Adedeji Olowe

Microsoft is cool again

I may need to see a shrink because of my addiction to email. I bet I’m the only one in my circle who has ever paid for an email app on the phone. Who does that? Considering that I use Android where you could get everything and anything (didn’t say anyone) for free then you could understand my malady.

Don’t be quick to blame me though. I live and die with my emails. I hate phone calls to a passion; my phone has been on silent since March 13, 2006. Don’t ask me how I could remember that date.

So having an efficient app is one thing that could make my miserable life bearable. After all what’s the most efficient way to harass my hapless colleagues? Emails!

My company uses Microsoft Exchange, and nothing beats that better than a native app. Too bad, Microsoft came late to the party. With the ghost of Ballmer exercised, Satyah started balling. I can tell you now that the most useful and fun to use app for managing emails on iPad is Microsoft Outlook. Not only does it do that, it hooks to your Drive, One Drive, Dropbox or other places where you’re hiding your smurty pictures.

Ok, Microsoft bought Acompli but who cares?

Excellence is an OCD

Sometimes you don’t know where to draw the line between OCD and the strive for excellence. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference or does it?

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is terrible and has made lives of millions a living hell. This is just a comparison and in no way making light the suffering OCD patients go through every waking minute of their miserable lives.

I was lucky, or unlucky as some of my friends would say, to have started my career at an organization where the passion for excellence was a religion. Looking back, I think I drank more than my fair share of that Kool-Aid because I really can’t see quite a lot of that excellence there anymore. But that’s a story for another day.

Those were days we believed we could do anything and nothing but the best matters. It affected my life; I ended up striving to get things done properly. Let me be truthful, to get some things done correctly. For the rest, I couldn’t give a damn.

I haven’t and may not reach perfection, but I never lost that drive. For a lot of my colleagues and friends, it can be an annoying nervous tick from an over-caffeinated dude struggling with a mid-life crisis. What has the straightness of a table got to do with excellence?

Maybe it has a lot to do with it.

I’ve always been amazed at well-made things – buildings, furniture, accessories, electronics, websites, and even well-written articles. I’ve since driven my unfortunate colleagues mad with that maniacal catchphrase “we should be the best.” Whatever that means.

IMHO, the underpinning of excellence isn’t about where you are but never losing the desire to get better every day or week (depends on your schedule :-)). It has helped me in a lot of ways. For example, even though my blog (this one you are reading, or what do you expect?) is riddled with more grammatical errors than the grains of sand at Eleko Beach but then it never matters to me. Show me, and I will correct them. Teach me, and I will learn. I get better every day!

No story better captures this than the quest of a man to rid Wikipedia of one single grammatical error: Comprise of. Now, I’m not a language buff, but it has been argued that this is bad English. He’s done thousands of edits and has been sworn at by thousands of Wikipedians for his overbearing manner. Who cares? He’s probably using that to calm the demons demanding perfection in his feverish soul.

Is it worth it? Maybe, after all, I think a straight table with chairs neatly tucked is also worth it.

Old geeks die hard

So here I’m, sitting and swearing at my desk trying to solve a server side graphing problem. How did I end up here?

You see, I should have transitioned from geek to management but the devil inside some computer just wouldn’t leave my tail alone. I have got that long thing trapped in a server door. Lord have mercy.

Anyway, what’s make some hair gray is that Adobe, in its tiny non-existent wisdom, made a mess of charting in CF11. I bet I’m the last person (OK, including some random dude in my office) left on earth who still do sh*t in Coldfusion. So I spent the whole day trolling the web like a serial killer, looking for some random piece of whatever to solve this problem.

Meanwhile I already preached the parable of the bulldog to my unfortunate colleagues yesterday. A bulldog, as long as it isn’t in Calabar, never gives up. So how dare I give up on this today? Truth is, I think I made up that parable. I can’t even remember if a bulldog doesn’t run away at the slightest sound of trouble.

Which bull dog wants a stone on the head?

I need a hefty lunch.

BVN will work the consumer credit magic

I really don’t envy the folks at CBN. They have the dirty task of making FOREX stable, keep Naira from running around like a kid with ADHD, regulate banks and bankers (two very different things) and come up with the miracle of financial inclusion. Don’t ask me when the last would happen or if it would ever happen. I’m not a miracle worker!

Expanding the financial market and the economy has been a major headache to every CBN governor since my grandfather was born. Even years since he died nobody has been able to fix this. It is no brainer, extend credit and the economy would boom. Everyone needs it – big companies, small companies, average Joe and BOP.

Without credit, there won’t be middle class, or that’s what economists said. But even the dullest Nigerian bankers know you are in soup if you dunk out loans like Father Christmas. For most borrowers, that would be the last time you would ever see their faces, or maybe even their backs.

The problem? No decent ways of identity. Almost everything in Nigeria can be forged. That shouldn’t surprise me because even at a personal level, I haven’t met any authentic woman – fake hair, fake lashes, fake colors, fake height, face hood, fake trunk, fake accent (country jumping!), as in, fake every damn thing you could imagine. Knowing they can’t be caught, borrowers have used every fake documents you could imagine.

The truth is, most borrowers are clean but the few bad ones muddy the water up for everyone. But then one bad loan is enough to wipe out all the income from the good ones. You won’t blame bankers to tread like they are in a field of black mambas.

We tried to bring credit bureau into the mix, no dice!

So bankers wised up and cooked up BVN, a proper child of necessity. Bankers need to give out loans, especially when CRR is now taller than the Burj Khalifa, because bankers can only (I mean only, when banking is done properly) make money from loans. With fewer loans there is a massive pressure on banks by shareholders to still dole out dividends, loans or no loans. To make a bad case worse, most banks have institutional investors on boards or as major shareholders and trust me, those guys don’t give out love! Portfolio performance is the only song in their albums.

So what will this BVN do? Or what’s BVN to start with?

BVN is Bank Verification Number – a type of unique identity for financial customers and you have to provide it to all your banks. It is a biometric identification system and short of cutting off your fingers at Oko Oba Abattoir, there is no hiding place. Come 2015, you can’t do any banking without your BVN.

What are the implications? Simply nowhere to hide. If you owe bank A money, with your BVN, they will track you to Bank X and collect with tulasi. If you do fraud and your BVN is blacklisted, you won’t be able to open accounts anywhere else again. Just try and explain to your new employer why you want to be collecting your salary in cash.

So when there is tidiness on identity, what happens next? Forget about all the fancy benefits on BVN website, the reality is, Bankers will know you and short of dying or running away to the USA, they will find you.
The interesting thing is that if banks know you, they will probably give you loads and loads of loans. Woe betide you if you default. Say a warm–bear-hug hello to auto-loans, mortgages, asset finance, etc. Educational loan may still be dicey, what if you got a 3^rd class?

More loans means consumer companies will sell more goods. More sales means more tax revenue for Fashola, Jonathan and my cousin, a local government chairman.

I suspect non-banks will now latch on to the BVN thingy – embassies will demand it; it must match the statement you bring. And if you owe your bankers money and embassy comes calling, you ain’t going no where!

Telcos will now give you postpaid line, don’t worry just default. They will meet you at Conakry. Credit Bureau will be happy. I mean very happy.
One fall out of the BVN driving the credit thingy – there would be more cars on the road and worse traffic. So either I move house, wake up earlier or get a consumer credit to buy a chopper. Lord have mercy!

Hacking your way into the company of gods

Lucy was a thoroughly shitty movie. It was so bad I was physically restrained at the cinemas from crawling into the screen and giving everyone an uppercut; not even Scarlett Johansson could distract me.

Ok, that wasn’t possible but my-my, I wish I could.

The deeper narrative wasn’t lost on me, though – humanity has forever daydreamed about making itself better, go above the laws of physics, and just become a nuisance to the neighbors. Maybe that’s why we invented religion. That’s another story entirely.

Let’s be frank; we have tried – we have flown five times faster than the speed of a crying baby’s wail, gone to the moon and back, we have smartphones, and oh, Nigeria even dealt with Ebola! But we are still unsatisfied. We want to be gods!

Meanwhile, I sat here at my desk wondering how my dull day would end and then bumped into an interesting article at The Verge. Not the usual place the normal guys crawl, but that’s my joint.

It’s estimated that about 100,000 unlucky souls today are plumbed with electrical impulses to fight pain and depression (you could have Bovi come around to make you forget your sorry life for half the price of the surgery). However, what if we go beyond making a sad man laugh and decide to augment our mental abilities? What if a consistent set of interfaces and protocols come into play that would allow us to tweak memory, maturity, reactions, or maybe someone would be able to reverse intelligence and give some of the dull people I know a bit of smart for a try?

It is scary to think about the significance of this. At first, I was an advocate of enhancing our body with bionic parts – smart eyes that can read the news and all that sh*t and ears that could discern gist from a mile off. This is bigger; this is godliness at the photonic level!

By the way, woe betides you if your brain crashes, freezes of gets Dosed by Chinese hackers.

There is a time when I wanted tech advancement just for the sake of it, but for the first time, I’m scared out of my pink boxers and afraid of what humans could do to humanity. Let me be out of here before Putin gets this done.

Time for the long drive home; where are my car keys? Damn, I need a brain implant.