Adedeji Olowe

Short scalpel cut to immortality

I’m assured of immortality.

Ok, if you think my religious inclination has changed, maybe not that fast but then why die, hoping for heaven when I can simply stroll over to the General Hospital Ikeja and get a body swap?

And when I have used that up, I can come back for another as long as I don’t get a bullet in the head.

So says the mad doctor who is going to do a full head transplant in 2017. And not just him, he’s got about 100 assistants for the macabre project.
Hey, before you call him mad, think about how much furor was raised, especially by some religions aunties of mine, when test tube babes were first marinated (or how do you describe the process) in 1978? Today almost all my nieces and nephews are born that way. OK, that was a joke.
What Canavaro, the name of the evil doctor J, is doing is to help some random dude, with untreatable muscle wasting disease, get a new stab at life but the implications are far reaching.

I can’t imagine Mugabe hanging around for another 50 years. Or Putin? Or? Now things look scary doesn’t it?

Just a thought, if my body is old, along with my head and then I get a new body, how about the head? Some shriveled round thing with clammy leather hanging and bobbing perilously on top of a body with six packs? Or could Canavaro just improve his methods so only the brain is transplanted? How do I feel waking up the next morning in a body with tattoos?

If the brain alone is transplantable, would it be the whole stuff, or just my memories? What if some bits of the brain is already worn out from age – Alzheimer and other random gerontological malaises?

Wait, what makes me me? My thoughts? My memories? My one pack? Definitely not!

Could this get less invasive and just a thin slice of brain is transferred? If that’s it, what about if we developed a process to transfer my thoughts and sentience from my body to another? What if I could do a transcendence from my body into a thought machine?

I’m getting confused and it’s a Friday evening. Time I went home before my sanity is sold on OLX.

A Gangsta Approach to Cashless

I really don’t know any other trick left in CBN’s bag that hasn’t been used to cajole the rest of us into the nirvana of cashless life. But Nigerians love the hard ways or how would you describe hauling cash around, endangering lives and limbs when the price of prosthetics are at all-time high?

A good example? Don’t worry I have a bagful of that.

At the Lekki Toll (I hate that damned contraption) you could line up for years to pay cash or just zip through the electronic gate in seconds. The kicker? It’s cheaper; it’s faster; and free to install. But you find guys lined up day after day, wasting their precious little lives away inside the heat and getting their cars nicked, just to pay cash.

Sanusi pushed hard for the cashless revolution, got banks to throw in a lot of commitment but what do we have to show for it?
In fairness, the country has witnessed considerable success. Using cards abroad is now common place. Paying on the POS no longer looks scary but rumor still has it that more than N1 Trillion in hard cash is still hiding under someone’s mattress.

So here’s the thing – if we won’t do it easy, we will do it the hard way. Just change the Naira and everyone must come to the banks to change it. You have to deposit your money in a bank, any bank, and not get it back in cash again.
Sounds impossible? Soludo almost got away with it. Buhari did it in 1984 and the world didn’t end.
This is how to do it.

Change the notes and give everyone a year swap
You can only deposit the money into the bank and so you have a year to open an account, get your BVN and your debit cards
At the end of the year, if you don’t change your dirty notes, your Naira loses 50% of it’s value and at the end of another year, it becomes zero, zilch, nothing.

Haven’t I talked about this before? Some things need repeating!
It’s a Sunday but with nothing important to do and rain doing stuff on the roof, I may as well apply my time to annoying cash hoarders.

Legacy of marketing

It’s amazing how a new entrant into a market sector touts it’s freshness and new ideas and best ways of doing things while dodging the mistakes of the so called dinosaurs.

Fast forward few years, if the dude hasn’t died (mortality of startups is so high it makes Somalia a relatively decent country), it then starts to tout itself as having experience.

Rant maker, since 1978.

Woolly mammoth shaking a fluffy tail.

Laptop makers have no brains

Once upon a time each phone brand had its own charger type. But common sense prevailed, hastened by the European Union, and everyone agreed on USB starting first with mini then micro connector. For more on this story you can read here, here and here.

Apple has been a notable exception, but it has gazillion phones out there using only one type of connector.

But it seems the day the rain of common sense fell the laptop manufacturers had umbrellas. Different charger types, even along same product brand? It’s hell. It doesn’t make sense. It is stupid.

There is nothing technical about this after all almost all laptops in the world are made by just 5 companies – Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Inventec and Asus. The last has since established its own brand. I use its excellent Asus RTN66R VPN Router in my lair.

There has been numerous talks and proposals to have all laptops share a common charger. A standard has been pushed aggressively by IEC but still a pipe dream. Wake me up when it happens.

Good night fellas.

The end of the world is holographic and unreal

Ok, I’m an armchair futurist but I’m not ashamed of that at all. How could one be ashamed of the progress Microsoft has with HoloLens? That sh*t simply blows the mind away!

Yeah, my mind got blown with the scary realities of VR and I haven’t been able to find the pieces since.

In a nutshell, HoloLens turns the VR world upside down by overlaying holograms on the everyday objects around us. It is easier to understand by starting here and then watching a live demo here.

This may be more useful for the everyday people like you and me while Oculus Rift is suited for core gamers. The possibilities are endless though – education, business, entertainment, porn, etc.

You don’t know what I’m ranting about? Leave, you don’t belong here!