Month: June 2009

Categories
Mombasa

More Video, You Say!

I also think it makes sense to start posting more videos.  As things become more routine for me, I feel less inclined to write updates, so videos can reveal what exactly this “routine” is.  Here are two to start with.

This is Class 3 Creative Arts.  We play Vocabulary Bingo about once a week.  I don’t actually do much since I’ve already taught them the rules, and the winner of each round runs the next round.  Another volunteer was visiting, however, so she managed to get some (brief) footage of me in one of the clips.

And this is me washing a sock.  This is designed to convey how much I hate laundry.  Don’t expect to be thrilled.

Categories
Mombasa Nairobi

Doing Taxes While in Peace Corps

Because I’m abroad, my taxes aren’t due on April 15—I get an automatic two-month extension until June 15, which is a week away.  I just e-filed a few minutes ago, a full week before the deadline, which is the earliest I’ve ever done them!

Taxes are terribly exciting, I know, but I thought I’d share a tip for future volunteers (or the morbidly curious), and explain how this works.

I started my Peace Corps Service late in 2008, and I was working in LA prior to that.  This means I needed to do my 2008 taxes just like I always do (using TurboTax), but I additionally received a W2 from the Peace Corps.  They mailed it to my school here in Mombasa.

The only difference from the usual process is that I also needed to report the Peace Corps W2 ($150 dollars!).  As far as the IRS is concerned, I”m not really a volunteer– I just have a very low-paying job.

So here’s the hot tip: Before you leave the US, TOAL ALL YOUR MOVING RECEIPTS.  It’s deductable because it was due to a change in employers.  I didn’t have any movers, just a U-Haul to NorCal, and even using the standard deduction I  got a significant bump in my return.

Wow, what a boring blog post.  I’m sorry… here’s something different: a picture of a Colgate box in English and Arabic.  I’m always impressed with translated logos that look strikingly similar to the original English design.  Arabic is especially hard because it’s read right-to-left and has its own alphabet, but somehow, when someone Arabic-illiterate (like me) reads the Arabic backwards (left-to-right) because of how it’s sitting on the store shelf, I can still tell it’s Colgate! (How did they pull off that “g”?!?!)

P1020923

Categories
Mombasa

Save Money on Internet (This is not an ad)

For all my fellow volunteers out there, and for many people in Kenya in general, this is a huge deal.  Opera just release a beta of their version 10 web browser, and it finally does what their mobile phone browser has been doing all along—it works in tandem with Opera’s servers to recompresses data before it gets sent to you.

If you pay by the megabyte, you have no excuse now to use anything except Opera.  It makes my little Firefox Greasemonkey/Mowser hack look silly.

They call the feature “Opera Turbo.”  Basically, before the pages are opened by your browser, the Opera servers resize and recompress the images to use less bandwidth. They also perform similar tricks for text (HTML, etc).  Bottom line: fewer megabytes used to visit the same exact sites.

It’s a little toggle-able icon in the lower left-hand corner of the browser.  Super easy.  Here’s a screenshot… go get it now! (It works on Mac and Linux, too.)

image

PS: If you’re nuts about privacy, you may want to read more about this feature.  Your data is being intercepted by Opera, after all.