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DarrenBarefoot.com
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Frequent updates about technology, pop culture, emerging Internet trends and occasional amusing anecddotes from this Canadian technologist.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'morocco'
VOIP Still Kinda Sucks
Maybe it’s just been a bad week, but VOIP feels like a rare Concorde-esque backward step in technology. In the past week, I’ve had three separate conversations (all, coincidentally, with s...
“Rendition” is an Exotic Thriller
After arriving in Chicago, we spent a quiet evening in at the swish and oddly-gothic Hotel Sax (”Monsieurs Lestat and Impaler, your table is ready in the Crimson Lounge”). We watched a mov...
The Mystery of Henna Hands
Before Julie came home from Morocco (she stayed on a couple of weeks to host a family member), she had henna applied to her hands. You can see it here moments after she had it done: It was applied to...
In Praise of Furnished Apartments
We’ve just moved into our fourth furnished apartment. The other three were in Europe and Africa (where it’s par for the course, as far as I can figure)–this is our first in Canada. I...
Rethinking Poverty (and Getting Nowhere)
Living abroad teaches you a lot. It also teaches you how little you know, and forces you to re-examine long-held assumptions. One of these assumptions is about poverty. My general assumption about pov...
How Living Abroad Limits Choice
I have ascetic aspirations. I certainly don’t live a monastic lifestyle, but I try to listen to the simplifying impulses in myself. Years ago, I decided that an easy way to live more simply was ...
My Perfect Trip Home
Over the last few years, I’ve done a fair bit of international flying. For sundry reasons, I’m hoping to curtail it. Among them is the fact that flights from Europe and Africa all the way ...
Songlines, or Tracking Music’s Movement
We’re driving in the last foothills before the Sahara Desert starts in earnest. We were on this twisty stretch of asphalt only wide enough for one car. You had to pull onto the gravel shoulder t...
Uneaten By Camels
We’re back in Essaouira after, all told, about 1000 km of driving in and out of the desert. I’m catching up on email and such, but I wanted to post to say that we’d survived, and to ...
Tomorrow, We Go to the Sahara Desert
I keep saying that because, frankly, it sounds cool. Tomorrow we’re taking six days and heading all the way across Morocco to the edge of apparent nothingness in the Sahara Desert. We’ve h...
Impersonate a Prince on Facebook, Go to Prison For Three Years
This is some sad news from my host country: A Moroccan computer engineer has been sentenced to three years in jail for setting up a Facebook profile in the name of a member of the royal family. Fouad ...
My New Weekend Bag is Made of Camel
Morocco is, among other things, renowned for its leather products. There are shops throughout the medina selling all sorts jackets, ottomans, shoes and every size and shape of bag. I’m in the ma...
Regional Outages in the Intarweb
What do I miss most from Vancouver? One thing is the super high-speed, reliable web access. Here in Morocco, the Internet access has been dependable, but desperately slow. I’m surfing like it...