SurplusKnowledge

Welcome

Welcome to SurplusKnowledge.com, the website with a lot of information about a lot of unrelated topics. The purpose of the site is to compile information from a variety of sources to provide a convenient and expansive resource that is easily available and accessible to anyone.

The topics are determined by whatever has interested me at some point in the past, from mythology to writing systems, Christmas carols to the Rwandan genocide. I have searched for information about these things in the past and in doing research have found myself frustrated that no one has had the sense to put all of this information in one place. Aside from isolated examples like www.theoi.com and www.firstworldwar.com, the closest thing is probably Wikipedia. But the latter, while a valuable and extensive source, does suffer from the same weaknesses that plague all open-source resources in that there is no explicit guarantee of accuracy. And that is precisely the motivation for the creation of SurplusKnowledge: a compendium of information on a variety of subjects which is user-friendly, fully cited and, above all, free.

Note: at the moment, the website is in its infancy; with time, it will grow beyond a homepage and a few articles and hopefully fulfill its promise. Currently, the two subjects being worked on are Christmas carols and the Rwandan genocide. For a full list of prospective categories, click here.

In compiling information for this site I have, for the sake of completeness, included as much as is available and reliable. As a result, some documents included, especially pictures and maps, may be under the protection of domestic and international copyright laws. The sources and authors of all such documents, regardless of what protection may exist, have been, if possible, properly acknowledged. They are not being used for any kind of personal gain, only in the interest of providing as wide a range of information as possible. If you are the copyright owner of any component of this site and would prefer that it was not here or that it was displayed in a different way, please e-mail me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Site Development Journal

This section is simply a record of my progress in building SurplusKnowledge.com, which I will update whenever I do any editing on the site.

August 2009: I have been taking some time off for a variety of reasons. These include vacation, separate work, etc. but the main one is that I have been learning HTML and CSS, in the hopes of giving SurplusKnowledge a much needed makeover. I'll probably be at this until well into September or October at the very least. If you'd like to get a sneak peek at the prototype design, you can do so at http://www.surplusknowledge.com/jake.

25 July 2009: After sorting through the problems associated with getting a new computer - moving files and software over, mainly - I have resumed work on the site. As of today I am completely finished uploading Kangura articles. This is by no means the end of work on Rwanda, and maybe not even on Kangura, but it is certainly a time to sit back and take a breather. Whew!

12 July 2009: Uploaded illustrations, cartoons and articles from issues 42 through 53 of Kangura, and added them to the menu, though there is still some stuff to do in that category, namely adding the dates of the issues and the Excerpts pages for those and some other issues.

5 July 2009: Sorry, haven't updated this in a while, though I have been working on the site. I have uploaded articles from Kangura through issue 35, notably nine from the latter and 26 from issue 30. I also added pages with all the Kangura cover illustrations I have, as well as PDF links called 'excerpts' with actual scanned pages from Kangura that may not otherwise have been linked to because they are in Kinyarwanda or French. Today I completed the editing of the 22 articles I have from Kangura No. 40, which I plan to upload now.

15 June 2009: Reorganized menu, uploaded material from Kangura issues 4, 9 and 11.

14 June 2009: Downloaded the rest of the Kangura material (the TRIM database was somehow working today), converted a good portion of it to text. Completed uploading articles and cover art of Kangura issues 1 through 8. More to come tomorrow, hopefully.

13 June 2009: Ah, it feels so good to be back. I have been busy for the past month and could not update the website. Just a few days ago, I added a section for Kangura articles, and today I uploaded nine of them.

14 April 2009: Added five more Security Council Resolutions, reordered site development journal so the newest stuff is at the top.

31 March 2009: Added five more UNSC Resolutions and made printer-friendly versions of all articles, with PDFs for the major articles; am in the process of adding the ‘printer-friendly’ links to all the articles - easier said than done, I am currently about halfway through the RTLM tapes.

30 March 2009: Added six more Security Council Resolutions.

28 March 2009: Done with RTLM Tapes - well, not done, per se, but it has gotten so boring and tedious that I refuse to do any more. The PDFs for all of them are here and I have made my contribution to society by transcribing 36 of them, but the conversion to text has become unbearable. Now I will be moving on to other facets of the Rwandan Genocide, possibly taking breaks and working on Christmas Carols in between. Today I created a section for U.N. Security Council Resolutions pertaining to Rwanda, wrote an intro and uploaded the first two articles.

23 March 2009: Uploaded one more RTLM tape, a particularly long one.

20 March 2009: Began work on a glossary of terms found in the RTLM transcripts.

17 March 2009: Uploaded two more RTLM Tapes.

14 March 2009: Converted another RTLM Tape to text, uploaded it along with the one from yesterday.

13 March 2009: Converted another RTLM Tape to text.

11 March 2009: Added another RTLM Tape - this one dictated to the computer because the scanning quality was too poor for the text-recognition program, which took significantly longer than usual - and updated the list page.

10 March 2009: Updated links page for RTLM Tapes, fixed formatting on a few of them.

9 March 2009: Worked on RTLM tapes all week, just uploaded about 12 of them. I am mostly done now, just a few more. I still have to update the links on the list page, though.

4 March 2009: Received acknowledgement e-mail about FOIA Request.

2-3 March 2009: Converted several more RTLM Transcripts, but did not upload them.

1 March 2009: Made a Freedom of Information Act request for some RTLM recordings, fixed a link.

28 February 2009: Uploaded four more RTLM transcripts, sort of proofread them.

27 February 2009: Uploaded three more RTLM transcripts, actually proofread them despite previous decision; noticed that someone has been visiting my site.

26 February 2009: Uploaded four more RTLM transcripts and the PDF files of some 300. Scrapped the idea of actually proofreading the transcripts (they’re really long) in favor of quickly checking through for formatting.

25 February 2009: Downloaded swmenupro extension to manage menus; wrote RTLM Tapes page and uploaded three RTLM transcripts.