Aquila pronounced AK-weh-lah, uh-KWILL-uh or even a-kee-laa, means eagle in Latin. Just like the eagle, this blog is my “bird’s eye view” on situations or topics that I happen to come across in my life.
// September 18th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // Blog Stuff, General
Just a quick mental note to say that I’ve been blogging for just over 5 years now. The Aquila Online blog kicked off on 10 September 2004 (Yes, yes I know. I missed my own blog-birthday) and is still going. These things still amaze me.
So without much Pomp and Circumstance – Happy birthday blog.
// April 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // General, News, Photos
Hey, have you voted yet? We have. Go exercise your democratic right and vote today. If you’re into all things social, tag your posts, pics, tweets, etc with #saelections and if you have pictures of your inked thumb then use #inkedthumb. The BBC is also collecting tweets, texts and pictures of the South African Elections.
Update: The BBC used my pic above to show the indelible ink after voting – check it out.
// December 9th, 2008 // 6 Comments » // General
I see that Time Magazine has released its Top 10 everything of 2008 list.
From movies to US election campaign gaffes to editorial cartoos to everything in-between. It got me thinking about my top 10 things of this year.
So what features on your Top 10 list for 2008?
// December 7th, 2008 // 5 Comments » // Food, General
Every 3.6 seconds, or the time from one breath to the next, someone in this world dies from hunger. That’s 25,000 deaths a day, or over 8 and a half million deaths a year. These deaths are mostly children.
1 in 7 people of this world live in chronic hunger, which is defined as not having a single day of one’s life receiving adequate nutrition. That’s the same number of people that live in the world’s developed nations.
The hands in the picture above hold 6 tablespoons of rice. The average person living in chronic hunger receives only this amount of food…daily.
We have a bountiful God. He has given us an earth capable of feeding every human a daily diet of 3,500 calories in grains alone, yet people still die from hunger.
The United Nations knows this. Our governments’ leaders know this. We have the distribution know-how to feed everyone. What is lacking is the moral courage of the people to say this is an injustice.
As a Christian, I must remember that I pray for our daily bread, not my daily bread. I must fight the temptation to construct a life where the poor are absent, and I must not submit to a theology that makes me comfortable in a world where the poor are invisible. When I do not recognise the faces of the hungry as my brothers and sisters, and when I do not stand up to be the voice for those whose cries go unheard, how sadly ironic it is that I follow the petition to give us this day our daily bread with a request to be forgiven of my sins.
The question becomes not if but how we are going to share the bread on our tables with these hungry brothers and sisters.
Sitting in Fourways mall, reading a kids booklet in the Spur, I was delighted to come across the website FreeRice.com. FreeRice started on 7 October 2007. To date it has donated over 53,477,769,530 grains of rice, enough to feed more than two million people.
FreeRice has two goals
1. Provide education to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
How it works
Go over to FreeRice.com and play the game. The game is made up of various subjects including vocabulary, math, science, geography, art history, other languages etc. For each answer you get right, they donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. The more you play, the more rice gets donated.
I like the quote from the Kansas City Star about the game.
“Addictive, yes. But . . . each correct answer results in the donation of rice to help feed the hungry around the globe. Perhaps that qualifies the game as a good addiction . . . one with redeeming qualities, something that’s, oh, didactic and edifying.”
It shouldn’t stop there though. Why not donate more rice, blog about it or grab a banner to promote it.
What else can you do to help end hunger?
Here are three things you can do to help end hunger. All are free and easy to do.
1. To learn how to take action in your community, click here.
2. Add your name to the One Campaign, where several million people have already joined together “as One†to end hunger and extreme poverty. If enough people join, dreams for a better world can be made into reality very quickly.
3. Twenty-two countries have joined together to try to raise enough money to end world hunger completely by each contributing 0.7% (less than 1%) of national income. Some of the countries have already met this goal. Others haven’t come that far yet. You can see how the countries are doing here. You can print a letter to support your country’s participation here.
If we all get involved, we all can make a difference.
// October 17th, 2008 // 6 Comments » // General, Tech
Lately I’ve been comparing Aerial Satellite Images from Google Earth and Yahoo! Maps and quite frankly I prefer Google Earth.
Over the last few weeks months I’ve been systematically geotagging my images over at Flickr and have been quite frustrated at the level of detail and how old the maps are (from Yahoo! Maps) in relation to those that I access through Google Earth. For those of you who don’t know yet (hi Mom), you can tag your photos in Flickr, with the latitude and longitude coordinates of where it was taken.
Unfortunately the Yahoo! Maps used in Flickr are quite outdated. To illustrate, note the two screenshots below of the same location (Google Earth left and Yahoo! Maps right). Below, middle you’ll notice the 14th avenue on- and offramp to the N1 Highway in Florida, Roodepoort. To the right of the overpass you should see the MTN Innovation Centre in the Google Earth version vs. nothing on the Yahoo! Maps version. That building has been standing for more than 5 years now.
The Google Earth images also seem to be more detailed and vivid than the ones from Yahoo! Maps.
Less than a week ago the Google-sponsored satellite sent back its first image – another feather in Google’s cap.
So, this begs the question. Which satellite image provider do you use?
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