family. Christmas preparations are going on full-blast and as my ‘evil’ brothers listed the things they were going to be enjoying, my mouth watered.
My mom is the best cook I know. There’d be fried and jollof rice, pounded yam or starch (one of our Delta staples) and certainly lots and lots of meat and cold malt drinks. Arggggh… I can’t wait until next year.
I’ve become something of a family celebrity — apparently, one of my Dad’s friends saw my interview with Deolu Akinyemi and sent it to him. The whole family’s read it several times :oops:.
If I were home what would I be doing now? It’s 12:00am here, that is 6:00am in Nigeria. I’d be in the kitchen chopping green beans (I am I used to be the fastest cutter). My Dad would probably be looking for something ‘manly’ to pull us away from the kitchen — pulling up the little grass beginning to sprout around the fence for example.
My cousins were as hilarious as ever. My younger brother wants me to send him games. ‘Chief’ (that’s what we call my elder brother) wants a copy of the Kamasutra (I pretended not to understand what he was talking about). I’d ordered a copy of The Da Vinci Code for my parents sometime in November — they still haven’t gotten it. Bukky in her own way didn’t ask for anything. I have to remember to get her something when I return next year. I think I’ll talk to the family next week again.
The second call was to Miss Green Eye. I checked my server logs for the past few days and I’ve been getting strange hits from Google and Yahoo. About 85% of the search terms that ended up on my blog were ‘Vera Ezimora’ and ‘Vera Ezimora pictures.’ What the… is the relationship between Azuka Okuleye and Vera Ezimora? Some poor lovesick dudes seem to be looking for a picture.
I gave her a call, and honestly, I expected to hear one of those Ajegunle voices. I don’t talk much, and only few people like Lee have seen and heard me in one of my extremely rare talkative moods.
I would have started off with something like, ‘this doesn’t sound like someone whose hobby is washing dishes’ but I guess everything flew out of my head. I mumbled a few words, and God bless her, I’d told her before that I don’t talk much.
She has a nice voice, and before you ask, I’m not in the habit of recording voices and playing them over and over again. That makes the first blogger I’ve talked to.
I’m off to bed. Merry Christmas everyone!
It’s all business here — that is, if you call sleeping and eating business.
I recently purchased a domain name, WritingInn.com and I think that’s where I’ll be putting up a writing community. Nikita‘s going to get some competition (he owns Outputwriting), or will we exchange ideas? Hard to say at this moment.
Speaking of my Xmas cooking, I ordered everything from Amazon — from the full chicken and beef to the spices and rice. I’d forgotten how to cut up a chicken and spent an hour yesterday using my ‘blunt’ knife to try to work on it. When I tested the knife against my thumb it cut me very cleanly. Turns out I’d been trying to cut through the ribcage of the crazy chicken — and I didn’t even let it thaw. I ended up breaking and tearing it apart with my hands.
I made some fried rice last night [no pictures this time] and have been doing nothing else but sleep throughout today.
I need to get my coding juices flowing once again. I intend to be doing just that all Christmas.