Shorts

Is the NSE driven by foreign investors? Apart from the bearish conditions due to inflation, NSE's falls and rise over the last week and this one would seem to suggest so. This might partly be due to effect on Diaspora. Either way, it remains a very bearish time at the bourse and the prospect of the Co-op IPO seems to portend more gloom. For me, bring the IPO so at least it can shine some light on the NSE (and hopefully we get full subscription for once).

In the UK, gova is now tightening the rules for Kenyans especially those of us who are underground by

• requiring everybody to turn up in person at the Home Office when their cases are due
• leaning on GoK to provide fingerprints yani, they can compare fingerprints-mbayaa especially for those who have taken ids in Kenya.

On one to one basis i.e. energising the masses; tv debates, McCain comes across as 2nd rate and a no-hoper. But the dude is a complete maverick with some good out-of-the-box ideas. Sarah Palin (although the effect has worn off sharpish-just watch this excerpt from CBS) was one. And so was his decision to cancel campaigning to help support the $zillion support for Goldman Sachs (sorry US economy). Again, that kind of backfired given he still turned up for the 1st debate on Friday.

Having tried the newish Google chrome, its disappointing on several levels. For a start, you can't blog on it! When you do a search, you get sent directly to msn live search! Both these two are its best selling products. And finally details keep missing off websites, which you only discover when you go onto Internet Explorer or Safari. Its fast though...

Used to think a lot of Vioja, until youtube came along and Kenyans discovered that they could post their videos on it. Now Vioja has been trying to scare youtube into successfully removing as many of the videos claiming copyright. A couple of those were videos I had uploaded with permission from somebody actually know personally. Saw I spoke to him later and he said he had never heard of Vioja! The pt about the majority of vids is that guys only upload them to give the artists worldwide publicity through a channel whose audience Vioja can only dream of. When are we going to stop this parochial and envy-based BS?