In two days of travelling I’ll arrive for my 30th birthday party. A handful of friends and family and a long weekend of doing next to nothing. I’m looking forward to it. Maybe the party is the reason, this departure feels different than I remember. I’m filled with a sense of joyful excitement. Or maybe it’s the knowledge that I’ll likely never have the desire to live in Morocco again. Either way, I’m looking forward to the journey, the arrival, and the weekend.

The departing train journey gives me a chance to reflect on my time here and my first experience of an Arab country. I’ll also mention that I’m listening to my entire music collection on random, so the wildly different moods may affect my writing.

Morocco has been a genuinely interesting chapter, not least because it gave me the opportunity to share living space with Yusuf. He showed me a truly different approach to life, and much of it was deeply inspiring. His limitless patience, inexhaustible kindness and permanent good nature were a deeply profound experience to witness.

As I sit here on the train writing a new neighbour has arrived and immediately offers to share his lunch with me. There is a warmth and genuine friendliness in Morocco. People are kind and generous. On the flipside, tolerant is not a word I’d use to describe my experience of Morocco. Kind and generous within the somewhat rigid confines of the social norms and religious dictates. While we sit within the norm of acceptable behaviour people are forthcoming, interested and genuinely kind. When their boundaries are touched, it seems like a wall goes up. Much like Scotland I suppose, with boundaries.

Perhaps the most troubling part of my experience here was my radical regression in relation to women. Virginity is sacred here, something to be fiercely protected. It seems like this creates a culture of conflict, both internal and interpersonal. Unmarried men seem to behave like teenagers on a constant search for pussy. Meanwhile women are caught between desire and social pressure. The whole situation is a mess of conflicts. Particularly when men want to shag bitches by night and marry virgins by morning.

That word, bitches, it came to dominate my talk of women in Morocco. I experienced the idea that women are either bitches or virgins, and men are defined by their pursuit of bitches, or the bitchifying of virgins, although the latter is certainly not desirable in every case. She might be a virgin, but she if looks like a bitch, treat her as such. This way of thinking reminded me of my late teenage years when I searched furiously for the validation of bedding women in a vain attempt to plug some hole in my sense of self worth. It took me a good month or so to remember who I really am, and remind myself that actually, I’m not interested in chasing bitches. In the early days in Rabat there seemed to be nothing to do except chase bitches or drink tea with men. Moroccan women are rarely out after 8pm, unless of course they’re bitches!

It’s almost a social class and it reminds me a lot of Thailand. A certain type of woman who doesn’t have a job, is out in bars most nights, and who is considered somehow dirty by “average” society. I found something similar in Morocco. Women who are not sex workers in the street walking sense, but who earn there living through partying and having sex. The social judgement seems to really taint their lives here more so than in Thailand. There’s usually an undercurrent of dishonourable behaviour which somehow seeps into other areas of her life. It seems like there’s a symbiotic relationship between being treated like a bitch and behaving like one.

One of the major differences between Thailand and Morocco in that regard is the law. In Morocco, it is possible to be hassled by the police for having a Moroccan woman in my house. It’s not very common as far as I can tell, but it is possible, and it definitely had me thinking a little more carefully about who invite over. That was a very strange feeling to think that by simply meeting someone and being behind closed doors, I was certainly falling foul of society, and potentially the law. Likewise, kissing in public. I’d definitely have an issue if I was making out with a Moroccan in front of a police officer. Makes for interesting times!

Of course, there is a class of Moroccan woman who lives alone, carries on an independent life, and who is more liberated in her relations to men. I was privileged to come to know two such women in a short time in Morocco. In both cases, they experienced cultural backlash from the benign to the outright violent, but nonetheless they carry on. To me, they represent the future of Morocco in many ways. They are a living example of what is possible. A beacon of light for a more liberal Morocco, a brighter, more progressive Morocco.

These exceptional women somehow manage to escape the bitch / virgin classification and carve out a new class that we might simply call women. They are few and far between, but they exist, and I find their very existence inspiring.

Otherwise, Morocco has been generally fun. It was hot and cheap. I again had that feeling of roaming around living like a king. Taking taxis on a whim, eating every meal out, sitting in cafes without regard for cost, and so on. As appealing and ego massaging as that feeling is, it’s not enough to hold me. So this chapter comes to a close and I roll on out. Another day, another town, another departure, another place left behind. Tomorrow brings a month in Scotland, a month in France, and then we’ll see…

To finish, here’s a random assortment of Moroccan photos to honour my deal with Rob.

Got it home, popped the sim card into the X301, the connection was terrible. Unusably slow. I was seeing regular >10s ping times. Unbearably slow. Tested again this morning, slightly better, but still awful. I kicked off a long running ping, copied the results into gedit, stripped out the text, saved as a csv, opened in Libreoffice and produced this.

It’s a graph showing ping times, on a logarithmic scale no less!

This morning I took the unit back to the shop and asked for my money back. The manager took the modem out to test it. I cut him off. As best I could in French, I explained that it works fine, but that the service in our apartment is terrible. Then I opened the laptop and present the graph. BOOM BABY. Full refund, thank you very much. The power of data. Oh, and I did manage to pull ~700MiB overnight, a small recompense!

However, those packages are no longer online, Karmic is long past end of life. The only currently supported release that still has PHP 5.2 is 8.04 Hardy. I was able to get PHP 5.2.4 installed (eventually) using the packages from hardy.

I created two files /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list and /etc/apt/preferences.d/pin-php52. Then the following met my needs:

sudo apt-get install apache2 apache2-mpm-prefork apache2-utils apache2.2-bin apache2.2-common libapache2-mod-php5 php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-gd php5-mcrypt php5-mhash php5-mysql

I constructed the two files mostly from things I read about how to get packages from Karmic to install on Lucid. YMMV.

I’m leaving behind a thing of beauty in Tangier, my first port of call in this country. I shared a magical time there with someone who kept me warm on the cold Moroccan winter nights. I learned more about Morocco, Islam, and love than I could have ever absorbed from guidebooks. It was a magical experience, one that I remember fondly and softly.

Now I’m striding out onto the road again, cruising forwards to bold and exciting new times. The whole country of Morocco is waiting to be explored and I’m eager to savour what I can in my short time here.

On the flight from Paris I started reading an incredible book called The Magician’s Way. It’s the inspiring story of a man’s journey discovering himself and the power of what he calls magic to unleash a life filled with love and joy. The timing was perfect. I can already feel myself loosening and allowing the universe to guide me with an ease and effortlessness I had forgotten this past year in Scotland. I feel a part of myself reopening after a year of darkness.  For the first time in recent memory I am filled with excitement for the possibilities the world has in store.

My time in Scotland was a period of driechness. It was a blessing to be near family and old friends, rejuvenating. But the time to move on was long overdue. Time to taste pastures bright and green.

After a year of prohibition, restraint, and self denial I am reconnecting with myself, my heart, my true passion and purpose. I lost my way for a time, I locked myself into patterns of lacking and needing. I needed more money, more time, more validation, more security, more life. But all the while I was surrounded by all the life, love and joy the universe has to offer. Now I’m reopening my eyes to all that is possible, reconnecting with my own power to manifest magic.

It feels fantastic to be alive.

If you follow through on your commitment, the service is free. But, if you fail, they’ll charge your card and give the money to either charity or a person of your choosing.

Simple, and most of all, effective, highly effective. A friend used the system last year to great effect, and I’m acting as the referee to another friend this year. It’s a highly effective system, If you’re serious about making change happen, take out a commitment contract on yourself this year.

• Partners in Health $2’760 USD, £1’763
• Friendly Water for the World $1’420 USD, £892
• El Paso de la Danta, Costa Rica, $200 USD, £128.13
• Amnesty International, £240
• Water Aid, £240
• Movember South Africa, 13’000 ZAR matched 1:1, £2’060.36
• Movember UK, £100
• Opportunity International UK, £620 matched 1:1, £1’240
• Help for Heroes £89.46 matched 1:1, £178.92
• Macmillan Cancer Support £59.37 matched 1:1, £118.74
• Spina Bifida £10
• Total £6’971.15

Matched donations

Of that total, £5’172.14 was either money due to me or my own personal cash, £1’799.01 was donations by others in order to match my donations.

When I made the pledge I was about to get £10k of investment. I was in the UK for the first time in 3 years and I was finding it very hard to reconcile the wealth, excess and waste of the first world with the developing world where I had been living. I was about to be flush, was trying to make sense of the world around me, and the pledge seemed like a sensible way to do that.

Then reality set in. The investment never came, I pissed about for a good six months before generating any income. It was a tough year. I was feeling serious financial pressure from the pledge. In November an opportunity arose. Mark Shuttleworth was offering to match Movember donations. The year was drawing to a close, I was well behind with my donations, and here was a chance to half the cost of donating.

I gave over £1’000 on 24 November. Not because I thought Movember was a great charity to support, but because I was feeling the serious financial strain of giving half my money to charity. I was barely generating enough cash flow to stay afloat, and at the same time facing a huge charity bill. I caved and took a soft option.

That sparked a lot of thinking about matched donations. Is it reasonable to count the whole amount towards my giving total? After reconciling it back and forth, yes, I think it is. To be clearer then, my commitment is not so much to give to charity, but to generate charitable contributions. I was directly responsible for generating those donations, even if they weren’t with  my own money. If money were no object, I’d ignore the matched donations just because I could, but I think it’s “fair” (whatever that means) to count them.

Giving to Movember was still a cop out. I gave to ease the financial pressure, not because I wanted to support the cause. I’m trying to learn from the experience.

Response

People’s responses have been interesting. The negative response far outnumber the positive. Stop and think about that for a second. Somebody says they’re going to give money away, and people criticise, condemn, and complain. Sad.

From here on, if you have something constructive to say, please do share it. If you want to bitch, whine or moan, keep it to yourself, I’m not interested. You all know who you are.

Spread

I aimed to split my giving into 3 parts. One part give a man a fish, one part teach a man to fish, one part part first world philosophical nonsense I think is important. The first two thirds were to focus on the world’s poorest people, those who genuinely are in need. I reckon 39% of my chosen organisations were in the third category. That number was mostly skewed by my donation to Movember. It soaked up all of the third part and more.

I hope to keep better within my aims in future giving.

Going forward

While writing this post, for the first time, I’m considering that I might not continue the pledge fully in 2012. It was a demanding commitment last year. I simple assumed I’d continue on the same basis, but maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll find a different way. I’m going to take a week or two to think about it and then make a decision.

I believe that people dying through lack of food is simply unacceptable and we each have an obligation to take action. Over the next few weeks I’ll consider how I want to honour that responsibility in 2012.

Opportunity International UK

From my research, Opportunity UK International is an organisation worth of support. For any UK citizens reading this, the government is matching all donations to the Opportunity 2011 Christmas Appeal until 21 February 2012. If you’re considering a charitable donation, I recommend supporting their work. Your donation will go twice as far if you support this campaign now. You can read more and donate online here. Think about it.

Happy new year. Do something worthwhile in 2012.

My biggest hassle was getting skype working. I documented the steps in the hope that it might save somebody else some hassle. This worked for me today, 8 Jan 2012, it might get out of date fast, and should be totally obsolete soon.

First, I installed a bunch of packages from oneiric. I don’t think these are available in precise yet. They are:

They can be downloaded in one go with this command (I believe, I haven’t actually tested, I downloaded them one by one). That command makes a new directory “skype-downloads” then downloads all the packages into it. From there, I ran:

dpkg -i *.deb
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install libxss1:i386 libqtcore4:i386 libqt4-dbus:i386 libasound2:i386 libxv1:i386 libsm6:i386 libxi6:i386 libXrender1:i386 libxrandr2:i386 libfreetype6:i386 libfontconfig1:i386 libqtgui4:i386


This installs all the downloaded files, upgrades / fixes some of them, then installs a whole load more i386 dependencies. Finally, after all that, I was able to install the skype .deb I downloaded from skype.com. After downloading the file, I’d suggest using dpkg to install it like this:

dpkg -i /path/to/downloaded/skype-ubuntu_2.2.0.35-1_amd64.deb

Then I was able to start skype. However, it wouldn’t show in the systray. To solve that, I used this command:

gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Panel systray-whitelist "['Skype']"

This command sets the value found in dconf-editor at desktop > unit > panel, called systra-whitelist. This value sets which programs can appear in the old fashioned system tray (now that we’re onto bigger and better things with unity and indicators). There’s a bug which means setting “all” in this value doesn’t work. So you need to add each program you want, in single quotes, separated by a comma. See this for more.

I don’t really understand what all of this does, I copied various bits and pieces from a few places and pieced it altogether through trial and error. This forum post talks about installing from oeneric, and this blog post listed the extra requirements.

I’m on skype video now, so this all worked!

The upgrade from 3.3.0 to 3.3.1 was in the file wordpress-3.3.1-partial-0.zip. I’ll try to remember to update this post as future versions come out. I’m not sure of the exact file format. I think it’s -partial-0/1/2 to mark how many minor versions back the upgrade goes.

Personally, I use these files for minor upgrades because it’s faster, but I use the full download file for a full version upgrade.

Update for 3.3.2: It seems that wordpress-3.3.2-partial-0.zip contains the changes from 3.3 to 3.3.2 and wordpress-3.3.2-partial-1.zip contains the changes from 3.3.1 to 3.3.2.