Push The Button For Reuse

This is European pop.   I get to listen to it, because I have high speed internet.

It's kind of catchy, kinda bubble gum pop. (And vid's undertone is "Geeks getting Lucky").

It is also a symbol of what is wrong about this blog.  No, it's not my taste in music... I'm quite willing to defend the mix of Fatboy Slim, Cat Stevens, MIA, Neil Young, Soukouss, Bluegrass, Ludakris, Jethro Tull, Egyptian, Dr. Nico Mbarga, and Matrix soundtrack videos sprinkled through the "Ethical E-Waste Recycling" discussion.

What is wrong is that the use of music videos, like "widget fever", slows down the upload/download time.  The froth on bandwidth, for the sake of photos, videos, and widgets, is a tax that falls on the poor.  Our visiting Ghana Tech could barely open his emails.  This week, we have another distinguished African Geek here, from Angola, here to test and buy product... but he also wants to know more about Las Chicas Bravas, the Ethiopia solution, and last night we explored ways to trim the bubbles off the information.

The same people who I vociferously defend for their use of "yesterday's" CRT monitors and pentium 3 computers (the sweet area for much of Africa) are the ones left out when we put bandwidth bandit apps onto our web pages.  Their internet cafes can get working and repairable computers for the price of scrap, and bandwidth is so bad that a P4 or dual core computer would be wasted.  But that same reuse partnership is non-java phenomena.

If I get a little vacation time this summer (not a certainty, I am American after all), I hope to use it to explore RSS feeds of the blog into a non-picture, non-widget, text and translate environment.   I need a "push button" solution for translation and re-posting in a low-bandwidth format.   If there is any reader who knows someone who knows someone who can help me with that, please drop a comment or a line.

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